rak0ribz

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• Commented on Bike outfited with one-cylinder engine
  @Mitch - Most modern sold-in-the-U.S. scooters now have 4-cycle engines; some (although, sadly, not my wife's) are actually fuel-injected. When I visited Taipei, however......
• Commented on Sorry if you got caught in the spam filter
  Wow - that's pretty impressive. The most recent spambots were good enough that I thought they might be actually paying people to post their links....
• Commented on Six-year-old girl chauffeured stoned mom
  Really, I feel that the 6-year-old should be prosecuted; unlicensed (and likely uninsured!) drivers are a real danger. I'm surprised that none of the parties involved remembered to think of the children....
• Commented on Bach canon played as a moebius strip
  @LUX_AURUMQUE, @EH, Shouldn't that be antepenultimate?...
• Commented on A visit to a store called Mr. Stuff in Los Angeles
  The AS&S store mentioned by SOMEGUY gets a vote from me as well; I used to order all kinds of crazy stuff from their catalogs. They have motors, magnets, labware, and all sorts of other industrial and scientific detritus....
• Commented on Write an iPhone disappointment Haiku in the comments, win a Mophie Juice Pack Air
  Taking her picture The preview disgusted her. Damn my greasy ears....
• Commented on Baseball pitching and batting robots
  I, for one, look forward to the day when all baseball teams are completely populated by algorithmically-perfect robots and games are decided by local atmospheric conditions....
• Commented on Land mine "donated" to Good Will
  And not the good middle-ages-roleplaying kind of claymore, either....
• Commented on Moto bluetooth box has three days of talk time
  BOOTICON #2: Well, yeah, but the other 12 hours a day are NIGHT. :)...
• Commented on Expanding shipping material protects PC components
  If Great Stuff wasn't so darned expensive, it'd be a great way to do this at home, as long as you could be sure that it wouldn't bust your bag and glom all over whatever you were packing. Jeez, that's...
• Commented on Bosch Cordless Hammer Drill: light, snappy and blows through brick like butter
  Cory, You're one of the main contributors to BoingBoing, with that logo - and you never bought a hammer drill until now?...
• Commented on Exovault iPhone Case has some brass
  So, feel free to post a "let me google that for you" link here, but I just wonder: Is there a repository of free-to-reuse CAD drawings/dimensions of popular consumer products? That would be a pretty awesome resource for people who...
• Commented on D-Lux 4 is a "gateway drug"
  @SAMSAM: You're likely to be disappointed by this one too, then. Unless the D-LUX 4 is substantially faster than the LX3 (and the smart money says it ain't), it's only about average on shutter/focusing delay IME....
• Commented on Sandia Labs' new SunCatcher power system resembles Magritte painting
  @NUTBASTARD I just got back from the press release page... From the press release: The modular CSP SunCatcher uses precision mirrors attached to a parabolic dish to focus the sun’s rays onto a receiver, which transmits the heat to a...
• Commented on Sandia Labs' new SunCatcher power system resembles Magritte painting
  @HOFFMANBIKE #2: I suspect the fact that they're partnered with Stirling Energy Systems is a pretty good clue as to what that CRT-monitor-looking thingus actually is. Without Googling, I'd expect that the business end of that reflector has a Stirling-cycle...
• Commented on Dymo's new labelwriter is considerably faster than mine
  @PAULR #2: Thanks for ruining my marriage. :)...
• Commented on Dymo's new labelwriter is considerably faster than mine
  I have always wanted one of these. I'm afraid to get one, however, for fear that I would wind up with labels on everything in my house....
• Commented on Boing Boing Video review: Sigma DP2 camera
  Once again, I'm going to mention that the Panasonic Lumix LX3 is a fantastic point-n-shoot-n-pretend-you're-a-pro camera. It has fast glass, a pretty wide field of view, and decent SNR in the dark. The wife and I took one along on...
• Commented on Gallery: Fit PC 2 fits just about anywhere
  What, is "Salmon of Doubt" not available in paperback yet?...
• Commented on Rubber Room: documentary about New York teacher purgatory
  This is the first reporting on this issue I've seen that doesn't toe the AP line of manufactured outrage (at least until the comments). My wife, who is an urban middle-school special educator, thinks that the AP story from last...
• Commented on Spheres of Influence: A Collection of Spherical Sites
  My bad - I was going from memory on Gravity Probe B. They don't use Helium III for suspension; they electrically levitate the spheres in a vacuum. The engineering section of that website is fascination multiplied by awesome, by the...
• Commented on Spheres of Influence: A Collection of Spherical Sites
  DREW #10 I think Gravity Probe B deserves mention for sure (Probe homepage at Stanford) but I imagine the new roundest spheres beat its quartz/niobium ones by dint of having been made more recently. The explanation on that page of...
• Commented on The Pyramid of North Dakota
  That RADAR system (actually, I'm pretty sure it was another one very much like it on the East Coast) was in one of my college textbooks as an example of a phased-array system. It was pretty high-tech at the time....
• Commented on Aluminum Pencil
  @NEUROLUX #10 I think that even the "tactical" writing implements only really have strategic utility....
• Commented on Aluminum Pencil
  A co-worker of mine has a Rotring rollerball pen that looks very much like this. Since Rotring's been closed for a couple of years, they're a pretty hot commodity on eBay right now. Speaking of which, have you guys done...
• Commented on Asking sf writers to imagine terrorist scenarios is dumb
  I don't know - it worked pretty well in Footfall. :)...
• Commented on Contest: Win a Set of BuckyBalls
  It's not an awesome story, but it's amusing: Before our wedding, my wife and I ordered rings which had meteorite metal inlays. The rings came in about 3 days before our wedding, and my (then soon-to-be) wife was talking to...
• Commented on Radio Valerie
  Looks like, in the second picture, they've got it tuned in to a station where they tell a lot of lies. So, it probably gets AM....
• Commented on Steve DeSpirito's Winged Thingy
  If you enjoy handcranked wire wonders, but would rather watch while an electric motor cranks them than expend the calories yourself, I recommend the AVAM in Baltimore. http://www.avam.org...
• Commented on Ribcage bag
  So...felt on the outside, heartfelt on the inside?...