Which brings us (eventually) to the main part of the post.  Remember a few years ago how digital photo frames were all the rage?  Every online electronic store, every photography store, department store, electronics retailer carried them.  You pretty much couldn’t walk through a mall without tripping over a few kiosks full of them?

Like some people, I ended up with a few, that I gave away or loaded up full of pictures, then mostly forgot about.  Never got around to loading new pics on them, and, well….  They’ve been collecting dust for a couple of years now.  It turns out, I like my family photos printed out, in a real frame.  As old-timey as that may sound.

Anyway, over Christmas I got given a free snow-globe from the Hallmark store when I bought a massive round of cards to send out.  It’s kinda a neat, in a trashy-hokey way, with a colour shifting LED, and a a little motor that stirs the glitter inside it.  I gave it to my toddler, who became instantly fascinated by it.  And the wife and I fell in love with its magical ability to zone out the wee one when we put her to bed.  Better than a shot with a tranquilizer dart.  Probably easier on the toddler too.

So how does this all tie together?  Fractals and digital picture frames and toddlers with high tech snow globes?

Well, the one problem with the snow globe is that it eats batteries.  So I got to thinking that what our wee one really needs is some kind of electric lava-lamp to help her get to sleep, and now I bet you can guess where this is going…

I loaded up one of the picture frames with a mess of different fractals, set it to random transition mode with the picture changing every 5 seconds, and BAMMO.  A plug-in-able mesmerizer for our precious that doesn’t eat batteries.

So, if you happen to have a toddler that has trouble getting to sleep, feel free to raid the collected fractals from here and give it a try.  Come on, when was the last time you actually turned on that digital photo frame anyway?

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Maybe it was that time you miraculously  pulled your car out of an inevitable death spiral on an ice covered road.  Or that time, in college, when you stayed out all night drinking, showed up barely conscious for class the next day, and somehow managed to pull off an A on a pop quiz.  If you’ve ever built something – spent weeks on end custom crafting a jewellery box for your wife, months on end restoring a classic car, or maybe even just putting up the best damn picket fence on the block.  Then you’ve had that feeling.  Even if just for a moment, you felt invincible, magnificent, like a total Rock Star from Mars.

And here’s a shout for all the nerds out there.  You’ve felt it too.  After spending bleary eyed hours poring over logs looking for that error, hand editing a corrupted DB on the fly without ever letting it crash, spending hours on end tinkering with an undocumented config file and finally getting to the point where you hit <enter> and it just -works- all of the sudden.  Every now and then, you too have been a Bitchin’ Rock Star from Mars.

So, hey, Charlie, get over yourself.  Everyone gets to be a Rock Star from time to time.  It isn’t about the fame and the money, it’s about beating your own limits.  Even just once.

And yes, at this very moment, I’m feeling very much the Rock Star.  I finally solved a not so niggling little technical problem that I’ve been moving network traffic around just to keep it off the radar.  I just didn’t have the time or mental space to solve it until tonight.  I feel like a Rock Star because no one even knew the bug was there while I took the time to sort it out.  And I’m a Rock Star because when I did get the time to work on it, at 3 am on a Saturday morning, I had it beat in under two hours – while I was watching a movie.  So, hell ya I feel like a Rock Star from Mars right now.

Fortunately, I have a wife and daughter who will bring me down to Earth tomorrow.  It’s good to have grounding like that.  Charlie’s problem is that he doesn’t have anyone around him strong enough to tell him that most of the time, he’s just a jerk like the rest of us.

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This is kind of an ugly fractal – something I rendered out from XaoS, ran through some colour shifting, de-selected the centre, and then distorted the heck out of the surrounding field. Can’t even remember what fractal it was based on, other than I seem to remember zooming in near endlessly on a tiny dot. I actually made this almost a week ago, but I’m posting it today because it has a slightly psychedelic look. It also reminds me how bloodshot my eyes must look, if I were to bother to look in a mirror.

I’m extremely tired right now.  Between one thing and another (and for once, work is only partially to blame), I’ve gotten two hours sleep in the past day and a half.  Soon, the caffeine is bound to wear off, and I have no doubt I will collapse into blissful oblivion for at least ten to twelve hours.

In the meantime, I’m in the midst of that kind of deep burn/caffeine buzz you can only really achieve through sleep deprivation.  It’s an odd kind of feeling, and for those of you have experienced it, you know that it isn’t entirely unpleasant.  I’m a firm believer that if you hit the exact right state of fatigue, you can achieve a mental focus that’s quite startling.  I’ve done some of my best technical and creative work in this type of state.

The problem is, it’s a fine line, and not maintainable for any length of time.  At some point, you just start nodding off in your chair.  It should also be noted that it isn’t for everyone.  I’ve have lots of practice at this over the years, and I take a kind of perverse pride in my sleep dep abilities.  My record is somewhere between 65 and 70 hours – years ago in University when I had a research paper deadline that I’d let creep up on me.  In spite of the fact that I’d gotten loopy enough by the end of it that I couldn’t even really tell if I was dreaming or typing, I ended up getting an A minus on the paper.  All the same, I’ve never had the desire to repeat the experience.  It may not have been quite my limit, but it was close enough that I don’t need to explore it further.

