( Read more... )

Well, it's the end of the month again, and I'm out of free ( Read more... )

• ESR did an interesting long-form essay on that very peculiar nootropic drug, Modafinil, which he takes for cerebral palsy. It sounds ( Read more... )

• I had some fairly sophisticated oral microsurgery about ten days ago, and it kind of took the wind out of me. That's why you're getting two Odd Lots in a row. I have things to write about long-form but have only recently found the energy to write at all. Promise to get a couple of things out in the next week.
• Some researchers at UW Madison are ( Read more... )

John Glenn. Carrie Fisher. Debbie Reynolds. Zsa Zsa Gabor. Gene Wilder. Lots, lots more. OMG! Worst year evah!

I wonder. And because I wonder, I doubt it.

It's certainly true that a lot of famous people died in 2016. However, we didn't have any ( Read more... )

• Take a look at Visuino, which is a visual development environment for the Arduino embedded processor family. This is a beautiful thing, and makes me wish I still ran a certain magazine.
• And there's a new default OS for the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3. (Don't try it on the earlier boards, nor the Pi Zero ( Read more... )

• Heads up: Today is the last day you can register (for free) to vote for the Dragon Awards, which will be presented at DragonCon next weekend. The Hugo Awards have made their preferences clearly known; for the cast-out Puppy cohort the Dragons are every bit as good and probably better.
• The least affordable American cities, and how much ( Read more... )

• Somebody over at USA Today seems to think that Colorado is just a little too high... (Thanks to Sarah Hoyt for the link.)
• Not new news, but startling: They're still digging up live, century-old ordnance in France and Belgium. I suspect they'll still be digging it up a century from now.
• Here's an overview of how to write custom components for the ( Read more... )

• If you're of the increasingly rare human subspecies called "morning people," consider watching the predawn sky for the next few weeks. Once Mercury gets a little higher above the horizon at dawn, you'll be able to see all five naked-eye planets in a line: Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Mars, and Jupiter.
• Here in Arizona, I don't even have to get up early. ( Read more... )

• The very first magnetic hard drive had 50 platters, stored 5 megabytes, and weighed over a ton. IBM was so proud of the RAMAC system that included the hard drive that it would take a demo unit on tour, to show it to a skeptical business community. Must have been hard on the truck's suspension.
• Compare that original hard drive to Intel's Edison, ( Read more... )