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May 16, 2005
Click for moblog…
Oh, yeah. Check out the car that was in
Category found things
Click for moblog…
Random Photos…
May 12, 2005
As I tend to do, I take photos of random crap that I find interesting. Well, I figure people here might find them interesting too, so here’s some of the random photos I snapped today:
· Stuff I picked up at Red Wagon Wine Shoppe today.
· Junk mail that I received which tries to play on the fear of someone becoming the next Terri Schiavo.
· A sternly worded cage around a mole trap placed under my bedroom window.
· Evil spiky parts of the trap which will kill the mole. (Pictured above…)
· Flowers on a tree out in the court yard by my condo.
· Detail of the aforementioned flowers…
· Growing bit of pinetree…
Oh, also, I picked up a four-pack of this beer: Dogfish Head’s 90 Minute IPA. I can’t wait to try it.
SCUBA Tank Failure
February 24, 2005
Click for more…
When I was poking around looking for the updated list of UN/NA Numbers for Hazardous Materials Shipment this morning, I came across a series of photos of the investigation of an explosion caused by the failure of a SCUBA tank during pressure testing. These photos can be found as part of the Cylinder Failure Analysis Reports section of the Office of Hazardous Material Safety‘s website. The site where it happens appears to be a dive center in Key Largo, FL, although upon further looking, these may be photos from two separate incidents.
From what I can tell, in at least one case the SCUBA tank was being refilled while submerged in a large tub of water. I believe this is done to cool the tank, show signs of leaking (stream of bubbles), and also to absorb some of the shock if the tank does fail. It appears that the SCUBA tank shattered, the plastic tub shattered, and the entire surrounding area was rather torn up (trees, siding, etc). A couple of the other photos appear to show blood on the gravel, right next to the point where the tank exploded. It’s truely, truely scary.
The aforementioned site is rather slow, and one has to download all of the files as part of a large, self-extracting EXE file, so I decided to mirror them in an easier to browse format.
To take a look at the pictures, either click in the photo above, or take this link: http://www.nuxx.net/gallery/scuba_tank_failures
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January 21, 2005
In case anyone is interested, here is a rather interesting article about Sports Illustrated’s workflow for digital photography. It’s mostly about how Superbowl 2003 was handled, but it’s really interesting to see the techniques they use for enlarging images, dealing with RAW files, etc.
The Henry Ford Museum
January 18, 2005
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On Sunday, January 16th I woke up around 8:45am. Suddenly the idea of visiting The Henry Ford Museum, a place I haven’t been to in almost 10 years, popped into my head. I’ve been wanting to head back there for a while, so I decided to go. Well, less than two hours later I was pulling into the parking lot.
For those who don’t know what this museum is, it is a technology-focused historical museum which tends to concentrate on transportation and items from the after the 1700s. It’s a top-notch place to visit, including such exhibits as the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile, the chair in which President Abraham Lincoln was sitting when he was shot, the limousine in which President Kennedy was riding when he was shot, the Rosa Parks bus, and many, many more amazing items. There is all sorts of transportation exhibits, too, from the 1950s tourist / travel culture to locomotives, from stage coaches to bicycles. This museum is well worth visiting.
Per usual I took a number of photos of the trip. These can be found here, and include some of the following highlights:
· Lincoln’s Chair
· Kennedy’s Limo
· The Rosa Parks Bus
· Internet In A Box
· The Dymaxion House
· Brushes and windings of a Generator
In addition to visiting the museum, I took in a showing of a newer IMAX film about Mt. Everest titled appropriately, Everest. This was pretty good, and was prefixed by a very enjoyable IMAX film showing many of the beautiful scenes around Detroit. It was really nice to finally see Detroit shown in such a beautiful light.
ATI HDTV Component Adapter
January 11, 2005
Has anyone here ever tried one of these, the ATI HDTV Component Video Adapter, with their Mac. See, this device can adapt a DVI-I output to be component video out, but supposedly only with certain ATI cards.
Well, with the advent of the Mac mini, and relatively cheap bluetooth mice / keyboard bundles, I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this…
Griffin SmartDeck
January 11, 2005
[Crossposted to
I hadn’t seen this mentioned yet, but it appears to be really slick. Griffin has released a tape adapter that also handles volume level adjustment and bunches of other things. It seems that it detects what your tape player is doing (FF/RW/Play/Whatever) and tells your iPod to do the same.
This just might be *the* cassette adapter to buy, and at $24.99 it’s marginally more than decent-quality cassette adapters originally meant for CD players.
