Dirkus Maximus

Wes let me spend a little of my school money on a present for my birthday; a Dell Mini 10v netbook computer. Of course I couldn’t leave well enough alone, so I nuked the default Windows Xp install and dropped Mac OSX on it instead. Honestly, that’s the whole reason I got this specific computer; I looked up it’s compatibility with OSX and it got high marks all the way across the chart.

OSX FTW!

You can see some great compatibility guides and tutorials over at http://www.mymacnetbook.com that will walk you through the process of putting the One True Operating System onto hardware that everyone can afford, with minimal hassle. If anyone has a netbook that shows up on the compatibility lists over at MyMacNetbook and wants to give it a shot, I’ve got an OS 10.6 bootable install flash drive I can loan you.

OK, now that I’ve got just about everything on the site put back together, let’s have an update on that nasty AT&T business, shall we?

So, I finally received my iPhone, three weeks after I ordered it. Wes’s phone rolled in 3 days after that. My iPhone case rolled in about 3 days more after that.

AT&T did make some concessions after all the crap and misinformation that we received. They’re giving us 2 months free, plus 1000 rollover minutes, plus that $24 back that I was overcharged.

The ECO iPhone case that AT&T sells does NOT fit the iPhone. It’s WAY too tight. Also, don’t be fooled, there’s no belt loop on the back. It’s just a slip cover. I ended up giving it to Wes for her iPod touch instead. Trying to squeeze the iPhone in and out of there was a hell of a chore, but the iPod Touch fits just right.

Wes is “Okay” with her phone overall. I need to get a microSD card so I can save some custome ringtones to it for her, but overall she seems to like it well enough. She really hasn’t said much about it. I think she’s just still steamed at AT&T for their bullshit.

So how about that iPhone? I’d give it 4 stars out of 5. The flexibility is awesome. The apps are great. The user interface is the standard by which all other phones should be judged. There’s just some nagging things that kinda irk me.

The compass in the 3Gs is pretty much useless in a car, or near anything made of metal. When it’s working, it’s GREAT. When it’s not, it’ll do strange things like show you going the opposite direction of reality on a street, or show the map skewed by 90 degrees.

The phone has frozen up on me a few times. Two or three times while “sleeping”, and occasionally after running a app that uses a lot of graphics or a “heavy” web page.

There are some odd compatibility bugs with some apps. Palringo, for instance. Palringo works just fine on Wes’s 1st gen touch, but refused to pop up push notifications on my iPhone and would scramble conversations from multiple users.

The YouTube upload function of the camera has two stupid bugs; 1) if the phone goes to sleep while uploading, it kills the upload. 2) it always defaults to categorizing videos as “comedy”. This doesn’t even make sense. It *should* remember whatever the last selected category is, and use that. It would be understandable if it defaulted to the first item in the list. Comedy is the second item on the list though, why the hell does it default to that?

There should be a way to actually hide icons you don’t plan on using, aside from just banishing them to the last page of app icons.

The antenna in the 3Gs sucks. Lance has a 3G, and he regularly gets 4 bars and 3G at his desk, right next to mine. I get 2 bars, maybe, and edge. Sometimes shutting down and restarting the phone helps, but most of the time it’s just got crap for reception.

The camera lacks any kind of controls. Even my wife’s old Virgin Mobile phone AND her new Motorola free-phone have neat functions like exposure compensation and preset white balance settings. Not having that in this phone is STUPID, especially seeing as those are strictly software driven items. You put hundreds of thousands of manhours into designing the best touch-based UI man has ever seen, but you forget to add an exposure slider and a simple pull down for daylight/incandescent/fluorescent white balance? WTF?

Lastly, the headphone jack placement. I can understand that there’s not much room for it, but the bottom would be a much better place for the cord to be jutting out. Seriously. I hate the jack being at the top.

All of that said though, I don’t think I’d trade this thing for the world right now. It does so many damn things that I never knew I was missing. The ability to have what basically amounts to a location-aware, always-connected computer in the palm of your hand is incredible. Not to mention I’ve taken up posting to my flickr photostream and youtube much more since I have a camera in my pocket at all times. I’ve even opened a twitter account because of this damn thing.

