Posts by Mike Flugennock 2068 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Nov 2007
If you check out some of the photography from the X-15 altitude record flights and the early Mercury suborbital flights, the curvature of the Earth is quite evident from about the 100km neighborhood.
Still, it's not quite as curved as it's shown in the video; this is, in fact, an artifact of the GoPro lens.
Point well taken. I also had this pointed out to me in my junior high school astronomy class. Still, as the Earth/Moon system's barycenter is within the Earth, most regular folks are good with the idea of the Moon "orbiting" the Earth.
Now, if you want a really good example of a "wobbly" system, check out some of the time lapses of Pluto and Charon taken by New Horizons on approach prior to the flyby. The barycenter of the Pluto/Charon system is well outside Pluto, and Pluto can be seen visibly wobbling in space as Charon tugs at it as they orbit their common barycenter much in the manner of a binary star.
Tell me about it, man. Tell me all about it.
I don't get a whole lot of telemarketing calls or SMS's on my mobile -- I make a point of not giving out my mobile number to anyone except people I actually want to stay in touch with -- but they come on a fairly regular basis despite my mobile number being on the Do-Not-Call list. At least three of 'em were that robot claiming to be from the IRS, trying to run that overdue tax scam or whatever the hell it is. These days, I just let 'em ring over to voicemail if the number isn't in my contact list; none of them have left any messages. The occasional SMS spam is almost always the classic penny stock tout. The numbers go straight into my block list.
And, yeah -- the FCC is toothless and useless.
Join the club. I have a grand total of two third-party apps on my 4S: Twitter, and an ad-supported free flashlight app which I rarely use except to read menus in dimly-lit restaurants. That's it -- no games, no bullshit. I do fine with the apps that came with the phone.
My wife's 4S, on the other hand -- don't get me started...
Believe you me, the stuff these guys are holding up for ridicule isn't even close to art -- not even "outsider art". This stuff is pure, down-to-the-bone crap.
Hell, as far as that goes, Mystery Science Theater 3000, one of the most influential TV shows of the last century, became famous for raising public ridicule to a high art -- but only by going after movies that truly deserved it.
...kinda like these guys.
Really, man... pretty much every tutorial on YouTube EVER. I'm at a point where whenever I'm searching for information on a software issue or for a tutorial, I always add "-youtube" to the search criteria to weed out all the stupid-ass tutorials done with a QuickTime screen recorder.
...and while we're at it, all those screen-recorder-generated videos of MMF hucksters showing off how they Made Money Fast On The Internet ought to be nominated as well.
Plane crash porn, car crash porn, Chuck E. Cheese fight footage, cats falling off of table tops, people throwing chunks of dry ice into swimming pools, time-share pitches, drunken frat punks launching bottle rockets from their butt cracks, "unboxing" videos, those goddamn' ice bucket clips -- hell, any actual interesting or useful content left on there is pretty much drowned out by all the friggin' bullshit.
I don't know about NoTube judging criteria, though. I wouldn't judge on description, or the number of hits, or the number of comments, or even on whether or not the shooter had the presence of mind to rotate her phone 90 degrees. The most godawful, shit-assed clips I've seen posted have "proper" descriptions, are shot in landscape, and have a crapdillion hits.
I abandoned my YouTube account several years ago because of the idiotic dross listed above -- not to mention being hounded about my "third-party content" for the 15 seconds of an old Pink Floyd song I used in the background of a video I posted eight years ago.
Vimeo, FTW.
"We should have a better job..."
"We understand people's concerns..."
Oh, cut the crap. You did a GREAT job of communicating what your policies mean. Quit jerking us around.
Man, I'm so goddamn' glad I didnt fall for the streaming hype. CDs and locally-stored mp3's FTW.
...for no other reason than that what they did helped bring down a hypocritical little right-wing shitstain named Josh Duggar.
As I recall, the fuel tanks and engines of the retired Shuttles were removed and the engines replaced with replicas before they went on display, owing to concerns about toxic residue, and the weight of a full-up SSME, which runs to nearly 4 tons (3390 kg). In the retired Shuttles you see in the museums, all you see is the outwardly visible hardware in replica, not the actual engines.
Hell, I can't remember the last time I had Java enabled in any browser I've ever used, as it could pretty much be counted on to slow page loads to a crawl, if not flat-out locking up and crashing the browser.
They call those little turd nuggets "crapplets" for a reason, y'know...
...to describe the act of having malware inflicted on your system by a skeezy Web ad. I don't know all the sordid details, so I won't say that Drudge Report deliberately serves up skanky ads, but I've always had the distinct impression that Drudge sure as hell doesn't care what kind of ads are served there.
I read Drudge Report regularly -- only for cheap laffs, of course -- and I noticed very early on that it was Skeezy Web Ad Central, notorious for the infamous wildly-flashing phony "Virus Alert" banners made up to look like a Windows alert box, along with other varieties of nasty-looking, tacky animated banner ads.
