3d printed shoes

The next revolution is on it's way. When anybody can make their own shoes, clothes and accessories or sell them to those that can't or don't want to, things will become interesting.

It has started with 3d printed shoes.

Image source:
http://www.infoniac.com/offbeat-news/dutch-artist-creates-3d-printed-shoes.html

why is the sky not violet

After reading this xkcd strip I wondered the same thing. Off to my favourite activity: seach the internet for answers.

The sky is blue because:
1) Shorter wavelengths are scattered more (Rayleigh scattering) than longer ones and therefore the radiation that reaches use is shifted to the blue-violet part of the visible spectrum.
2) But our eyes see better towards the middle of the visible spectrum and can't see the violet as well as the blue.
And therefore the sky looks blue to us humans.

Source:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8631798/
http://apollo.lsc.vsc.edu/classes/met130/notes/chapter19/rayleigh.html

i before e except after c exceptions

The one I always remember is weird, but it turns out there are many exceptions to the rule "i before e except after c".

Here is a list:
beige, cleidoic, codeine, conscience, deify, deity, deign,
dreidel, eider, eight, either, feign, feint, feisty,
foreign, forfeit, freight, gleization, gneiss, greige,
greisen, heifer, heigh-ho, height, heinous, heir, heist,
leitmotiv, neigh, neighbor, neither, peignoir, prescient,
rein, science, seiche, seidel, seine, seismic, seize, sheik,
society, sovereign, surfeit, teiid, veil, vein, weight,
weir, weird

Also:
This list could obviously be extended by adding more derivatives of Latin "scire", and by adding inflected forms of some of the basic words listed. The list has "conscience", "prescient", and "science", but there are also, for example, "omniscient" and "nescient". To "eight" could be added "eighty", "eighteen", and "eighth". And the list could be greatly extended by adding the plurals of all words ending in "cy".

(Is someone going to cite a word ending in "cy" that doesn't form its plural with "cies"? I can't think of any at the moment, given that I'm excluding capitalized words from my discussion.)

With regard to the extension added by some people for "neighbor" and "weigh", and the fact that this is only a start toward covering all the sounds of "ei", I have broken down my list according to the six different sounds "ei" had in that list. In doing so I have excluded cases where the "ei" or "ie" was not a digraph. Here is the list as so reorganized:

It seems the exceptions almost outweigh the rule. But I often fiend it useful to remember when writing words like receive, retrieve etc.

Sources:
http://alt-usage-english.org/I_before_E.html

shortstraw waterworks lyrics

One of my facebook friends posted this video on his timeline.

It features beautiful music and poignant scenes of the relationship between father and daughter.

I was disappointed that I could not find the lyrics.

ShortStraw is a South African band with facebook, myspace, soundcloud and boom.com presence.

Deum fortem viuum

This last weekend I visited a friend who had the most exquisite (and by her account expensive) picture in her house. It was a framed piece of vellum with the Latin words:

Deum fortem vivum: quando veniam & apparebo ante faciem Dei.
Fuerunt mihi lacrimæ meæ panes die ac nocte: dum dicitur mihi quotidie: Ubi est Deus tuus?
Hæc recordatus sum, & effudi in me animam meam: quoniam transibo in locum tabernaculi admirabilis, usque ad donum Dei: 
In voce exultationis 

The font and the faint lines however made it difficult to read and transcribe correctly. I did however, after searching for several similar phrases get to the source and the English translation:

It is part of Psalms 42:3-5 (although the Latin numbering indicates 41)

the strong living God. When will I draw close and appear before the face of God?
My tears have been my bread, day and night. Meanwhile, it is said to me daily: “Where is your God?”
These things I have remembered; and my soul within me, I have poured out. For I will cross into the place of the wonderful tabernacle, all the way to the house of God, with a voice of exultation

   






 

qr code mail

I'm trying to find a good home for Dixie my dog. So the idea I had is to create a poster with her picture, and a QR barcode with quick response email that can be scanned and quickly sent to me by any prospective takers.

There are two ways of generating a QR code that contains a mail message:

1) using mailto format
here you simply write the all your fields in one line like this:

mailto:obama@whitehouse.gov?subject=Congrats%20Obama&body=Enjoy%20your%20stay%0ARegards%0A[Name]

you can use any of these fields:
cc
bcc
subject

The first separator has to be a ? and any subsequent ones have to be a &. Multiple email addresses can be separated by ,. Space have to be encoded as %20 and new lines as %0A.


2) using MATMSG format
here you write out you message in ; separated fields, starting with MATMSG:

MATMSG:
TO:obama@whitehouse.gov;
SUB:Congrats Obama;
BODY: Enjoy your stay
Regards
[Name];;


I have not seen CC and BCC fields but I guess you could just try to add them. Remember to close each line with a ; and end with ;;

Then once you have constructed you message you can use any QR code generator on the web to generate you a barcode. Here is a basic one: http://ctrlq.org/qrcode/

Sources:
http://www.labnol.org/internet/email/learn-mailto-syntax/6748/
http://www.techtipsgeek.com/use-qr-codes-write-email-messages-save-secret-text-data/14258/
http://www.itechmindz.com/2011/how-to-use-qr-codes-to-compose-an-e-mail-message-2/

i am starstuff

I saw this cool picture on FB which shows amino acid letters and spells I AM STARSTUFF. One of the comments pointed to http://store.madewithmolecules.com/

On searching for 'i am starstuff' I found this etsy store http://www.etsy.com/listing/42964890/mad-scientist-challenge-i-am-starstuff

brass monkey snopes

This morning I received a mail with the old story that "to freeze the balls of a brass monkey" means that the canon balls kept on ships got so cold that they fell off the brass monkey I.e.the metal plate that held the balls.

