Thumb Drive Management
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It seems like everyone has a USB thumb drive/memory stick these days. I’ve observed two things. 1) when I ask people what they do with their drives, the usual answer amounts to “not much”. 2) when I service someone else’s PC and use my thumb drive, a lot of folks are quite interested in how I have mine organized. Thus the reason for this article.
I have several considerations. Among them
- Have my medical history readily available
- Keep common utilities on-hand
- Have a familiar computing environment on-hand
- Have my photo collection at hand
- Have space to move files between computers
I listed those roughly in order of importance. I have several chronic medical problems including diabetes so having my medical info readily at hand even though I might be unconscious is very important.
This brings up a very important decision. How much info to make semi-publicly available? My complete medical history should be easily available to any doctor who needs it but it should not be available to anyone else, including nosy authorities.
The way I’ve addressed the problem is to place an open file on my thumb drive that contains my current drug profile and allergies plus my doc’s contact info. My entire medical history is in another file, this one encrypted and hidden. The people I list in the public file as emergency contacts have the password to access the encrypted file. I’ll provide details of how I set this up as we go along.
The Thumb Drive Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by neonjohn on May 1st, 2008 under Computing, Science |Comment now » :::del.icio.us :Digg it :StumbleUpon :Yahoo MyWeb ::
Just Say No to the Gate Gestapo
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I’m not one of those people who rabidly hates Wal-Mart and other big box stores. I don’t like the experience but they’re a fact of life. I usually wear headphones and listen to an audio book so that I don’t have to listen to the toothless trash prattle on about their miserable lives but other than that, I’m in and out, no muss, no fuss.
Awhile back I got fed up with one of the little indignities that goes with Wallyworld shopping - the door checkers, AKA the Gate Gestapo. You know, those geezers that stop you and demand to see your receipt and prowl through your purchases. One of my life’s little resolutions that I made long ago is that I refuse to be treated like a common criminal (which is why I don’t fly commercially anymore.) I realized that the Gate Gestapo were doing just that so I decided to Just Say No!
I looked around the net and found out that I wasn’t alone. This is probably one of the best articles that I’ve read on the subject. I wish I’d written it myself.
http://www.bwcitypaper.com/bw.digg.page.final.html
A little more looking found this site. It’s a bit more along the lines of the rabid HateWallyWorld sites and they steal most of their content from others but still, a useful meeting place. I left a comment there but I decided that it wasn’t enough so I wrote this article.
http://www.standuptowalmart.com/index.html
I have been refusing receipt checks for several years. I haven’t been physically touched yet but when I am, a battery warrant will be taken.
Normally I “just say no” and keep walking. However, when I’m feeling frisky and have a little time to burn, I use a few of these techniques.
When the gate gestapos asks for your receipt, let ‘em see it but don’t let ‘em stop with the normal cursory glance. Insist that every single item be removed from the bag and compared with the receipt. And insist that an official printed price guide be produced so that scanning and mis-pricing errors may be detected. And be sure to ask for the manager. Once, when I got a very smart-mouthed manager, I insisted that we walk the isles to verify that the scanned prices matched the shelf prices.
After all that checking is done, wheel the cart over to customer service and return everything. Be sure to check off each item as it is scanned for the refund to make sure no mistakes are made. Try to take as much time as you can to maximally muck up the works.
Then, if you REALLY want to mess with their minds, go buy everything all over again. If you use a shopping list, that won’t take long. Or just change your mind at customer service. Tell them that you’ve decided to take the stuff after all and would they please re-ring all the stuff expeditiously?
If you have a friend along, video record the initial encounter. (takes some pre-planning, of course.) Write up the incident in the form of a press release and send it, along with a copy of the video to all the local media. You don’t have to be a big corporate type to send out a press release. If you’re lucky, they’ll pick up on the story and run with it.
