Psychology exam tomorrow. It would seem that the human input system tops out at about 110 bits/second. I thought it'd be higher, but Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (lol, no, I didn't type that! Paste ftw!) reckons we've only got 110bps.
I routinely look up specs on graphics cards, hard drives, USB sticks, monitors and upcoming internal specifications like SATA 3. All these numbers are pretty big, so it's no surprise that our human bandwidth is comparitvely puny.
It's important to remember that we hum…
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Added by Shtanto on December 6, 2009 at 4:33pm —
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An old gypsy curse I once heard said "May you always get what you want". It's a clever curse because if you always get what you want, you'll never value what you have.
Also, apparently 'Y' is a vowel
and a consonant. I'll ask Chris about this later. He's an English major, or so I'm led to believe.
Today's post concerns an annual tradition. Each year, families all over the world get together and pass the time in a besotted state by playing a board game. I've played many in my time. Monop…
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Added by Shtanto on December 1, 2009 at 8:51am —
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Many geeks find that the world is out of focus. The world doesn't make sense. Then we get our first pair of glasses and everything shoots into focus again.
Having experienced problems with my own spectacles, or glasses as they are commonly known, has gotten me thinking that there might be a way to tweak my PC monitor to offset my myopia (shortsightedness). If it worked, there would also surely be a way to help people with hyperopia (longsightedness).
I'm not sure how you'd do it though. The pi…
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Added by Shtanto on November 24, 2009 at 2:10pm —
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If you're at work or in college (as I am) you may have lost a USB key at some stage. Or have you?
The windows registry is like an oven that never gets washed, unless you use a registry cleaner of course. I never saw any reason to tamper with it. It aint broke. My registry contains a unique serial ID of my USB key from when I last used it with my computer. All USB devices have this. Just run a search for usbstor and you'll eventually hit paydirt under currentcontrolset001, devices.
My own USB k…
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Added by Shtanto on November 15, 2009 at 12:00pm —
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Now that I'm having RAID errors again, a lot of strange stuff is happening with my PC. Many of you might suggest this is just the halloween ghosties getting busy, but when half your start menu lights up and says prgrams you've used before haven't been touched yet, you know it's time to back up and RMA some faulty parts.
Midterms are coming up fast, so I haven't really got the time to do the right thing just yet. With very few options to work with, I'm having to consider ways of getting my image…
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Added by Shtanto on October 26, 2009 at 9:13am —
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Windows XP tells me it's having a problem with my 2TB hard drive. I have since managed to make a backup (lucky me) of the essential files. Backing up everything is slightly impractical. I decided to make a 2TB array to last me for the next 5-10 years.
Now the way I see it, I can mark as ignore, image the faulty drive, or image the whole array. The drive is indeed making the click of death and has been online up and running for about 10 months. Still in warranty, and going for about €40 these da…
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Added by Shtanto on October 24, 2009 at 5:13pm —
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I'm surely not alone when I find myself clicking a link only to be told
'computer says no'. If the number of errors you encounter per hour were measured and recorded, I think we'd be in for a surprise. How often do you click something and get something back that wasn't quite what you were after? How often do you unconciously use habitually learned workarounds? It's all very well to say 'google it' but if you're ho…
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Added by Shtanto on October 9, 2009 at 6:30pm —
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I dreamt I was playing a game there, something a bit like Warcraft, not sure which one, but the important thing was that it
didn't suck! Does anyone have any nifty tricks for remember dreams? Man, I'd love to know what game that was. It had the lore of Warcraft, the depth of Eve, the social atmosphere or Pirates of the Burning Sea, the creative freedom of City of Heroes and the adventuring sensibilites of Dreamfall. Somebody needs to make that game.
I suppose it'd be useful of me to say…
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Added by Shtanto on October 5, 2009 at 9:12am —
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We often wonder what life would be like if it were more like a video game. Infinite lives, invincibility, ammo cheats, no money worries and zero confidence issues. Bottomless pit full of demon dragon nasties? No problemo!
Science fiction has plenty of cool films, games and stories about this sort of thing. I'd like you all to consider something else though.
What if this
is your redo? Are you doing things properly this time around?
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Added by Shtanto on September 26, 2009 at 11:04am —
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SIS - Spatial Information Systems. That's what I'll be learning about pretty soon.
Where?
(College of course, but that's not what I'm getting at). That's important right? Is it always important? No, not
always. Just pretty much most of the time.
If I asked you to do up a database of dinners past and present, how would you design it? Simple right? First column would be meal, second column would be when we had it. So you'd have maybe Pizza on Monday, Chicken and Rice on Tuesday, Po…
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Added by Shtanto on September 13, 2009 at 3:00pm —
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How many different media players would you say you have? 1 or 2? More?
