Beginnings
What if…
Twelve Colonies were settled by colonists from a mother
world, Kobol. These writings also say that a thirteenth group of settlers moved
across the stars to settle another world (Earth). In the series, Earth was considered a myth and little was
known about the Colonials’ true origins, save for the ancient writings. From there it goes… Man creates robot, robot rebels against man, robot causes man to retreat. And that’s what the series is about.
The last remaining fleet of humans (which I think they said was about 2 million people or so) are retreating, and heading towards the mythical planet of Earth while evading/fighting with the Cylons.
What if… it’s true? Not so much the Cylon/12 planet colonization part, but what if we did come from the stars. There’s really no proof either way for it. The technology could have simply been destroyed for our protection. Hell, Earth could’ve been the equivalent of Australia… somewhere where you just drop unwanted people (possibly criminals) off.
Picture this: A man and his pregnant wife commit some kind of nasty crime and are sent to Earth as punishment. Just dropped off, fend for yourselves… good luck. No technology or anything… they’re dropped butt naked on this planet with jack. A few months later… the child is born. There’s no hope for them getting off the planet… so what do they tell their child?
Let’s ignore the parent’s perspective for a second. What about the kid. If that was me, and my parents told me that we came from the stars, and there were other civilizations out there, i’d say they were full of crap. True enough right?
tv and marooneyfest
The TV:
Pics from Marooneyfest:
Cooney …
+ Martz ….
= Marooneyfest 2k5!!
seventy five inch tv
The End Result:
(roll over the pictures to see a brief description)
How I got there:
I might edit this later with more commentary, but this will be good enough for now.
Tech(nology) update
Do it yourself lcd projector
Ok. I’m feeling pretty good about this now. I had hit a wall with the whole ‘how the crap am i going to show anything on such a shit laptop’ issue until I discovered that Windows Media Encoder works with my ATI TV Wonder card! This means that I can stream tv over my home network (I’ve already tested this and it works, even on the crap laptop). I spent the last hour or two researching the feasability of converting the laptop monitor to a standalone lcd monitor, but no one has seem to do it yet. When I obtain the overhead projector I will start the build process right away. I would estimate that it will take me approximately 1-2 hours. I’ve taken apart laptops before, so no problem there, and it’s a pretty simple set-up in the first place.
Also, I’m pretty good at modding stuff. When I was a kid (around 6th grade) I modded a am/fm radio and a walkie talkie so that the walkie-talkie retransmitted the radio station to the other non-modded walkie talkie… Why? I’m not quite sure… i just had some spare stuff lying around and apparently decided to throw them together. I also had an electronics kit and rigged together a door alarm, so that when a door was opened, this annoying buzz would sound until the door was shut again. Among other… things…
When I start the conversion process I will post pics to my site for sure. If anyone has any questions about it I’d be more than happy to answer them (whether or not i’ve started)… it should be a really fun project.
In reality… I think Steve K. is the only person [of known readers of my site] that I think would be interested in this project, so…
RANDOM SHOUT-OUT TO STEVE K
That’s all, peace out
Tech(nology) stuff
AOL Instant Messenger’s Terms of Service
Use AIM? Of course you do (if you’re reading this I can almost guarantee it, in fact, it’s probably on right now)
�Although you or the owner of the Content retain ownership of all right, title and interest in Content that you post to any AIM Product, AOL owns all right, title and interest in any compilation, collective work or other derivative work created by AOL using or incorporating this Content. In addition, by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to privacy. You waive any right to inspect or approve uses of the Content or to be compensated for any such uses.�
So basically, if you plan on marketing something, copyrighting or trademarking something, distributing your music, poetry, works of art, source code… whatever (file transfers on aim also go through AOLs server)… don’t do it via instant messenger. There are plenty of other alternatives out there to use so… I would recommend doing that.
Granted, I doubt AOL searches everything that gets sent over their servers for this kind of stuff… it wouldn’t be hard for them to archive everything to search later on, or to continually search and archive stuff as it’s sent… I mean, it’s freaking AOL… they have the server space for that, that’s for damn sure. And storage is cheap… you can get a 160 gigabyte hard drive for like $100 or less… A library floor of academic journals = 100 gigabytes. 10 hard drives = 16 floors of academic journals. Yeah, thats a lot of storage space for less than $1000.
Source
My new favorite website: http://www.hackaday.com/
It’s a hacking blog. It has a lot of neat projects that people have done (hacking in terms of modifying hardware and doing neat stuff)
My next project is going to be a: do it yourself lcd projector
I’ve got an old dell laptop here that is good for NOTHING, so i’m going to find myself an overhead projector [Nick, from The 400 (he's a suitemate) and I are going to a Radford Universtiy Surplus Auction saturday in hopes of bidding on an overhead projector real cheap].
So hopefully by the end of the weekend I’ll have an LCD projector of my own… not that I could play movies on it or anything… yet. The old crappy laptop I have doesn’t have a DVD player and no network card.
I can plug in my wireless card to it though, so I should be able to do some kind of remote-desktop style connection, or possibly network my dvd drive from my desktop computer or whatever in order to show files. My desktop computer also has a tv tuner card, so maybe I can stream that out through an in-network (my personal network) webcast or play video games (whatever).
If I could do that, it could be really convienient [being wireless] because I could bring it into the suite, or anywhere within the range of my network and show stuff big screen. The dell has a pretty decent screen on it so I should get good results (plus, I’ve taken apart laptop monitors before, so I know how to do it and keep it working).
It’s good to be back at tech.
Quote of the day:
“Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.”