For tonight, this aging geek teetotaller is enjoying the experience.  But only in moderation.

Now Walt and Jesse are really the leads.  But one of the characters you gotta love is Saul Goodman, the world’s greatest lawyer (warning – the preceding link leads to an intentionally bad website).  As Jesse explained to Walt: “When it gets really bad, what you want is a criminal lawyer, and that’s this guy.”

Yah, I can hear the gasps in the audience now.  But it does happen.

My most recent nerdburn moment came a few minutes ago, when I finally got around to updating to the latest version of Thunderbird, bar none the best email client available, from the people who bring you Firefox, the best web browser on the planet (suck it up ChromeBoys, Firefox still rocks, and will continue to  blow Chrome out of the water until they get their extension framework worked out.  Not to mention using WebKit as the base rendering engine.  Webkit?  I mean, what were they thinking?)

Ummm…  where was I?

Oh, yah.  I finally got around to updating to Thunderbird 3.0 a few moments ago, almost an entire week after it was released.  Yes, my slackitude is shocking, but I had other things to do.  And upgrading my mail client could take an easy 60 seconds out of my life.  That’s 60 seconds I could be devoting to work (mmm… sure, I’ll get right on those TPS reports, boss), or fragging, or spending time with my wife and kid.

But, a week is long enough to wait.

Thing is, when I updated, two highly critical plugins were deemed in-compatible.

Plugin Incompatible #1:  Adblock Plus.  A lot of people don’t even realize you can add ABP to Thunderbird, but you can.  And it’s wicked handy for keeping your RSS feeds advertising free.  I was able to solve that with a quick click of the “check for updates” button.  I can now safely leach info from the web without contributing to anyone’s ad revenue.  The way God intended news to be consumed.

Plugin Incompatible #2: Lightning.  Frack.  And check for updates was no help whatsoever.  For those who may not know, Lightning is the Calendar add on for Thunderbird.  A while back, it had been suggested that Lightning was going to be fully integrated with TBird 3.0, and would no longer be an add on.  But alas, it wasn’t to be so.  And the Lightning development team fell behind, and have yet to release an “official” build that’s compatible with TBird 3.0

And that sucks.  My entire life is organized in that calendar.  Most importantly, it’s what keeps me from getting disowned by reminding me of family birthdays and such.

So, my need to have the latest and shiniest software, along with my arrogance with handling open source software, almost killed my calendar.  Almost.

And this is where being a geek comes in handy.  I knew that there was no way in hell I was the first person to get burned by this.  And I knew that because Lightning is open source, there was most likely a hacked build, or a semi official “nightly” available for me. And yup, a few moments googling led me to the developper’s blog, which kindly pointed straight to what I needed.  Sweet.  No need to wait for it to be officially released.

All in all, I spent more time writing this post, that I did upgrading TBird, having a momentary panic attack about losing my calendar, and then searching for and fixing the problem.

And really, that’s as it should be.  If it was some closed source piece of software (Outlook anyone?), an upgrade that breaks a third party extension usually means you’re S.O.L.  But it’s an open source project.  So the fix was already out there.  Actually, the fix was out before even TBird 3 was out.  And how cool is that?

Damn cool.

The WarMouse, also called the OpenOffice Mouse (which seems to be how they’re branding it), falls into the monstrosity category.

No, this isn’t some joke mock up.  At least, as far as I can tell it isn’t a joke.  If it is, then even Wired got fooled.

Can you imagine trying to work with that thing?  How many times a day do you think you’d hit the wrong button?  And that joystick on the side – exactly how many hours of practice would it take to become proficient with that?

Sometimes, I come across a page with interesting ‘comments.’  For those who might not know, most languages have a function where you can enter snippets of information that won’t be executed – they’re basically cheat sheet notes for the coder, or also used to help other people who might need to work on the code later on.  You’ll find all kinds of gems in code comments.  I’ve seen code with Haikus inserted, bits of poetry, rants against ex wives…  I even know a website where the author maintains his personal Blog within the comments of the website.  It’s un-viewable to anyone who doesn’t read the code of the site.  However, that site is a well known, widely used forum for web developers, so there’s probably a lot of people who read it.

Anyway, I was reading the code of a web page today, and came across some comments that reflect a certain, personality, of the developer.  It’s a big commercial site, so I think the coder was probably exercising a bit of “freedom” by inserting one or two extraneous comments.  I’ll share a couple of them here.

// Look!  A clock.  Niiiice.

(someone is proud of their spiffy clock generator code)

// Yay for Suckerfish!

(actually, this is a nice little tip of the hat – Suckerfish is a well known and widely used chunk of code used to generate those spiffy drop-down menus you see all over the web)

// Let’s define the innumerable global arrays that Javascript will use to keep track of things.

(someone’s a little bored with grinding out variables)

// …that’s a bit of an overstatement, don’t you think? there might be a lot, but innumerable?!

