ExpanDrive

“For filmmaker Michael Bay slow motion and badassery are part of a complete breakfast.”

via Wired

Aspiring scientists from the Zurich School of Applied Sciences have built a video simulation that displays the flight path of every commercial flight in the world over a 24-hour period. There isn’t much of an application for it, but it sure is cool to look at.

Sure is.

Jon found a great post on over at randomwalker’s Live Journal which takes an interesting analytical look at caffeine intake strategies to help maximize your mental productivity.

He starts by looking at the mechanism by which caffeine makes you sharper:

Caffeine has a number of effects on the body, but the one that is relevant here is that it blocks adenosine receptors in the brain (by tricking your brain into thinking it is adenosine.) A decrease in the activity of adenosine (which is a sleep chemical) increases neuron firing rate and increases focus and concentration.

Then proceeds with a rudimentary, yet interesting, analysis to produce this lesson:

Over the long term, consistent caffeine consumption is as good as nonconsumption, because of (you guessed it) tolerance. Is there a better strategy? Of course there is. Periodic abstinence lets adenosine levels return to normal. With complete abstinence, it takes 5 days to reach adenosine normality; conservatively, and with imperfect abstinence, a week or 10 days may be required. (Quitting is hard!) For most people, work involves a natural cyclic pattern of crunches and lean periods, and moderated coffee consumption to reflect this pattern will let you enjoy its cognition-enhancing effects more-or-less permanently.

via Calculated Risk

The Onion [hilariously] hosts a panel to discuss if the Government should stop dumping money into the National Money Hole.

“No reasonable person is advocating we stop destroying money – but the American people earned that money, they have the right to decide how it should be destroyed… let the free market decide the most efficient way of destroying money”

In The Know: Should The Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole?

Google is going to make a space elevator once they’re bored of search. Pretty sure I’m going to make a time machine. Can’t get enough time travel. Jon dug up this post by Amit Patel on time loops in the Terminator series.

In the Terminator series (movies and TV show), there are some odd time loops.

   John Connor sends Kyle Reese back in time. Kyle and Sarah have a son, John Connor. But John sent Kyle back in time only because of Skynet. Without Skynet, John wouldn’t exist. The timeline protection hypothesis suggests John can’t kill Skynet.

   Skynet sends a Terminator back in time. The Terminator’s arm and CPU are left behind. The technology in that CPU is what Dyson uses to build the beginnings of Skynet. But Skynet sent the Terminator back in time only because of John Connor. Without John, Skynet wouldn’t exist. The timeline protection hypothesis suggests that Skynet cannot destroy John.

Food for thought.

We’re hardcore here at Magnetk. Scheme interpreters, language compilers, ray tracers (in our custom compilers), magnetohydrodynamic models, a Windows filesystem driver… We could go on. The thing is, there’s hardcore, and then there’s unnecessarily hardcore. Doing something hard is hardcore. Doing something just because it’s hard is unnecessarily hardcore.

Renderfarm with CUPS
Simon Bunker writes about how to us CUPS, the “Common UNIX Printing System”, to queue tasks for digital image render. Be careful, he warns at the end: “You could end up with a lot of scrap paper if you use the wrong queue!”

ICFP Entry in TeX
This year’s ICFP contest was to write a controller for a simulated vehicle. There was a two dimensional map with circular boulders and craters on it, and hostile creatures would chase your vehicle while your controller tried to drive it to the finish point. Steve wrote his controller in TeX. That’s hardcore because: “…TeX doesn’t even really support things as simple as floating-point multiplication or (even worse) division.”

Nicely done, guys. “Um, I’d write a scheme interpreter and then write it in scheme.”

The New York Times quotes an amazing statistic today: San Francisco recycles 69% of all landfill bound waste. Even more surprising is our national average is 32%. Nearly 1/3rd of the waste we throw away gets sorted out and somehow recycled or reused.

Houston, bucking the trend, seems to rebel “against mandates or anything that seems trendy or hyped up” with their meager 2.6% rate. Recycling is trendy. Who knew?

Houston recycles just 2.6 percent of its total waste, according to a study this year by Waste News, a trade magazine.

City officials cite the difficulties surrounding the effort: expensive collection, little public support, high cost of fuel for collection in a sprawled urban environment. Also, a ludicrous argument from Houston’s Mayor, Bill White, about their “independent streak” keeping them from recycling.

