Lately I’ve been entertaining myself by building a rebreather loop controller using the Arduino micro controller. This little open source board is really nice to work with for a number of reasons. Unlike many of the alternatives which employ proprietary programming languages, the Arduino simply uses “C”. It also has an IDE that runs the my Mac, and it enjoys an enormous development community. I’m pretty new to this kind of thing, so I’ve been using web tutorials to work my way up from the most basic blinking LED to something that actually monitors oxygen sensors and populates an LCD with information. Some of the [...]
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The Banana Slug is not a Mythical Creature
OK, so I never actually believed that they were a mythical creature, but it took me so long to actually find one after moving to Santa Cruz that I had great fun telling those who didn’t know better that they were figment of the collective local imagination. Courtney, who had seen them before, always sighed, rolled her eyes, and reassured whatever unwitting soul I happened to be talking with at the moment that they did exist, and that I should absolutely not be taken seriously. On this point, I cannot disagree with her, but I must have been somewhat convincing because her mom actually sounded [...]
World’s Coolest Datacenter
Ever since coming to work at UC Santa Cruz, I have been feeling pretty lucky to work in a well engineered and managed datacenter. So lucky, in fact, that I’ve been cultivating hatred towards me in my former coworkers by regaling them with stories about how wonderfully designed everything is here. The problem with thinking you have it made though, is that someone will always point out some greener grass in another field. This is exactly what happened when I saw this article about the Pionen datacenter, owned by Bahnhof in Sweden. Located nearly 100 feet beneath the city of Stockholm, this epic datacenter has [...]
Move to Santa Cruz
Well, after five years living in Vermont, and something like thirteen years living in New England, Courtney and I have gone and moved to Santa Cruz, CA. There are a lot of reasons for this; the very hard winters and extremely rainy summers in Vermont were starting to wear on us, but mostly we just wanted to live in a young and vital place that has a larger population. Courtney had some experience with the area during her brief stint working at Land of Medicine Buddha, and I had always enjoyed The Monterey Bay area when my family and I would camp here as a [...]
Bare Metal Linux Restore
Several weeks ago we started seeing some pretty scary errors showing up on the main system disk for our Blackboard server. We had an extra server hanging around, so we decided to move all the data off the failing disk and onto our spare server. The only question was how to make the new server as close to a perfect copy of the old one as possible. Simply restoring all the filesystems failed for a variety of reasons, mostly related to GRUB and the kernel, so I had to find a way of excluding only the files and directories that were tied to the specific [...]
Darkness Beckons
All next week I’ll be taking a cave diving class on my CCR down in North Florida. Cave diving has been a dream of mine since reading an article about Sheck Exley’s exploration of the Nacimiento Mante cave system in Mexico. At a time in my life when I almost bought into the idea that divers should not venture deeper than 130 feet, there I was, reading about a man who had plunged to a world record depth of 881 feet and returned safely to the surface after 14 hours of decompression. It was as if the wool that had been pulled over my eyes [...]
iPhone Hacked; No Longer Bound to AT&T
George Hotz, along with a team of hackers have come up with a method to break the chains binding the iPhone to AT&T, allowing it to be used with any carrier. The complete method can be found here on George’s blog. It does take some soldering skills and a bit of familiarity with UNIX and modem commands it should be pretty easily accomplished by most techies who have some tinkering under their belts. Even though I still feel the iPhone is too expensive, and that it is lacking in some basic features, this might just be the thing that gets me to buy one. After [...]
Joybubbles – A Phone Phreaking Legend Passes
Joybubbles, known by many as the grandfather of phone phreaking died suddenly of a heart attack on August 8, 2007. Born blind to the name Josef Carl Engressia, Jr. he was gifted with perfect pitch and could whistle a perfect 2600 Hertz, giving him the unique ability to place free long-distance calls simply by whistling into the phone. Other phreakers needed a Blue Box or Captain Crunch Whistle to to do this. It was, in fact, Joybubbles that first discovered the giveaway Captain Crunch cerial whistle could be modified to generate 2600 Hertz and taught John T. Draper, a phreaker who would later go by [...]
Brattleboro Selectmen Ban Public Nudity
In a truly astounding display of cowardice and pandering to conservative whining, the Brattleboro selectmen narrowly approved an “emergency ordinance” banning public nudity on city streets today. Vermont, and Brattleboro in particular have a long history of tolerating nudity in public. The state, along with many of its towns have absolutely no law requiring that people wear cloths in public so long as they are minding their own business. The “emergency” that precipitated the ordinance was an elderly Arizona man who decided to attend the city’s gallery walk in the nude. Apparently the conservative blowhards can handle it when nude people are young and beautiful, [...]
Springfield Vermont Will Host Simpsons Movie Premiere
I live in Vermont, so of course I was excited yesterday when I learned that Springfield Vermont had won the nation-wide contest to host the premiere of the Simpsons movie. A total of 13 Springfields from around the country entered the contest and made Simpsons-like movies to convince the judges that their respective Springfield would be the ideal place to host the upcoming movie. Springfield Vermont won with a video depicting a Homer-like fellow chasing a giant pink doughnut through the town and wreaking havoc. All the videos can be seen here. Thru-out the 18 seasons of “The Simpsons”, the location of the fictional town [...]
Go Alinghi Go!
Alinghi came from behind for the second day in a row to beat Emirates Team New Zealand yesterday afternoon on the waters off Valencia. The Swiss Defender put in an impressive performance in difficult and unpredictable conditions, but they were rewarded with a 4 to 2 lead in the match, bringing them to within one race of defending the America’s cup. I don’t race sailboats anymore, but I have to admit that I have that I’m glad to see the Swiss beating the New Zealand team and staging a strong defense of the cup. Today’s race was called off because the wind never settled down [...]
Charges for Making Faces at Police Dog Don’t Stick
Last July Jayna Hutchinson of Lebanon, N.H was arrested for making faces at a police dog following a heated debate with a Vermont police officer who refused to take down her report of being assaulted. Citing that she smelled of alcohol, Vermont State Police Sgt. Todd Protzman agitated Hutchinson when he told her that he would only take her report after she had sobered up. This tuesday, only two days before Hutchinson was to go to trial, Orange County State’s Attorney Will Porter decided to drop the charge, after viewing a videotape of the incident. The subsequent charge of “resisting arrest” was also dropped because [...]
Strom Thurmond – Still History’s Biggest Windbag
Strom Thurmond conducted the longest filibuster in history when he talked to the US senate for 24 hours in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1957. All these years, Thurmond’s throne as nation’s biggest windbag has gone totally without challenge… Until now. Jeffrey Long, a high school student from the Buffalo, NY area, decided that the time had come from someone to unseat the late, but long-winded US Senator and proposed to out-talk him for his senior project. He set up camp at the Buffalo Historical Society and started talking. He talked and talked and talked until shortly after 4:00 AM, when he sat [...]
Baltimore Kinetic Sculpture Race
We missed it this year, but it looks like the 2007 Baltimore Kinetic Sculpture Race was great fun! On Saturday, May 5, Kinetic Sculpture enthusiasts gathered from far and wide on the shore of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor in central Maryland to partake in an eight-hour race that covered 15 miles on pavement, mud, sand and water. In its purest form, the term kinetic sculpture refers to a class of moving art that originated in Europe, but became internationally popular from the late 1950s through 1960s. The moving parts of a kinetic sculpture can be powered by anything from wind to the maker’s hand, but a [...]
mhmmmmmm tasty