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:

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

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