A related Wallyworld peeve is not having enough check-out lanes open to handle the crowd. I refuse to stand more than 2-deep or for more than 5 minutes in line. If either of my “Policies” is violated then I wheel the cart to the door checker and tell him that I’m abandoning my purchases because of the store’s failure to open enough check-out lines. Then I walk out.
I used to just walk out but I decided that the message wasn’t being delivered clearly enough. So now I make sure that I tell someone, normally the gate gestapo, what I’m doing and why.
Wallyworld claims that all this checking is to deter shoplifting. As is obvious to the ordinary man, it doesn’t work very well. One reason is that most of the inventory “shrinkage” is from the inside. That is, employee theft. I got that from a friend who retired as a police chief and became head of store security for the local stores. We’ve chatted about that a bit. His educated guess is that perhaps 80% of the shrinkage is from inside jobs.
I used to cater meetings fairly often for one of the stores. I would pay attention to a large chart on display in the the employee break room. It charted shrinkage by department. Electronics led the way with an annual shrinkage in that one store of almost $1 million.
Think about that for a minute. Think how many big screen TVs and iPods would have to go out the door tucked up under someone’s coat :-) to equal $1 million dollars’ worth of shrinkage. That chart certainly reinforces what my friend told me, that most of the theft is not committed by customers. The Gate Gestapo are little more than security theater, management demonstrating that they’re doing something - anything - regardless of whether it works.
So. We may be stuck with the big box stores until something comes along to displace them but we don’t have to put up with the rudeness and indignities that frequently become part of the experience. Just Say No. Even if your effort doesn’t change corporate policy (it will if enough people do it), just saying no will make the individual gestapo gun-shy about asking. And after all, that’s what we really want. To be left alone.
Posted by neonjohn on April 15th, 2008 under Current Events, Philosophy |Comment now » :::del.icio.us :Digg it :StumbleUpon :Yahoo MyWeb ::
What they’re fighting against
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I don’t normally write about politics (and never partisan politics) but a couple of things I’ve run across in my web surfing absolutely demand comment.
The first is this video taken by the cowardly towelhead terrorists who also fired the shot. In this video you see a couple of GIs conducting routine security operations. As the closest GI faces the camera, the raghead bastard fires a shot into the soldier’s chest from an AK (I well recognize that sound). As the title of the video says, Thank God for Ballistic Vests! Thankfully the soldier was fully protected, got up and went for cover. I can only hope that our guys subsequently made camel food out of those snipers.
The second is this item at cyclerides.com. They were conducting a fund raiser to help soldiers injured in Iraq. In particular is the interview with Private Stackhouse in this video. This is young America at its finest. Listen to this soldier talk. He’s educated, erudite and driven. He’s what a volunteer Army produces.
Listen to what he has to say too. Kinda different from what you’re fed by the media, eh? Pay particular attention to how much he and the other soldiers appreciate what folks back home are doing for them, sending them care packages and stuff like that.
For several years at John G’s BBQ, I conducted a little program that turned out to be very effective. I called it “Operation GI-Fone-Home“. It was very simple. I solicited donations from my customers. I matched those donations dollar for dollar. I used that money to buy pre-paid phone cards. They were sent directly to the GIs that needed them, bypassing the bloated professional charity bureaucracies. A chapter of the VFW coordinated the collection of cards, then bundled and shipped them where they needed to go. This was all-volunteer labor and 100% of the donated money bought cards for the GIs.
I had been searching around for some way to help the soldiers without enriching any of the charity industries (Yes, even USO has far too much overhead for my tastes.) Food was out because of the various export restrictions and duties. I had no idea what kind of gadgets might be useful. Then I found out that DOD does NOT provide free calls back home for overseas GIs. It dawned on me that pre-paid cards might just be the universally useful treat. I searched the net and learned that I wasn’t the first to think of that idea.
