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 […]
I just watched Robert Greenwald’s new documentary Wal-Mart: The high cost of low price. Greenwald also did Outfoxed a great documentary about Rupert Murdoch’s attack on American journalism. Now Greenwald skewers the world’s largest retailer with a relentless mix of very individual stories of family businesses that were ruined, workers who were intimidated and harassed, […]
Looks like another South American country is taking a left turn: Bolivia seems to have handed a clear victory to Aymara Indian candidate Evo Morales, a socialist and admirer of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez: Several polls give him 42-45% of the vote ahead of his nearest challenger, former President Jorge Quiroga who, the polls […]
This is great news – especially for the family of Susanne Osthof: BERLIN (Reuters) – A German woman abducted in Iraq three weeks ago is free, her brother told German n-tv television on Sunday. Archaeologist Susanne Osthoff, 43, who spent more than a decade working on excavations in Iraq, disappeared with her driver on November […]
Shark fin sup is considered a delicacy in Asia. Shark’s fin is “regarded as a tonic food and an aphrodisiac, the Chinese believe shark’s fin strengthens the internal organs and retard aging,” explains a recipe. The sharks that supply their trademark body parts to this dish are caught using longlines. Fishermen then cut off the […]
It’s getting chilly out in Durham and the chill gelled the juice in the juicebox, despite the 10 percent kerosene blend. Today at noon it was just below freezing, and the biodiesel/kerosene blend (B90) was solid in the mason jar net to the pump. The pump only managed to squeeze a few drops out of […]
Not your daddy’s diesel clunker: Audi is going to compete at the 24 hours of LeMans with the R10 race car, powered by a 5.5 liter 650 HP V12 diesel engine. According to Audi this engine put out 1100 Newton meters of torque (811 Lb Ft). Audi claims this is the most powerful diesel engine […]
The cold fact that Governor Schwarzenegger refused to grant clemency to Stanley Tookie Williams was predictable and consistent with the cruel spirit of the death penalty. The practice in this country to terminate the lives of convicted murderers is irrespective of any subsequent redemption or repentance. It is thus quite remarkable that the Governator’s decision […]
The Reverend Moon is at it again, promoting an idea so breathtakingly absurd that he should get a prize for it: a highway tunnel from Alaska to Siberia! Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the South Korean giant of the religious right who owns the Washington Times, is on a 100-city speaking tour to promote his $200 […]
Old Europe is in a tizzy over finding out more and more details of how the CIA used European airspace and airports to shuttle abducted terrorism suspects to and fro for “innovative interrogation” in what some call a “gulag-like” system of “black sites” – secret prisons. Well, the GULAG it ain’t, but a scandal it […]
Big promises, lots of talk today, and some quirky publicity, for World Aids Day. Anybody care to listen to the voices of those among us living with the dreaded disease? The stories of how the stigma, the ignorance, the silence kills millions? Anybody? Black Looks shares one of those stories, Rose’s story, with us: R: […]
