The blog of a Leslie Wong
Links to things that interested me at one time
The underlying engine for my blog is WordPress. There are occasional “point” upgrades for bug fixes and security and I found this WordPress plugin, WordPress Automatic Upgrade, (by Ronald Huereca and Keith Dsouza), makes upgrading an easy operation.
I still optimize my db tables and make a manual backup before running the plugin, but using the automatic upgrade plugin just works.
msaleem, a 22 year-old guy from Chicago, IL over at digg.com writes:
“The US sub-prime mortgage crisis has lead to plunging property prices, a slowdown in the US economy, and billions in losses by banks. It stems from a fundamental change in the way mortgages are funded.”
This is a graphic explanation even I can understand…
Wired has a photo gallery,”Looking Back at 25 Years of the C64, the Ultimate ’80s Computer“
My first computer, the Commodore VIC-20, was actually the precursor to the Commodore 64. I remember rushing out to buy the $(US) 299 VIC-20 from a computer store on Lexington Avenue in the 50’s.
The VIC-20 I bought came with 5K RAM and a tape cassette storage device. It was marketed for games that were sold on ROM plug in cartridges, but there was a word processing application and a 300 baud modem. I later upgraded the RAM to a total of 8K and bought the 5.25″floppy disk drive.
I think I used the VIC-20 with Citibank’s first online banking service, “Direct Access” (or was the first iteration called Home Base?). Kim Moser has put up a few photos of Citibank’s Direct Access brochures. The main thing I remember about it was that at 300 baud (Citibank gave me the modem), I could pretty much read the data that was coming up on the screen as it scrolled. When modems got up to 2400 baud, I couldn’t keep up. A Compuserve and Prodigy membership followed shortly after that.
I passed the VIC-20 on to my mother, when Kenny, (who gave me a lot of stuff) gave me an Apple II+, which I still have. That was the start of my downward experience with computers.
VIC-20 Photo courtesy of cbmeeks and Wikipedia, C64 photo courtesy of Commodore
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’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.
