Day: May 27, 2006

Can You Set a Jello Shot on Fire?

Surely everyone has sat around on a lazy day thinking, “I wonder what would happen if someone tried to set a Jello shot on fire?” Well, there’s no need to be left in ignorance on the outcome any longer thanks to MyScienceProject.Org. After first establishing the upper possible limit for alcohol content in a Jello shot the site turned to seeing what happens when you combine Jello shots and fire. Inquiring minds just want to know.

GameBoy-based Controller for Lego Robotics

Charmed Labs manufactures an interesting Gameboy-based system that transforms a Gameboy into an embedded controller that can be used, among other things, to make Lego-based robotic systems. This product page for the Xport Robot Controller includes a number of demonstration videos in WMV format that are pretty interesting. Cost is $140 to $200 depending on the just how much you want in the devkit — Gameboy or Gameboy Advance not included.

Breakfast of the Gods

Ran across Breakfast of the Gods over at The Groovy Age of Horror.

Breakfast of the Gods is a very well-drawn comic positing a war between breakfast cereal character. If you’ve always wondered what would happen if Lucky the Leprechaun and Captain Crunch threw down, this is for you.

This reminds me of an April Fools issue of Wizard comics where they had Alex Ross or someone imitating his style do a Ross-style portrait of Boo Berry for a mock mini-series.

KeePass Password Safe

I was looking the other day for a good password storage/management solution. — preferably a free, open source application.

KeePass meets my needs at the right cost. It uses TwoFish and AES to encrypt the password database and keeps the passwords encrypted in memory as well. It also allows for the use of key disks by themselves or in combination with a master password. Suffice to say, you can customize the level of encryption and security to match your particular level of paranoia.

Fundamental Dishonesty about Net Neutrality

When it comes to the principle of net neutrality — the idea, essentially, that a packet is a packet is a packet — I’m largely neutral. Along with the political issues involved there are some technological issues that I rarely see discussed enough (and don’t know enough about to render a judgment) so I really don’t have an opinion one way or another.

Unfortunately, what I have noticed is that some advocates of net neutrality are intentionally distorting the issues at stake. Craig Newmark does just that in a Wall Street Journal debate with Mike McCurry. The claim goes something like this — what the industry wants to do is slow down connections from certain companies unless they pay a fee to large bandwidth providers. In Newmark’s version,

Do you believe Yahoo should be allowed to outbid Google to slow down Google on people’s computers? That’s the kind of thing that the big guys are proposing.

But Newmark debunks this idiocy just a bit later. The source for this is a Bellsouth exec,

FYI, Bellsouth guys have admitted that they don’t intend to play fair [according to a December 2005 Washington Post article]: “William L. Smith, chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., told reporters and analysts that an Internet service provider such as his firm should be able, for example, to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc.”

But paying for my site to load faster is not the same thing as slowing down the speed of everyone else’s site. Rather, what telcos are proposing to do is essentially leave the existing Internet as it is and build a parallel system with higher bandwidth and lower latency and charge companies for traffic to be carried on this network.

Such a system already exists to some extent for those of us with access to Internet 2 connections, with the main difference being that I2 doesn’t charge, say, Youtube, for any of its traffic that finds its way over I2.

Is building such a separate network a good idea? Should companies be allowed to charge additional fees for data that traverses that separate network? I don’t know. But that is not the same thing as believing that “Yahoo should be allowed to outbid Google to slow down Google on people’s computers”.