• Jim Strickland sent word that Lindsay's Technical Books is shutting down next year, not for financial reasons but simply because Lindsay is retiring. Their last print catalog has been sent. Order the stuff you've been prevaricating about for years--I will be. (Recommendation: Radio for the Millions.) Tip for those who haven't heard of him before: ( Read more... )

• I was wrong about Diesel engines being easy to make, as I suggested in my entry for March 5, 2012. Fuel injection, as it turns out, is a bitch. You're trying to divide oil into a multitude of very small droplets of (reasonably) consistent size. Gasoline carburetion, by comparison, is a snap. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht, an automotive engineer, for the ( Read more... )

• Of all the essential elements of science, proving causation is by far the hardest. Correlation only points in a direction that further research should take; it has no value in and of itself. (The title of the article is very hokey, by the way: Science is not failing us. Human ignorance--and corruption--are interfering with the scientific process.)
• ( Read more... )

I just heard this morning that the ASUS Transformer Prime will be shipped with a locked bootloader. I wanted to spit; that machine was (until a few hours ago) at the top of my tablet prospects list. Then, about twenty minutes ago, I found the update: ASUS, having felt the Gates of Hell open upon its head for the last four days, decided that it will ( Read more... )

• Here's a great site on older toy and hobbyist robots; if you're a collector or just a nostalgist, it's a must-see. (Maybe some here have never seen my late 70s robot Cosmo Klein.) Alas, the link came from an old email sent by the late George M. Ewing WA8WTE, who suggested it as an Odd Lot. Better late than never.
• We used to giggle at the name in the ( Read more... )

• The Nook Tablet is no longer rootable, thanks to a recent stealth update applied automatically when the device connects to the Internet. The big deal with the mod is that sideloaded apps can no longer be installed; all you get are what's available from the B&N app store.
• Lose a few, win a few: Amazon no longer blocks rival ebook apps on its Kindle ( Read more... )

• You're getting two Odd Lotses in a row for a reason. Stay tuned--I'll try and explain tomorrow, if I don't run out of Aleve.
• Bruce Eckel is returning his Kindle Fire because the damned thing will not render .mobi files. C'mon, Amazon. I mean, come on. (Thanks to Mike Bentley for the link.)
• Xoom 2, where are you? Whoops, it's going to be called the ( Read more... )

• Pete Albrecht sent a YouTube pointer to some riot footage in Warsaw taken by an RC helicopter. If we can't have flying cars here in the 21st century, well, this is better than nothing.
• Linux Mint 11 does not handle the integrated graphics on the Dell Optiplex SX270. Even the liveCD version doesn't detect video correctly and is basically unusable. ( Read more... )

• Does anybody here use true peer-to-peer chat? I don't use chat much, and when I do it's with a very small number of people, typically one-to-one. By peer-to-peer I mean via direct connect from one IP to another, without intermediation at the server level, as with things like Trillian, Skype, Jabber, etc. I know that WASTE does this, though I've ( Read more... )

• A lot happened while I was down in Taos, and I'll do my best to catch up a little here today. But as you've seen from my two entries about the workshop, it was tough to pay attention to anything there but the challenge at hand.
• More photos from the workshop: Christie Yant has established a single page linking to all four of her Flickr albums from ( Read more... )