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Bait and switch
Moving house is always fun. Particularly when getting hold of packing boxes. Moving companies charge for them if they're not going to be returned. There's a place advertising itself as the Box Shop which has "Boxes from $1!" all over its website, by which they mean "There's a beat-up box sitting out the front of the store exposed to the weather ( Read more... ) -
Movies: GI Joe Retaliation, Oz the Great and Powerful, The Croods, A Good Day to Die Hard, Hansel an
Summary: Meh.
GI Joe: Retaliation
Plenty of stuff going boom, but it's more for the franchise fans, if only to see things like HISS tanks on the big screen. Missable.
Oz the Great and PowerfulStuffed to the gills with homages and references to the most well-known of the Wizard of Oz movies, it's something of a love letter to the 1939 production. ( Read more... ) -
Fun, fun, fun
It seems a lightning strike from a recent storm took out the hardware I was using to manage the internet connection here. I built a new one, but that decided to spontaneously explode and die soon afterward. So I've spent today building a new system from scratch. New hardware, new operating system, new configurations... except that the new software ( Read more... ) -
Movies: Rise of the Guardians; Wreck-It Ralph
Summary: Guardians is missable, Ralph is watchable ( Read more... ) -
Anger
I've been around long enough to know what pushes my buttons. And one of them is when I've spent years collecting information about an aspect of my life, only to mention one tiny fragment of it in passing to someone, and they come back to me the next day determined to control my life despite knowing jack-all about the situation ( Read more... ) -
Design notes: extended elbows and knees
Update: worked out how to retain the clean corner-based double-joints while allowing them to extend into elbow and knee joints with more central axes. This will also allow slide- or flip-panels to origamiform the external parts of the joints without affecting the functionality. Basically, it allows those joints to look like nearly anything, then ( Read more... ) -
Movies: Skyfall
"I'm told the PM was particularly proud of England's IT infrastructure, apparently defended by an ageing go-getter, a genius, and a man from Scotland."
Yes, the computerese in Skyfall is abysmal, but it's thankfully over very quickly, and the movie can concentrate on its other themes - namely, being an unexpectedly well-written method of writing ( Read more... ) -
Random thoughts
Assume you've been given a whole bunch of property. Say, four to six square blocks in suburbia, complete with previously-occupied buildings. You may include a small skyscraper in this, if it suits ( Read more... )
