1. Experimental neurochips fabricated in a lab.

    22 August 2010

    Fans of the manga Ghost In the Shell no doubt remember one of the more visually stunning pages at the beginning of the saga, CG art depicting a neurochip, which in the series was the technology underlying artificial intelligence and the prosthetic brains which made full body cyborgs possible. Not a few of us have dreamed of the day in which it would be possible to directly interface doped silicon processors with our wetware and move information out of one and into the other with little more than a thought. However, our science fiction-fueled dreams are just that, dreams, and …

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  2. An interesting development in the Lower Marion School District surveillance case.

    22 August 2010

    For a couple of months now I've been following the Lower Marion High School laptop surveillance case in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. If the story's been dropped from your cache for whatever reason, earlier this year it was discovered that a school district in the vicinity of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania was using the laptops it issued to students to spy on them while they were off-campus. As it turned out some of the staff had been remotely activating the built-in webcams and using them to watch students. A cache of images taken through the webcams was found on some of their servers, some …

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  3. Transformer fire, NOVA apartment complex.

    21 August 2010

    Driving home yesterday evening I nearly jumped out of my skin when a bright flash of light reflected in my rearview mirror nearly blinded me, closely followed by what I can best describe as a cartoon-character-gets-zapped sound effect that I heard even through closed windows and the air conditioning going at full blast. In a move that probably says more about my sense of self-preservation than anything else, I threw the TARDIS into park, jumped out, and ran toward the source of the sound - a rapidly descending power company cherrypicker below what used to be a small transformer on the …

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  4. Eclipse Phase NPC: Paul - El Pulpo Magnifico!

    20 August 2010

    System: Eclipse Phase
    Character name: Paul - El Pulpo Magnifico!
    Apparent age: 3
    Character concept: Psychic octopus, professional sportscaster

    Prior to the Fall of transhumanity people always said that there was something a little.. off.. about an uplifted giant Pacific octopus whom the Somatek geneticists decanted. Given the name Paul, he soon distinguished himself from his broodmates by becoming something of a historian. It's widely agreed that the first thing Paul saw after awakening to sentience was probably a sportscast of some kind; maybe it was microgravity rugby, maybe it was superconducting hockey, it might even have been centripital soccer. One …

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  5. There's a first time for everything: target shooting

    19 August 2010

    It's been a while since I've had a surreally nervewracking experience to make things interesting, so when the opportunity came to go target shooting at the NRA range in northern Virginia I decided to give it a go.

    I found out only recently that The Wrong Hands has been handgun training for a while now (six months, I think), and she extended an invitation to Lyssa a couple of weeks back to go to the range. By all accounts, at the end of the evening Lyssa had had an excellent time, and I was extended an invitation to join them …

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  6. Radio silence: a sign of the times.

    16 August 2010

    I wish I could say it's been quiet over here, but it's actually been relentlessly busy for Lyssa and I down here in DC. I think I overextended myself a little the weekend of the prototype Spaceblimp launch, which left me fighting off... something.. that kept me at a high fever and feeling run down most of the time. I did a little detail working on my car to cover up the myriad scratches and scuffs that accumulate whenever you park for long periods of time in an urban area. While the speeding edge of an SUV door doesn't actually …

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  7. Rtorrent and proxies.

    16 August 2010

    For those of you who are fans of the text-based BitTorrent client rtorrent, it is worth noting that you can run its tracker communication traffic (though not its block exchange traffic) over an HTTP proxy of some kind by setting an environment variable http_proxy=http://some host:port/ before you start rtorrent. This appears to work because rtorrent is linked against libcurl to implement HTTP. However, please note that some BitTorrent trackers specifically disallow the use of proxies, and might penalize or ban you outright for doing so. If you want to do this, just set the above environment variable …

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