MS-DOS running on my MacBook. Is there nothing I won’t stoop too?
Blog
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Cambrian Plush Toys – How cool is that?
It was big, it was dangerous, a top predator of the Cambrian Explosion and, in Japan, a plush toy for the kids.
I want one.
Technorati Tags: Blog, Japan, Paleontology
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It’s Bulwer-Lytton Time!
The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction contest has been run again and the winners are in!
What’s the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction contest?
An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Although best known for “The Last Days of Pompeii†(1834), which has been made into a movie three times, originating the expression “the pen is mightier than the sword,†and phrases like “the great unwashed†and “the almighty dollar,†Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the “Peanuts†beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, “It was a dark and stormy night.â€
My favorite was the winner in the adventure category…
As the hippo’s jaws clamped on Henry’s body he noted the four huge teeth badly in need of a clean, preferably with one of those electric sonic toothbrushes, and he reflected that his name would be immortalized by his unusual death, since hippo killings are not a daily occurrence, at least not in the high street of Chipping Sodbury.
Tim Lafferty
Horsell, Woking, UK -
A New Hard Drive… A New Hard Drive at last!
Finally! 5400 RPM 2.5“ SATA drives over 200GB are available.
I found a good deal online for a Western Digital 250GB model and ordered it last week. It arrived today and with the help of an external hard drive and Carbon Copy Cloner, in just 5 hours, I have completed duplicated my old MacBook drive onto the new one and was up and running.
134GB Free! The free space is slightly more than the entire capacity of my original drive. I wonder how fast I can fill it up?
One potentially bad thing: It might be that I need to re-calibrate my battery, but prior to installing this drive, if I kicked the plug out while not doing anything, my time remaining would be about 4:45. With the new drive in there, the time is only 3:30.
I’m re-calibrating now and will post an update when I have it.
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How dare you say such a thing to me! Those wacky Japanese – again.
Those wacky Japanese aerobics girls are at it again… This time, how to exercise your way through an abusive argument.
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Rain Flood Rain
It’s not flooding like in Britain, but ol’ mother nature really gave it a good try today in a 6 square mile area around my house.Between 3:00 and 4:00PM, water levels rose over an inch above the sidewalks.
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Expanding Parallels Virtual Machine Hard Drive
Just a tip that I found useful.
When I first purchased Parallels Workstation (back when it was beta), I setup my VM Windows XP installation and I decided (unwisely) that I needed a very small virtual disk drive because I didn’t want to waste space on my MacBook. I didn’t realize that the virtual drive doesn’t take up the entire space, but expands up to that limit. Consequently, I set my drive to 8 Gb. This has proved a bit problematic from time to time.
In the latest update of Parallels they re-supplied they re-supplied the Parallels Image Tool (which had been removed earlier.) This tool allows you to expand the virtual HD.
What it doesn’t do is expand the virtual C: drive, all it does is provide unallocated space. Using Windows alone, this means all you can do is either reformat, or create a second drive. Neither option was appealing. On a “real†hard drive, I’d grab a partitioning to and expand the drive, but I was not so sure that’s a good idea on a virtual drive.
To make a short story long, I decided to grab gparted, a linux-based tool available for download. gparted comes as a bootable ISO image. I made a couple changes to my VM configuration – telling it to boot to the “CD-rom†first and also telling it to treat the gparted ISO image as the drive.
It worked flawlessly. Linux booted, and gparted expanded my NTFS volume without a single glitch. Very cool.
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Doctor Who – Logopolis – DVD Review
Logopolis has been released as part of the “New Beginnings†boxed set which also includes The Keeper of Traken and Castrovalva.
Writer Christopher H. Bidmead takes Computer Science 101.
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Unsolicited Product Endorsement – iKlear Apple Polish
When I bought my MacBook (actually, when I bought my iBook before it), one area of concern for me was the white color.
If you’ve ever worked tech support on computers, you know how disgustingly dirty a taupe keyboard can get. How awful must a gleaming white laptop get?
In all the time we’ve had the iBook, it’s still quite clean, and I’m very pleased with that. When I got the MacBook, I expected much the same cleanliness; however, I couldn’t help reading on the net how some people’s MacBooks got filthy brown and others didn’t. That really worried me because, when I was in drafting, no matter how clean I kept my hands, I couldn’t keep a clean drawing to save my life.
