Last night I stayed up until 2:00 AM tinkering with my SLUG server – a modified Linksys NSLU2 device. V1 ran off of an old, noisy hard drive attached to it via the USB port. Last week I got a 1GB flash drive and I formatted it with an ext3 partition. The plan was to […]

Last week I finally got to watch this strange movie “Grizzly Man” about Tim Treadwell, the ultimate bear nut. Treadwell spent 13 summers in Katmai National Park in Alaska literally among huge grizzly bears. In October 2003 Treadwell and his girlfriend Amie were killed and eaten in their camp in the park by one of […]

Lately I have found myself staring at this. It’s mesmerizing and it makes me wonder about the quality we call “random” (as opposed to the mathematical concept). I think our brain is just really wired to try very hard to extract meaning out of visual stimuli and it is very hard to get it not […]

After the panel discussion about biodiesel on Friday, I returned to CCCC in Pittsboro on Saturday morning for girl Mark’s biodiesel 101 class. The class was packed and Mark commented on how great the interest in biodiesel is in NC compared to other parts of the country. In the class we had a good cross-section […]

This weekend was fun. Friday after work, I drove down to Pittsboro in Chatham County for a 2-hour discussion forum on biodiesel. And Saturday and Sunday the program was all-biodiesel, all-day, at girl Mark’s workshop at Chatham County Community College. Both events were organized by the tireless folks at Piedmont Biofuels Coop. Friday’s discussion brought […]

The SLUG’s alive! Friday I bought another Linksys NSLU2 and spent most of the weekend hacking it. I re-flashed it with the uNSLUng v5.5 beta firmware, configured a thttpd web server, a CUPS print server and a set up an automated torrent downloader. The little Linksys box is sold as a home-network NAS device for […]

WOW – deep-fried nerd alert! Are you ready for the grease PC? The guys at Tom’s Hardware posted the report of some Germans who had the – uh – intriguing brainstorm to take a high-performance PC, rip out all the fans and dip the whole thing in 8 gallons of canola oil, to see what […]

Last night we did our post-solstice ritual and torched our christmas tree. The tree was still way too green – we should have let it dry out more. Still, it was quite a firework ….

I am really torn when I ponder the pre-holiday sellout by Germany’s ex-chancellor Schröder to Putin’s little racket Gazprom. Which is the bigger scandal? His cynical, middle-finger-in-your-face exit from the public arena? Or is it even worse that it is apparently perfectly legal to conduct foreign policy for the German people for seven years while […]

What a year: Nature terrorized humans with hurricanes, earthquakes and floods. Awareness rose of the threats of a global flu pandemic and global warming. Terrorists killed innocent people around the world. Human rights abuses, government secrecy and spying were uncovered in the U.S., in Europe and in many countries around the world. The new pope […]