Memory Suppliers has supplanted 1800Memory as my RAM shipper of choice. They’ve got solid prices on sticks for apple, as well as some homebrew supplies: I just ordered a coupla DSTT to try my hand at DS development. Sweet.
After all that, archive and install saved the day in the matter of an hour. Everything is up and running like it used to be, with 100% less flakiness.
And somehow I’ve got 20 extra gigs. Woohoo!
Since I’ve been a mac-guy, and we’re going on 6 years now, I’ve got to do a reinstall exactly once. Tonight I’ve got to do it again.
The Leopard install on my macbook pro has been messed up for a while, and after the 10.5.2 update finder won’t start up.
The install on my iMac went fine, and it’s been running great. The stability differences between the installs bug me. This shit is supposed to “just work,” and for the most part is does, but this could be a crack in the armor. Something about permissions? Hopefully the fresh start will fix it.
Backing up a borked mac is easy. Cmd-T’ing with a firewire cable, the backer-upper computer automatically sees the borked drives index. That and that all of my important files are in my home directory and applications folders, and it’s a little drag and drop.
I have my desktop on time machine. My laptop was not. C’est la guerre.
We’ll see.
We’re talking about nanowhosists and they cameraman pulls pack so wide as to get this:
That happens to be the corner of the lab dedicated to oversized plumbing supplies. Really.
Everyone is asking me for it anyway, and by everyone I mean my parents.
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Or I guess when you see it, if you see it, 11:29 PM. No way in hell I’m watching it. Eesh.
Not that Alan and his cameraman Andrew were anything less that professional. I just had an hour to read a Nature paper, digest it, and try to explain it to people that don’t spend their days trying to thing about this.
So first and foremost, let me apologize to Yong Qin, Xudong Wang and Zhong Lin Wang. I didn’t do your work justice, but I’d like to take the chance to say how neat it is.
Long story short:
ZnO piezoelectric nanofibers have two big advantageous over traditional piezoelectric.
The signal is inherently DC because the ZnO forms a diode. Thus it’s self rectifying. This is huge: it’s the nano equivalent of building your wall wart into the wire itself.
The geometry makes frequency of vibrational almost irrelevant. Any motion, due to the number of fibers and their comb configuration produces a current.
Add on top the claimed mechanical stability, and it’s a good package. Now to make it waterproof….
However, you’re not going to run your iPod from this: the scale up produces 80 mW per square meter, max, and theoretically. Your iPod battery has over 5000 mWh (~2500 for a mini/nano) so it might take over a day of moving to charge the thing. I don’t know the average power draw for sure. But given a 14 hour lifetime on an ipod, that’s an average of over 300 mW, or 3x the power the shirt can deliver.
As I told Alan, and I hope made it to air, this is meant for low power wireless computers: 80mW goes a long way with these devices, hell, 8 mW goes a long way, and 800 µW, in conjunction with my batteries, is completely useable.
So I apologize for spazzing up the airwaves: Eep, for the love of all things holy please be gentle.
I spent a good 5 minutes thinking about this one.
I’ve been getting about 2 or 3 hits per day from searchme. What’s odd is that all other bots type searches get filtered out, so I wonder what’s going on here.
BasicSerial is a netbeans project with just enough to get you connected to a serial port and reading in data. It’s up to you to give that data a place to go or send data to the device at the other end of the serial port. I use this as a basic template for all my serial java code, so I figured other people might need it as well, given that serial ports and java are a bitch to get going. This takes away most of the pain.