So, what apps am I using? Lots of free ones. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a card-carrying charter member of the Cheap Bastards Association. Some of the apps I’m using the most are…

• Echofon – free twitter app that includes automated insertion of Google maps links, photos, and videos. Also automatically shortens URLs. Pretty damn sweet for something that’s free.
• Bump – Contact/image/video transfer between iPhone OS devices. Think old-school palmOS “beam” functionality, but without the hassle of IR transmissions and with the addition of fist bumping. This should be standard software on every iPhone OS device. Apple needs to buy this company, and make this part of the iPhone OS. Seriously.
• AT&T myWireless – AT&T account monitoring and management. Pretty much a no-duh thing to have for an iPhone.
• fring – the all-in-one IM/Skype/video conferenceing app. My only gripe is that you can’t get rid of the damn “Fring Test Call” buddy listing.
• Pandora Radio – This is the most awesome thing ever. Screw both terrestrial and satellite radio.
• I Can Has Cheezburger – You’ve gotta have LOLcats. This is not optional.
• Flickr – The Flickr app is another no-brainer. Honestly, this should be part of the camera app, the same way that Youtube is in the camera app for video.
• PS Mobile – Photoshop… ON YOUR PHONE.
• Naturespace – …zzzZZZzzz… …zzzZZZzzz… *drool* *snort* Oh hey, was I supposed to write something here?
• Pic2Shop – Barcode scanner, with amazon and froogle integration. Pretty damn cool.
• 3D Camera Lite – Makes AWESOME stereographic images, either anaglyphs or cross/parallel image pairs.
• Ping Lite – Awesome little network scanning tool.
• Words With Friends Free – Scrabble, over the Internet. A¹W⁴E¹S¹O¹M⁴E¹.
• Fandango – Finds theaters near you, and displays showtimes. Pretty cool.

I also have a home screen link to Wunderground’s iPhone optimized site on my main screen, the url is http://i.wund.com and the fullscreen wundermap on that page is great.

In conclusion, I still hate AT&T’s customer service, but I’m willing to suffer their idiodicy for this phone.

Front of one fake faceplate with a magstripe reader in it

I really, really, REALLY hate those stupid “RE: RE: re: FWD: re: FWD: OMG VIRIS ALERT READ THIS IMPORTANT!!!!1111” emails and blog posts and crap, so you know if I post one, it’s something serious, right? Well, it is, and you should.

There has been a rash of identity theft occurring recently that involves the vandalization and addition of extra hardware to ATM’s and gas pump credit card readers. This scam is not exactly “new”. According to this article on Snopes.com, it’s been around at least since 2004: http://www.snopes.com/fraud/atm/atmcamera.asp

The scam usually involves some kind of fake face with a magnetic stripe reader built in, stuck over the card slot with double-sided tape. In the case of ATM machines, this also involves a camera positioned directly over the PIN pad. This hardware is added by identity thieves looking to grab the account numbers from your card (using the magnetic stripe reader) and your 4-digit PIN code (from the camera). Some of these devices are very well disguised, painted in the same colors as the rest of the machine and often bearing logos or labels that match the rest of the machine. There have even been a few exceptionally well hidden ones that are made up to look like a badge around the existing card slot, the thickness of a single layer of printed circuit board material.

There are a few VERY VERY simple things you can do to avoid getting stung by this scam.

1. Use ATMs you’re familiar with. If you walk up to an ATM machine you’ve been using for years, and the card reader looks “different” today, DON’T USE IT.
2. Tug on the card reader, or the area surrounding it. If it starts to wiggle or feels like it’s coming off (or if it DOES come off), DON’T USE IT.
3. Look for any unusual boxes, particularly above or near the PIN pad on any ATM you plan on using. Tug on them, just like the card slot. Look for something that looks “newer” than the rest of the machine, or has a small pinhole pointing in the direction of the number pad. Also look for extra stick-on mirrors around the area of the PIN pad. Cameras have been hidden in these as well. If you see anything that looks like this, DON’T USE IT.