So while the videos are still fresh in your mind, consider doing something for those guys and gals over there. The phone card is still a great idea. When I was doing it, the AT&T card that Sam’s Club sells was the best deal, both on the initial price and on the relatively low surcharge charged for overseas calls. It’s been a couple of years so check out the current situation before blazing down to your local Sam’s. While I’m at it, guess what two mega-corps would NOT give any discounts on the cards for this project….
John
Posted by neonjohn on March 25th, 2008 under Current Events, Government |Comment now » :::del.icio.us :Digg it :StumbleUpon :Yahoo MyWeb ::
Green Weenie Laughing Stock
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It’s not that often that one runs across a single incident that simultaneously illustrates so many things wrong in the world today. Here is one. Another version.
At first blush what we appear to have is a revolutionary new lighting invention, a lamp that will run for hours using the energy supplied by a falling weight. This invention is so momentous that the student that designed it is immediately awarded a prize from an eco-nazi, er, environmental group called Greener Gadgets.
Only one problem. It doesn’t work. Nor does it even exist. It can’t work without defying the most basic laws of physics, stuff us nerds learned in middle school. Unfortunately this fellow forgot to audit a basic math course on his way to inventing a perpetual motion machine. And as usual, the enviro-whackos bite, hook, line and sinker.
Press Release Science
Let’s start at the top. The Press Release. From a university that has “Tech” in its name, no less. “Tech” used to mean that somewhere on the campus there was an engineer or scientist hanging out. Apparently not any more.
The headline says “Lamp lit by gravity wins Greener Gadget award”. A minor detail. Gravity doesn’t power anything. If this lamp existed and worked, the energy to power the light would have come from the muscles of the person who lifted the 50 lb weight. This is exactly how a Grandfather Clock works. A university ought to know better, even the university’s press flack.
Next we see in the press release that the student “created the lamp when he was an industrial design graduate student.” Now, to you and me and most folks, “created” means that something was actually made. Apparently not, in this case. A little later he says “The light output will be 600-800 lumens”. Notice the future-tense. In other words, this thing hasn’t actually been built. The “photo” in the article, reproduced above, is actually just a CAD rendering.
Do the Math!
Next, the specs. He claims that this thing will (future-tense again) generate at least 600 lumens of light, running on the stored energy of a 50 lb weight a few feet off the floor. Several people here, myself included, have run the basic high school physics calculations. The result? Using pretty much state-of-the-art 100 lumen per watt LEDs, this thing would run for less than a minute while producing 600 lumens.
To run for his claimed 4 hours, I calculated that the 50 lb weight would have to drop from the height of the Empire State Building!
But it gets worse. This graduate student goes on to claim that the mechanism will “last more than 200 years, if used eight hours a day, 365 days a year”. Can you think of ANYTHING that’s used every day that has lasted 200 years? Me neither. I’d be hard-pressed to think of anything mechanical that would last even 20 years.
Patently Silly
Looking a little further down the press release, we see that the university is wasting public funds pursuing a friggin’ patent on this absurdity. Given that the patent office will now issue a patent on air if someone applies, I bet they get it. It used to be the patent office’s policy to dump perpetual motion applications at the gate but I bet this one gets through. I bet VT will blow $5,000 or more on this application.
Not doing even the most basic math certainly didn’t keep this student from whipping out a profound-sounding artist’s statement.
“The precedent for this lamp lies within horology, the science of keeping time. Gravia recalls the archetypes of ‘grandfather clock’, ‘hourglass’ and ‘wind-up clock’. User input provides the potential energy for these devices, and maintains a cycle of timely upkeep for the life of the object.
Gravia is also metaphor for an understanding of social activism. The mechanism of social activism is like a flywheel, where each participant in society is not necessarily required to provide all of the energy to power a movement, but instead, contributes with others, bits at a time to accomplish positive change.”
“A metaphor for understanding social activism”. I feel soiled just reading that.