More info available here: http://www.griffintechnology.com/images/products/prod_image_deck.jpg
Picture Update
November 23, 2004
Click for more…
I spent a bit of time last night scanning in still more negatives. The photo above is from the collection of photos taken when I went to England in 1995 with the L’Anse Creuse High School North Wind Ensamble. We toured around bits of southern England, London, Portsmouth, and a number of other places. These photos are fairly randomly taken bits of that trip. If you are flipping through them from start to finish, be aware that the photos towards the end of the collection are more interesting.
While I’m still being frustrated by discoloration caused by rolling at the ends of strips of negatives in all the photos, I also went ahead and scanned in a number of photos which were taken on my last day of high school. This was my carrying a camera around, snapping photos randomly, showing various people doing various things.
So, that’s it for now. Hopefully tonight I’ll get even more scanned in, maybe a Washington DC trip in 1994 with Civil Air Patrol, some of friends from 1996/1997, Undernet’s #industrial people, etc.
We’ll see how it goes. :)
Links Again:
· England with LCN Wind Ensamble (May 1995)
· Last Day of High School
Ketchikan, Alaska in 1996
November 22, 2004
Click for more…
I know I posted a bit about this before. However, something I’ve wanted complete for eight years is finally done. I’ve just completed uploading all of the photos that I know to have from the times in 1996 when I visited Ketchikan, Alaska. This was a rather interesting trip made under a number of circumstances (which I won’t get into here). Suffice to say, it was a very memorable and life-changing time for me.
That said, all the photos I know to have are now available, complete with captions. The 158 photos are available for viewing here: http://www.nuxx.net/gallery/alaska_1996
These were batch scanned on an Epson Perfection 3170, then run through a simple Auto Level / Auto Color / Auto Contrast routine in Photoshop. While they aren’t ideal, they do look pretty good, much better than the original prints. I’d imagine that individual images could be cleaned up further if need be.
Please, feel free to look through them, and if you can make corrections to any of the captions, let me know. As these photos were all taken over eight years ago, my memory is a bit fuzzy as to names. However, events and other details are fairly crisp.
If everything goes as planned, I’m hoping to add more photos to the gallery this week, including a trip I took to Washington DC with Civil Air Patrol in (I believe) 1994, England in 1995, many photos I took of people from (I)ndustry BBS, photos from when I was in high school, and a few of some people from Undernet’s #industry.
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June 1, 2004
VisionTek sure uses some wacky terms to describe their video cards. Check this out…
With 8 pipelines, pushing through 3 BILLION pixels per second, and 4 parallel GEO-Metry engines, processing 380 million [T&L] polygons per second, this card gives GRATUITOUS, adult entertainment. The 9800XT supports 128-bit, 64-bit and 32-bit floating-point color formats. HI-RES 32-bit, 3D gaming up to 2048×1536 for head-shooting, flesh-ripping, ALARMING graphics power.
The 9800XT fronts more than 18 BILLION (with a “B”) anti-aliasing samples per second for AWESOME performance up to 16 trilinear filtered texture samples per pixel. ATI’s programmable SMARTSHADERª 2.1 makes head-wounds and severed limbs look real with enhanced lighting and texture effects, while SMOOTHVISIONª 2.1 serves up full-scene anti-aliasing.
(taken from here)
Computers have gone to the ricers. :(
[UPDATE: I found a bit more…]
Here‘s the one I was originally thinking of when I went digging around VisionTek‘s site:
Freak’n KICK ASS performance
Xtasy 9500 Pro, powered by ATI’s RADEON™ 9500 PRO VPU with 128MB DDR memory WILL BLOW YOU… AWAY! ATI’s TRUFORM technology makes heaving orbs more ample and well-endowed, while HYPER Z™ II saves bandwidth for mo’ righteous performance in your more demanding sit-e’ations. ATI’s SMOOTHVISION, anti-aliasing, KICKS THE CRAP out of visual distortion, and sends that BI-A-TCH crying home to mama! That means better, smoother looking images. HI-RES 32-bit, 3D gaming up to 2048×1536 means that when ‘intense applications’ leaves his house, THE 9500 SLAPS THAT PIG DOWN, SAYS “GIMME MY MONEY BI-A-TCH!”BITCH’N Visual Effects
SMARTSHADER 2.0 provides FREAK’N AWESOME lighting effects. The 9500 PRO supports DirectX® 9.0 and OpenGL® ATI’s CHARISMA ENGINE II fronts ‘Transformation and Lighting’ (T&L) at 62.5 million triangles per second. “62.5M per second?”YOU BET YO’ ASS 62.5M PER SECOND! PIXEL TAPESTRY II, 3D rendering engine, powers an AWESOME 2.4 gigatexels/second for fill ratesat 32-bit HI-RES.Ever have TWO MONITORS at one time?
Throw in DVD support and you have yourself a threesome…
Heaving orbs? < sigh >