If you see anything that looks suspicious, look for a sticker on the ATM that gives an emergency contact 1-800 number. Call it and tell them you see what might be a skimmer on the machine. If the ATM is outside a bank, go inside and inform them. If you pull on the card slot or any other part of the machine, and it pops off, you’re almost definitely looking at a skimmer. DO NOT SIMPLY TOSS IT IN THE TRASH. It may contain dozens or hundreds of ATM and credit card numbers. If you’re in front of a bank, take it inside and give it to the manager. If you’re at an ATM that is not near a bank, call the police and tell them that you may have found an ATM skimmer, and where you are.

For photographs of what these devices may look like, and for current coverage on where they are being found and how banks are handling this threat, please go to http://consumerist.com/tag/skimmers/ and read through a few of the articles.

If nothing else, read this one in particular: http://consumerist.com/5218680/heres-what-a-card-skimmer-looks-like-on-an-atm

I’ve also posted some pictures (shamelessly ripped from The Consumerist) after the jump… (more…)

Wes and I were talking on the way back from taking my parents out to the Texas Roadhouse tonight. Once again, the long trip sparked an unusual conversation.

The US is working very hard to switch to greener energy sources. Just last year, there was record growth in the area of wind power generation. There is, however, a large and powerful group who doesn’t want this kind of reform of our energy infrastructure. Who are these evil, earth-hating, individuals? The railways.

Think about it; the thousands of coal-fired power plants around the US depend on massive amounts of coal being delivered daily by rail. Currently, this is the rail road companies’ primary source of revenue. If America “goes green”, the railways go belly-up. I have a co-worker who’s husband has a fairly high-ranking position at Norfolk Southern, and every time someone in the office starts talking about cleaner energy sources, she chimes in (semi-sarcastically) about how much she loves coal power. There’s a lot of folks who’s jobs are on the line when you start talking about alternative energy sources.

What can the rail companies do about this? (more…)

Back in October and November of ‘08, the Srizbi and Rustock Spammer botnets were seriously wounded by a series of actions by administrators around the world. Most notably, the folks at Hurricane Electric. Hurricane provided Internet backbone connectivity to a shady server farm business called “McColo” who’s client base used their collocated servers as the command center for hundreds of thousands of PC’s infected with malicious software.  These zombie PC’s would “call home” at regular intervals, download templates and address lists, and then spew Spam onto the Internet in massive quantities. Hurricane was presented with some rather compelling evidence about it’s downstream client’s bad behavior, and subsequently pulled the plug on their part of their internet connectivity, in a coordinated move with the other telecommunications companies that were selling connections to Mc Colo. The decapitation of these botnets resulted in a roughly 40% drop in the amount of email spam worldwide. So, did anyone actually notice that drop? Did it change the rate of any other types of Spam?

Yeah. That's a significant drop.

How about “HELL YEAH.” At one point, my blog had to filter out 237 spam comments in one day, though the average was closer to 100. Lately, nine spams a day is a “bad day.” I can’t even begin to imagine the processing overhead that was freed up on the world’s mail and website servers the day those bots died.

So, what can John Q. Public do to prevent another outbreak of zombified, spam-spewing PC’s clogging up the Internet? It’s quite simple really, let me break this down into a four-point-plan for you after the link: (more…)

ROCKET ENGINES, motherfarker.

In the future, that whole idea of racing in “cars” will be quaint and all but forgotten if these guys get their way. And I certainly hope they do.

With a total of 6 racing teams already formed, the fledgling “Rocket Racing League” is working hard to make a name for itself. They’ve already demonstrated an early version of their first generation airframe at the “AirVenture” event at Oshkosh, and plan to hold their first exhibition races there on the 1st and 2nd of August. Dreamed up by X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis and two-time Indianapolis 500 champion team partner Granger Whitelaw, this league hopes to take the excitement of NASCAR to the air. Only this time, instead of greasy V8’s and burning rubber, they’ve got ROCKET ENGINES, MOTHERFARKER.

Powered by a Liquid Oxygen and Kerosene rocket engine making 1,500 pounds of thrust, the pilots of these aircraft will have to guide the craft though a three-dimensional course projected on the craft’s Heads-Up-Display, while simultaneously avoiding other craft, keeping their own craft from disintegrating under  extraordinary structural stresses, and trying not to give the crowd a fatal overdose of AWESOMENESS.