As time went by, the MacBook really didn’t get dirty. That is, until I took it to Taiwan. Once I got there, it started to get filthy, and, like so many other people on the net, it just wouldn’t clean up! What kind of weird plastic is this thing made out of?
Anyway, after trying every non-destructive cleanser I had at home (and a few I had to improvise) I was ready to give up. Instead, I broke down and bought some iKlear at the local Apple store.
I have no idea what is in it, but it cleaned up the MacBook without any problems. Kudos to iKlear.
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Dinosaurs turning in their graves.
My previous post praising BBC documentaries wasn’t just brought on by having watched the fantastic Earth Story.
As part of my never-ending battle against the forces of darkness, I don’t just watch good television. I also get to watch a lot of seriously disturbing nonsense. As it happens, at the same time I was watching Earth Story, I was also watching a videotape of a “seminar†by Kent Hovind.
Kent a particular pet peeve of mine because he setup the Dinosaur Adventure Land in Florida. That was a “museum†aimed at children, which foisted a lot of really, really bad science on unsuspecting children brought in by their equally gullible parents about the Earth only being 6,000 years old and dinosaurs coexisting with mankind.
A federal judge saw fit to put him in jail for 10 years. Sadly it was just on tax charges, not for child abuse.
Anyway, despite Hovind being locked away, his videos are still making the rounds and I had the “opportunity†to watch a tape of him explaining the Hovind Theory to an audience.
It’s complete bullshit, of course, but I have to give the guy credit where it is due. He is an effective speaker to an audience and he can spout complete nonsense with authority. He peppers his narrative with enough scientific jargon that, if you didn’t bother research what he was actually claiming, you could (particularly if already inclined) walk away believing he had something meaningful to bring to the table.
…and so there’s the negative aspect of television/video: The convincing misinformer.
I’ve mentioned the major points of his theory before, but, I’ll just lift the current summary of the Hovind Theory right out of Wikipedia because, no matter how many times I hear it, it’s good for a both a laugh and a cry of righteous indignation.
From the Wikipedia entry on Kent Hovind (7/22/2007) [with a couple clarifications in brackets by me]
The theory includes a literal reading of the Biblical account of Noah: Noah’s family and two of every “kind†of animal (including dinosaurs) safely boarded the Ark before a minus 300° Fahrenheit (~-184°C) ice meteor came flying toward the earth and broke up in space.
Some of the meteor fragments became rings [around the outer planets] and others caused the impact craters on the moon and some of the planets. The remaining ice fragments fell to the north and south poles of the earth.
The resulting “super-cold snow†fell near the poles, burying the mammoths standing up. Ice on the North and South pole cracked the crust of the earth releasing the fountains of the deep [the mid-oceanic ridge], which in turn caused certain ice age effects, namely the glacier effects. Also this made “the earth wobble around†and it made the canopy [a whole lot of water that was in the Earth’s atmosphere in the pre-flood days] collapse that used to protect the earth.
During the first few months of the flood, the dead animals and plants were buried, and became oil and coal, respectively.
The last few months of the flood included geological instability, when the plates shifted. [Apparently the continents were not sitting on the mantle, but were floating upon water, which was forced out when the mid-oceanic ridge was formed, then the continents slipped away at 45 MPH until the ended up mostly where they are now and slowed down to their current speed of 4 or 5 cm per year.]
This period saw the formation of both ocean basins and mountain ranges and the resulting water run-off caused incredible erosion — Hovind says that the Grand Canyon was formed in a couple of weeks during this time.
After a few hundred years, the ice caps slowly melted back retreating to their current size and the ocean levels increased, creating the continental shelves. The deeper oceans absorbed much of the carbon dioxide in earth’s atmosphere and thus allowed greater amounts of radiation to reach the earth’s surface. As a result, human lifespans were shortened considerably in the days of Peleg.
There’s also some good stuff in there about plants not actually being alive, too. (And, insects may not be alive, either.)
Sick, Sick, Sick.
Technorati Tags: Blog, Dinosaur, Dinosaurs, Geology, Loonies, Paleontology, Psuedo-science, Rant, Science, Television, Video