Category: Found

Doing the RepRap #5 — The fun of frying

Good god damn goat balls.

I finally got the bootloader onto the ATMega — thanks to a lot of trial and error and handwringing and help from ethereal beings on the Internets and KKV, and with the motors and Pololus installed I hook the PSU into the board and the LEDs are shining and — wait a minute, isn’t the processor a teensy bit too hot? Oh, let’s touch it — well whaddayaknow, it’s blistering my finger, how peculiar!

As it turns out, I’ve soldered the Molex connector the wrong way around, so am feeding 5V to where I need 12V and vice versa. Which means some components are now fucked, possibly including the ATMega. I guess I ought to be grateful that none of the capacitors blew up in my face, but right now I’m just going to bed.

Below are some helpful links left for future reference

I found a good description for what the bootloading process is about here: http://smileymicros.com/blog/2011/03/04/busy-as-a-beavratmega644-on-a-breadboard/

Resources on what AVR’s are: http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/avrstuff

A tutorial on what AVR programming is about, somewhat technical: http://www.ladyada.net/learn/avr/

Using the AVR ISP MkII as a programmer to bootload ATMegas. Relevant if I get me the programmer, but can give inside into the process: http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Code/OSXISPMKII

Crosspack is a complete AVR developing package, not sure how to implement the homebrewn boards there, but the bootloaders should be more or less generic, right? http://www.obdev.at/products/crosspack/index-de.html

Wormfood has a baud to Mhz calculator here, which I’m sure is good for something down the line: www.wormfood.net

A thread started in 2006 about the process of getting the Arduino to act as an ISP, which I never succeeded in doing: Turn Arduino into an ISP programmer

The schematics for my model of Arduino, the old NG, are here: arduino_NG_schematic.png and there’s a description of most of the parts and ports here: www.arduino.cc

I’m not sure of what this page does but it seems handy: http://www.sengpielaudio.com/calculator-ohm.htm

Crime and punishment and sensemoral

The things I’ve enjoyed most since I’ve left are just mundane things that allow me congenial interactions with people. Paying for the bus. Talking to the person you’re sitting next too. Buying a sandwich. Excusing yourself when you pass someone on an escalator. Helping people. I helped a woman get her pram off the bus this morning, and she probably walked away thinking ‘what a nice young man’ without realising I’ve just spent two years locked inside cesspool of human indignity for threatening a room full of people with a firearm.

→ Teamliquid.net, Amnesia: 2 Years In Prison – A Man’s Story

For both games, two 6 gram weights was almost too much, yet with only one weight in the R.A.T. 7 gaming mouse, it felt a little whippy and I had to dial down the DPI a notch from 4000 DPI range to about 3500 DPI. If there had been a 2 or three gram weight option, it would have been perfect and I probably would have been able to boost the DPI settings even higher than 4000. In any event, my hand was not fatigued in the least by the end of either gaming marathon sessions, this is something which happens all too often for me and some mice I literally have to take a break or risk hand cramps.

→ Everthing USB, Anthony Garland: Mad Catz Cyborg R.A.T. 7 Gaming Mouse Review

The lesson, basically, is that a company won’t do well in the developing world simply by hawking cheap, out-of-date hardware after it’s become obsolete in places like America. Companies like Nokia, LG and Samsung spend a lot of time and money developing new phones that you and I might consider old-fashioned or odd, and with good reason: Emerging markets are huge. The 8th, 9th and 10th largest phone seller in the world, by volume, are companies you’ve never heard of—ZTE, G-Five and Huawei—which have made heaps of money selling millions of customers their first phones.

→ Gizmodo, John Herrman: The most popular phone in the world

Not long ago, foods like kiwis and sushi weren’t widely known or available. It is quite likely that in 2020 we will look back in surprise at the era when our menus didn’t include locusts, beetle larvae, dragonfly larvae, crickets and other insect delights.

→ Wall Street Journal, Marcel Dicke & Arnold van Huis: The six-legged meat of the future

By the next morning—day six—the three were well aware that they’d made a terrible mistake. But what could they do? They sat on the benches, facing each other. They had no watch. Nothing to read. No pen or paper. They tried to distract themselves with conversation, but they had little to say. “It started to get quiet,” says Etueni. “All I was thinking about was water and juice.”

→ GQ, Michael Finkel: Here be monsters

On punching suckers

So why have we ended up here? Why Sucker Punch? Well: Movies have to make money. And risks don’t sell. After the ’90s came the backlash; Strong Women survived, but they no longer got the attention they once did. In the absence of a widespread enthusiasm for Girly Power, misogyny—as always—crept back in.

