Well, I guess my blog has hit the big-time. Regular, observant visitors may have noticed some “SPAM” comments showing up recently on the “recent comments” over there to the right. Bankruptcy loans and Texas Hold-Em poker are the subjects du jour. Having done a little reasearch, I believe these comments to have been placed not by humans, but by robots. The mechanical bane of mankind, I say! Well, in an attempt to “nip [this problem] in the bud”, I have implemented ANTI-ROBOT MEASURES on the comment system. This system is know in the industry as a “CAPTCHA“.

What does CAPTCHA mean? Well, it stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart”. You know those little boxes with the squiggly letters and numbers you are asked to fill in before you can proceed with a form on the internet? That is a captcha. It’s used to prevent robots from crawling through, say, lists of available tickets on TicketMaster. The term “Turing Test” is a generic name for any test that is capable of determining if the subject being tested has the presence of mind or intelligence. (“Intelligence” in this case means being able to think on its own, and not have to follow a set of logic rules, as robots do).

Please give the comments system a run-through, and feel free to email me if you have any problems.

So, I sat down this morning to read through the
>Radio Controlled Soaring Exchange emails that I receive on a daily basis, and noted that there was an obit for a guy named Jef Raskin. His connection to soaring is that he was one of the first guys (perhaps the first) to kit an all-foam “slope-flyer” plane called the “Anabat” in the early 80s. Foam and tape planes are now extremely common in the hobby, and the Anabat was, up until a few years ago, still manufactured.

However, upon reading the press release on his passing I found that he also was an Apple employee (the 31st), and among other things, he invented the “click-and-drag” inteface that we now take for granted. He also apparently named the “Macintosh” after his favorite variety of apple (the McIntosh). Raskin also recently (2000) wrote a book called “The Humane Interface“, which has apparently been well-received as a textbook for interface designers.

Again, this hobby of mine never ceases to amaze me by the amazing people that it attracts. For a great article/interview with Raskin check this out: The Macintosh at 20: Interview with Jef Raskin, by Berkeley Groks, a weekly radio science program in Berkely, CA.

update: Forbes has a nice little article on Raskin — Who Can Really Take Credit For The Mac?, and here is a great link for all-things-Raskin: http://www.digibarn.com/friends/jef-raskin/index.html. That also includes a page on his model airplane designs. Early use of CAD!

further update: Geoff would like to mention that Raskin was also a HAM, as evidenced by this photo with a HF transceiver in the background. A man of many, many geeky hobbies!

As much as I hate to do it — I’m putting my Fender Performer 650 guitar amp up for sale on the eBay. One of my first big purchases ever, I bought this thing when I was 17 new with the help of my mum. It was hell-of-loud, and never turned up past 3 (maybe even 2 1/2). Anywho — doing some research on teh intarweb shows that it was and still is a very well-liked amp, being that it’s so loud and only weighs some 40 pounds, has an effects loop, and has TUBED distortion. Tubes! In this day and age! Of course. Nothing beats vacuum tubes when it comes to powering soul-crushing rock machines.

I found a bunch of reviews for it online, and I was pleasantly surprised that it was and is well-liked, well-reviewed, well-respected and maintains a decent resale value. By the way — if anyone within driving distance (50 miles) of Louisville wants it, let me know. We’ll make a deal and forgo the shipping.

Meanwhile, I want this and one of these.

So Kelly and I got new cell phones for Christmas — it had been a long time coming for me, as I was stuck using Kelly’s old phone which, while trust-worthy was feeling quite brickish as of late. So, we got new Motorola V265 phones from a Verizon retailer in Oxmoor Mall. They are cool, small, have long battery lives, and also have little, crappy cameras in them. I’m most pleased with the usability and the battery life of it, but the camera is a nice touch. All that, and we are only paying about $10 more a month and we have beaucoup minutes now. Huzzah!

Now, here’s the rub… (There is always a rub). Verizon had locked down these phones so damned tight! You couldn’t get your photos off of your phone unless you paid Verizon $0.25 to send them via email from your phone. And if you wanted to transfer a background image to your phone, you had to go the same route. You can’t upload games or ringtones or any of the things that you might expect a futurephone such as this would allow. Verizon has that locked down and would like to sucker you at $0.25 a pop. Me, being the meddling user/client/customer that I am did a little research….

