A Leslie Wong Blog

Chuck Cage at Wired has a good article on explaining all the numbers in HDTV.

He says: “A 20/20 human eye can’t recognize details smaller than 1/60 of a degree of arc. Don’t worry, you don’t have to understand that. With a little math, though, we can use this number to find the distance beyond which the eye has trouble distinguishing one pixel from another. It turns out to be 137 percent of the diagonal measurement of any 16:9 widescreen: around 38 inches from a 32-inch TV. So if you’re sitting 5 feet away, you’ll never notice the difference between 720 and 1,080 lines of resolution. But if you trade up to a 60-inch screen, that distance jumps to almost six feet. Better push the couch back,”

I wonder how many people sit 38 inches from their 32 inch TV? I have a 480i TV (read, CRT Sony KV-36FV1) and if I sit 42 inches away while playing Halo 3, I get car sick.

I ordered OS X 10.5 (Leopard) from Amazon.com and it was delivered today. I didn’t buy the boxed retail version of OS X 10.4 (Tiger) because it came installed on my Macintrash, but I did buy the retail version of Panther for my my other Macintrash, a Powerbook. When I opened the box from Amazon, the first thing I noticed was how much smaller Leopard is than Panther.

I’ve always liked flashlights – I think every kid did. I didn’t know there were serious “flashaholics” until I came upon candlepowerforums.com. These people are very serious about flashlights. Who knew one could spend upwards of $800 for a flashlight?

Look at this thread on the Ultrafire C2. After I read it, I had to have one. The Ultrafire C2 makes my upgraded (Terralux MiniStar2 Extreme LED) Mini-Mag light look like a candle.

Hong Kong, with their cheap manufacturing, seems to be a source for these inexpensive but powerful flashlights. I ordered some parts from dealextreme.com – a Cree P4 LED Emitter and a 3.6V~9V 800mA Regulated IC Circuit Board.

I thought I would use these new parts instead of the original LED and voltage dropping resistor in modding this $12 “SUPER” 7 watt Luxeon LED flashlight I bought from a Hong Kong vendor on eBay.

My first mod sort of failed in that I didn’t consider the position of the new LED in the reflector for that all important beam. I guess that’s how you learn.

A Western Scrub-Jay, crestless blue head with white throat; blue wings and tail, olive-gray back, light gray underparts, landed on my Macbook.

I saw this YouTube video on John C Dvorak’s blog:

Discover Magazine writes, “Columbia University physicist Brian Greene recently chose the winner of the String Theory in Two Minutes or Less user-generated video contest.”

Muhammad Saleem over at Digg.com writes: “It’s a map of the entire Internet. At the moment we’re displaying the owner of each IP address (grey boxes), and which IP addresses are listed on the Spamhaus XBL blacklist (red dots), but we should be able to show other things in the future. Yes, we map all 4,294,967,296 IP addresses onto a huge image and let you zoom into it and pan around.”

I always thought the internets were bigger.

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September 21, 2009: the link no longer loads.