2. November, 2003 - software & hardware
- Cory’s got an Extended iCal rant from a timezone warrior. He’s got a point or twelve there. iCal has some serious time-zone problems, but last Monday, I had to recompile every file in a project I’m working on because daylight savings time ended over the weekend. Macs are generally okay at handling time issues, but there’s still plenty of work to be done, if for no other reason than the fact that our ideas of timekeeping have gotten pretty complicated over the years. [boing boing]
- The Light at the End of the Tunnel is a new use for LEDs, using infrared LEDs to heal wounds. [vinnie]
- Speaking of LEDs, I’ve been looking for a while for a good bike headlight that’s low power consumption and still bright. I’ve been using a LED flashlight, but this article on Powering Six White LEDs with High Efficiency Using the MAX1848 looks pretty interesting. Maybe I’ll dig out the soldering iron this winter and see if I can put something together. [vinnie]
- Geek humor has been a little scarce around here lately. These useful Resign Patterns for programming remedy that situation a bit. There’s also the Big Ball of Mud pattern, which is seen far too frequently “in the wild.” [some guy]
- The Kempt.net DNS Black Hole List is another black-hole list that can be used to help filter spam. With other black-holes shutting down it’s nice to see one that’s still hanging in there.
- Finally, bluejackQ with a Q tells about bluejacking, which is when someone screws with your bluetooth device remotely, doing things like adding contacts to your cell-phone. The whole issue of bluetooth security is one of the reasons I haven’t jumped on the bandwagon yet. The idea of “connecting” peripherals without wires is very enticing, but I still don’t understand what’s to keep other people from connecting with my devices. The other missing link in bluetooth is that it doesn’t have enough bandwidth to be able to do stereo audio over the link, and the first bluetooth thing I thought I’d like was a set of bluetooth wireless headphones for my PowerBook. Nothing like that exists, and when it can (someone will do some form of compressed audio that’ll get around the bandwidth problem eventually), there will probably be multiple, different standards. [boing boing]
Copyright 2008, Dave Polaschek.
Last updated on Sun, 02 Nov 2003 09:29:33.