Went to visit the Shuttle Enterprise over the weekend. Only negative to the setup is that the enclosure should have been a little wider so you could see more of the sides. The deck size of the USS Intrepid obviously hinders that. Regardless, they let you get pretty close.
Back on announcement day for the iPhone 5, I said it would be difficult to impossible for 3rd parties to make Lighting cables because it was likely an active cable. Sadly I was right. From AppleInsider:
Peter from Double Helix Cables took apart the Lightning connector and found inside what appear to be authentication chips. He found a chip located between the V+ contact of the USB and the power pin on the new Lightning plug.
That’s pin 1, the far right pin of a Type A, the far left side of a mini/micro, and the top left of a Type B USB plug. That provides 5V DC. Depending on the nature of how the chip works it could be difficult for cables to provide even power, much less transfer data to the device. Pin 1 and 4 provide power/ground, 2,3 are data.
The big upside here is the market is huge for the first cheap silicon that can emulate this chip at least enough for power, preferably data. Assuming that happens we’ll see a plethora of 3rd party cables. Until then, we’ll see nothing. Of course that could be a huge lawsuit right there.
The CD is now 30 years old:
The digital music revolution officially hit 30 years ago, on Oct. 1, 1982. While you may be surprised to learn that the heralds of the coming age were, in fact, the Bee Gees, it probably comes as less of a shock to learn that Sony was at the very heart of it. After years of research and an intense period of collaboration with Philips, Sony shipped the world’s first CD player, the CDP-101. Music — and how we listen to it — would never be the same.
The CD is actually kind of strange. Most people would date CD’s to the late 80’s not the early 80’s. Presumably because of the adoption rate.
In related note, a curious little tidbit about the Sony CDP-101 from Wikipedia:
Due to the cost of producing Digital to Analogue converters at the time of its production, the CDP-101 features only one DAC, which is used for both the left and right audio channels. No sample-and-hold circuitry is present to delay the first channel until the other is ready, so the left and right channels are out of sync by approximately 11 µs.
Weird to think that’s what they had to do. Clever how they dealt with it.
From Scientific American:
A Buddhist statue brought to Germany from Tibet by a Nazi-backed expedition has been confirmed as having an extraterrestrial origin.
Just taking a guess here, I know very little about sculpture, but this might be a rare piece and difficult to insure/replace.
Doing a little network test and ran a traceroute to apple.com:
$ sudo tcptraceroute apple.com Selected device ppp0, address 172.17.152.110, port 55167 for outgoing packets Tracing the path to apple.com (17.149.160.49) on TCP port 80 (HTTP), 30 hops max 1 xxx.xx.xx.xx 12.847 MS 12.899 MS 13.736 MS 2 xxx.xx.xx.xx 14.734 MS 14.966 MS 16.143 MS 3 10.255.12.45 14.335 MS 14.712 MS 13.902 MS 4 10.253.44.242 14.992 MS 14.204 MS 13.693 MS 5 velocity-engine.com (17.149.160.49) [open] 14.639 MS 17.666 MS 15.295 MS
Check out that last host. Velocity Engine was part of the marketing for AltiVec in the late 90’s early 2000’s. Curious that Apple is re-purposing that.
Warning: The above video could be slightly disturbing.
So apparently this is a thing. I can’t for the life of me understand it. It’s just bizarre to me.
Steve Jobs in interview for PBS’ ‘One Last Thing‘ documentary, 1994 (via Wikipedia):
When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money.
That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is – everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will, you know if you push in, something will POP out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it. That’s maybe the most important thing. It’s to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.
I think that’s very important and however you learn that, once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better, cause it’s kind of messed up, in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.
I’ve always admired how he pushed the limits. I can’t help but read “… embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it” and think of the “Crazy Ones” ad campaign’s: “because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do”.
He was a crazy one.
I wish more science was taught this way. Never got to see anything like this in the classroom. It’s like Bill Nye + Mythbusters in the classroom. I love it.
Someone built an amazing LEGO machine here. This thing is like a giant Rube Goldberg machine made out of LEGO. As someone who has a life long love of Rube Goldberg machines and LEGO, this is awesome. This video goes on a while because it’s so big. It must have cost a fortune to do this.
Ongoing debate with a coworker over dog vs. monkey. I feel a monkey is superior (no surprise there). This video suggests they can coexist together… at least when tiny.