I've lost count. There used to be the old classic windows media player of yore. It worked. It was fine. Then Microsoft started updating it. The screams of anguish could not be heard, due to an unsupported codec. Written complaints came in, but the addresses were in so many different formats that the postal service didn't know how to deal with them. A commitee was set up to try and sort out the problem but all the members kep…
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Added by Shtanto on August 27, 2009 at 12:43pm —
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Jean likes John, but John likes Joan. Jean is friends with June but June hates Joan. Joan isn't interested in John, who used to go out with June. Jean would like to go out with John but doesn't want to upset June by asking. Joan would like John and Jean to be happy together but June would attack her if John wasn't interested because June is still friends with John even though they aren't going out anymore. Joan needs to find a way of making friends with Jean while keeping herself out of jeopardy…
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Added by Shtanto on August 22, 2009 at 8:00pm —
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...even by me!
Dad wanted to get a few pictures off his phone onto a laptop.
Sounds simple.
Let's just go through what I did to make this happen, shall we?
The laptop has no bluetooth.
Luckily, sis has a dongle
But the laptop won't support it
So I'll use the dongle on my main PC
How the heck do I select all with this Ericsson interface? Oh, there it is - mark all, send via bluetooth
Turn off bluetooth security for the 5 odd minutes to get the pictures over.
Ok, got the pictures on my m…
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Added by Shtanto on August 14, 2009 at 2:00pm —
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I've been battling this one for a while now. The most recent skirmish involved me getting the TV speaker up and running.
Sure enough, I got it working using some AV cable, but the sound quality is sorely lacking. I'll stick to my T7700s from now on. I had thought getting the TV speaker working would allow me to set up an 8.1 system, but it sort of ruined the 7.1 field I already have, so I went and finally got around to calibrating those instead. T7700s seem to have to upmix from 5.1 or 6.1 sour…
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Added by Shtanto on August 9, 2009 at 5:39pm —
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I've just been reading about a game called Magic World Online, an MMO so it is, where the developers have decided that some parts of the game are so boring that they'd best write a bot to play them.
Now,
can anybody tell me what's wrong with this picture?
…
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Added by Shtanto on August 2, 2009 at 5:19am —
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Thanks to everyone for the many happy returns!
So far, I've gotten tube socks which is only really supposed to happen at Christmas, soap (always handy), a PC mag I bought for myself in case anyone forgot to get me something (oddly the best present so far), the Where's Wally birthday card (found the git in about 14 seconds), some lovely Australian Riesling (yum!), chocolate, beer, chocolate beer, and I won the staring contest.
This weekend is a bank holiday, so I'm not sure if I'll be able to g…
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Added by Shtanto on August 1, 2009 at 3:56pm —
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While out walking earlier today, it occured to me that I should check out how far I'd gone when I got back to the house. Here's a picture from Google Maps of where I went. You'll notice Ireland's only baseball diamond in the lower right corner, but in the hay field, something strange is going on. This is either a crop circle, a sideways eight, some pranksters, a sideways number 8 with a possible correlation to the work of Yoko Ono, a lawnmower calibration test, a divide by zero error, an elabora…
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Added by Shtanto on July 13, 2009 at 2:30pm —
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I found this site and thanks to the magic of the Internet, I came up with this story. Sort of online madlibs :) It's about a boy and his Prawn. Good fun
Once upon a time there was a young boy named John. John was 24 years old and lived in Honalulu, Hawaii. While walking home from school one day, a Toap Prawn jumped out from behind a Copyright Law and tackled John to the ground. But just…
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Added by Shtanto on July 11, 2009 at 3:08pm —
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The band here are called Apisonadora. They are from Spain. Yes, this is what grindcore sounds like. Perfect for the angry nerd inside, the same nerd that tackled the quarterback right before the big game and caused the team to lose the playoffs
and the championships! Now I'm sure we all have open minded broad opinions, but I'm smiling when I listen to this. Maybe it's the absurdity, maybe that's what entertainment sounds like. Naturally I have…
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Added by Shtanto on July 4, 2009 at 4:28pm —
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Eve Online emailed me last week to see if they could get me back playing the game for only €10. They've even given me 5 days pro gratis. This usually happens every 6 months so I go and see if it's worth my while.
A few funny things have happened since I went back for my biannual visit. First of all, I realised how badly addicted I used to be. When you're like me and have
nothing else to do or look forward to except some video game, the game becomes what you are. Existentialism once said,…
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Added by Shtanto on July 2, 2009 at 5:54pm —
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