Category: Odds and Ends

Off-topic and unclassifiable stuff of interest

Vanquishing those pesky Torx screws

May 19, 2009 / / 0 Comments

We live in an age of throw away technology, and for me, the silver lining of this has always been to take old products apart before trashing them. It’s fun, and it’s instructive to see how computers, home electronics, even the occasional appliance are built inside. And of course, you may bring to light gems like the 10-platter stack from inside a 1980’s PC hard drive, shown below.

Platters from a 1980's hard drive

The problem is, to get at this you need to open the drive up, and these are closed tight with scary “warranty void if removed” stickers (not a problem) and a dozen screws like the one above, right, that never have a normal Phillips head for which a normal person will have a normal screwdriver around! The use of more esoteric screws like this Torx screw makes dismantling delicate electronics a problem. What is needed, of course, is a specialty driver, but who has those?

Precision multi-driver setSo, I kept accumulating old hard drives from long gone computers… intending one day to take a power drill to their pesky screws, but never getting around to it… until one day I got fed up and solved the problem once and for all.

I went and bought a whole set of non-standard driver bits – not only Torx, but many other weird shapes, thirty bits in all. Not something I’d use daily, but it’s good to know I will never again be stumped by a stupid screw.

And of course, I took to my pile of old drives and had a field day taking them apart!

Dismantled Hard Drive

Torx screwdriver

Tesseract – an action comic for the ultimate geek

May 14, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Tesseract Comic panelNew on my Possibly Interesting site: a weird superhero comic spoof that I drew when I was studying Mathematics in College. It follows closely the style of 60’s Superman comics, but it takes place entirely in the domain of geometrical figures (and no, at that time I hadn’t yet read Abbott’s Flatland). Lost for years, it had surfaced in a drawer of old stuff, and I figured I might as well share it: if you, too, were a comics fan, and a geek to boot, you may enjoy this.

You can get the single episode ever drawn here, and you can read a bit of background here.

Gotcha, Google translator!

April 14, 2009 / / 0 Comments

I was checking some French using Google translator, and discovered that – contrary to my French teacher’s insistence  back in high school – “La langue Francaise” means “English language”!

Of course one doesn’t expect perfection from machine translation, but this was different than the usual silly mistakes: a translation program ought to know the meaning of the name of a language it translates, after all. So can it be that Google, in its staggering growth to encompass all knowledge, has finally reached true intelligence and reasoned that the above translation is correct on some higehr level – the way Douglas Hofstadter pointed out in his immortal “Godel, Escher, Bach” that “Borscht“, when translated from the Russian, may need to be converted to “Campbell soup” to convey its ubiquity in the respective culture?

Nah… not likely. I actually played a little more – for instance, “La langue Francaise” in Italian, according to Google, means “Lingua inglese“, not “Lingua Italiana“. I suppose by posing such questions to the program one could map where the problem lies in its cognitive functions, like one tries to localize brain damage in a patient by mapping input/output relationships in an interview. So is Google Translator a conscious entity after all, albeit a brain-damaged one?  🙂

FameLab again!

April 2, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Last year I posted about FameLab, the science communication competition organized by the British Council in the Jerusalem Science Museum. Well, here it comes again, and today I’m a judge again. Like before, we get treated to a group of fine young students presenting diverse scientific subjects in only 3 (yes, three!) minutes each. Fascinating!

I also learned an interesting thing: the British Council is working hard to empower the winners to propagate science knowledge. Not only do they receive presentation skills training, they also get to attend international get together where winners from diverse countries meet face to face to exchange views, learn from each other, and figure ways to promote Science education. This is really a wonderful program!

A proud Wikipedian!

March 27, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Yesterday I was at a meet of the Israel Innovation Forum hosted at IBM, and over coffee I notice this guy whose name tag reads

David Shay

Wikipedia

At first I thought he must be one of the few people who actually work at Wikipedia as employees; but he assured me there are only 15 of those, all in the US. No, he told me, he simply writes for the Hebrew Wikipedia. I asked whether he’s part of some special group appointed to manage the local version, and he said no, he simply writes and edits articles, like anyone else. I do that occasionally myself, but David does a lot more of it.

When we exchanged business cards I found that he actually has a regular day job at a regular company; he just felt good proclaiming himself on his badge as a Wikipedian. And maybe he’s right – though people seldom bother to check who wrote the article they are referencing, the impact you can make on humanity by writing online can be much greater than whatever you can do in a regular job (well, unless you’re a major inventor, scientist, or world leader, I suppose).

Wayda go, David!

Web site redesign!

March 9, 2009 / / 0 Comments

My loyal readers know that in addition to this blog I maintain Nathan’s Possibly Interesting Web Site, where I share my history of computing collection, software, and various articles. I built it some years ago as a personal web site, and am happy to have it as just that.

