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How to Make a Cantenna
2008-05-12 21:24:00
I decided to experiment with building cantennas for a physics project this semester. Here’s a tutorial explaining the process: How to Make a Cantenna
More About: Science , Technology , Electronics

The Democratic Party?
2008-05-05 02:42:00
It’s about time we found our way to the ground put together the pieces and got back to work.
More About: Party , Democratic , Democratic Party

Saint Olaf Shared Drives
2008-03-31 04:21:00
Saint Olaf students have access to a number or shared drives (personal space, class space, shared applications, department space).  It’s often convenient to access these drives from one’s personal computer but the process is not intuitive.  IIT has a good tutorial for making the correct mappings and it’s come in handy quite a few times. Since ...
More About: Saint

Perhaps McCain is Worth the Vote
2008-03-27 19:49:00
The past several months have brought a clear Republican Party nominee and recently, a more and more decided democratic nominee.  I’ve discovered that, for the first time in my politically aware consciousness, I will not be absolutely disappointed by either party’s candidate. John McCain spoke yesterday afternoon on issues of foreign policy: Remarks Transcript I side with ...
More About: Politics , Vote , Worth

Electronic Contraptions: www.volunteerlabrat.com
2008-03-25 23:03:00
There’s nothing better than looking at the unreasonably high price of an electronic gadget, and discovering its cheaper and more powerful home-brewed alternative.  David, at Volunteer Lab Rat, has posted a number of interesting projects, including a tesla coil, FM transmitter, and wireless device range-booster among other things. It’s so easy to forget that so many ...
More About: Electronics , Electronic

Moving and Organizing iTunes Music Files
2008-03-25 05:14:00
I’ve been looking for this solution for awhile but only just stumbled across it.  Over the years I’ve built up a sizeable collection of music from CDs, family members, friends, free downloads, iTunes purchases, Amazon purchases, etc.  Unfortunately, I never restricted myself to a consistent convention for storing and keeping track of these different files. What ...
More About: Music , Itunes , Organization , Moving , Files

Evolution and the Robot that Lies
2008-01-25 00:17:00
In an effort to create a model of evolutionary processes researchers at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland have turned to robots. The robots were placed in an “environment” with a “food” and a “poison” station. Robot s were given two minutes to find the food resource while successfully avoiding the poison. ...
More About: Science , Evolution , Websites , Lies

Hobbies
2008-01-13 21:57:00
Anyone worth anything has a set of activities that are simply rewarding for no other reason than their inherent value. There isn’t a dependence on company, or context. There’s no need for credit or outcome. A hobby is the work of a satisfied soul, pursuing something that is clearly and simply enjoyable. Mine ...
More About: Life , Hobbies , Psychology

Affirmation Turned 180 Degrees
2008-01-13 21:55:00
I’ve discovered about myself that I crave attention more than I’d generally be able to admit to myself. When I’m depressed, it generally has some basis in the fact that I believe myself to be uninteresting, unworthy of attention, or generally alone. These feelings stem from an innate belief that to be happy ...
More About: Philosophy , Life , Psychology , Affirmation , Degrees

OpenGL Video Tutorials
2008-01-13 21:54:00
I’ve been working a bit lately with the Glut Open GL library. It’s pretty simple to get started with but there were a few complicated bits that had me stumped. In my search for online resources, I came across Bill Jacobs’ very good step-by-step set of video tutorials with lots of accompanying sample code. Covering ...
More About: Video , Programming , Tutorials

St. Olaf Proxy
2008-01-04 20:21:00
For anyone needing to know how to access the st. olaf proxy from off-campus, here’s a page of instructions for doing so: IIT Documentation - Configuring a Proxy Server  Automatic: http://www.stolaf.edu/proxy.pac Manual:   www-proxy.stolaf.edu on port 8080
More About: Olaf

