I heard an odd quiet sawing/buzzing sound coming from the middle of our side fence a few days ago. Today I looked again and found the culprit; a 1.5" long (huge!) carpenter bee (I believe this one was Xylocopa californica) that had bored a perfectly round hole into the fence and was happily excavating its way through ( Read more... )

Dagoba dark chocolate "New Moon" is extraordinarily smooth for chocolate that is 74% cacao. It's much tastier than dark chocolates from Scharffen Berger and Ghiardelli.

I looked forward to the Ken Jennings (human) vs Brad Rutter (human) vs IBM Watson (8 racks of computer) battle on Jeopardy. However, it turned out to be a dull match. All three competitors could correctly answer 70-90% of the clues by the time the clue had finished being read. They were likely an close match in terms of knowledge, but we'll never ( Read more... )

I bought something from a merchant who uses the Amazon payments system, and sent some questions via the Amazon payments form, which stated:
IMPORTANT NOTICE: When you submit this form, Amazon Payments will replace your email address with one provided by Amazon Payments in order to protect your identity, and forward the message on your behalf.
That ( Read more... )

Amazon has been offering free streaming versions of movies that you buy on disc from them. In theory it's a great concept, however ( Read more... )

Here are the five highest first-place vote-getters in the history of the Heisman Trophy ( Read more... )

Short version:
1. Buy the EasyCAP DC60
( Read more... )

I've recently seen pdf files which have broken checkbox characters due to a missing font. I don't know what generates these pdfs, but they have what are supposed to be checkbox (checked and unchecked) characters that show up as unrelated substituted characters. Presumably this can be fixed on the production end by appropriately embedding fonts in ( Read more... )

Discovered by process of elimination the culprit behind the idle browser page CPU-eating woes. The javascript from "sharethis.{com,net}" causes "idle" pages in Chrome to eat around 6% CPU on my old Macbook Pro ( Read more... )

The Ice Storm's (1997) cast includes Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver, Katie Holmes, Tobey Maguire, Christina Ricci, and Elijah Wood. It's directed by Ang Lee.