Lucky Disasters » Neatorific

Thee More NASA Images

Kris — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 19:31:10 +0000

I’ve been meaning to post these, just that time of year I guess, everything happening at once. Anywho – these are from the most recent (STS-123) shuttle mission, enjoy!

2010 or NASA photo?

Kris — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 15:09:08 +0000

Looking unnervingly similar to a scene from 2010: The Year We Make Contact, this photo of the ISS at night looks less like NASA Image of the Day material and more like material from a science fiction movie! All-in-all, an incredible photo of the present meeting the future…

Links:
the NASA Image of the Day Gallery
The above photo

Another Great Image on NIotD

Kris — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:45:03 +0000

NASA had another really neat image of the day the other day, here’s a crop:

{click it to go to the images page}

UPDATE – 080312!!
Updated the link so that it pointed to the right photo on the NASA image gallery site and not the thumbnail on this site. Sorry for the mix up!

Background Images for your Desktop (Wallpaper!!)

Kris — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 19:04:04 +0000

Here are six of the better images I’ve taken over the last year. Use them in good health. They’re licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. In other words, feel free to use them as you see fit, with the exceptions that you must attribute the original works to me (and other contributors – sell below), you cannot use them for commercial purposes (money making – unless you ask – I can be flexible for the right price :) and you must license any derivative works under the same license. Clear as mud? Just follow the link to the Creative Commons license at the bottom for a full explanation.

The font I’ve used for the site logo on these came from the Sull-A-Day blog, another site you should definitely checkout. Anyway here they are, to download, right-click and do a “Save Target As” (IE) or a “Save Link As” (Firefox):

LD_BG01_1024×76 LD_BG01_1280×960 LD_BG01_2816x2112 LD_BG01.7z	LD_BG02_1024×768 LD_BG02_1280×960 LD_BG02_2816×2112 LD_BG02.7z
LD_BG03_1024×768 LD_BG03_1280×960 LD_BG03_2816×2112 LD_BG03.7z	LD_BG04_1024×768 LD_BG04_1280×960 LD_BG04_2816×2112 LD_BG04.7z
LD_BG05_1024×768 LD_BG05_1280×960 LD_BG05_2816×2112 LD_BG05.7z	LD_BG06_1024×768 LD_BG06_1280×960 LD_BG06_2816×2112 LD_BG06.7z

Download all these in a single file:

backgrounds_luckydisasters.com.7z [080207]

At some point I’ve got to make some 1440×900 versions of these too, that’s my laptop’s screen size after all…

These wallpapers are licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Quick Registry Hack to Add a Command Prompt to Folders

Kris — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 02:15:13 +0000

Ever want a command prompt in a folder and didn’t want to install the Command Prompt Here power tool from Microsoft? Well you’re in luck cause there’s an easy way to add a right click menu item that opens a command prompt for the folder you’re clicking on (lots of good information in that link).

Go to:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SOFTWARE\Classes\Directory\shell\

Add a new key called “cmd” and set it’s default value at”Command Prompt Here”. Then to “cmd” add a new key called “command” and change it’s default value to “cmd.exe /k pushd %L”. Do the same for:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Directory\shell

In other words add the “cmd” and set it’s default value, then add “command” to that and set it’s default value as above. Or you can download this reg file (CAUTION! Event though I use this myself, editing your registry may be really bad. Like no more using your computer bad. DON’T ADD THIS UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING!!):

MyCommandPromptHere reg file

In order to remove these entries, you can manually delete these keys, or you can right a reg file that looks like this:

[-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SOFTWARE\Classes\Directory\shell\cmd]

[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Directory\shell\cmd]

Neat eh? To remove registry keys, just create a plain text file, paste in the registry entry you want to remove, add a minus sign in front of the key and inside the bracket, and save the plan text file with a “.reg” extension. Run the file and presto, no more entry. Almost scary how easy that is…

I’ve included the above code already in the 7z file with the MyCommandPromptHere.reg as well, and you can find out a little more about modifying registry entries here. Enjoy!!

Cool View of the Sun

Kris — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 13:38:25 +0000

Neatorific photo of the sun over on the Astronomy Picture of the Day site:

It’s been photoshopped, but still, neato!

UPDATE – 080312!!
Fixed the link to go to the correct page instead of the Astronomy Picture of the Day home page.

Happy Samhain! And Autumn Wilst We’re At It!