Here is the text in full:
DID YOU KNOW THIS?

It was necessary to keep a good supply of cannon balls near the cannon on old war ships. But how to prevent them from rolling about the deck was the problem. The storage method devised was to stack them as a square based pyramid, with one ball on top, resting on four, resting on nine, which rested on sixteen.

Thus, a supply of 30 cannon balls could be stacked in a small area right next to the cannon. There was only one problem -- how to prevent the bottom layer from sliding/rolling from under the others.

The solution was a metal plate with 16 round indentations, called, for reasons unknown, a Monkey. But if this plate were made of iron, the iron balls would quickly rust to it.. The solution to the rusting problem was to make them of brass - hence, Brass Monkeys.

Few landlubbers realize that brass contracts much more and much faster than iron when chilled.

Consequently, when the temperature dropped too far, the brass indentations would shrink so much that the iron cannon balls would come right off the monkey.

Thus, it was quite literally, cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey. And all this time, folks thought that was just a vulgar expression?
You must send this fabulous bit of historical knowledge to at least a few intellectual friends. 

However a quick check on snopes reveals that this was not the case. More likely is the story that Wikipedia gives and that is the three Chinese monkeys sitting in a row and sometimes with a fourth holding it's genitals.

made with molecules

such a cute and geeky idea

http://store.madewithmolecules.com/

19d2:fff1 ubuntu

A n00bs progress in setting up a Neotel branded ZTE WCDMA device on Ubuntu 12.4 LTE. Hint: It's is not as easy as it sounds or should be.

From the discussions (for Ubuntu 9 and 10) it seems there are two problems:
Problem 1) the device is a modem and a memory stick/flash drive so that the windows drivers can be automatically installed when the device is plugged into a windows machine.
Problem 2) Even though Ubuntu detects the device as a modem when it tries to connect if fails due to some misconfiguration.

Problem 1 is not a problem in Ubuntu 12.4 since it detects the device correctly and installs it as a modem and not a memory/drive device.

Problem 2 is a bit more tricky.
There are several ways of getting a network/modem running under Linux (as one would expect). These 3 I tried and had varying degrees of success:

1. using the Network Manager
2. using pppconfig and pon
3. using wcdialconfig and wvdial

1) It seemed to me that the easiest way would be the NM. I set up a new mobile broadband connection using the wizard, but that did not work. For some reason when looking at syslog I can see that it uses the ttyUSB1 connector of the modem.
However, using dmesg in a terminal window:
dmesg | grep -e modem -e tty
we can see that the device exposes 5 ttyUSB ports:
[ 9215.940690] option 5-1:1.0: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected
[ 9215.940803] usb 5-1: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB0
[ 9215.942720] option 5-1:1.1: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected
[ 9215.942819] usb 5-1: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB1
[ 9215.944688] option 5-1:1.2: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected
[ 9215.944790] usb 5-1: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB2
[ 9215.946688] option 5-1:1.3: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected
[ 9215.946789] usb 5-1: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB3
[ 9215.948657] option 5-1:1.4: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected
[ 9215.948755] usb 5-1: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB4I will have to get back to this later and figure out how to the NM to use USB0 instead of USB1.

2) pppconfig and pon works. with a bit of knowledge gleaned from above.
In a terminal window type:
sudo pppconfig
a nice text menu appears and guides you through the process.

• Create a new connection
• name your connection something like: neotel
• use dynamic DNS
• use PAP - when I specified CHAP the modem no longer worked
• type your login name from the Neotel box. something like 0881234567@neotel.co.za
• enter password, default is 1234
• leave baud rate at 115200
• tone dialing
• telephone number is #777
• type port manually and enter /dev/ttyUSB0
• Confirm that you typed everything correctly and Write the config file

Now you can use pon to start your network. Type
sudo pon neotel
the network should start. You can check the progress by looking at
plog -f

3) 12.4 does not come stock with wvdial, so I had to download it after I got the connection up with pon.
First:
sudo apt-get install wvdial
Then run:
sudo wvdialconfThis will scan your modem devices and create a config file. However it always sets the baud rate to 9600 (ugh)
Now edit wvdial.conf
sudo vim /etc/wvdial.conf
change all the settings to the correct ones. Remember to remove all ; (comments)

Followed by:
sudo wvdial

I'll update this blog once i get it running with NM.

These forums helped:

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1411741.html
or
http://techsk.blogspot.com/2009/09/installing-usb-modem-zte-ac2726-in.html

and this site may have been helpful but has a horrible error
http://www.pharscape.org/networkmanager-0.7.0-and-3g-wwan-modems.html

Search page:
https://www.google.co.za/search?q=19d2%3Afff1+ubuntu&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a