Spaceblimp pictures are now available!
R. Mark Adams has posted the photographs taken by the test-type HacDC Spaceblimp to his Flickr account. Take a look at them here.
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Transformer fire, NOVA apartment complex.
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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The test type HacDC Spaceblimp is in the air!
HacDC has launched its test-type Spaceblimp for the Hackerspaces In Space competition! You can track it wherever you happen to be by following @hacdcspaceblimp on Twitter (where updates are posted every two minutes) or aprs.fi on the map.
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Eclipse Phase NPC: Paul - El Pulpo Magnifico!
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 …Read more...
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There's a first time for everything: target shooting
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 …Read more...
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Reply hazy; hack again later.
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Radio silence: a sign of the times.
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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Rtorrent and proxies.
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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Don't put a box back together until you're sure it's working.
Never bolt the sides back onto a computer you're building until you're absolutely, positively, cutting-charge-wrapped-around-a-major-artery serious that it's working exactly the way it's supposed to. Installing a server in the rack before the systemware's installed and patched and the servers are up and running is a sure-fire way to provoke a hardware failure or hard drive crash.
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Aftershocks from the Afghan War Diary release.
If you haven't been paying attention to the news for a week or so, Wikileaks dropped a major bomb last week by releasing approximately 75,000 classified mission reports from the ongoing yet formally undeclared war in Afghanistan. The staff of Wikileaks has made it known that there is so much data there that anyone and everyone out there with programming skills should at least consider downloading the archived documents and writing software to analyze their contents to find patterns in the information. However, nothing ever happens in a vacuum and blowback is being felt across the Net, and I …
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