Turns out there are a number of pieces of software that can help you with your phone woes — but first you need the phone-to-USB data cable. I found one on eBay for about $8 shipped. Then you have to find a copy of Motorola Mobile Phone Tools (normally $50). One would assume that with the data cable and Mobile Phone Tools, you’d be able to get at your images, right? Wrong! Thanks Verizon! After just a little bit of searching around, I managed to find a very nice walkthrough for getting your photos from a Motorola V265 phone. It requires two further utilities, P2Kman and PST Phone Programmer, which you can also find with a little searching. It requires hacking the software on the phone only slightly, but then you can use Mobile Phone Tools to get your photos off of your phone and upload MP3s for ringtones, image files for backgrounds, etc.

I followed it, only had a little bit of trouble, and eventually got my photos off of my phone and put them into my futurephone image gallery. I also uploaded an image from Achewood as a background image, and as planned, I found and uploaded an MP3 of Kenneth Branagh’s “St. Crispin’s Day” speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V as my obligatory ridiculous ringtone. Enjoy.

I spent a good deal of my Sunday afternoon engaging in a sport that I’d like to call “toilet wrestling”. We had some issues with our master bath toilet constantly running as if the little valve in the tank wouldn’t shut off. An inspection of “the works” revealed that it was in fact the “filler valve” that had gone bad. (see illus.) Luckily, I had replaced one of these before, so Kelly and I went down to Home Despot and picked up a new one.

Get back home, turn off the water, drain the tank, install new FluidMaster® Anti-Siphon Fill Valve 400A, turn on water, fill tank, flush, HUZZAH! Triumph and exaltation. A smattering of applause. But I couldn’t leave well enough alone, could I? I noticed that when the toilet overflowed (as it would on occassion), it really overflowed. So I wanted to lower the water level in the tank, thereby saving a bit of water per flush. This required me to lower the fill valve, which required me to cut the overflow tube down to the recommended height. The fill tube on this toilet was from the original 1950′s installation, and was metal. So, I ran downstairs to fetch my handy hacksaw (everyone should own one with an assortment of blades). I had had the fill tube on the other toilet crack off in my hand when I was replacing the flapper valve, so I tried my best not to disturb this overflow tube, and make light strokes with the hacksaw, keeping my hand on the top of the tube. Perhaps I was a bit overzealous, perhaps this toilet was nearly 50 years old, but in any case, it snapped off in my hand. Dammit. Now I was going to have to take off the tank and everything.

So, to Home Depot again to get another FluidMaster® Flush Valve kit and a new tank/bowl gasket. Return home. On the bottom of a toilet tank there is an obscenely large nut that holds the flush valve/overflow tube in place. Since this was the original 1950′s installation, it was metal and hell of corroded and just plain funky. To top it off, they had apparently used some sort of plaster substance to seal/level the tank on the bowl. Following the advice of Chuck P., I used my rotary tool with a cutoff disc to cut the nut in half and lay waste to it’s holding power. Considering I had to borrow a giant monkey wrench last time, this went much, much better. I then installed the flush valve, and also installed the new tank/bowl gasket. Reconnect water. No geisers of water! What, wait a minute — minute drops of water around the hold-down screws. Dang! Repeat that process (with the leaks and all) maybe half a dozen times, and then I finally break down and slather silicone sealant on anything I think might be leaking. I sit on the couch and take a twenty-minute nap to allow the sealant to harden a bit, and put the tank back on the bowl. Tighten screws, turn on the water! Looks pretty good so far, but what is this? Now the line from the shutoff valve to the toilet is leaking! Dang! One problem leads to the next. But at least the hard part of sealing the toilet tank is done.

So, I short, I spent most of my Sunday with my arms wrapped around a toilet — not as a penance to the porceline goddess per se, but in something that appeared to be greco-roman toilet wrestling. Who was the victor? Me. (maybe).