Sorry, I’ve just always had a thing for planes and flight in general. I really hope this catches on, and that the new airpark being built here in E-City will draw their attention as a possible venue. You can catch video of the first demo flight at AirVenture 2008 over on Gizmodo.

I swear to God, if a toy company doesn’t pick up on this idea before Christmas, I’m gonna be pissed. Of course, as soon as the developer “Fritsl” posts diagrams and code, I may be able to make my own.

Basically, the cars have two ultrasonic range detectors; one front and one to the right. The detectors are constantly polled by a small microprocessor that takes that distance information, and uses it to apply a small and simple set of “rules” to driving the car:

1. If there’s something in front, turn left.
2. If something is closer than 30cm to the right, turn left.
3. If there’s nothing ahead and there’s something between 30 and 70cm to the right, go straight.
4. If there’s nothing closer than 70cm to the right, turn right.

You can catch a video of two of these things racing eachother after the jump. Read the full write up on LetsMakeRobots. Linkage found via Gizmodo. (more…)

This is an incredible concept. I’m not so sure about practicality, or about safety, but this concept car looks absolutely AMAZING. The lines are smooth and clean, the design low-slung and sporty, but the big story here is the “skin”. And really, that’s the best description for it. There’s no hard exterior panels, the whole thing is covered in an elastic rubberized fabric stretched over a wire and carbon fiber frame. The spoiler, the “hood”, the headlights, the doors, even the seats themselves all move by way of a very organic-looking flexible structure. The headlights are downright scary. Just look at the video, you’ll see what I mean. You can read more about it and see a gallery of still images on WindingRoad.com

A guy by the name of Doug Selsam seems to have come up with a pretty novel idea for wind power. Using a load of small, lightweight props (they look like model airplane props) and attaching them all to a long carbon fiber shaft, he can produce several hundred watts of power off of 20 mph worth of wind. He calls the system Superturbine, and it presents a much lower risk to wildlife than the giant windmill style generators. Then again, so do vertical axis turbines, and those new lighter-than-air rotating turbines they’re testing down the road at TCOM, but this may be easier to implement and looks ripe for some home-built knock-off action. I’d like to set something like this up to try and run some low power lighting and things here at home to make us more efficient, but lack of funding is keeping me out of the market for this stuff. I’ll just have to settle for using CFLs and turning off lights behind the kids all the time for now. You can visit Doug’s (very geocities-esque) site here.

My mom got a box full of old odds and ends the other day and was showing them to me this afternoon when I found something unexpected hidden in the pile. It was a pair of stencils labeled with the text “IBM” and “THINK”, along with a few unused IBM 5081 punch cards all stuffed in the back of a box of 12 Eagle “Wood Crayons” (coloring pencils). A closer look at the stencils showed that they were marked along the edges for checking the alignment of the holes on punch cards of a few different varieties. The stencil shapes themselves are for programming. Right off the bat, I recognized the standard symbols for Start/End points, physical output, and branches. The cards date from somewhere in the very wide range from 1928 to 1964. In 1964 IBM switched from square corners to rounded corners on the 80 column cards, presumably to reduce jams.

The punch cards themselves are (obviously) very common, but I haven’t seen any templates like these after trying to google them up for a while. I’ll probably bring one of each to work tomorrow to hang up at my desk. More pics after the jump.

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So, I had been bragging to all my co-workers that I was getting one of these Linux-powered UMPC’s, but between bills, the cost of heating oil, and the kid’s camps and soccer and t-ball registrations, my bonus is GONE; and because they’ve cut Wes’ hours again, we’re going to have to live on the Tax Refund money for a while. If anyone would like to donate your spare pocket lint change to the “Dirk Needs a Cheap-Ass Laptop Foundation”, please feel free to toss it at me at any time.

I’m actually considering a deal like the guy who got a G5 PowerMac Tower 25 cents at a time from donations, in exchange for video of him blowing up his old Mac G4 tower. Not sure what I’d blow up that would be epic enough to generate donations though. I wish I’d have kept the corpse of my old Compaq laptop from a couple years back. That might have blown up real good. Any suggestions from the crowd? What would you play a quarter to see blown up/rocket propelled/set on fire/blender-ized? Keep it legal, make it epic, and I may just do it. I promise slo-mo, high frame rate video from several angles and High-Def footage of the carnage in return.