→ The Atlantic, Sady Doyle: ‘Sucker Punch’ and the Decline of Strong Woman Action Heroines

Though her name and her pigtails infantilize Babydoll, inside her dreamworld, everything is sexually charged; her skirts get shorter and her hair gets longer. Just one of the many clues that we are not actually inside the mind of a young girl, but inside Zack Snyder’s spank bank!

→ Jezebel, Dodai Stewart: Why Sucker Punch Really, Truly Sucks

Snyder’s ideas about women may be weird, and messed up, and objectifying (and I don’t think they always are, but that’s another discussion), but at the end of the day, he wants them in his lens. When he got the chance to tell an original story, he chose to tell one about women.

→ Alyssa Rosenberg: Frances Farmer will have her revenge on Seattle: On “Sucker Punch”

But there’s more than just playing with the building blocks of nerd culture going on here. That would be fun, but Snyder is interested in something trickier, more complex and possibly just outside of his grasp – he wants to explore the role of women in culture, the impact of the male gaze and the concept of sexualized self-empowerment. That’s a big topic for a supposedly dumb action film.

→ Badass digest, Devin Faraci: SUCKER PUNCH Is Thrilling, Smart… And Deeply Flawed

If when asked, “Tell me about your character,” all that can be said is, “She is abused,” you have not told me anything about who she is. You are allowing the violence to define her and rather than showing someone rising against oppression, you are basically just perpetuating it by erasing her and leaving only what has been done in its place.

→ Cave City Sink: This movie made me feel bad to be alive: A review of Sucker Punch

Nukes, flies, guns and nerds

While others stare in awe at Assange’s many otherworldly aspects — his hairstyle, his neatness, too-precise speech, his post-national life out of a laptop bag — I can recognize him as pure triple-A outsider geek. Man, I know a thousand modern weirdos like that, and every single one of them seems to be on my Twitter stream screaming support for Assange because they can recognize him as a brother and a class ally. They are in holy awe of him because, for the first time, their mostly-imaginary and lastingly resentful underclass has landed a serious blow in a public arena. Julian Assange has hacked a superpower.

→ Webstock, Bruce Sterling: The Blast Shack

July 18, 2010—California Highway Patrol officers arrest Byron Williams, 45, after a shootout on I-580 in which more than 60 rounds are fired. Officers had pulled Williams over in his pick-up for speeding and weaving in and out of traffic when he opened fire on them with a handgun and a long gun. Williams, a convicted felon, is shot several times, but survives because he is wearing body armor. Williams, a convicted felon, reveals that he was on his way to San Francisco to “start a revolution” by killing employees of the ACLU and Tides Foundation. Williams’ mother says her son was angry at “Left-wing politicians” and upset by “the way Congress was railroading through all these Left-wing agenda items.”

→ Coalition to stop gun violence: Insurrectionism Timeline

Though I never doubted that I would execute a launch order without question, other misgivings occasionally surfaced. We arrested a group of Catholic nuns staging a peaceful protest on one of our launch facilities a few years back. For a missileer who is a practicing Catholic, such a situation brings up questions: If women who have committed themselves to the Word of God feel so strongly about the immorality of nuclear weapons that they’re willing to be confined for their convictions, what kind of Christian am I to sit at the launch switch? How do you resolve a conflict between duty to your God and duty to your country? Who wins, faith or flag?

Danger Room, John Noonan: In nuclear silos, death wears a snuggie

Now Joe and I are good feminists, like our hero, and we believe in rapprochement between the sexes, and do everything we can to encourage it; we’re sweet-natured and respectful of women and big fun on dates (which is irrelevant, since neither of us will ever have another date after Dec. 8). We don’t actually believe that men are irredeemable, and we especially don’t like to contemplate the possibility that there is some sort of surly misogynistic brute deep down inside us, lurking behind all those layers of wit, charm, and sophistication. But that’s exactly what this little thought experiment required. In some weird gender-inverted way it was like being Andrea Dworkin for six weeks. Six long weeks.

→ The Sideshow, Avedon Carol: Interview with Sam Hamm about scripting The Screwfly Solution

Stoning, cheating, rats, slugs

The size of the stone used in stoning shall not be too large to kill the convict by one or two throws and at the same time shall not be too small to be called a stone. “That is, pebbles are ruled out, but so are rocks big enough to kill quickly. As Slate magazine explained, the stones should be “around the size of a tangerine.”

→ National Post: Graphic, anatomy of a stoning

And they have rats down there that have maybe never seen the surface. If they did, then they’d run people out. Like in the movies. You see, we only see the tail end of it. And we only see the weak rats, the ones that get forced out to look for food.”

