Stuff missing from my collection: IBM vacuum tube plug-in logic modules. The damn things go for 70-80 bucks on eBay.
100 Inch ……. TV
I was browsing a site that sells weird keyboards and fount this :
“A Perfect Monitor Solution”
Just $285.00
I think various pixel pushers and the nuts who set their screens to ridiculous resolutions could actually get some use this product.
Wow, this reminded me the Soviet “КВÐ?-49” TV set that was sold with a water (or glycerin) filled lens so that you could make out something on it’s tiny screen.
Oh, and a $9.95 kit for making a 100 inch TV. “The picture produced by this lens compares only to the high-end HDTV plasma screens costing over $12,000!! “ and “With every order you will also receive… A FREE 3 DAY, 2 NIGHT VACATION OVER 20 WORLDWIDE LOCATIONS!”
Don’t know about the plasma screen comparison and that vacation, but from what I’ve heard the projection apparatus kind of works.
And I also remembered my high school AP Physics teacher Mr. Lloyd who explained how Fresnel lens works.
International Lets Come Out of the Woodwork and Surprise Michael Day
Yesterday was International Lets Come Out of the Woodwork and Surprise Michael Day. First my school chum from Odessa contacted me on ICQ and sent me some photos (this doesn’t happen more often than a few times a millennium). Then he gave me an ICQ number of another alumna of our school. Our school was regular good ‘ol School Number 39. But before the Revolution of 1917 it used to be a very prestigious school known as Madam Balen De Balu’s Gymnasium for Girls.
Interestingly enough both of my friends never even heard about LiveJournal. It seems to me that it’s not very well known in Odessa. That sucks.
Then my grandfather called me and said that a package arrived for me. From Bangor, Main. From King, S. Well, holy crap! You see, about 6 or 7 years ago I sent a couple of books for an autograph. I received my books back without a signature, but with a note that said that my name was put on a list and that I’d be sent a letter when it’d be my turn to get the autograph. Then the whole story with a van accident happened. I thought I’d never get my King autograph.
Well, guess what. He sent me a copy of Black House. A little note stated that Mr. King no longer signs books, but to honor his promise to me, Constant Reader, he is sending a book and a signed paper slip. The paper slip states, that even though it’s “computer generated, the signature is real”. The signature looks like an autopen to me, but I am not so sure. It does say “real” and King is a very decent person. Thank you, Mr. King.
Another Post from cubicle filled corridors of the Newscorp Building.
We tender this premium coffee for your enjoyment as a tribute to your good taste. It comes from the deadprogrammer’s collection to you 33.
Recently a commercial Bunn coffeemaker in our office kitchen was replaced with an automatic Keurig B2003 machine that uses K-cups. K-cups are a neat technology, but not suitable to good coffee preparation. Cffee from k-cups tastes like coffee prepared in athletic cups (because it gets very stale). On the other hand, conventional Bunn machine was actually very good, but we had the most foul prepackaged coffee. To this day I have one package of that coffee hanging on the wall of one cubicle. Check it out:
I new there was something weird in that coffee. “Milds”! What the hell are “milds”? Judging by taste it is probably tobacco. Or dried dog crap. But then, what else what did I expect from a company called “Mother-Parkers”? Hey, these motherparkers even have a website.
There is an OU symbol on the package. Milds must be kosher.
Baikonur On The Hudson
What always amazed me is that water towers are really just wooden barrels. No futuristic technology there.
Righty Loosey
I’ve read somewhere that threads in all emergency light bulbs in subways are inverted. That way they would not fit into a normal socket, and make it harder for would be thieves to steal them. Regular bulbs, like the one on the picture supposedly have normal thread because they are always on and thus hard to steal because of their temperature. This bulb is not store bought – note the NYCTA logo on the bulb.
I didn’t know the difference between NYCTA and MTA. Pretty interesting.
Normal People Don’t Think About This Stuff
If you pay attention to NYC infrastructure like I do, you might have noticed little lights that sit on street lamp poles on certain intersections.
For a long time I tried to guess their purpose. I thought that they had somemething to do with street lamps. Maybe indicating when light bulbs need changing. But they do not appear on all street lamps. And sometimes they would be attached to a telephone or a power pole. Sometimes they would be lit up, and sometimes not. They do not appear on all intersections. A mystery, right?
I’ve searched the net finding nothing. Finally I found a reasonable explanation in Time Out New York magazine. The little lights simply appear on the intersections where a fire alarm telegraph box used to be located.
I knew about fire alarm telegraph boxes from an awesome book Underneath New York. You see, those fire and police alarm pull boxes that were retired a few years back in fact were automatic telegraph boxes. They all shared the same circuit which would be normally closed. When somebody pulled the handle, a clockwork mechanism would rotate a little wheel with a pattern of bumps. The bumps would break the circuit and transmit an id of the pull box in Morse code to a nearby fire station. I guess they did not handle collisions — if two boxes were activated at the same type there would be trouble.
I wonder how much electricity is wasted on those things.
Some links:
Interesting, ADT stands for American District Telegraph. I didn’t know.
Some pretty cool pictures of fire telegraph control rooms.
A site about Fire Alarm Telegraph Systems
The Rocketship Building
I really like seeing this building in the morning. The rising steam makes it look like a rocket. I still don’t know what generates the steam. Probably a cooling plant or something. It’s not the GE building like I mentioned earlier though. It’s 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
Whatdya Know : There Are Smart Doctors With Blogs
From the list of medical blogs with rss feeds provided by
The payoff was instant:
Hey,
More of Deadprogrammer’s Aspirations
I want to become rich in one of the most honorable ways possible – by inventing something. The first step that I took in that direction some time ago is writing down ideas into a notebook.
The notebooks is kind of special. It’s an NYPD style memo binder that I bought from DeSantis. Interesting to note that the NYPD binder is 4×8, but regular one is just 4×6. It took me a while to find correct paper that would fit the notebook, but I found out that the reporter’s notebook available in all stationary stores fits. I just had to remove the wire spiral. You know, the most amazing thing about this notebook is that cops manage to stuff it into the back pocket of their pants. I thought about buying some uniform pants (they look like dark dress casual pants, but are probably very comfortable and durable) but it turns out that you can’t buy them without a cop’s id.
But I digress. Inventing. Right. Well, sometimes I stumble upon companies that are already doing what I was thinking about. Maybe some of my ideas are actually not without merit.
I had an idea bout billboards beaming advertising to PDAs. I made a note in my log about making a cheap beaming module that could be used in subway ads. A blinking light would attract one’s attention, and if the passenger would point a palm pilot towards the ad, a coupon would be beamed down. I did a bit of searching, and it didn’t seem that any company was doing that at the time. That was a few years back, when I got my Palm III. The first company to actually do this (I think, I am not sure though) was Streetbeam. Today there are many more companies that make beaming booths, beaming nodes, etc. Wide Ray is just one of them.
Later I was thinking a lot about wireless power transmission after reading a book about Tesla. Tesla had his lab illuminated by wirelessly powered fluorescent lights. Why not power devices that don’t need that much juice, like cell phones and PDAs wirelessly, I thought? I was also thinking about magnetic fields in trains. Could it be possible to recharge a Palm Pilot or a cell phone from an induced current somehow? My hate of wall warts (12 volt transformers) is also well known. I was thinking for a while about a system of modules that would allow using one power cable to charge multiple devices. The system would involve a modular “multicradle” that would allow to store all devices needing powering neatly on the desk. This Friday I’ve read about a British startup that is going to produce a very cool wireless charging solution. That is going to be so cool.