Mind you, it's been ages since I've seen one of those, as I've been AdBlocking, FlashBlocking and NoScripting like a sonofabitch for as long as that technology's been available.
Of course, I've also used only Macs for the past thirty years, so that helps, though I've never bought into the idea of "security through obscurity". Still, every time I read in the Reg about the latest Windows malware scourge, I think "there but for the grace of Steve go I..."
Unless the USPTO still thinks you can patent anything by tacking the words "on a mobile phone" onto the prior work...
Yep, you pretty much nailed it. Kinda reminds me of that silly game you play with the fortunes in fortune cookies, where you read the fortune with the words "in bed" after it.
Next week, I'm filing a patent for software which allows me to fry bacon -- on a mobile phone.
I finally blew off Firefox a couple of years ago because of bloat and speed issues, but mostly due to their "sponsored frame" deal they started shoving off on new user installations.
I've been using SeaMonkey since then -- quicker, not as bloated, and almost all Firefox add-ons work with it, and the ones that don't have versions specifically for SeaMonkey.
"...And the solution is not to avoid registering mobile phone number with webmail providers, since the process by itself offers security benefits because it underpins two-factor authentication options within, for example, Gmail..."
Actually, if I understand this scam correctly, the solution IS to not register my mobile phone number with Gmail. I mean, c'mon, man. Think about it.
I have a backup account on Gmail to fall back on, on those very rare occasions that my own domain's mail server gets the hiccups. Every now and then I'll check it to see if I missed any messages and to clear out the spam, and it seems as if every other time I log on there, Google pesters the shit ouf of me for my mobile number.
Cripes, Google, do I have the word "dumbass" tattooed on my forehead or something? Facebook didn't get my mobile number when I set up my now practically abandoned account there, and I'm sure as hell not going to be stupid enough to give it to you.
...when meanwhile, YouTube For Adults is still a shithole full of schlocky music videos, plane crash porn, car crash porn, MLM and timeshare real-estate spam, cats falling off of sofas, frat boys launching bottle rockets from their ass cracks, and people throwing dry ice into swimming pools and dumping buckets of ice water on their heads?
When I first started working in vector-based design and illustration, I used FreeHand, way back when it was still made by Aldus (remember them?). My first few attempts to learn Illustrator were more than a bit painful, whereas I was up and creating decent work in FreeHand in a day.
Around the early '90s, Illustrator's finally got to where I could learn it without feeling as if I were beating myself upside the head with a baseball bat. I switched from FreeHand just before they were sucked into Macromedia (and, in turn, sucked into Adobe and snuffed).
I've sworn by Illustrator since the late '80s although I -- like many others -- am more than a little bugged by Adobe's subscription-based profit grab. When upgrading my equipment a year or so ago, I spent a little extra time and was able to rustle up a real, physical copy of CS6, which I plan to stick with until I retire -- which, to my relief, isn't that far off.
Just for the hell of it, I tried out the OSX version of Inkscape on my MacBook Pro, and god damn, what a friggin' mess. It wouldn't import my Illustrator files cleanly, and the interface looks like a mid '90s version of Corel Draw for Windows 3.1.
Feature-weak, makes a big mess out of my Illustrator files, and a butt-ugly interface on top of it.
M'eh.
I've been a profesional illustrator and designer since the late '70s, and I've been using Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign (nee PageMaker) in various combinations on every Mac I've owned going back to about 1985. Hell, I used InDesign -- then PageMaker -- before Adobe scarfed up Aldus.
I've sworn by Adobe's products since God was in short pants, scraping up for upgrades when I could afford it, but this latest profit-grab by Adobe makes me glad I'm so close to retirement I can smell it. When I upgraded my hardware about a year ago, I made a point of judiciously hunting around for a boxed edition of CS6. For the time I have left in my career, it made a helluva lot more sense than "renting" from Adobe and having my shit go south on me when I'm right in the middle of a crunch deadline, or doing last-minute revisions at a client's site. Seriously, screw that noise.
Right now, after checking out these reviews, I've already downloaded some trial versions of Pixelmator and Affinity Designer. My wife finally upgraded to a MacBook Pro also, has no need for full-blown CS6, but really could use a decent cheap image editor or layout tool, and I plan on kicking back a bit and testing these out for her.
"...If I ran a tech blog, it would be full of me cocking things up and products misbehaving..."
Y'know, Dabbs, that's a tech blog I'd actually read fairly regularly.
No, really, I'm serious. That's be awesome, especially given your dry wit and "bad attitude".
Actually, I think what we have in these reviews is a case of something being easier to do than to explain... but, then, I have a fair amount of experience ripping tape, having spent the better part of a year ripping all of my old Grateful Dead concert bootlegs, a bunch of my old radio tapes, and obscure cassette-only releases by local/regional alt/punk bands.
You get a "Y" adapter for the mini-plug stereo audio input on the computer, plug the leads at the other end into the cassette deck output, do a test rip or two to set the levels, click "start" on the sampling software and press "play" on the cassette deck. I'm betting that ripping LPs is probably also simpler than the description makes it out to be.
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