→ BLDGBLOG: Stratigraphies of Infestation

Now as all the Rats will not run out of the packing cases or waste paper, but will hide amongst the same, this is the time to take a good terrier dog or two with you, and to have a bit of sport. Let one dog hunt among the cases, etc., and hold the other, for the Rats will soon make for the holes, but the rags preventing their escape you will catch and kill a great many by this means.

→ Project Gutenberg, Ike Matthews: Full Revelations of a Professional Rat-catcher

After I’ve gathered my sources, I pull out usable quotes, cite them, and distribute them among the sections of the assignment. Over the years, I’ve refined ways of stretching papers. I can write a four-word sentence in 40 words. Just give me one phrase of quotable text, and I’ll produce two pages of ponderous explanation. I can say in 10 pages what most normal people could say in a paragraph.

→The Chronicle of higher education, Ed Dante: The Shadow Scholar

It looks like any other sea slug, aside from its bright green hue. But the Elysia chlorotica is far from ordinary: it is both a plant and an animal, according to biologists who have been studying the species for two decades. Not only does E. chlorotica turn sunlight into energy — something only plants can do — it also appears to have swiped this ability from the algae it consumes.

→ MMN.com, Stephanie Rogers: Bizarre sea slug is half plant, half animal

On work and working

We don’t correlate our sense of responsibility with what we are actually producing. We correlate it with how hard we are being on ourselves. Thus anything that’s fun cannot possibly be work, and everything that’s unpleasant is.

→ Harvard Business Review, Dan Pallotta: Worry isn’t work [Via Eithface]

What I learned is that burning out isn’t just about work load, it’s about work load being greater than the motivation to do work. It was relatively easy to drag myself to classes when I thought I was working for my own betterment. It was hard to sit at a laptop and crank out slides when all I seemed to be accomplishing was the transfer of wealth from my client to my company.

→ The Tech, Keith Yost: The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell [Via Mefi]

Freelancing means walking from the West Village to the Upper East Side and back because you don’t have enough money for the subway. Freelancing means being so poor and so hungry for so long that you “eat” a bowl of soup that’s just hot water, crushed-up multivitamins and half your spice rack (mostly garlic salt).

→ The Awl, Richard Morgan: Seven years as a freelance writer

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The sounds for these videos is created by Tweet a Sound by Sound plus design. It’s an simple tone modulator with built in real time recorder, and it’s great fun to play with. If you listen through headphones you can try to melt your brain, which is an interesting experiment for a boring evening.

Capitalism. Art. Death. Fascism!

It was a bargain. We will give you our lives; we will spend our lives obediently doing things we wouldn’t choose, things that probably do not really matter to anyone. And in return we will get money. And money will take care of us
→ Shareable.net, Benjamin Rosenbaum: The guy who worked for money

Dead bodies alone, are not that fascinating or scary or whatever you think they might be. They are just what they look like, lifeless skin suitcases. Without the life in them, they’re nothing. I think a person needs life and a body to be a human being. Without one of the two they are just meat furniture that needs to be moved before it starts to stink, or starts to rot, or starts to rot any more in any case.

→ My life with death: mylifewithdeath.blogspot.com

The notorious stage theory of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whereby one progresses from denial to rage through bargaining to depression and the eventual bliss of “acceptance,” hasn’t so far had much application in my case. In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.

→ Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens: Topic of Cancer

An artist can only add shit to shit. Dinos once said, ‘Our art is potty-training for adults.’ He got that about right.” The Chapman brothers are trying to help grown-ups be more civilised? “We’re not here to help,” he giggles. “We certainly don’t care about moral instruction. Our interest in morality is not in being moralists, but in how morality works as a functional pacifier.”

→ Guardian.co.uk, Stuart Jeffreys: How the Chapman brothers became the brothers grim

Moreover, “57.6 percent of the respondents agreed that human rights organizations that expose immoral conduct by Israel should not be allowed to operate freely. Slightly more than half agreed that ‘there is too much freedom of expression’ in Israel. The poll also found that most of the respondents favor punishing Israeli citizens who support sanctioning or boycotting the country, and support punishing journalists who report news that reflects badly on the actions of the defense establishment.”

→ Judy’s world, Judy Mandelbaum: Yes, it can happen there: Artists envision “Israel fascism”

I consider myself a reasonably bright person, who works hard to make something people like. When I’m old and crumbling, I want to be able to feel that I had a successful life in which my work brought happiness to a lot of people.

→ The bottom feeder, Jeff Vogel: Sometimes it’s OK to pirate my games

Sticks and stones, words and bombs.

