Paralipsis

Worth watching for the cameos.

Truly a genius product, the carstache looks like the ideal automotive accessory.

I don’t know how my jeep would look with it, but I’d like to find out.

Seriously Husqvarna, I love you. I wish I could have one of these. Just being able to drive it around and demolish thing would be so theraputic. The only thing that would make it better would be a video camera and long-range connectivity. Those seem like easy to add mods.

Santa, please won’t you bring me one of these? I PROMISE I’ll be good.

I recently got a Kindle DX, upgrading from a Kindle 2. My reason for upgrading was twofold. First, I felt that I was having to ‘next page’ too frequently on the kindle 2’s screen. I hoped that the larger screen meant I’d be able to stay in the prose for longer between gaps in page turns.

The second, is that PDF display on the Kindle 2 necessarily requires making the text very, very tiny. That, or using the device in landscape mode and viewing half a page at a time. Not too pleasant, especially when there are so many materials I’d like to have on hand in PDF format. Especially those I’ve downloaded from OReilly’s Safari service.

In this latter regard, the Kindle DX is awesome. No longer do I have a thumbdrive filled with PDFs that I’ve been meaning to read. Now, as often as I can, I move them onto the DX, named appropriately and read them when I get a moment.

Here’s a command that is a life saver. It merges multiple PDFs into a single larger one while preserving pretty much every aspect.

gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dBATCH \
-sOUTPUTFILE=newpdf.pdf a.pdf b.pdf c.pdf etc.pdf

Kindle DX, plus PDFs, I’m so happy now.

Oh and it reads books too .

I’ve been using the maven eclipse plugin m2eclipse for a long while now and recently upgraded a couple of my eclipses to the 0.10 version. All told, it’s better than the previous version of m2eclipse.

Of course as I write this, I try to set up another eclipse instance and it fails to load a pom. So close.

Via

Timothy Treadwell loved bears. In the name of loving them, with a stalwart sense of the innate sanctity of his mission, he continuously abused them for thirteen years. Time and again from 1989 until 2003 he invaded their territory — startling them, scaring them, angering them. Interrupting their hunting, their mating, their sleep, their play, he would coo sweet nothings at them in a flamboyant, high-pitched whine. He gave the savage beasts silly names like Lulu, Cupcake, Daisy, Ginger, Booble, and Mr. Chocolate, robbing them of their natural dignity. He firmly believed he was their protector, and unleashed torrents of self-righteous hatred upon anyone who dared question his treating of one-thousand-pound predators as if they were cute cuddly teddy bears. Handsome and charismatic, yet narcissistic and naïve, filled with honest caring, yet a smooth liar thoroughly at home in delusion, he became a constant danger both to himself and to everything he loved, ever on the verge of instigating a sudden volcanic eruption of nightmarish unintended consequences.

In short, Timothy Treadwell was a perfect liberal. He loved bears, with all his heart.

And then one ate him.

Argh, ‘automated upgrade’ my ass. I hope my blog still works.

We’ve been deceived by a stroke of luck. In the two million years during which we climbed from stone-tool wielding Homo erectus with sloping brows to high-foreheaded Homo urbanis, man the inventor of the city, we underwent 60 glaciations, 60 ice ages. And in the 120,000 years since we emerged in our current physiological shape as Homo sapiens, we've lived through 20 sudden global warmings. In most of those, temperatures have shot up by as much as 18 degrees within a mere 20 years.

via Howard Bloom: Climate Change Is Nature’s Way – WSJ.com.

If you’re running eclipse galileo SR1 on linux along with ubuntu 9.10 (karmic koala), then you MUST launch the eclipse script with GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1 set.

Change blindness. One of the many ways our brain is so damned complex.