Kris — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 02:43:48 +0000

My daughter’s jack o’lantern:
Concept

Completion

Standing Purification

Nice. It’s only been sitting outside for a week (usually it takes a little longer for this kind of thing), but it’s been REALLY humid here in NC the last week or so (over 80% humidity even though it’s in the mid 60s, it’s like walking inside a cold, clammy hand). So I guess that’s the contributing factor for this pumpkin’s early “5 0′clock shadow”. I think it makes it really creepy. Just in time of Halloween!

Just as a bonus, even though we’ve had a really dry summer this year, it must have been just right for our five big oak trees…

And, speaking of our oak trees, here’s some of the native fauna that accompany them:

The stuff dreams are made of (well, geek dreams anyway)…

Kris — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 02:41:48 +0000

When I was a kid I loved playing with Legos (hell neither has changed, I’m still a kid and I still love playing with Legos). When I built things I loved trying to get details right, or at least trying to get the coolest looking… thing… I could make. Mostly I liked building space ships and other sci-fi vehicles for little Lego people to interact with.

I used to put my creations in stop motion movies. This was long before the Lego digital camera sets or even digital cameras hit the scene. I would use my family’s 8mm camcorder to record the movies and then play them back at high-speed on the camcorder while re-recording on a VCR to get the proper movie speed. Yeah, well, I worked with what I had…

Anyway, over on Neatorama they’ve posted about a new Lego Millennium Falcon set built in scale to the Lego minifigs. This is what I had in mind with every Lego space ship I ever built, this is what I wished I had enough parts to built when I was a kid, this is the stuff that dreams are made of damn it!!

From the site:

“…
This is it – the biggest, most spectacular LEGO® Star Wars model ever! Straight out of the classic Star Wars movies comes the Ultimate Collector’s Millennium Falcon, Han Solo’s famous smuggling starship. Every detail of the modified Corellian Engineering Corporation YT-1300 freighter is here, all constructed to scale with LEGO minifigures. At almost 3 feet (90cm) long, it’s the ultimate centerpiece to any Star Wars collection!
…”

The set sports over 5,000 pieces which makes it the single biggest Lego set yet released.

If I had the money, I’d buy two…

Link

Holy Covert Channels Batman!

Kris — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 00:31:55 +0000

A covert channel is a means of communication that is non-standard. In other words, messages sent by other than normal means (more here). One method (vector) used as a covert channel is steganography. Steganography is a means to hide messages, usually within images like JPEGs, as opposed to cryptography where messages are encrypted. Over at Daily Cup of Tech (great site by the way, worth a good dig through the articles) they’ve posted a video which details how to use a compression tool and a built in Windows command line utility (FINALLY, a real use for cmd and it should work with GNU/Linux tools too) actually embed files into JPEG or other image files. While not strictly speaking steganography (which only deals with messages, not entire files), this is just too cool! Can’t wait to try this one out on my own!!!

link

Just when you think you know a thing or two…

Kris — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 03:13:22 +0000

Ever see something, some piece of cool, some bit of technology that makes your jaw drop? I had that happen twice this week. First have a look at David Kellogg’s website and his Plain Old Webserver (pow).

Plain Old Webserver (POW)

POW is either a really cool Firefox extension that turns Firefox into a web server or a lightweight xulRunner web server. Either way it serves up web pages using server side javascripting. Sweat! I still have to play with this a bit to get a feel for it because I’ve never used javascript on a server before, but considering this is portable to any system that xulRunner or Firefox will run on, it makes it a very versatile package right out of the box. While the fact that it doesn’t have a php module means I can’t do local development of my website on it (yet), POW does offer sqllite as a database. You can also download some extras for it like a Firefox database management or directory file listing.

You can also use the xulRunner “portably”. I quoted that because, while the POWUSB package includes both Windows and MAC xulrunner versions (no Linux yet either!), it isn’t exactly portable in the way that say, FirefoxPoratable is. In other words, if you run the included xulRunner on Windows, it will still leave files on your local file system. To make this truly portable, you’d need to refrain from leaving footprints on the system you’re using, therefore this really doesn’t qualify as a portableapp quite yet…

I thought I knew a thing ‘er two about javascript (I taught myself javascript, and after HTML it was the first interpreted language I learned, and so far I’ve had no formal training in with ECMA specific code), then I saw Dean Edwards website. This guy (and his commenters) must live on planet ECMAscript for crying out loud (if you don’t believe me take a stroll through Mr. Edwards’ website and take a look at his projects and comments on his work, just freakin’ fantastic – from a programming point of view). Anyway, what I really geeked out about was his MiniWeb application. MiniWeb

What can I say, other than – freakin’ sweat! Contained in just 14 files is a (partial) javascript based blog, file management (will kind of, read on), and a *nix-like terminal (again, kind of). The reason for all those caveats is this; pretty much the fact that is is a work in progress AND, the fact that nearly the entirety of the system is contained in the one file: miniweb.html. Any new blog posts, files (which can be text or I think some form of executable – through some javascript magic), etc. are all stored in the miniweb.html file.

