Wüt for Leopard.

I’ve been enjoying the hell out of Apple’s new OS - you can read about its awesomeness elsewhere. I will express my surprise, however, that they are using a picture of Windows’ BSOD as the icon for network PCs. So… smug. I hope people are laughing about this as much as I am.

I was wary of the semi-transparent top bar, but the only thing I didn’t like about it was Google Notifier’s icon indicating that I have no unread mail. It… used… white…, not… transparent. I think you’ll agree it looked awful:

Much better after deleting the white bits and making them transparent:

At the supermarket, middle-aged folks with nothing planned for the evening will take a glance at the $9.99 rack of movies just to see if anything pops out at them. Middle-aged folks.

More and more the movies that are on those racks are some of my favorites: Trainspotting, Amélie, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown… So, when did I become the target market? In some ways it’s nice that products I want are being marketed towards me, or rather that there’s more of a market for things that I want, but I still find it quietly discouraging.

If you need more evidence, check out BestBuy’s $9.99 DVD page.

Beer can golf - greatest thing ever. Grab yourself a smoke, some beers, some empties and a blunt object and have yourself a time.

1. Place cigar/cigarette in mouth, ignite.
2. Open yourself the first of your beers and begin consumption.
3. Line up a few empties at a time.
4. Swing away.
5. Repeat ad infinitum or until you run out of time.

I don’t think I’m alone in not having “done” Halloween since the 6th grade, but I find myself wondering if I’m too old to get candy from strangers.

Either way, I’ve decided to party up this October 31st nerdy-style. Gonna find / make myself some steampunk goggles and pick up a lab coat. I’ve been carving up LEGO mans and ordered a couple of bags of LEDs for them. If I feel particularly festive, I might try to carve a Dalek.

Apparently Google is increasing storage at a faster rate - a rate which will put our Gmail storage at 6 Gb by January 2008. I personally enjoy signing into Gmail every day and taking a glance at their storage counter.

Like passing a 10k mile mark on your car, who doesn’t get a kick out of seeing lots of 9’s turn into lots of 0’s? I’ve been waiting for the 3000 Mb mark for a while, and with the new rate, it’ll be happening tonight around 6:20 Mountain Time. Would it be nerdy to actually go to my computer and visit the site just to see it turn? Maybe. I’ll post screen shots if I’m nerdy enough and victorious.

I’m now accepting bets on whether or not confetti will fall from the ceiling when it hits 3 gigs.

I set out on Sunday to fix a speaker in my car that had been buzzing. I expected that I would find a wire that wasn’t well-attached or that I’d have to solder a weak point, but first I had to get to it.

When I installed a 3.5mm jack in my stereo, I was angered to find that to get to it, I had to remove most of the dash. While I’m sure they didn’t have end-user customization in mind when they designed the 1992 Toyota Corolla, it would be nice to have these things accessible. When we did the same on my friend’s car, we were able to pop a piece off and access the stereo there and then. The same with the truck we used to have. Why does it have to be so buried?

The speaker was a similar, if worse, story. Bolts that were almost impossible to access, large pieces that must be removed in unison. Parts to unscrew that, in order to access them, you’d have to remove the piece they attach. Who makes a car like that?

I appreciate the durability, though. This particular car has just under 240,000 miles on it, and if you need further evidence, check out the Top Gear episode where they try to destroy an old Toyota truck.

Two hours and countless f-bombs after starting to try to get to this speaker, I find it and bring in half my dashboard into the house. Break out the speaker to find that it’s completely eviscerated. Four inches, and all of 15 Watts RMS. Nice.

Browsed around online, but found mostly expensive and powerful speakers, so I head to Checker. Nothing. Target - nope, and Sears doesn’t do car audio anymore. They suggest RadioShack. Nada.

Someone at Checker said he got his (essentially the same speaker) at Walmart. I had been avoiding this, but lacking any other alternative… They’ve got only one pair of speakers that will work, and I’m going to have to do some time with the tin-snips. I get back, get it installed, and I have to admit, they sound a lot better than the old ones.

On a last note, it turns out that parts that are hard to get out are even harder to put back in.