For a while now, I’ve been mulling the idea of registering a couple of new domains for my own personal use. FUZZROLL.COM is one that you folks might have heard of, and I have duly registered it today. Also, I’ve been thinking for a while now that THELOCUST.ORG is a little tired and really doesn’t suit me like it used to. It’s a bit of a pain to spell and half the time when I tell someone to go to “thelocust.org”, they inevitably leave of “the”. I don’t know why — they just do. In any case, I was looking for a shorter, more phonetic name and found BENTO.US (.org, .com and .net were taken). I don’t have any plans at the moment to abandon THELOCUST.ORG, so don’t get all afearin’. I’m not sure what I’ll do with BENTO.ORG just yet, so stay tuned on that front. I also registered BENWILSON.ORG, which will most likely become a portfolio/resume site for me. I’ve had a 80% finished portfolio thing I whipped up a while back, and that will probably go there.

So, in short, keep an eye out. Developments might be underway.

I will blatantly rip-off Metafilter‘s link to this listing of the Top 100 Toys.

I had quite a few of these things growing up — tho’ my favorite was probably a Radio Shack “Electronic Experimenters” kit like this one:

That’s right, the capital “A” Audiophile in me made me reconsider how I rip CDs into the digital MP3 format. At lunch today I did a little looking around at the current ripping/encoding systems available for the PC. After a little deliberation, I have found that there are two tools that are considering the audiophile standard for digital music. First is Exact Audio Copy (EAC), a ripper that I find better than they venerable CDex, due in part to EAC’s sophisticated error checking and error recovery methods.

Further, I found that the choice encoder is (as it has always been) LAME (LAME Isn’t an MP3 Encoder). However, earlier this year someone tweaked version 3.90.3 of LAME for ever finer audio reproduction. There are a couple of presets in LAME now called “Alt Presets”. The most popular of these presets is “Alt Preset Standard”. This makes a stereo, approximately 256kbps variable-bit-rate MP3 file of exquisite quality. The filesize is a little larger over that of my previous modus-encoderi of stereo 192kbps constant-bit-rate, but the quality of the music is much better (at least in headphones).

I did a little comparative testing with my brand-spanking-new copy of Interpol‘s newest album, Antics. The results were, to my ears, astounding. I’ve heard stereo 256kbps VBR and I ain’t going back!

On a side note, I should mention that Antics is a really awesome album — much like their previous hailed effort Turn on the Bright Lights, it might require a few listenings for it to sink in. However, after it has sunk in, you’ll be hard pressed to not hum their solid rhythms to yourself, while secretly wishing it was snowing outside. File under: Winter music.

So I enjoy flying radio-controlled model gliders (with our local club), and I also subscribe to a mailing-list for like minded individuals called the Radio-Controlled Soaring Exchange (RCSE). For a while now there have been reports of people crashing their planes due to radio interference whenever the President of the United States was within 50 miles of a flying field. This had happened quite a few times in Ohio, with one incident involving a fly-over of an AWACS surveillance plane over a soaring contest which resulted in the crashing of a model sailplane. There has been a lot of speculation as to the true cause of these radio interruptions, but today I saw a message that would seem to corroborate the suspicions of governmental security:

Hi all,
If you will remember last week I sent out a notice about flying here in the valley, well today an incident happened, Randy’s friend Bruce was ask[ed] very nicely to stop flying his electric powered wing type glider, by none other the US Secret Service. So they do have the ability to seek us out. Must have been by GPS.
President Bush spoke here in Medford/Central Point, OR tonight, landed about 3:25 PM this afternoon. I’m no sure what time Bruce was flying, but he was ask to land and not fly the rest of the day. At least he was not shot down [this is a term for crashing due to radio interference -ed.] by the unknown.

Jerry Miller, SOSS

Anyone involved with a hobby knows that there are some involved that can get pretty bent out of shape when protecting their interests, but so far the reaction has been pretty tame to all of this speculation. Personally, I find it all very intriguing. Makes me wonder how deep security planning goes. Are they watching messageboards and mailing-lists of RC aviators? I’d probably think they would be, just to be safe.

Reading an article today on the Ansari X Prize today, I noticed that SpaceShipOne was sponsored by Virgin — the megagroup that includes wireless phones and record labels. Upon further reading, I found that the new name for their space-ventures is Virgin Galactic. That is awesome. Word on the street that the first CEO will be Galacticus, Eater of Worlds. VP is of course, Silver Surfer.