l-dopa

1. Get a time machine. (This step seems difficult, but it gets easier later on in the process).
2. Wait to use the time machine until late in your life, then travel back in time.
3. Meet up with your younger self.
4. Give them the time machine (see?), and teach them of all the major and minor technological advancements during your lifetime — your older self will have experienced much more than your younger self, so there will be much to tell. Your older self will then be able to live out your twilight years in the period of your youth, which is a pretty good deal.
5. Because your younger self now has all the knowledge of your older self, your younger self will be able to make even more technological progress during their lifetime than you did previously the “first” time through.
6. Loop and repeat the process when your younger self is old again. After enough iterations, you will be able to have given 1,000 generations worth of technological advancement to the world in the span of one lifetime. You’ll also probably be worshipped by all the people of the Earth as a living God, which is quite a nice side benefit.

EXTRA CREDIT: At the end of your 1,000-year iteration, go back in time, kill the original time-traveller (you), then go forward in time 1,000 years. How does your 1,000 year ‘loop’ of technological progress match up with the ‘actual’ 1,000 years of technological progress? Explain. (WARNING: this creates paradoxes.)

~jeff

Two Four Tet videos:

My Angel Rocks Back and Forth

Smile Around The Face

~jeff

Dear ldopa,
my wife wants me to get a video game console from the
Annual Gift Man. Problem is that the Gift Man doesn’t know which
system to get and, even worse, I do not know either. Should I
go for the 360? Or should I wait for the new offerings from
Sony and Nintendo? Or how about one of the portable systems?

…your wife wants you to buy her a videogame console for Christmas? Every man should have your problem:

• The Xbox 360 ($400) has mighty pretty graphics, but currently zero (0) games that your wife will want to play. Also, unless you make “good friends” with a blue-polo-sportin’ Best Buy employee right now, there’s virtually no chance of you finding a unit for purchase before Annual Gift Man Day. This isn’t because they are so popular, this is because Microsoft apparently made about twenty of them for the entire continental United States. Also, the consensus on the Xbox 360 is that while it looks incredible on an HDTV, on a regular TV resolution, there’s nothing so jaw-droppingly amazing about it. Bottom line: unless she’s a nut for online gaming, which is pretty polished on the Xbox 360, I’d hold off for right now. The older model Xbox is a scary, noisy, obsolete doorstop which only exists to reject my fresh and newly bought games as “dirty or damaged” — stay away from the older Xbox entirely.
• The Playstation 2 can be picked up for a song ($150) and has many inexpensive and used games, but at this point the graphics are a little behind the curve. The new Playstation 3 will be very technologically advanced, but expensive Ken Kutaragi, the president of Sony Computer Entertainment Japan, keeps making ominous public statements as to how expensive the Playstation 3 will be — statements such as “Ninety-two weeks of salary is not too much to ask for a technological marvel such as the Playstation 3″ and “I hope you haven’t become too attached to your youngest child, because soon you will gladly trade them for a Playstation 3″ and “Hey — I couldn’t help noticing your child looks succulent and delicious” and “I really look forward to eating your child”. What PR purpose Kutaragi hopes to accomplish with these statements is unclear, but what is clear is that the Playstation 3 will probably be expensive and won’t be out until around March of next year. It’s probably worth waiting for the new model rather than picking up an older one, but start saving your pennies, and children, now.
• As you may know, I have an unhealthy and forbidden love for all things Nintendo. I have the world’s largest collection of GameCube ($100) games, in fact, I just yesterday moved the entire collection to the other bedroom, and while I was moving it, I put the collection in order from “girlfriend-friendly” to “not-so-girlfriend-friendly”. I was impressed by the number of “girlfriend-friendly” GameCube games I own; I define “girlfriend-friendly” game as a game I would offer to play with my girlfriend, like “Super Monkey Ball”, and not a game I would hide away like underage-snuff-porn, like “Resident Evil 4″. Recently, Josh, Carrie and I have been having a lot of fun playing Monkey Boxing and WarioWare. Also, I love the wireless controllers Nintendo offers, they are cheap and comfortable and run forever on two AA batteries. And additionally I point out: it’s the cheapest of all your options at $100. However, the same caveat applies to buying a GameCube that would apply to buying a Playstation 2; next year there will be something much, much more advanced, so at this point it might be better to adopt a wait-’n-see attitude.
• Finally: I am an fool, soon parted from my money and so I own both a Sony PSP ($250) and the Nintendo DS ($130). I would wholeheartedly recommend the Nintendo DS; I’ve found lots of games I have enjoyed playing on the DS, while almost a year after purchase, the Sony PSP sits gameless. If your lovely wife would have any inclination for gaming-on-the-go (or gaming while lying around languidly in bed, another big plus for portable gaming) then I say pick one up. The downside is that two-person gaming becomes an expensive and extravagant affair — you’d have to pick up two — but two Nintendo DS’s cost about the same as one Sony PSP, and is still cheaper than one Xbox 360.

Hope this long, rambling polemic helped!

~jeff

Gorgeous Mac OS X 10.4 season/holiday-themed screen saver for download here… Quartz Composer is so cool; I just wish it didn’t max out my CPU quite so hard.

~jeff

Johns Hopkins researchers have devised a self-assembling cube-shaped perforated container, no larger than a dust speck, that could serve as a delivery system for medications and cell therapy.

The relatively inexpensive microcontainers can be mass-produced through a process that mixes electronic chip-making techniques with basic chemistry. Because of their metallic nature, the cubic container’s location in the body could easily be tracked by magnetic resonance imaging.

Link to the story. Not pictured: a little tiny “Pinhead” from “Hellraiser” to go along with.