However, now that I am starting into my new career, I faced a problem – you can’t talk business to people and when they Google you they reach a collection of slide rules! I needed a site devoted to my areas of professional expertise and service offerings. So I wrote one. As of this week http://www.nzeldes.com is the professional site, and the Possibly Interesting site links off of it under “Personal site”, or you can bookmark it if you wish at http://www.nzeldes.com/possiblyinteresting.htm. I have every intent to keep it alive and growing at its usual steady rate of one page a month.

You’re also welcome to send in feedback on the new site’s design and content via its contact page; this is a first revision, and will be developed as things progress.

Blast from the Past

February 23, 2009 / / 2 Comments

Today I had the pleasure of attending the opening of the Computing and Communications museum of the Israel Electric Company. The IEC has been around for almost a century and has kept pace with computing advances since its early days; curator Dlila Shapira did a great job rounding up some lovely vintage pieces from the “big iron” era and later.

No less interesting than the equipment on display were the speeches of some veteran managers of the computing division. One gentleman told us how when he first arrived on board as a programmer his first task was to glue shut holes that had been punched in error onto punched cards; a bottle of the liquid used was on display, and here it is.

Punched Cards and correction fluid

Also on display were storage devices of yesteryear. In the photo below you see a removable hard disk pack from a Prime computer system of the 1980’s; the dozen 12-inch platters together hold 300MB. For comparison, you see on the glass case another removabe storage unit, namely a 2.0 GB – 2000MB – Disk-on-key from today. We’ve come a long way…

300MB Disk Pack from the 80's

Semantinet’s headup

February 6, 2009 / / 1 Comment

Well, many friends asked to stay current on my adventures outside the cubicle farms, and though it’s early days, here is one thing I’ve been up to: I spend one day each week working with a start-up called Semantinet.

It is an attribute of start-ups that they both empower and expect every person in their small team to contribute directly to the main thing, which is the application of innovative technology to create magic. You work hard, but you can really make a difference, as explained by Paul Graham in his insightful book Hackers and Painters. I like it a lot.

Semantinet headup logoSo, what magic do we make there? Semantinet, as the name hints, applies leading edge semantic search technology to enable a whole new manner of experiencing the web. Its product, headup, is a Firefox add-on that identifies on pages you browse names of entities like people, places, events, books, musical artists, videos, and more; and it shows you on demand a small window with additional information on any of these.

The additional information can be general – like financial data for a company, or albums and tracks for a band. But things get interesting once you personalize headup by pointing it at your accounts in social sites like Facebook, FriendFeed, or Last.fm. Then, headup starts surprising you with information like “your friends that work at this company”, or “upcoming concerts by a band you like in this city”, or “books that both you and this person like”, or “mutual friends you both know”. I call it a “Serendipity Engine”: you never know what it will discover. How does it know? By correlating information that you and others had published in any of numerous social sites. And because Semantinet is a start-up and works at the pace that this enables, new capabilities are added to the product literally every day.

If you use Firefox, give it a try – the application just went out of stealth mode and into public beta last week so you can download it at headup.com. And do share with me any comments and critique – at this early stage you, too, can make a real difference in the evolution of this magical product!

The unexpected advantage of VHS tape over DVD

January 26, 2009 / / 2 Comments

For the last couple of years I kept saying I’m not buying a DVD recorder until the VCR dies. Well – the VCR died, so I went and bought a DVD recorder. In fact I bought a dual-mode unit that has a VCR and a recording DVD in the same box.

I thought I was keeping a VCR option in order to play the many old tapes we have, and perhaps convert them all to DVD when I have some spare time (yeah right). And I thought I’d use the DVD side to dump to disc the many programs we record on hard disk in our cable PVR, just like I used to do with the old cassette unit, may it rest in peace. So guess what… after getting the hang of the new setup, I find myself dumping many programs to cassette tapes, rather than to DVD. Turns out the tape format has an inherent advantage over DVD in some situations; and it is precisely what we tend to think of as a disadvantage: its serial access.

An optical disc is a random access device; the head can skip to any position on its surface instantly. With tape, which is serial, you have to wind it slowly to get to a given spot. When would that be an advantage?

Here’s when: if you record, as I do, multiple chapters of a given TV series – say, half a dozen episodes of Babylon 5 – at one run to a single media, then watch them one at a time, then with a tape you hit Stop at the end of an episode and the next day, or week, or year, you stick the cassette back in and hit Play and the next episode starts immediately. With a disc, you need to find the start of each episode, and while the head can get there in an instant, it can’t tell where an episode begins, not if they were recorded in one run. So you have to start running forward and backward to locate it. That’s why I use the DVD to record single movies, and the VHS tapes for TV series.

Of course, I still haven’t converted a single movie from one format to the other…

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