Vaporware
That this thing doesn’t exist and could not work if it did, obviously didn’t slow down this eco-nazi bunch “Greener Gadgets” from awarding this guy a prize. This is a common theme running through most all so-called “alternative energy” proposals. “Don’t bother with any math, just wave your arms wildly and think pure thoughts and everything will work OK.” Best to keep that in mind the next time you see someone claiming to have come up with the latest invention to “save the planet”.
College Educated?
Finally, we have to consider the implications of a technical university that woud not only graduate a scientifically illiterate student with an advanced degree but then go and brag about his illiteracy in a press release. It is any wonder that the Asians are kicking our technological butts?
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Posted by neonjohn on February 22nd, 2008 under Energy, Science |Comment now » :::del.icio.us :Digg it :StumbleUpon :Yahoo MyWeb ::
TrailTech HID Lights
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TrailTech is a company that makes a variety of products for off-road racing. The flagship lighting product is their line of HID (High Intensity Discharge) lights. HID lights are miniature versions of the metal-halide light that is in common use lighting sports stadiums, race tracks and other venues. It is a high efficiency arc light that delivers white light.
Welch-Allyn perfected the manufacture of miniature HID lights and markets them under the name Solarc. The lamps range in size from 10 watts to several hundred. The light is very white and the lamp is fairly long lived. They offer the arc lamp tube in a variety of forms, from a loose lamp to mounted in MR11 and MR16 integral reflectors.
TrailTech buys Solarc lamps and ballasts and manufactures off-road lighting fixtures. Of particular interest to us are the 10 watt lamp in the MR11 form factor and SCMR16 35 watt lamp in the MR16 form factor
Here are the two lights. I photographed them lit so that the difference in color temperature can be seen. The MR11 is bluish while the SCMR16 is warm, almost pure white. The MR11 is attached to the vice grip bracket to form a semi truck dock light. This light is simply clamped to the back of a semi trailer and provides enough light to illuminate a whole dock. Contact me if you’d like me to build you one.
Here’s a little bit better photo of the light. It is being powered from a 12 volt gell cell through a Watts Up DC wattmeter.
Here’s a closeup of the front of the fixture. The lamp/ballast assembly is mounted in the yellow polymer shock-absorber ring. The entire assembly is sealed and is not accessable by the user. The MR16 reflector is clearly visible in this photo. The inset shows details of the arc tube.
This is the 10 watt MR11 lamp disassembled. Unlike its larger cousin, it is not sealed. The ballast and lamp can be replaced separately.
This photo clearly shows how the lamp and ballast fit together. Notice the O-ring on the lamp. Also notice the anti-arc plastic barrier between the sockets. The lamp is keyed so that it fits only one way.
Of interest to any flashahaulic is the power consumption of each lamp. The next two photos tell the story. The first photo is of the Watts Up measuring the draw of the 10 watt lamp. The second photo is of the 35 watt lamp.
MR11 Lamp 10 watt
MR16 35 watt
Well, that about wraps it up. I own two of each of these and am very pleased with their performance. I have the 35 watt unit mounted on my GoBig Hotrod electric scooter. Even on that thing I don’t think I could outrun my lighting.
Stay tuned, as I’ll be posting some beam shots shortly.
John
Posted by neonjohn on February 6th, 2008 under Flashahaulism, Neat Stuff |Comment now » :::del.icio.us :Digg it :StumbleUpon :Yahoo MyWeb ::
The Big Gun
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At various points in my life, I’ve had a second occupation as a professional photographer. Mostly mundane stuff like product and loss (insurance) photography but both paid well and most importantly for a gadget dude like me, allowed me to accumulate a decent quantity of pro equipment. Some of it is somewhat old but that doesn’t mean anything outside the the Snob Wars.
I needed to do so product photography so I dragged out my Big Gun flash system, a Speedotron 6 flash head, dual power pack Speedotron D-400. This is a full-boat studio flash system that duplicates the sun for a millisecond at a time and draws enough power for an instant that TVA probably notices. It weighs in at over 50 lbs. I have a dedicated 2-wheel luggage carrier to wheel it around. But damn, does it make the light. And to think that this is the next-to-smallest unit Speedotron makes. This is a system that was designed back when men were men and film was slow.