It seems like the last month, the only thing on my mind is NP-completeness. For those of you who are not cool enough, er, nerdy enough to know about this class of problems, the basic idea is this: if you want to solve a NPC problem, you’re f**ked. See Wikipedia.

The library on campus has had a puzzle available for people to take a crack at, with the potential for $50 at the book store. If you can solve one half of it, you get one entry, and if you can solve the other half, you get a second. The drawing is at 1 PM today.

The problem? Shape-separability. You’ve seen these genre of puzzles before: a hopeless tangle of metal parts one of which can be removed from the mess. This… is an NP-Complete problem.

We even talked about shape-separability in Applied Algorithms, proving that it’s NPC by reducing it from set-partition - a problem we proved NPC on a homework (I used subset-sum). (A quick note: a problem is shown NPC by demonstrating that a known NPC problem, and reduce it to your problem, the thinking being that if you can solve your problem in polynomial time, you can solve this NPC complete problem in polynomial time. Therefore, your problem is in NPC.)

I took a look at it yesterday and played with it for about an hour, leaving irked that I couldn’t solve it - I had expected not a physical puzzle, but rather something a computer scientist might like. I had also expected that it would be the kind of thing I could just show up for and solve on the spot. On the way to school this morning, I had a sort of ‘ah-ha’ moment (no, not “Take On Me”), and so before class, I hopped on over the library and the solution was exactly what I had come up with. A good start to hopefully a good day.

I’ve got my two entries and we’ll see what happens at 1 - it’s a tough problem (after all, it’s NPC), and it was not well-advertised.

The St. Vrain Valley School District had two brands of science kits they were considering for purchase on display and open to public commenting. Alan and I decided we would go over and take a look.

When I stepped into the room where the kits were under review, I immediately felt creepy. I was suddenly that crazy guy ranting and raving about how kids these days lack an appreciation for science. Well, not exactly, but I certainly felt like that guy.

Mostly what attracted me to this project in the first place was the idea that the school would ask for public opinion with respect to the science kits it would use. It felt so… participatory. When we didn’t look through the other evaluations to see what kinds of people came through (people were asked to identify themselves as public, student or teacher), we didn’t find that only eight people came by (over the course of three weeks), all of whom were teachers. Only mischievous kids would sift through things like that.

Like MacGy-ay-ay-ay-ver.

Scenario: you need to boil some water to incapacitate a guard (a hot cup of tea puts him right to sleep. Also, he’s very trusting when it comes to strangers offering him tea), and you’ve got sandpaper, two soda cans, a razor, a tuft of fiberglass insulation, a tack and a bottle of Heet at your disposal. Also, the internet to watch this metacafe video.

I had seen this before and in various design complexities, but I really like the compactness and ease of this one. I decided to scrounge up some Heet ($2.10 at a local gas station), a couple of cans, sandpaper and a razor blade (both on hand), and pull a little piece of insulation off of some that happened to be sitting in our basement.

It got surprisingly hot - I tried setting an oven rack over it with a kettle (to knock out that tea-loving guard), and it started to melt one of the bars of the rack. I expected it to be hot, but not hot enough to melt parts of an oven rack. Who knew?

Success: certainly.

The folks over at iPod Mechanic have conjured up the iPod Deathclock which, given your iPod’s serial number and a little information on how you use it, it tried to predict when your little friend will expire.

According to them, my 1st-gen iPod video has got another 483 days, 5 hours, 7 minutes and change left. Not bad in my opinion - I’ve already had it for a year+ and I use it for a couple of hours every day.

My 2nd-gen iPod shuffle has got 513 days, 15 hours, 33 minutes of tunes for the trails before it kicks it. I’ve had it for about 11 months, and have enjoyed it intensely - relatively cheap (especially for Apple), aesthetically pleasing, and I love the clip. Yeah, it’s not for everyone or everything, but autofill it from a ‘haven’t-heard-this-in-a-while’ playlist (using smart playlists and the last-played date), and it’s a little nostalgia machine. It also helps me resurface the ‘why-do-I-even-have-this-album’ music and get rid of it.

As per their suggestion on the site, I’m going to add a reminder on the day it’s set to die, and we’ll see if they’re still ticking away.

Via Lifehacker