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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Category: Geekery

  • Does this mean that Dumbledore is Gandalf, or Saruman?

    I’ve stated over the years that I’m something of a dilettante. Among the interests in which I dabble you’ll find the fascinating field of etymology. Words are fun. History is interesting. Therefore, the history of words is an endless joy… to me, anyway. A case in point:

    Kyla and The Roomie and I were in the kitchen yesterday morning, eating and fixing breakfast respectively, and my eye chanced upon the cat food bag on a nearby windowsill. One of the featured fish caught my eye: Albacore tuna. For some reason I thought next about the albatross (and refrained from quoting Monty Python, I’ll have you know), at which point I mused aloud about the similarity in naming. “What does the ‘alba’ prefix mean?” I knew that it was going to bother me until I found out.

    Late last night I indulged in a few minutes’ research. Turns out that one of the sources of ‘alba-‘ is our old dead friend Latin, “albus” for white. Albacore? The “only tuna species which may be marketed as ‘white meat tuna’ in the United States.” Albatross? A mostly-white seagoing bird. (Granted, the etymology is a bit mixed here, being a weird morphing from an Arabic origin having to do with being a “diving bird” to a Latin-influenced final product.)

    Thus educated, I could sleep peacefully.

  • Why I Love System Restore CDs

    The Spud’s computer went sort of kerblooey, in a software-ish sort of way, a week or so ago. Luckily it’s a Compaq D310 (well, most of it is, anyway) and I have all of the restore CDs, still in the big fancy ziploc bag they came in. I booted off of a handy-dandy “Bart” DVD, copied off everything that I deemed worth saving onto the network drive (wasn’t about to use the USB drive on a machine that old), and swapped out the two smaller drives for a newer, bigger model I happened to have kicking around.

    You’ll be amazed to know that I can see eight unused IDE hard drives from where I’m sitting, without even turning my head, won’t you? Right.

    Sorry, that’s ten. And two SCSI drives. Anyway…

    Say what you will about PCs built by megacorporations, but HP/Compaq restore disks have saved my bacon dozens of times in the last half-dozen years. You have to go in afterward and tweak a few things, it’s true. If you leave out the “supplemental software” disk, however, there’s surprisingly little garbage to worry about. Among the nifty benefits is that you don’t have to worry about entering the license key. Any time I don’t have to stress about typos is a good time.

    The next step is to install video drivers (you don’t think it’s using the motherboard video chipset, do you?), throw on some of the key software that no Windows PC should be without, and haul those files back off of the network drive. When I’m done the machine will be cleaner (dust bunnies? try dust elephants) and leaner (less leftover cruft from years of installing and removing software) and feature greater capacity on a single drive instead of two drives so it’ll also run cooler and on less power.

    All I need to do is complete it by the weekend. I can do that, right?

  • Music Meme Answers

    Here are the answers from last week’s meme post, and the Excel spreadsheet you’ve all been waiting for. First, the songs: (more…)

  • Newfangled Contraptions

    I’ve been… busy. Making contraptions, that is. Intermittently. After work, mostly.

    Allow me to show you my bizarre creations, won’t you? Note that the only contraptions I’ve bothered to save are those which satisfy some “above and beyond” quirk of mine. For instance: Don’t Stop completes the goal in mere seconds, but the fun part is watching it climb the hill and throw itself off the side. Four Plus 1 is an exercise in very, very slowly removing all four of the accessible orange balls. As with all of my creations, the trick is to click the “back” button when prompted as the goal is reached.

    For her part, Erica managed to get three of them in the same challenge with her Push and Roll. That’s right, I hooked my darling daughter on Fantastic Contraption. You know what? She’s not doing too badly. Her solution for “Mission To Mars,” Chain Reaction, elicited a forehead slap from me. “Why didn’t I think of that?” (My solution to that puzzle didn’t warrant posterity, I assure you.) Her Push-Over is a much more creative contraption to solve “U-Turn” than what I’ve done so far, too. (I have an idea, I just haven’t been able to make it work yet. Argh.) Erica showed promise right from the start with her straightforward yet amusing LastMinuteSave.

    Other contraptions of note that I’ve cobbled together include Brick Bridge, Goal & Clear, Latch & Chain, Tilt & Go and the Humpmobile. I’m probably not done yet, either…

  • Verizon xv6800 Upgrade: The Good & The Bad

    I received a text message early this afternoon with the news that the long- (long, long, long) awaited software update to Windows Mobile 6.1 is finally available. So, like the versionitis-afflicted waterfowl that I am, I hurried off to upgrade. There were some difficulties at first, such as the USB connection to the laptop going sour early on in the first attempt, but eventually the update installed and ran.

    The upside? Overall, WM6.1 evens out many of the rough edges from the at-release version of the OS on this phone. Among the nifty new items is a built-in feature that you used to have to hack in: The ability to configure the “X” button so that programs actually quit instead of merely hiding in the background. On a device with not nearly enough RAM (is there ever enough?) to run more than a few apps, this is a gift from heaven all by itself.

    The downside? Somewhere in the process, my phone’s authentication code with Verizon got wiped out. I can’t send or receive calls or text messages. Even better: In order to fix the phone, I have to call from… another phone! Since I’m not about to try juggling two cellphones, I think I’m going to simply wait until I get to work tomorrow.

    Here’s hoping that there aren’t any personal emergencies in the next eleven hours…

  • Not Incredible, Not A Machine

    The Fantastic Contraption, a Flash-based device-building game, is a suitable facsimile of The Incredible Machine. It’s good enough for my purposes, anyway. I spent some time building machines that achieve the goal plus a bit of something extra for fun. Please, allow me to demonstrate (in some cases the full amusement value requires clicking the “Back” button once the challenge is technically completed):

    • Kick The Can – A nudge and a bridge. I could’ve just flung the ball straight over, but what’s the fun in that?
    • Carrion Luggage – Everything must go! Well, everything in my machine’s path…
    • The Ball, Too – Who says you can’t take it with you? This one took more time than you might think, but c’mon. I had to do it!
    • The Ball, Also – I couldn’t leave it alone. I mean, it was just perching there. Mockingly, I might add. If I was crazy.
    • Roomba Falling – Once I got onto the “orange ball” kick, I couldn’t just take the easiest way out of this challenge.
    • Backflipper – Not only did I clear all of the orange balls in the path, I even collected four of them within the build area, leaving none on the field elsewhere. Hah!

    There may be more to come, or I may grow bored before getting a chance to stretch my brain further. Still, I hope you enjoy my silly contraptions. What can you come up with?

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