The most interesting part of the article is this graphic showing recycling rates for other major urban centers across the country. San Francisco manages to achieve a 69% recycling rate across all landfill bound waste.

Click for full graphic

Seems too good to be true? I thought so. After a bit of research, I found this press release from the SF Mayors office confirming the numbers.

Recycling is simply part of life in San Francisco, with new statistics showing that the city kept 69 percent of all waste-stream materials from going to the landfill, up from 67 percent the year before. The most significant gains were in the areas of commercial recycling, and the collection of compostable food scraps and yard trimmings.

The figures, compiled by the City’s Environment Department (SF Environment) and approved by the California Integrated Waste Management Board, show that San Francisco generated 1,978,748 tons of waste material in 2005. Of this, 664,033 tons went to landfill, while 1,367,013 tons were diverted through recycling, composting, reuse, source reduction and other efforts.

Wow.

Ever wonder how you get a new sport into the Olympics? The BBC seems to think that one way to do it is with cash. Big, million dollar stacks of cash. They claim that a Japanese cycling association paid $3,000,000 to cycling’s international governing body (the UCI) to get the “keirin” included in the slate of Olympic velodrome events.

I don’t really care about the scandal. I assume that everything about the Olympics preparation, from the venue to the events, is decided by bribery. It’s just a good segue for me to explain how awesome the keirin is. It works like this: the racers have to stay behind a pace setter (who rides either a bike or motorcycle) for most of the race. The pace setter starts out going medium-slow (about 20 mph), and over the course of about 8 minutes slowly ratchets the speed up to 30+ mph. The cyclists jockey for the prime position, right behind the pace setter. Then, at a prederminded spot about a half mile from the finish, the pace setter pulls off the course and it’s a free for all.

Check out this video (1:33) and you’ll get the idea. The action starts with the pace setter (in purple) pulling off the track.

The Japanese had to pay $3,000,000 to get that in the Olympics? Who wouldn’t want that in the Olympics? How much did Russia have to pay to get Rhythmic Gymnastics in the Olympics?

For me, one the biggest disappointments about the original iPhone was the lack of a mountable file system. Not that the iPhone needed any more hype, but how sweet would it have been to tack on “portable drive” to its laundry list of features? Well, thanks to ExpanDrive, now you can.

All of a week after the release of the iPhone 3g, the iphone dev team released its pwnage tool, allowing you to jailbreak your phone. There’s a pretty exhaustive step-by-step of how to use the 3g pwnage tool here; the only thing I’d add to it is this bit about how to fix a DFU mode bug:

The error that everyone has been googling since the tool was released: “Failed to enter DFU mode”

The fix for this was difficult to find. There are hundreds of posts out there from people trying to find answers, but very few useful solutions. However, the solution is a simple one:

Fire up Terminal on your Mac and fire of these two commands:

cd ~/Library/iTunes
mkdir “Device Support”

If the Terminal is scary, you can do the same thing by going to your Home folder, opening “Library”, opening the iTunes folder inside Library, and then creating a new folder called “Device Support” in that iTunes folder.

Jailbreaking the phone does lots of fun things for you. But the ones that matter for this article are enabling root access and SSH support. After the jaibreak is complete and the phone has rebooted, open the Cydia app that has just been installed on your phone.  Scroll down to “OpenSSH Access How-To” and follow the the directions there.

After the last step, and while still in the terminal window, type “passwd root” and enter a different password, one hopefully hard to crack than the default, which is “alpine”.  This will prevent people from messing with your phone while you poach their wireless networks.

Once all that’s done, go over to Expandrive and enter whatever IP address you just typed into the Terminal, along with the username “root” and the new, secure root password I just told you to make. The drive should pop right up on your desktop. Open it, and it should look something like this:

You can drag and drop stuff onto and off of that as you would any other ExpanDrive-mounted disk. Unfortunately, it only works over the Wi-Fi connection, so it’s still not as fast as a disk-use iPod, and I still haven’t figured out how to add and delete media and apps this way.  I’d also be careful filling the drive to capacity, since it seems to have no idea how large it really is.

Windows users can find similar instructions here using our SftpDrive product.