Scott Blomquist's space: General geeking

Amazing mouse

Sun, 04 Feb 2007 16:40:10 GMT

Absolutely incredible new mouse: http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/mouseandkeyboard/ProductDetails.aspx?pid=085

Transparent screens

Wed, 20 Sep 2006 05:39:12 GMT

http://www.flickr.com/photos/w00kie/sets/180637/show/

Imagining the Tenth Dimension

Sat, 08 Jul 2006 02:42:45 GMT

There's a book out called "Imagining the Tenth Dimension", which I'll have to pick up and read sometime. Meanwhile, they have a really unbelievably incredibly slick flash animation that helps you visualize what in the world the universe could possibly do with 10 dimensions.

Still out of love with Apple

Sun, 14 May 2006 22:37:19 GMT

The story of the dead Mac Mini gets even better: I took the computer in to the Apple store. They directed me to get in line at the Genius Bar (what a silly name, but that's another entry). While waiting for an available Genius, the sales droid and I took my computer over to try it out on one of the floor models' power supplies. The computer still didn't work. And when the power supply got returned to the demo model it was borrowed from, it didn't work, either. So apparently, my comptuer is not only dead, but it kills power supplies.

When the Genius heard about this, he told me the story of the iPod Dock of Death. It apparently had the same superpowers as my Mac Mini--that is it killed anything that got plugged into it. He said that they had all sorts of evil fun with that before it was finally retired.

Out of love with Apple

Sun, 30 Apr 2006 19:51:15 GMT

I bought myself a Mac Mini the other week just so I could refresh my dreadfully obsolete Apple knowledge (last time I touched a Mac was probably in 1990). I literally asked the first salesman who made eye contact with me to show me the cheapest computer in the store. Maybe that's where I went wrong.

I got it home and played around with it. I even made it my daily use machine. It worked fine for checking email and surfing the web. I missed being able to play Windows Media file formats (apparently, there's no WMA or WMV codec available for MacIntel machines yet, but there's one available for PowerPC-based machines).

Overall, I think the experience has been mostly acceptable, but certainly not amazing. When I first got it home, the Front Row[tm] remote had a dead battery. That was a shitty out-of-box experience. I get asked to install component updates all the time, and may of them require reboots. I always heard that only Windows had problems like that. I changed my password at the command prompt, and it turns out there are some components that still prompt me for my old one. Overall, it's not the unbelievably smooth, completely defect-free experience that I was always told to expect.

And the ultimate offense? After having it for less than a month, it died. I came home from work one day and it was shut off. I have tried turning it back on to no avail. I'll be taking it back to the Apple Store to see how service works. I hope I have better luck with that than with the rest of the "seamless user experience" that I have yet to discover.

Perhaps I'm just not smart enough to use an Apple The Way That Jobs Intended[tm].

Fun with dice

Sun, 26 Feb 2006 08:32:54 GMT

Two really cool dice puzzles that have already been solved to death by bored mathematicians:

Nontransitive dice

Number three blank dice such that one of the dice (say die A) beats another of the dice (die B) more than half of the time, which in turn beats die C more than half of the time. Nothing unusual so far, right? Now make it so that die C beats die A more than half the time as well. Yes, put in simple terms, A > B > C > A. Mathematicians call these nontransitive dice.

Imagine the great bar bets that you can make with these: "choose any of these three dice; then I'll choose one; we'll roll 10 times, and whoever rolls a higher number more times wins $20--all you have to do is figure out which die is best."

For extra fun, design a set of dice that enable you to offer to take on two guys at once who each choose a die from a pool of 7 dice, and then you choose a remaining one that beats them both!

Try to come up with at least the 3 dice set on your own, and then check out the Tournament Dice article on Math Games for lots of fun information on both of the above schemes.

"Normal" dice with abnormal numbers

Next, number two 6-sided dice in such a way that if you roll them both and take the sum, it's the same distribution of sums as that of two normal 6-sided dice (i.e. 1 way to roll a 2 or 12, 2 ways to roll a 3 or 11, and so on). It's cheating to use non-positive numbers (otherwise, you could just add N to each face on one die and subtract the same N from each face on the other).

I found this one easier to contruct on my own than the nontransitive dice. Give it a shot and then see Wolfram's Sicherman Dice write-up for more details on this.

The Grand List of Console Role-Playing Game Cliches

Tue, 03 Jan 2006 15:20:41 GMT

Probably old news, but I got a huge kick out of this: http://project-apollo.net/text/rpg.html

Amazingly cool illusion!

Sun, 13 Nov 2005 19:42:43 GMT

Unreal!

http://www.patmedia.net/marklevinson/cool/cool_illusion.html

Cell phone feature request

Sat, 10 Sep 2005 01:32:41 GMT

Y'know, even more than being able to assign a particular ring tone to each caller, I wish I could have my cell phone play a random ring tone from its library for each call. That way, I'd get a wider range of ring tone experiences, and the distribution would no longer be at the mercy of my friends and family.

New PDA/phone!

Tue, 06 Sep 2005 02:01:03 GMT

I recently replaced my Samsung i700 with a Samsung i730. Verizon's network continues to treat me well, except at work and at home. Oh, wait. Their reception is crap in the places that I spend 95% of my time. But at least when I'm hiking up to Melakwa Lake on Mt. Denny, I can phone ahead to my friends to ask how much further to the top. So, Verizon's network that's solid in all the wrong places aside, I absolutely love their customer service, and my phone. The phone routinely benchmarks an 800kbit data download speed, which comes in very handy for checking the web on the go. Its processor packs enough punch to play transcoded DVD movies (Office Space has been the only test project so far, but it worked great.), and hardware-wise it seems to have been designed with an upgrade to Windows Mobile 5.0 in mind. I admit that I heard rumors about a Windows Mobile 2003 upgrade for my former i700 for 9 months or more before it finally happened, so I won't hold my breath, but I still harbor some hope for the future.

Slytherin!

Fri, 12 Aug 2005 23:22:00 GMT

When I was down in Los Angeles for the National Puzzlers' League convention, I went on the Warner Brothers Studios Tour. In the WB Museum that they took us to at the end of the tour, they had the real live Sorting Hat. He was actually alive and everything. I sat up on a stool, one of the Museum's staff put the hat upon my head, and with almost no thinking whatsoever, he shouted out simply "Slytherin!". I'm not quite sure what I think of that, but just in case you're avoiding those of us from the Slytherin house, that includes me.

Microsoft gets a monorail?

Thu, 21 Jul 2005 07:43:08 GMT

http://www.cities21.org/MS.wmv

Amazing a capella performance!

Thu, 21 Jul 2005 07:40:17 GMT

http://video.msn.com/video/p.htm?t=1&i=da274bdc-8f0b-49c1-b0c4-d5b2031f07d6

BNF grammar for espresso beverages?

Mon, 06 Jun 2005 19:01:40 GMT

Requesting canonical names of everyone's favorite espresso beverages over on my technical blog.

How many mm^2 does _your_ car use?

Wed, 11 May 2005 06:32:06 GMT

Want to know your vehicle's fuel economy in mm^2? Google will tell you. How exactly this works (and probably more importantly, what in the hell it actually means) is left as an exercise for the reader. Feel free to leave a comment to show the world how smart you are.

Google Search: 25 mpg in sq mm

[Edit: adding a category. Those of you who read my blog via RSS, please let me know if your reader picks up a new copy of this. Apologies in advance for the redundancy.]