geekery

Hard Drive Destruction

Since I’m starting a new major project, the family wanted to spend a lot of time on a staycation this weekend.  One of the activities was a field trip to Creation Station, a store with, well, bunches of stuff that you would have tossed out, except when you see a lot of them neatly arranged, it […]

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Random passwords

Long ago, I hit the threshold where the number of accounts I had and needed passwords for exceeded my ability to remember them.  I thought it reasonable, then, to have tiers of passwords: Banking and financial – alphanumeric, mixed-case, non-alpha characters.   An unpronouncable base plus an unique addition for each institution. Shopping (where a

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My first iPhone hide

As GPS-enabled phones become more popular, there have been a lot of geocaches placed by people using phones.   Many of these will have serious “adjustments” to their posted coordinates because the person placing it just took a single reading, using whatever their phone was reporting and called it good.  Usually these adjustments are anywhere from

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Mapnificent

The other day I came across Stefan Wehrmeyer‘s very interesting tool, Mapnificent, which estimates how far you can go by public transportation in a specific period of time (defaulting to 15 minutes). There is an option to indicate you have a bicycle available. Obvious uses of the tool are looking at commute times and evaluating

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iPhone 4 travel map

Since the phone tracks where I’ve been, I thought it’d be fun to map it out using Pete Warden’s iPhoneTracker application.   I spend the most time in the Pacific Northwe’t: I had forgotten about my trips to San Jose: While I was in Houston and New Orleans (separate trips), there was some opportunistic geocaching, spreading

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Dolphin Kick

When I first heard someone mention the term dolphin kick, I thought it was a reference to the 1980s Patrick Duffy show, Man from Atlantis. The BBC says the dolphin kick “replaces a standard underwater leg kick with a whipping motion that minimizes water resistance.”[1] It’s a little easier to make sense of this if

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Notes from SC10

King Neptune, outside Mardis Gras Land A few weeks ago, I spent a week in New Orleans at Supercomputing 2010.  (Sometimes my job has perks.)   I wrote a really long summary of this for internal use, but thought I’d share some of my notes: Jack Dongarra of Oak Ridge National Labs offered his perspective

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Have data, will geek

I had waaaay too much fun with this data visualization software… Sheet 1 Powered by Tableau (Note, you will need javascript enabled as there is an embedded scripty thingie. The controls aren’t ideal — mouse mode selection is on the bottom; to zoom out, use the shift key — but it excites me how little

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