1. RFID dust?!

    16 February 2007

    The Hitachi corporation has come out with a new generation of RFID tags, and get this: They're about as large around as a human hair and 5 microns thick. In fact, they're unobtrusive to the tune of 0.05mm by 0.0.05mm in size. They're calling it RFID dust, and it's an order of magnetude smaller than the smallest RFID chips that Hitachi has on the market, the so-called mu-chips, which are only 0.4mm on a side. RFID dust doesn't have a lot of storage capacity, at most 128 bits of data, but they're so tiny, they could …

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  2. Could the predicted Bird Flu epidemic bring about the impending Death of the Net?

    16 February 2007

    It seems that the bird flu, which has a disproportionate number of people scrambling for grey market antibiotics and sterile facemasks (a rant that you can be sure I've been prepping for a while) is making financial and networking industry high ups wonder what would happen to the Net in the event of a real outbreak. Their reasoning seems simple enough: In the event of an outbreak of the avian flu that posed a serious threat to people in the US, many thousands would want to work from home to minimise their chances of being infected. However, it is also …

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  3. I don't think that these are subtle enough to really work well.

    16 February 2007

    An outfit called Innovative Fabrications is specialising in furniture with hidden compartments for Joe and Jane Average, though their prices are a bit more than /J*e Average/ can probably afford at the drop of a hat. That's not why I'm not so sure about them, though... if you click around in their catalogue, you'll notice two things: One, the styles of furniture, or at least the ones pictured, are a bit too old fashioned to blend in well with the furniture that people these days are likely to buy. Someone with a bit of common sense and a bit …

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  4. 29: Another year older, another year wiser...

    15 February 2007

    Well, my body turned 29 a couple of hours ago, and here I sit with a full stomach looking back on the year just gone by. Orthaevelve and Lyssa took me out for dinner at the China Star for my birthday tonight, and afterward we hit up Whole Paycheque for a tasty German chocolate cake that I've been sharing with everyone that came over tonight after we got home (that'd be Hasufin, who was kind enough to bring a shovel to help me free the TARDIS again) to hang out.

    Since last year, life's taken a decidedly good turn for …

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  5. First the man is gone, now his books have followed.

    15 February 2007

    Following the death of Terrence McKenna in the year 2000, the Esalen Institute took ownership of his voluminous library of rare texts and an uncatalogued number of his notes, diaries, and other pieces of written information that accumulated through the course of his life. On 5 February a five-alarm fire broke out in the building in Monterey that the library was kept in, destroying everything. An incredible amount of information was lost in the blaze that also consumed a couple of restaurants, a coffee shop, and several other office blocks. So many rare tomes, some dating back to the 1800's …

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  6. Moving visualisations of air traffic patterns.

    15 February 2007

    If you've watched television for any length of time, chances are you've seen the classic FAA blips-on-a-screen representations of air traffic over the United States. A student at UCLA has taken this to the next level by generating high-res 3d movies of air traffic over the country. They're all in QuickTime format, so you'll have to have the appropriate CODECs or players installed. The animations are an interesting diversion, if nothing else. There is a version where each kind of flight is colour-coded, a 3D dome projection (nice work on that, incidentally), and even one where an amorphous blob is …

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  7. Yeah, it is Valentine's Day, isn't it?

    14 February 2007

    As one would surmise, it's Valentine's Day, so Lyssa and I had planned to go to a local restaurant (the Sweetwater Tavern) for dinner to celebrate after work tonight. Little did we realise that it would turn into something of an adventure right from the outset.

    As I wrote earlier today, DC was hit by what was considered a major ice storm last night, and temperatures continue to fall. Not only does this mean that roadways transformed into ice skating rinks (which eventually caused the shutdown of part of the outer loop of the beltway today due to a multi-car …

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  8. How the mighty have fallen!

    14 February 2007

    The encryption algorithms for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD content have been cracked!

    The processing key is one of the keys used in the process of generating the media key, the unique key that encrypts the contents of a particular DVD. Due to the encryption algorithm used in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD technologies, they keys seem to work in a hierarchial manner: If you compromise a key lower in the hierarchy, you crack media. Compromise a key higher up in the hierarchy, and you crack all of the media encrypted underneath it.. meaning that all of the new generation DVDs may be freely …

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