100dpi MiniSD w/dime. Click for GIGANTIC size!

So, I was thinking today and it occurred to me that digital photography has changed things a bit. In the past if you took pictures of things that the powers that be didn’t like, they would likely take your camera and smash it and pull out the film and possibly search you for more film and destroy that too.

Well, digital memory can be small, really small! Its also really tough, surviving drops, water, plane crashes, and lots more. So the weird guy that I am I think, hey why not swallow it? My normal SD cards are easily small enough to be swallowed, and MiniSD is even smaller and can be adapted to SD. So you could keep a spare SD card, when they go to take your stuff swap out the card and swallow the important one. Its definitely small enough to pass through, but no guarantees =)

P.S. The image is 90DPI which should be close to real sized on many monitors. 72-100dpi is fairly typical these days. My Dell 20″ is spot on 100DPI.

FIOS Availability

So I went a little crazy and put in a bunch of my neighbors address in to the Verizon FIOS availability form. Mix in a little Photoshop and you have what is driving me mad. FIOS is available in what appears to be completely random locations.

The picture is a link to a map of my neighborhood. Click it…

Ok, explain that! I’ve thought about it and its either 1. random (maybe to stage the workload?), 2. computer error or 3. the bundles of fiber not hooked up at the CO have no particular order. What ever it is…its driving me a bit insane…

I’ve called and the CSR filled out a engineering report, but I don’t have any high hopes of that changing things.

108nm Al

I was recently reading Defense Tech and read a small interesting post that made a big impact. Nano-Explosives…

I hadn’t considered the implications and relative ease for nano-tech in the explosives realm. Unlike many of the far reaching nano-technologies (tiny robots to fix cells, etc…) the structures for nano-explosive are orders of magnitude less complicated. The implications for high-energy radiation free explosives are nothing short of staggering. The blog link points to a news article on Technology Review where they discuss the technology in a bit more detail.

Researchers can greatly increase the power of weapons by adding materials known as superthermites that combine nanometals such as nanoaluminum with metal oxides such as iron oxide, according to Steven Son, a project leader in the Explosives Science and Technology group at Los Alamos.

I’ll summarize a bit, 1000x the chemical reaction time to current high explosives. If you know anything about explosives, you know that its the velocity that counts and this is some serious improvement.

Here is an older but interesting look at the topic from Feb 2, 2002 from Small Times, a look at the Los Alamos Team on the bottom of this link, and some interesting electron microscope shots from Texas Tech.

Tree rigging

Its Los Angeles, we aren’t supposed to have ‘weather’. Oh well, anyway the recent downpour has caused no end of annoyances for me. First the Internet goes out, the comes back on, then off, then on, you get the point. Then finally the power goes out. I give up for the evening and try to go to sleep only to be awoken every time the wind blows as the house is creaking unusually heavily. Kimmy after much effort convinced me to go out in the rain and take a look. I found one of the large oak trees has decided to lean on the house, great…

So this morning (after sleeping in the living room to avoid death by tree) after several failed attempts to get someone up here during the holidays, I gave up and made a temporary rigging. With the help of my father who has no end of supplies when it comes to the right tool for the right job, I did the following…

Tree Gallery

The cable and ratchet are rated for 2000lbs and the chain (which is doing double duty as a backup in case all else fails) is good for at least twice that.

It should hold until I can get a tree guy up here to assess the situation.