Mozilla Prism: Webrunner with A Little Extra Juice
2007-12-30 06:48:00
Well I’m a bit slow on this one, but I finally noticed that mozilla labs has been working on the project previously known as Webrunner. For those who don’t know, Webrunner was a ‘browser’ of sorts that allows a web application (gmail, google reader, meebo, etc.) to be run as if it were a ...
More About: Software , Web Design , Mozilla , Websites , Extra

Bush to veto pay raise for the troops. Merry Christmas!
2007-12-29 22:29:00
Suddenly, out of nowhere, Bush announced today that he’s going to veto the Defense Authorization bill. This is legislation that’s already passed Congress, and that the administration had no problem with. Now, suddenly, Bush is against it and is going to veto it, threatening pay raises for the troops and more.read more | digg story
More About: Christmas , Troops , Merry Christmas , Veto

Priorities
2007-12-29 22:24:00
The vast majority of the American public is ignorant to the government process and the decisions made by its governing body.  These decisions affect nearly every aspect of public and even private life and yet it’s reality television, co-worker drama and scandal that people care about, whilst the important stuff goes on by.  For instance, ...
More About: News , Politics

10 Fluffless Books With Redeeming Value
2007-12-20 07:03:00
Enough with the cliche terrorist/save the world plots and enough with the literary fluff. Here are a few top-notch choices with real redeeming value: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson Foundation by Isaac Asimov Memoirs of a Young Lighthouse Keeper by Peter Hill The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff Enders Game by Orson Scott Card Sailing Around ...
More About: Books , Redeem

Command Line Hack for Maxed Out Remote Desktop Connections
2007-12-15 00:17:00
“The terminal server has exceeded the maximum number of allowed connections” If you’ve got an unreliable internet connection, it’s possible to build up remote desktop connections that don’t time out when they should, putting you in a rough position.  If you have access to another server machine, you can use the following commands to view and ...
More About: Web Design , Desktop , Hack , Line , Remote

Top 20 Geek Novels
2007-12-12 18:26:00
I just stumbled across this Top 20 list of the most popular “geek novels” out there.  Looking through the list, there are a bunch of classics that line up pretty well with my experience.  These are a bunch of good books.  Looking for new reading material, I get turned off pretty quickly from the cliche ...
More About: Books , Novels , Geek

Bush Says Iran Still a Danger…Sound Familiar?
2007-12-04 18:34:00
New York Times: Bush Says Iran Still a Danger Despite Weapons Report This headline is way too familiar. Try changing one letter and you’re back 4 years ago debating the exact same issue. Intelligence agencies released the following long-awaited report on the nuclear capacities of Iran, finding that they stopped weapons development in 2003. National Intelligence Estimate: Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities A few highlights from the report:We judge with moderate confidence that the earliest possible date Iran would be technically capable of producing enough HEU for a weapon is late 2009, but that this is very unlikely. We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program. We assess with moderate confidence Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007, but we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons. We assess with high confidence that Iran has the scientific, technical and industri...
More About: Sound

Is anything safe? What online image are you giving?
2007-12-04 06:40:00
Lifehacker features a pretty interesting list of ways to find information about anyone online. Anything from employment info, to social network connections, to press mentions, to phone numbers and addresses for an individual could be turned up with a quick search of these sites. I see this as a good chance to check out my online image and to screen what others can see about me. Employers and contacts do check these kind of things to get a feel for what has done or what he or she is like. This is definitely something to take a look at. Pipl - personal sites, social networks, press releases, et. Zabasearch - phone numbers, addresses (often both unlisted and listed) Wink - Many social networking sites, including Friendster, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, and Xanga Zoominfo - employment history and job titles Facebook - there are so many people on facebook.  This one goes without saying Who is this Person Firefox Extension - brings up people search engines from the right-click menu wi...
More About: Online , Image , Giving , Safe

Bring back lost firefox tabs
2007-12-04 03:00:00
Say you’re working along in firefox on a research project, or christmas shopping, or just a bunch of blogs and emails in various tabs. Chances are, you’ve mistakenly closed a tab without meaning to and regetted it. Quick Firefox tip: The key combingation “Control-Shift-T” will restore the most recently closed tab.
More About: Lost , Back , Tabs