As I mentioned, it’s a work in progress, so nothing is complete, the terminal, the blog, pretty much everything but file viewing and management is incomplete. At this point I’m still just toying with it, so it pretty much takes on the Arthur C. Clark idiom of being so far beyond my understanding that it appears to be magic. To wield some of this magic Dean appears to use a home grown javascript compressor. Just… wow…

To check out MiniWeb click here. To download it and play with it on your own, click here. When you open up the file or depending on what you click on in what ever browser you’re using, you’ll probably have to get passed some of your browser’s security to fully use the software. In IE I think you need to allow the software to function on the bar that appears at the top of the browser window, in Firefox, depending on what you’re trying to do you may have to allow the script to complete some actions (don’t forget that “remember this decision” checkbox). Too much fun to pass up…

The only movie I ever want to see, EVER: Goonies of the Carribean

Kris — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 02:34:58 +0000

Links:
Goonies vs. Pirates website
YouTube link

Frickin’ awesome.

Harvey Danger + Little by Little = * tH3 Awesomeness *

Kris — Tue, 22 May 2007 20:48:28 +0000

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while now, back in September of 2005 Harvey Danger released their album – Little by Little – as a free download on their website. The album is available in MP3 or Ogg and available either via direct download or via Bittorrent. My favorite tracks?

Cream and Bastards Rise
Moral Centralia
Little Round Mirrors
Happiness Writes White
Cool James
What You Live By
Diminishing Returns

But what’s that you say? That’s most of the songs off the album? Why yes, yes it is. The more I listened the more each grew on me, and the listed tracks are what made it to my current play list. While you’re downloading, checkout HD’s reasons for distributing their music on the internets in internet-distributing-musical-trailblazing style. The forum is also still lively!

Friday Fun: Space P 0 r n

Kris — Fri, 11 May 2007 13:12:43 +0000

1. Go to: http://mediaarchive.ksc.nasa.gov/search.cfm

2. Search on the phrase “assembly building”.

3. Go to page 2 of the results (should show the large booster tank)

UPDATE! 070622

Weeeell, it looks like the KSC team regularly updates their photo archive, so to get you to the results more quickly (actually find them I mean) here are replacements for the above steps:

2. Search on the phrase: “KSC-07PD-09″

3. Scroll about halfway down the page (you should see the large, orange booster tank seemingly inserting itself into the repair building).

All this wouldn’t be necessary if the KSC web developers had seen fit to allow a suitable search address for the results to be linked to. Then I could just post the link…

4. Scroll down the page and let the space p 0 r n begin (insert funky bochikiwow music here)!!

Linky Goodness

Kris — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 02:13:10 +0000

Retro, steampunk, whatever. I like ‘em:

http://www.shorpy.com/
http://www.muar.ru/ve/2003/moscow/index_e.htm
strenco robot live steamrobot

Yeager, but not Meister

Kris — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 17:17:44 +0000

I heard on NPR this morning on my way to work that today is Chuck Yeager’s birthday. So, in celebration, I decided to go over to NASA’s image gallery and find some images of the Bell X-1. NASA doesn’t lay copyright claim to many of it’s photos as long as you’re not using anything with their logo to promote something. This begs the question “Why isnt’ this stuff licensed under a Creative Commons [insert your favorite Creative Commons license here] license?” Who knows…

If you checkout NASA’s GRIN (Great Image in NASA) you can find many nice high-res images of early computing, flight and so forth. Some of these were used by Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim a few years back for their “bumps”. These image gallery links and more below:

NASA Image of the Day Gallery
Great Images in NASA library of images (GRIN)
Astronomy Picture of the Day
NASA Dryden Flight Research Center Gallery
NASA Image eXchange (NIX)

As always, read the fine print if you’re going to use any of these images. If you have any other good goverment/other image galleries I’d love to hear about them!