So, yes, there is reason for Israelis, and for Jews generally, to think long and hard about the dark Hitler era at this particular time. For the significance of the Gaza Flotilla incident lies not in the questions raised about violations of international law on the high seas, or even about “who assaulted who” first on the Turkish ship, the Mavi Marmara, but in the larger questions raised about our common human condition by Israel’s occupation policies and its devastation of Gaza’s civilian population.

→ Haaretz, Henry Siegman: Israel’s Greatest Loss: Its Moral Imagination

“Every time I drop a bomb and kill one innocent Afghan, I set the war back — even if I killed 100 Taliban,” he says. And maybe, Grasso admits, he was a little overeager to drop bombs last year. “When you’ve got a truckload of food, everyone looks hungry. So when everything looks suspicious, when you’re looking for suspicious stuff, you almost want it to be suspicious.”

→ Wired, Noah Shachtman: How the Afghanistan Air War Got Stuck in the Sky

PRIMAL 31 (HARRIER) DROPPED (1) GBU-12 ON THE COMPOUND EFFECTIVELY SUPRESSING THE EN THREAT. EN FORCES RE-ENGAGED THE MARINES FROM THE BUILDING THAT WAS THE TARGET OF THE UNSUCCESSFUL HIMARS MISSION. E/2/8 ENGAGED WITH 81 AND 60 MM MORTARS. AT 1304, ENEMY FIRES CEASED.

→ Wikileaks Wardiary: (ENEMY ACTION) DIRECT FIRE RPT (Small Arms) 2/8 USMC : 0 INJ/DAM

Avoidance speech, or “mother-in-law languages”, is a feature of many Australian Aboriginal languages, some North American languages and Bantu languages of Africa whereby in the presence of certain relatives it is taboo to use everyday speech style, and instead a special speech style must be used.

→ Wikipedia: Avoidance Speech

This is, perhaps, the most troublesome use of a generally troublesome mark. That said, the basic rule for possessives is quite straightfoward: to denote possession, put an apostrophe and a lower-case ‘s’ at the end of the noun (ie person, place or thing) which owns. So we have: Somebody else’s thoughts on the subject of possessive apostrophes.

→ Between Borders, Brian Forte: Mind Your Apostrophes

More than half of the semicolons one sees, I would estimate, should be periods, and probably another quarter should be commas. Far too often, semicolons, like colons, are used to gloss over an imprecise thought. They place two clauses in some kind of relation to one another but relieve the writer of saying exactly what that relation is.

→ Opera, Sex, and Other Vital Matters, Paul Robinson: The Philosophy of Punctuation

Reading the city. Dancing in the streets.

Exactly what common ground do the modular megastructure of Plug-In City and the instrumentalized cityscapes of Civilization share? Both of these frameworks propose that urban growth is an algorithmic or procedural operation whereby “the city” (rather than a singular edifice) embodies the essence of Le Corbusier’s technophilic proclamations that architecture should function as a “machine for living”.

→ Serial Consign, Greg Smith: Urban screens: The schematic city in gaming and architectural representation

Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn’t just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization.

→ Newsweek, Patrick Symmes: History in the Remaking

The first of two fingernails found at the site suggests Ötzi may have been ill. Characteristic lines across the nail suggest his immune system was compromised three times in the months prior to his death. The second nail has yet to be analysed.

→ Cosmos, John Pickrell: Who killed the iceman?

In his spare time Professor Nas is a magician. The magic he’s working for the car companies is to devise the right voice to make driving safest, certainly, but also a voice that gives the car a character that you like, so it seems like your friend, or the other half of your driving team; You and the car. As he puts it: A team-mate bucks you up when you’re down, A team-mate takes over when you need it to take over, and people looove team-mates.

→ BBC, From Our Own Correspondents, Steven Evans: Future of back-seat drivers

[audio:https://www.monocultured.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/FOOC_BBC_Radio_4_03_Jun_2010.mp3|titles=Future of back-seat drivers|artists=BBC – Steven Evans]

Technical support

For the benefit of the less technically inclined among you, I recorded a short video on how to recover lost data on a dead harddrive. When I tell you that I “need some supplies” before helping you out with your busted computer, it is likely beer, incense and occasionally a screwdriver.

With this insider information you can now go forth and repair any harddrive out there, and you’ll totally be the boss of anyone with hardware failure. You’re welcome! And in order not to be too snarky, below is an article on the fallibility of even technically competent people. Go read.

If there’s a niche, a parasite will fill it. There’s a reason the cells of the organisms that live in your body outnumber your own by 100 to one. And every complex system has unfilled niches. The only way to eliminate unfilled niches is to keep everything simple to the point of insignificance.

→ Locus online, Cory Doctorow: Persistence Pays Parasites