Remember that scene from Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back where a creepy looking medical droid attached an artificial hand to Luke’s wrist-stump after his dad went all psycho and chopped his real hand off? Well, that’s just one step closer to being a reality now.

Dean Kamen, inventor of the over-hyped and underwhelming Segway, has headed up a team to develop a new prosthetic arm for the Department of Defense. This of course means incredible amounts of funding, and quite possibly the creepiest looking piece of hardware ever attached to a living human being.

At just under 8 pounds, this artificial limb is both far more anatomically correct than those Captain Hook style prosthetics, and extremely flexible and agile. The test subject in the video over on IEEE’s “Spectrum” website seems extremely comfortable with the arm, and noted that he was able to do things with it that he hadn’t been able to do since he lost both his arms 26 years ago.

As the tester noted at the end of the video, I’m sure his wife has managed to amass quite a long Honey-Do list in that time. I hope that thing’s got a Fast-Forward button on it!

Apparently some of Apple’s folks are doing their homework on little bugs in Leopard in preparation for some patches. A Google search for “dashboard crashes on leopard” directly from within the walls of His Steveness’ fortress in Cupertino showed my lowly little page popping up as the number one result. Maybe someone’s going to hunt down and squash the zombie widget bug I’ve encountered a few times. I had a screenshot of the bug in action, but I never did post it and I think I’ve deleted it. You can check out a PDF of the hit here, if the direct link to the hit on StatCounter is expired.

As a side note, I also want to toss a happy birthday shout-out to King Jobs’ number one defender, fan, advertiser, and all-around fanboy, Lance G! Happy Birthday, you old fart!

CES is just around the corner, and Macworld is almost here. Between the accidental leaks, the dubious claims and the wishful thinking fanboy photoshops, it looks like it’s going to be an interesting first quarter. Here’s my question though: Who the hell is going to have the loot to BUY all this stuff? (more…)

I just had to post a link to this one because I OWN two of the products on this list, and we have several examples of another one of them at work. I present for your heckling pleasure the 16 WORST Apple products of all time.

I own a Performa 620CD, a close relative of the 630 on the list, and I’m actually posting from an eMac right now. In fact, I use the eMac as my main machine at home. We have 2 iBooks at work, and both of them are completely busted. I’m not too sure the eMac really belongs on the list (I love mine), but the 6xx series and the iBook DEFINITELY do. This is really a reminder to the Apple Fanboiz out there that every company makes F***-ups once in a while, and Stevie J. and friends ain’t no different!

I’ve been playing with this little widget for a hour or so tonight, so I added it to the sidebar of the website. It may well end up being a replacement to the homebrew webcam script I’m currently using. It’s called Stickam. Think MySpace, but with a flash based video broadcasting system built in. I could care less about the site itself, and all of it’s angsty myspaceish emo retards on video, but the widgets are pretty cool, and it actually streams the video pretty well. It seems to have some potential, not as a social networking website because it fails horribly at that, but as a tool for multi-person cross platform video chat and collaboration. Check it out some time. Believe it or not, I actually stumbled across this while running a raid on some of the more emo-looking users with some /b/tards. Don’t ask, you don’t want to know.

I happened across this one while randomly youtubing, it’s a pretty neat little bit of machinima.

Ivan, an employee of the database software company iAnywhere Solutions, moved away from his company’s home base five years ago so that his wife could work at a new job more than 800 miles from where they used to live. His employer let him telecommute, but Ivan quickly found out that working from home wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, and had to find another way to work.

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I’m not sure why, but this video is strangely addictive.

Looks like Edmund Scientific is closing out some old stock. These PicoBotz kits look like silver spray-painted testicles, but the feature set is good and they’re knocking the price down from $99 to $77, which isn’t bad. The kit, once assembled, operates in three modes: obstacle avoidance, sound control, and line following. With the addition of a Windows PC, you can use the included serial cable and software to program the robot for other tasks with a set of 180 instructions. (I knew I was keeping that Windows machine around for SOMETHING) Sounds like a good gift for the geek in your life, available for only $77 while stock holds out. Maybe you should buy it now and hold on to it for Christmas or something. (WINK WINK NUDGE NUDGE)

Update: This story got picked up on Make:Blog!