NPR Song-of-the-Day

Kris — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 14:18:24 +0000

If you’re looking for new types of music, then NPR has a feature you should check out. Called “Song of the Day”, it has many different styles of music for you to sample. There’s one I like from February 8th from a band called Monkey Majik. Take a look, you may like what you find!

Link

Neatorific roundup

Kris — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 16:28:21 +0000

LifeHacker:
Geek to Live: Back up Gmail with fetchmail
Put IE7′s file menu back where it belongs – Thank goodness someone figured this one out!

Neatorama:
Quantum Computer may Debut Next Week – Wow
Sachiko Kodama’s Ferrofluid Sculpture “Morpho Tower” – Wow
The Very Weird Science of Dr. Hau. – and… wait for it… Wow

Amazon – All Month, 1¢ TV Show Dowloads!

Kris — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 16:21:13 +0000

That’s right, Amazon is giving away television episodes for free with the purchase of a DVD (as long as you redeem this within the first 24 hours of your purchase). If you’ve been checked out my last couple of posts, then you’ve seen that you can buy some DVDs on Amazon.com for 1¢. Under the “Format” type you’ll see:

“Download Bonus! Get a FREE TV show download when you buy any DVD. Must redeem within 24 hours of DVD purchase. See details. “

Following the link to Amazon Unbox you get the details:

“This month, if you purchase any DVD on Amazon.com you will receive a $1.99 instant rebate on a purchase or rental through Amazon Unbox, our video download store. You need to redeem this rebate within 24 hours of purchasing your DVD. Because most of our TV downloads are available for purchase for just $1.99, you’ll be able to purchase a TV show FREE. If you prefer, purchase or rent a higher priced video download and receive a $1.99 discount. Just purchase any video download and we will automatically deduct $1.99 from the price. For more details on how to take advantage of this offer, see below. To begin shopping for your TV show, go to the Amazon Unbox video download store. “

There you have it. Amazon has 1¢ TV show downloads!

As long as you live in the US.

And, you only get one per purchase.

And, there’s a limit of one per customer.

Oh, and Amazon can cancel this at any time.

UPDATE!! 070219
Well, that didn’t take long. I checked back on this offer this morning and it seems like the promotion information line is still present for some DVDs, but not for others. When you find a “Download Bonus” promotion link, it no longer displays any information on the promotion. Guess they exercised their right to end the promotion after they figured out they’re literally giving away (without gaining any revenue from DVD sales) videos!

If you buy @ Amazon.com and don’t read this you’re Amazon’s Be-yach.

Kris — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 15:53:46 +0000

Sorry for the harsh words, but this is an absolute fact.

I can’t remember where I got this link from (it’s got to be one of these: BoingBoing, LifeHacker, Gizmodo, Neatorama, or The Consumerist), but if you’ve ever been shopping on Amazon.com and you’re just shy of the free shipping limit, you probably end up doing one of a couple of things to find filler to round out your order.

You may try to find something else you like for cheap to fill in the price gap. If you’re like me, then you have a wish list on Amazon (and you also try to spell Amazon, “Amazone” EVERY time you type it). Or, you may have been to the book store recently and wanted a book that may have seemed just a bit over priced, so you do a search for it.

Well DON’T BOTHER! If you’re close to the Super Saver Shipping limit (anywhere from a penny to a five spot) then please, PLEASE for the love of Mike, don’t buy anything that will put you way over the limit just to get free shipping. The good folks over at ProBargainHunter.com have figured out the Amazon system for displaying discount products and made this available to you!

First, they’ve accumulated some very good discount codes. Wish I’d known about the text book discount before I bought my Cisco Academy books this semester (don’t get me started on Cisco Academy books).

Second, they have a list of tips and hacks for Amazon shopping. There are also a few links to websites that will find filler for you.

Third, they’ve already done the work and provided a list of pre-made links to % discounts for most of the popular Amazon categories.

Happy consuming!

Bitter Sweet Consumption

Kris — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 21:09:51 +0000

I’ve always liked the idea of being a smarter consumer, even though in practice I tend to fall short (way short, I’m as impulsive as a neuron when it comes to shopping). Over at The Consumerist they have “10 Shopping Tricks Stores Hate”. Now’s as good a time as any to start sticking it to the capitalist dogs. Eh comrades? ^_^

“Stores are always trying to get you to do what they want. But what if you refuse? What if you do what benefits you and not the store? Aside from outright fraud, what are the things that you can do to come out ahead? We’ve put together 10 tips that will help you save money, but probably won’t help the store. That’s why they hate them. And you. “

Link. via Lifehacker