Coming back from West Africa, I found some excellent truck crash footage, which I proceeded to post to my YouTube channel. Turns out that one of the trucks had some furniture on it that belongs to a guy who writes for Gizmodo and he posted the crash video on said website. Since the post appeared, [...]

“Oh boy!” – I thought when around luchtime today a reporter and cameraman from a local TV news station knocked at my office and asked me if they could do an interview about the truck crashes I had captured on video. But they asked nicely, and so I agreed to do it. I sent Jacob [...]

Tying my shoes is one of those things I don’t remember learning. I did it all my life without really ever worrying about it. However, there is this pair of shoes I really like, but the ties of these stupid shoes keep coming untied. Several times a day I have to stop to re-tie those [...]

About a year ago I installed a camera to record the traffic outside my office in dwntown Durham. Over the course of that year, that camera recorded several boxtrucks crashing into the railroad trestle crossing Gregson St. Here is the newest one:

There’s more on my YouTube Channel.
The fundamental problem here is not so much [...]

The German start-up car maker Loremo says it is still on track with production in 2010 and they announced a couple of weeks ago that they will offer the Loremo in three flavors: Electric (EV), Gasoline (GT) and Diesel (LS).

While I understand the idea of adding diversity to their product lineup, I hope they won’t [...]

Geoeye published a great satelite photo (half-meter resolution) of the inauguration ceremony for Barack Obama. The image above links to a high resolution version. Geoeye provides the original high resolution image (3.5MB) that shows the entire National Mall.

Note to self : turn off theme before updating the blog software. After I installed the update nothing worked. Internal server error. So I deleted everything and rolled back to the old version, turned off my custom theme, updated again … and everything worked just fine. We’re now on WordPress 2.7.

The big splash about Tata Motor’s ultra-cheap Nano ($2,500) all but buried another announcement from the Indian automaker at the Delhi auto show: they signed a $20M deal with MDI, a European start-up car maker working on commercializing cars that run on compressed air.
Of course, the cars don’t “run on air,” rather they use compressed [...]

… computer product (according to PC World).
AOL mailed a billion of these annoying CDs to people, and I think I received most of them.

Whoopee – isn’t it amazing when stuff just works??!! Upgraded to the latest version of WordPress in a few Minutes. I also added the calendar plugin (see on the sidebar at the top). maybe that’ll be useful.

Boy – Bill Gates is so not funny! Even Jon Stewart has a hard time being funny with the Ãœber-geek in the studio. “What does the F12 button do?” ??? This is a bit of an awkward interview, especially for Stewart, who is usually pretty good at it.
Last night we watched the DVD of Andy [...]

Oops – apparently the harddrive fried on the server that hosts my website, this blog and my email server. So I was without email (at least non-work email) for two evenings, which was a bit disconcerting. And I was a bit nervous about the provider’s ability to restore all services and files and databases. I [...]

For all you non-parents: Elmo is a red Sesame-Street “monster” that talks about himself in the third person. Toys based on this character have been extremely successful over the last 10 years. In 1996, a Wal-Mart clerk “suffered a pulled hamstring, injuries to his back, jaw and knee, a broken rib and a concussion” after [...]

How many types of computer networks do you know? There is the most common TCP/IP networking, across copper, fiber or wireless (very likely that is what you are using to read this page). IPv6 is the new kid on the block, and some may remember the old stuff, like Tokenring and IPX, and when all [...]

For better or for worse – the Personal Computer turns 25 years today. In August 1981, IBM introduced the PC to the masses. Since then, the little beige box has changed the world and left quite a legacy.

The jet engine in Ron Patrick’s car puts out 1,450 horsepower.
Photo by Ron Patrick, SF Chronicle
Why would a 48-year-old engineer want to bolt a Navy surplus General Electric T58-8F jet engine into the hatchback of a New Beetle? Just because he can: “This is entertainment. It’s a toy, a toy for silly boys” [...]

Philips is working very hard these days to piss off consumers, as acknowledged by one one of their recent patent applications. Odd thing, you think, for a consumer electronics company to create technology to disenfranchise and piss off consumers? Seems disingenuous? Yet, this seems to represent a new industry trend. Consider the recent whooping Sony [...]

New Google Brain to Keep “Golden Copy” of Your Deepest Hopes, Fears, Secrets
Today Google introduced a new product, Google Brain. Building on its popular Google Goggles, a headset that records users’ audiovisual sensory input and uploads it to Google’s servers, the Brain attachment will build and transmit to Google a constantly-updated computer model of the [...]

The BBC reports on a weird trend of people taking their mobile phone to their grave. The origin of this idea was fear of being buried alive, according to Martin Raymond, director of international trend-spotting think-tank, The Future Laboratory. However, that does not explain cremations with cell phones:

“We came across this in places like South [...]

I know – I know, I’m a geek! But this is cool: I overclocked my slug. The NSLU2 as supplied from Linksys actually runs the little MIPS IXP420 CPU at 133 MHz, which is half its rated clock speed. You can fix the NSLU2 to run the processor at the full 266MHz by removing a [...]