~jeff

Mitchell Baker is the CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, and is by all accounts a extremely smart and savvy woman. So what the f*ck is up with her hair? It’s like she lost a bet to an angry cubist hairdresser. If you’re going to go out and get the “Terry Gross“, go all the way — don’t get (literally!) halfway there and then wuss out.

I will give her this; as far as the haircuts of the open-source movement go, she’s still doing pretty good.

~jeff

The I/O Brush is a really elegant input device from the Media Lab. Dig it!

In a correspondence between Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, and George Orwell, author of 1984, Huxley said, “I think my vision of the future is more accurate than yours.” In response, Orwell said, “I wasn’t writing about the future.”

… so what happens when we are in the future?

I’m in charge of the network at my company, and one of the things I manage is the AirPort network we have. Here are some of the tools I use.

The first place to start is of course Apple’s AirPort support page. It is a great stepping off point to find documentation and tools, though it has a tendency to change, making that great document you like disappear overnight. The most useful document there is Designing AirPort Networks (pdf). It is mostly a best-practices guide, and doesn’t really delve into nuts and bolts. The other doc I have found so useful is a list of default settings on modern AirPort base stations. Unfortunately, it disappeared, but here is a mirror.

There are some great freeware and shareware tools out there to help you get a handle on things too. The best wireless monitor app out there in my opinion is MacStumbler. It will list all available networks, their MAC address, signal strength, if a password is needed, and tag it with a date and time the network was seen. Its only downfall is that it does not list hidden networks, which may or may not be an issue for your particular situation. Many folks like iStumbler, which will also scan for bluetooth and Rendezvous, but I find the interface of MacStumber to be more friendly.

Finally, Apple has a pair of management utilities. AirPort Management Tools includes AirPort Client Monitor, and AirPort Management Utility. Client Monitor will give you a nice readout of signal strength and signal noise, as well as throughput on your machine. It is a fine-tuning tool, and will help you as you try to determine the actual throughput in various places on your site. Management Utility is a centralized place to view base station information you won’t see with any other tool. You can view your base station’s logs, see how many clients are connected and their MAC addresses, and you can compare and contrast the configurations for all your base stations at once. All of these are fantastic tools for troubleshooting.

~tgp

Konfabulator has now been renamed to the far-less-catchy but far-more-synergistically-branded “Yahoo! Widget Engine“. The ldopa.net RSS feed widget still works just fine, despite the name change.

I do like that Yahoo! is giving this out for free, but I could care less about the Yahoo! widgets themselves. It just seems like they are playing catch-up to Google Desktop with their recent acquisitions and this scattershot offering of… stuff.

~jeff

SCENE: An Eskimo stands on a dogsled at rest. In the distance is an igloo. The Eskimo looks passively forward, perhaps squinting into the bright sun glinting off the snow and the distant, sharp horizon.

Rather than sled dogs, his sled is lashed to a herd of cats. The cats stand still, and passively look into the distance, perhaps jostling a bit, ready to go.

The Eskimo raises his whip and cracks it in the air. The cats panic and leap in every direction, but the net result is that they pull the sled exactly nowhere. The Eskimo continues to squint at the distant horizon.

There are now some cats fighting with each other while other cats flail about at the end of their leashes, mrowling angrily.
The Eskimo continues to look intensely at the horizon while the cats squeal.

After several minutes of this, the sled falls over on its side while the Eskimo, still in place but now lying on his side, continues to look intensely at the horizon.

The sled catches fire.

FIN.

Found on Coke’s web site, it’s apparently a mix of coca-cola and coffee. Listen: I’ve tried before (in college, usually around 3:45 AM) to create this mix with surprisingly disappointing results, so it will be interesting to try Coke’s official stab at it. In this household, we’re always looking for ever more efficient caffeine delivery mechanisms, and yes, you guessed it — we’re talking now about installing high-pressure “coffee hoses” mounted around the house.

~jeff

Every time I pass TechCavalry’s headquarters on Bridge St. in Northampton, I’m reminded of this email I got from a list a couple months ago:

If you or someone you know would be interested:

Computer Technician
Full or Part Time for PC/Networking/support. Minimum of 3 years experience.
A+ Certification required.
Microsoft certifications, MAC/Linux experience are a plus.

We are looking for people who have both Technical and customer service/people skills.
Additionally the ability to document your work is important.

You will need: A Reliable vehicle & clean driving record.
Salary range: 20-26K email resume and cover letter to: namedeleted@techcavalry.com

Sincerely,

name deleted
Technical Operations Manager
TechCavalry, Inc.

413 586 7070 or

“help is on the way!”

…20K a year? In this area, where it often costs $1,000+ per month for rent? And after Massachusetts taxes, that’s hardly anything at all. That is a downright insulting wage to give to your technically skilled employees. TechCavalry should should be ashamed. They are no better than Walmart.

~jeff

According to the “play count” on my iPod:

1. Madvillain + Four Tet, “Remixes EP”
2. Clem Snide, “You Were A Diamond”
3. Decemberists, “Castaways And Cutouts”
4. Iron & Wine, “Our Endless Numbered Days”
5. Phoenix, “Alphabetical”
6. David Last, “The Push Pull”
7. Low, “A Lifetime of Temporary Relief”
8. Boards of Canada, “The Campfire Headphase”
9. Caribou, “The Milk Of Human Kindness”
10. Four Tet, “Everything Ecstatic”

…special mention go to Stan Getz and Vince Guaraldi, both of whom I really enjoyed listening to during dinner this year.

Year-end top-ten lists are by far the best part of any music nerd’s holiday season. Josh maintains that they’re kind of pretentious, and I know what he means, and he’s not wrong; however, I personally use them as a tool to find out about new albums I might have missed during the year. So, with that in mind, please feel more than free to post your own list for 2005 in the comments section. Hyvaa joulua!

~jeff