Paralipsis

I’m considering building one of these Wonder Boxes. The box is basically a long contraption with a drawer pull on the end. When the drawer is opened, you find, a drawer. However, if you roll the box 90 degrees and open the drawer, you get another drawer. Roll it again [...]

Over at Help Net Security’s web site they have a fancy 3 page PDF available for download that details how you can go about blocking Skype traffic from your lan. The document by ‘rootn0de’ ultimately says you can deny Skype’s SSL tunneling behavior by have Squid block all CONNECT attempts that are specified by [...]

Recently BoingBoing posted about Britney Gallivan’s successful folding of a piece of paper in half 12 times. The way the BoingBoing post and the updated Pomona Valley Historical website reads, this would appear to have been a recent event. In fact, the event was way back in January 2002. The news is [...]

It took me quite a while to figure out how to make eclipse work with sshexec targets on ant build files. Turns out it was quite easy and even uses the cached identity used for cvs operations. Quite handy. The way I made it work was to tell the ant builder to [...]

Over at Big Picture there’s an excellent story of how DRM is killing the world of consumer media.
This tale is part of a larger struggle within the recording and digital download industry — not of P2P or piracy — but one of innovation and competition. As you follow this odd story (broken into 4 [...]

In our computer lab we have a communal stereo system which enables people to play their personal MP3s through the speakers at one end of the lab. This has greatly reduced the music mayhem that previously occurred when people w/o headphones wanted to listen to music, or people wanted a way to listen to [...]

Donald A. Norman (of DOET/POET fame) has an excellent article titled Emotion & Design: Attractive things work better. In it he discusses the affect an object has and how that dictates our ability to interact with it in different situations. A must-read by anyone interested in design.
Affect therefore regulates how we solve problems [...]

Here is how I configured Linux to record an Toslink/SPDIF audio source. It’s quite easy once you figure out what all the buttons do. I do not know if the Creative LiveDrive actually captures the digital stream or re-encodes it. I haven’t been able to find out one way or the other [...]

So, I decided to bite the bullet and purchase the much vaunted World of Warcraft (WOW) by Blizzard. If you don’t know what WOW is, well then you’re probably living under a rock. Regardless, after purchasing the game, I created an account and used another installation to play my account for a few [...]

A short while ago I had the opportunity to (re) watch the movie Ronin (1998). This movie is quite good and most well known for the intense chase scenes which set the standard for many movies that have followed. However, the part that stays with me after the movie is over is a [...]