Technicon 27 started with our water heater cracking open ( Read more... )

Seems that I have two VHS copies of the "Gentleman's Agreement" Shadowrun movie. I found the better of the two, but I still played with the brightness settings a bit in iMovie to make Jerry's Toaster work show up better. The initial team meetup scene remains dark as heck, though.

This is Part One...

Click to view

( Part Two behind the cut )

"Very much what I imagine a small college town with crappy weather would be like, back on old Earth." - Captain Vanderdecken, Space RoguesYes, we've got nice thick fog, accompanied with that fine, voluminous rain that coldly soaks everything in no time ( Read more... )

This morning I found a hotel cardkey from a 2007 con in my stuff. I'd feel guilty, except I know they churn these keys out by the millions, and since the whole thing is computer-controlled, they've already invalidated the darn thing. So now it's a memento ( Read more... )

While watching the 2005 season finale of Doctor Who with Rain the other day, something struck me. The Doctor carries a tool he calls a "sonic screwdriver". About the size of a regular screwdriver, this tool emits sonic (and perhaps other) waves which can manipulate small mechanical and electronic objects. It's most commonly used as a lockpick, but ( Read more... )

Phew. Still a little tired from the accumulated 12 hours of driving this weekend. I had a great time in Riner, it was good to catch up with folks. Ironically, I had to drive back to the B-burg area to see some people who live here on the Virginia coast :p By the end of the evening, I was on the floor of the guest house with a bunch of buzzed people ( Read more... )

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From the useless-but-cool department...

You can now watch your movie files in ASCII in the Terminal application of MacOS 10.2!

Here's some shots from a certain video - each image links to a larger version:


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Researchers at IBM have developed technology which uses dents in thin plastic film to store information. It's a bit like the punch cards of computing history, except the dents are 10 nanometers in width. (A nanometer is one-millionth of the width of a piece of paper-clip wire ( Read more... )

Technicon starts a week from tomorrow, and they've posted an early version of the schedule. I do realize that con schedules are subject to complete revision until late Sunday afternoon, but I couldn't help noticing a few things ( Read more... )