Ghosts in the Machine

So, recently my Windows 7 beta ran out, so I had to downgrade to Vista. Back when my laptop ran Vista originally, it had all sorts of quirks, including bad wi-fi. They're all back now, and they brought another one with them.

Last night, I put my laptop in sleep mode before I went to sleep. I woke up to find the laptop on. It was really creepy.



I'm just looking forward to the new laptop I'm getting this summer. I'm thinkin' a lenovo. With Windows 7.

Midtown Madness 2

You know what the best thing about improving computers is? Going back and playing old games with ten times the quality they had back then. I remember when I was about eleven I got Midtown Madness 2 for Christmas. I installed it on our computer, a Toshiba rig with a 300 MHz Celeron and 256 MB of RAM. I'm kinda amazed you could recognize the cars as cars. This weekend, I installed MM2 on my current project computer, which has a 3.00 GHz Pentium 4 and 1 GB of RAM, plus a 256 MB video card. That's right, my video card has as much ram as the old computer. Needless to say the display is spectacular.

C-Cube/KITT Combined Workstation

When video editing, I often need to access online data, or I just get bored and want to surf the internet while a file is rendering.  So I set up the C-Cube and KITT (my laptop) next to each other, and for good measure I threw in a CRT display from an old computer.  I now effectively have three screens, so one can have my timeline, one can have files, and KITT's screen can be monitoring facebook for me.  Its a sweet setup, and makes me feel a little bit more like an evil genius.

Active Cooling

In labs recently, I've noticed that my goggles get fogged up during experiments.  While a normal person would just buy new goggles, my brain doesn't work properly I have the spirit of an inventor.  I went to Re-PC and bought a used CPU cooler and glued it on to my goggles.  Now I get a fresh breeze in my goggles, and they don't fog at all.  Now I just need to find a way to make them look less dorky.

Autonomy

I'm currently working on a fully autonomous robot designed to defeat humans.  Not actually defeat humans, but beat a robot controlled by a human.  So far its going well, the bot can defeat humans about 10% of the time.  Its a little bit scary, though.

Strange Thought

What if someone were to make a supercomputer out of an array of Ti-83s?  That might just be the most epic thing ever.  Of course, you'd need a monumental number of calculators, just to match the processing power of a modern desktop, you'd need approximately 500 calculators.  But imagine the glory of it: a warehouse sized room filled with rows and rows of server cabinets, each with stacks and stacks of TIs, each with several wires sticking out and flowing together like pythons toward a single central control.  A man sits at the console, and with all the flourish necessary for such an occasion, types out "Hello World!"

C-Cube Revision B

The C-Cube continues its quest towards becoming the ultimate computer.  This mod added an LG LightScribe drive, adding two new functionalities; LightScribe label writing, and DVD disc-to-disc burning.  Next stop: 1 GB video card.