(someone’s boss is reading their code comments)

// Various data arrays.

(yup, they’re still bored with grinding out data chunks and variables)

Ok, maybe that’s only interesting to me.  I dunno.  Seemed kinda cute at the time.

One thing I should mention.  If you’re a sensitive type who’s easily offended by foul language, never, ever, read the code for the Linux kernel.   Linux kernel writers have issues with cuss words.

Fortunately, I was smart enough to backup the database on a regular basis, so nothing really lost.

I’ll get a new theme up and running to “celebrate” the upgrade to the newer, more secure backend.

Oh, and I’ll get the video plugin working again too.  There’s probably a pile of hacks and tweaks I’d forgotten I’d made, so it might take a bit to get things “up to snuff” so to speak.

But this is a damn funny video.

Now, you might think that, given the order of posts, the following project was inspired by the Conan Night I held last weekend, but the two are fairly unrelated. Actually, the inspiration for the following project came during the winter when I started to set aside some heat sinks from old PII Slot 1 processors, just because I thought they were a neat and nasty looking piece of industrial design. See for yourself:

Pentium II Slot 1 Processor and Heatsink

Any rational human being is going to take one look at that hunk of metal and think to himself: “I can make a weapon out of that.” At least this human being thought that. And I’m pretty rational. Most of the time anyway.

So the idea emerged to wrap them around the head of a baseball bat and create a nice looking mace. Problem was my boss frowns on me making weapons on company time (go figure), and my shop at home isn’t heated, so I had to wait for spring to get a chance to work on it.

Stage one was basically gathering up the parts I’d need. I collected four heatsinks from the old slot 1 processors, and some neat memory heatsinks from some really old servers to attach as runners down the side of the bat. I ended up going out and buying the cheapest wooden bat I could find to complete the parts list. Here’s a pic of the assembled necessities should you decide to try and imitate the project.

The Collected Parts

Stage two was squaring off the top of the bat so I could attach the heatsinks. I cut the very top, bevelled part of the bat off with a chop saw so I had a nice smooth surface on the top to mark out. Basically, to mark square, determine the centre of the bat, draw an X at right angles through the centre, and then connect the points of the X to create a square. I took a pic of the bat with the bevelled top off, but forgot to take a pic of the markings, so I photoshopped in the X and square. Oddly, I was less accurate with Photoshop than I was on the actual bat, but you get the idea.

Topped and Marked

Next was to cut vertically down the bat along the square lines I had drawn, to an apropriate depth to accommodate the heatsinks. I used a carpenter’s saw for this, and made the cut by hand, because I have pretty good control with a carpenter’s saw and can make a nice accurate cut that way. A band saw or some other mechanized means would be just as good. Just use something you feel comfortable with. Once down to depth, I used the carpenter’s saw to cut across the grain and remove the wedge at base.

Cutting the Square

NB: You can see the line I drew to mark the depth of the cut I needed.

This created a square tipped bat, but the square was just a tad small for my purposes. To increase the size of the square, I cut some shims out of 3/8″ plywood to wrap around the tip. I then glued and clamped the shims onto the tip and let that dry.

Shims and Glue

Leave the glue to set at least overnight. In this case, it got set aside for a week, just because I ran out of time that weekend, and didn’t get a chance to get pack to it until today.

The rest was pretty straightforward. On the squared end I created, I lined up the first heatsink, and drilled pilot holes for the screws to match the existing mounting holes in the heatsink, I made sure to line up the first heatsink well, because all the other heatsinks would be based on the placement of the first. The third pic in the following series is just me lining up the second heatsink. Make sure to drill a small pilot hole for every screw, so you don’t crack the wood, and also so the sink doesn’t move or slip as you drive in the screws. Also, use long enough screws so that it penetrates the shims you added and gets a good purchase in the wood of the bat. It’s a good idea to use a screwdriver to drive the screws, instead of a drill driver. With the torque of a drill driver, it can be a little easy to over drill the screw, and just bore out the hole.

Pre-Drilling Holes

Screwing on the Heatsink

Lining up the Second Heatsink

After I finished attaching all four heatsinks, I screwed the bevelled top back on to give it a bit cleaner look.

Side View of Finished Head

Top View of Finished Head

After that, it was merely a matter of lining up the runners, pre-drilling some holes to match up with the existing mounting points of the heatsinks, and screwing them down.

Runners Attached.

And Voila! I have my own customized medieval looking mace. Kinda steampunkish in mixing modern equipment with an old design aesthetic. Only much older design than steampunk. As far as being an actual weapon goes, I really don’t recommend it. While it’s pretty well bolted together to a solid chunk of good Ash bat, the heatsinks themselves are aluminum. If you hit anything substantial with it, the aluminum spikes will just bend. Also, it has horrible balance, very tip heavy and unwieldy. Which could probably be said about real maces as well, which might be a good part of the reason they fell out of favour. Still, could you see a burglar (or door to door salesman, or JW or Mormon) arguing with me if I answered the door with that thing In my hands? I doubt it.

The Urban Viking

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