The grid game. Sort of like Conway’s Life: less of a game and more of a fascinating thing to watch, as the patterns die out, then suddenly start to spread again. My best “score” is 813.
How to Destroy the Earth…
That is, actually destroy the physical earth, as opposed to merely making it uninhabitable. It turns out to be a) quite a difficult task to achieve in reasonable time, but of course b) a very easy task if you have an awful lot of patience. My favourite methods: Destroyed by vacuum energy detonation (you will… Continue reading How to Destroy the Earth…
Tiddlywinks no more at Cambridge?
The Guardian has a story about the impending demise of tiddlywinks. That would be a sad day. Even though I haven’t played in a while because of geographical reasons, I did remember to join ETwA this year.
Robots
Took my car in for a service on Saturday, and while it was being done I went to see Robots. Good movie! The sort of film I'd like to see again to get all the references I missed first time around. They had fun making this one. Nothing out of the ordinary plotwise, and Ewan… Continue reading Robots
Infrared webcam fun
1. Open up webcam 2. Remove IR filter 3. Insert photo negative material to block visible light 4. Reassemble webcam 5. Play with looking at everyday stuff in the IR spectrum – navy blue fleece turns white! – my eyebrows disappear! – US passport picture page goes blank (except for lettering)! – UK passport first… Continue reading Infrared webcam fun
WoW… same old crowd
The game’s fun. I can see it getting repetitive fairly quickly though. Not sure about the longevity, but it’s something I had to play both for fun and for research reasons. It has a ton of features designed to make it easy on the player. I’d forgotten about the MMORPG crowd. This being my 4th… Continue reading WoW… same old crowd
this weekend
1. I read Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. Very good. 2. I started playing World of Warcraft. Elbeno is now a level 10 priest. That's also good.
Another blow against Internet anonymity
Via Slashdot: A San Diego research team has developed a method for extracting information about a machine from the timestamps contained in the TCP packets it sends. In summary: Machines will include timestamps in each TCP packet as an option (RFC 1323: TCP Extensions for High Performance) which for most machines is negotiated by default.… Continue reading Another blow against Internet anonymity
I was almost getting withdrawal symptoms…
…it’s been so long since I recompiled the kernel. After going swiftly through 2.6.0 to 2.6.9, I stuck with 2.6.9 for quite a while. For some reason my firewire storage support wasn’t working properly in 2.6.9 (even though my USB storage did). So I just compiled 2.6.10, and now it works. Easy. Sometimes, even with… Continue reading I was almost getting withdrawal symptoms…
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Way to go, 17 computer science professors!