Forbidden Planet

As promised , side by side (well, top by bottom) comparison of the Fly scanned handwriting and my actual handwriting as it appeared on the page. The Fly and other digital pens require a special paper. The paper has a series of dots printed on it in a pattern. It is a sort of two dimensional barcode. According to Wikipedia , if the entire pattern was printed out, it would cover an area in excess of 4.6 million km 2 . Last weekend, 51cm of snow fell in Ottawa. As you can see, the backyard is filled almost to the top of the fence with snow. Which means the snow is close to 5 feet deep. More than 411 cm has fallen in Ottawa this Winter. There is more snow expected this coming week. We have a chance to break the 1970/71 snowfall record of 441 cm. I think less snow fell in Montreal. As you can see in this photo, the snow only goes about half way up the fence. Making it maybe 3 feet deep at best. A blood orange. The inside of a blood orange. The first animated film I have ever made (if you di...

Recently I purchased the Fly Fusion Pentop Computer , just because it looked so cool (and I had some spare money to spend). It is pretty cool. To get best handwriting recognition out of it, you do have to print in a fairly clear manner, which I can, though it is a bit of an effort and slows me down as I consciously try to form the various letters. On the other hand, the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology is pretty good if you print nicely. If you don't then it is a bit of a mess. Below are two samples of writing: one done in nice tidy print, the other in my usual scrawl. It does quite well with the first sample and horribly with the second. Obviously my normal upper case block printing is pretty hard on the OCR. And it certainly doesn't seem to like the way I prefer to form my letters. It may have helped to be sitting at a table rather than lying on my stomach on the bed scribbling away, but, then again, it is the portability I want. An interesting observation is th...

I saw Metropolis about 15 years ago and then read the book about 8 years later. The book is better than the movie. As I grow older, the futile image of constantly feeding and tending the machines grows stronger in my mind. I recognized pater noster as Latin for Our Father (as in the opening of the Lord's Prayer) and assumed that Thea von Harbou's references to the pater noster machine were overt references to a machine that consumed and ate its workers (much like Cronus in Greek mythology ate his children – or perhaps Moloch, to whom children were sacrificed). I only recently discovered that a pater noster machine is a type of slow moving elevator invented in 1884 . Image nabbed from here .

I have noticed that Google translation is much better than it was in the past, surpassing BabelFish in capability. As evidence I present the following translations from Jules Verne's Five Weeks in a Ballooon . Original text Il y avait une grande affluence d’auditeurs, le 14 janvier 1862, à la séance de la Société royale géographique de Londres, Waterloo place, 3. Le président, sir Francis M..., faisait à ses honorables collègues une importante communication dans un discours fréquemment interrompu par les applaudissements. Ce rare morceau d’éloquence se terminait enfin par quelques phrases ronflantes dans lesquelles le patriotisme se déversait à pleines périodes: Google translation: There was a large crowd of listeners, January 14, 1862, at the meeting of the Royal Geographical Society of London, Waterloo place, 3. The chairman, Sir Francis M. .., made his honorable colleagues an important communication in a speech frequently interrupted by applause. This rare piece of eloquence fin...

As tin-tin commented in my previous post , waste water can be reused for other pruposes. While I would not advocate reusing toilet water to water your garden or lawn (unless it is going into a septic tank - in which case, you are already reusing your waste water). You can certainly reuse dirty dish and bath water. Granted, the convenience of scooping the water out the sink, into a bucket and carrying out to your garden may be a bit much. However, here are two ways waste bath and sink water can be reused, rather economically, if only they would build houses this way: (1) irrigating lawns and gardens. It would be a fairly simple matter to have option of redirecting the water into the drainage tiles (like a septic tank) under your lawn. I envision the drainage for the bath and sink would be switchable between sewer and irrigation. Alternatively, it could be fed out to a cistern, though I am not sure I would want standing dirty water :P (2) waste heat could be reclaimed from the water (m...

Did you know that Word 97 can only display a maximum of 769 characters on a line before wrapping to the next line? I found that out yesterday, when I was trying to format some debug data for printing. My font was Courier New, my font size was 2, my paper size to 11x17 in landscape mode with margins of 0.5". Yet, word insisted on wrapping my lines. Fortunately Word 2000 does not have this limitation. It was able to print my data which had 1152 characters per line. While I can just about read it, I wouldn't recommend doing so without a magnifying glass. It looks a lot like ASCII art and it is the general appearance, rather than the actual content that I am interested in at the moment. _/\_ __/\__ ) . (_ _) .' ( `) '.( ) .' (` `-._\(_ )/__(~` (ovo)-.__.--._ ) `-.______ / `---._ ( ,// ) \ `\/-. | ...

Last week I purchased a new memory card for my camera. This is a 2Gb card and is my third (fourth if you include the one that came with the camera). For some reason, I got it in my head to simply buy new memory cards when the old ones fill up (it is one way of keeping backups - aside from the ones on the hard disk). My reasoning is simple - the cost per shot, is cheaper than film. At a maximum resolution of 3.1 megapixels, I get about 2500 shots on a 2Gb card. At $70 for the card, this works out to 2.8 cents per image. Even if I buy film from the dollar store (which I have, but stopped because the film has sometimes been exposed to light), it works out to 4.2 cents per image (or 25 cents per image if you include processing costs of $4.99 per roll). Never mind that I can eliminate bad photos from the memory, but cannot retake poor film shots. As I slipped into the driver's seat and laid my purchase down on the passenger seat, I had one of those "What am I doing?" moments....

That was how the guy who sold me my snow tires described the difference between driving with snow tires or all season tires. I have never had snow tires before and, given that I do a lot of driving, I decided maybe it was time I tried them. I bought them 22-December-2006 and got to try them out during the freezing rain that fell that evening. I have Yokohama Ice Guard tires. They were the best quality Winter tires the tire shop had – given that they were significantly cheaper than the lowest grade tires the auto dealership would sell me, it was a no brainer to go with them. I have to confess, that I see no difference between driving with snow tires and all seasons. Maybe if I could do a side by side comparison (rather than relying on my memory from last Winter) I might notice a difference. On ice, there is very little traction. If there is snow on the road, the wheels still slip. Granted, it is better than driving on bald tires. Is the difference Winter tires and all seasons like nigh...