Digital cameras give us much more latitude than film, of course. I don’t really NEED high powered strobes. Indeed, I usually shoot with compact fluorescent lighting. My camera color balances to that just fine and since the light is on continuously, composition is much easier. However, sometimes it’s nice to be able to hand-hold the camera and shoot with strobes.
I see so many poorly lit and under-lit photos on the net that I thought I’d take a moment and post some properly exposed photos. I didn’t go to any great trouble with these and I’m only using 2 flash heads. With another head or two I could get rid of even the trace of shadow that is present.
The Setup
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Civil War on the Periodic Table
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This is serious. They’re screwing with the periodic table again and I’m pissed…
Background…
By the age of 10 I’d memorized the periodic table in the back of Dad’s post-WWII college chemistry textbook. I could recite elemental statistics like dumber kids recited baseball stats. I’ve always loved that table. So elegant. So organized. So Nerdy.
One of the bits of trivia about the elements is, what is the rarest naturally occurring element? The answer is Alabamine, 85At205. It has no stable isotopes but is made by the decay of Uranium. It has been estimated that there are only about 25 grams of the stuff in the earth’s crust, down to 10 miles.
Do you have ANY idea how many chicks you can attract with trivia knowledge like that? Yeah, I’m single too…..
WTF?!?!
So tonight I’m prowling a periodic table site and my eye naturally falls to the lower right corner for old familiar element 85. wtf? Where did Ab go? At is listed as the symbol and when I click on it, I get a Wikipedia (the roulette table of scientific information) for Astatine. WTF?!?!?!
So I Google. I find this. It lists Alabamine as formerly Astatine. OK, that looks good. I find this, Feb 15th, 1932 Time article on the discoverer of Alabamine, Professor Fred Allison of Alabama Polytechnic Institute. (Did anyone else know that Time has its morgue online?
Here It references back to Astantine. WTF?!?!
I’m beginning to see a pattern of discrimination here. As a thoroughly unreconstructed Southern boy, I’m good at that. I ain’t up there with Ralph David and Jessie but I’m pretty good. I see that all the yankees are trying to take credit away from our good ole Southern boy, Prof Fred Allison. It’s a conspiracy of the ruling yankee elite! First our slaves and now our Alabamine!
Both as a Southerner and a Nerd, I take this very seriously. WTF do they mean, screwing around with my periodic table? This is as bad as Sieverts and Grays, as silly as cm and pascals, as awful as Bars and joules. Well, OK, Gray is fine as long as it’s south of the Mason-Dixon line and on a uniform.
Change just to be changing stuff. Don’t you just hate that? Looks like we may need War for the Southern Independent Periodic Table just like we need one for Southern Weights and Measures. Imagine, a Southerner using anything as french as liters and kilograms, especially after they left us hanging during the First Great War. The Yanks moving down here will just have to learn Our Way (TM)
John, In Occupied Tennessee.
Posted by neonjohn on February 6th, 2008 under Funny, Science |Comment now » :::del.icio.us :Digg it :StumbleUpon :Yahoo MyWeb ::
WebSitePublisher - Slick Tool
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Occasionally I run into a software tool that “just works”. No muss, no fuss. Just start it, tell it to do its thing and forget about it. Kinda the opposite of Microsloth products.
This little bit of freeware, WebSitePublisher is just such a package. It does only one thing - shoveling bits and pieces of data from my computer to my website - but it does it extremely well.
Some web editing programs (I use FrontPage - it hasn’t been Microsloughed too badly yet) have the ability to push out pages, or synchronize the local machine with the website. Few do it well, however. If I make a single character change to Neon John, it takes FrontPage about 20 minutes to figure out that this one file has changed and therefore it needs to be uploaded to my web host.
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