How Could Anyone Smoke After Watching This
2007-12-01 10:46:00
Frankly, I’ve never been tempted myself to smoke, but I could see how it could happen. It’s something people do, and really, what’s the harm in just trying it? Well, finally here’s a concrete answer…
More About: Science , Life , Smoke , Watching

A Brief Word to Bloggers and Social Networking Participants Everywhere?Part
2007-11-26 05:50:00
Here are a few rules that would go a long way to clean things up: Ask yourself: If I ran across this post without knowing the author, would I care? Is this adding value to the wealth of information or the organization of the web? No personal, isolated stories included simply for the sake of telling Did some thought ...
More About: Social , Web Design , Social Networking , Networking , Word

Disconnected
2007-11-23 06:17:00
“Please turn off all portable electronic devices.” Okay, so I’ve read reports about the mostly cautionary purpose for this request, protecting against hypothetical interference with airplane-to-tower communication among other things (see CNET: Cell phones to take flight). Studies have shown that the tiny amount of power drawn by little iPods and DVD players is no threat ...
More About: Philosophy , Life , Nature

Another Clever Apple Ad
2007-11-22 06:13:00
Apple uses a clever ad to make a reasonable point.  Vista is the new Millenium Edition, plagued by compatibility issues, bugs and resource-hogging tendencies, and it doesn’t present enough new features to justify the headache of dealing with an entirely new framework.  Give Up on Vista
More About: Software , Apple , Clever

A Brief Word to Bloggers and Social Networking Participants Everywhere? Par
2007-11-22 04:55:00
There are a few classes of web pages on the web: Those from which I can glean some value from, as an anonymous visitor, and Those about which I couldn’t really care less, essentially consisting of a glorified journal entry by someone, somewhere, who ...
More About: Social , Web Design , Social Networking , Networking , Word

Magic DVD Ripper - Finally a simple, efficient, and fully-featured solution
2007-11-19 20:01:00
I’ve looked around for quite sometime, trying to find a simple means to backup my DVDs to take them with me on the road.  All too often the results are disappointing with loss of quality, glitchy results, or complicated settings to maneuver. Magic DVD Ripper provides the ability to rip copy-protected DVDs to disc in a ...
More About: Video , Software , Simple , Finally

Workfriendly.net
2007-11-07 05:51:00
Workfriendly.net provides a clever way to browse the web on the sly in an office environment. This isn’t something I really ever do, but I found the idea rather clever. Enter an url in the main page and it gives you a new window, skinned to look like a word document. The window then ...
More About: Websites

Forwarding St. Olaf email to Gmail Accounts
2007-11-05 23:27:00
Saint Olaf College’s new email system, RoundCube, is a pretty classy upgrade from the previous SquirrelMail interface in use until this year. Unfortunately, the new software is still in beta and unreliable. I personally have found it much easier all along to have all St. Olaf email forwarded to my Gmail account where ...
More About: Google , Email , Forward

Of Honey Bees and Finer Vision
2007-11-05 21:35:00
Upon the shores of an endless sea rests noble Thomas, a honey bee whose thirst is for the finer fruit- riches like tunes from the gentlest flute. Though large the span, no awful feat for the small one to grasp such things so sweet at the horizon’s edge for him to see, a modest contented honey bee. To his loyal peers, taking pause, he ...
More About: Philosophy , Life , Nature , Honey , Bees

Weather.com: Yesterday vs. Today
2007-10-30 18:57:00
  Living on a college campus and walking to class puts me outdoors a fair amount in a given day. So naturally, I’m one of those people who checks the weather forecast each morning as I get dressed. For me, though, the actual forecasted highs and lows mean very little without some context. Is 60 degrees (F) ...
More About: Weather , Life , Nature , Today , Yesterday