Very busy today, but here’s what’s fun today:

1: The annual Desert Bus for Hope play marathon is running! Desert Bus is probably the worst video game ever made – this was by design – wherein you drive a bus in realtime from Tuscon to Los Vegas in realtime. There are no stops, nothing happens. It does get dark and one or two bugs may hit your windshield. When you get to Los Vegas, you get one point, and start heading back.

In other words, this was Penn and Teller pulling an Andy Kauffman on videogaming. And where this goes from unmitigated pain to hilarity is that the whole thing is hosted by Loading Ready Run, a group of comedians from Victoria, who are hosts. No; what makes it hilarious is the chat stream running in parallel, with which they interact. The chat stream is critical.

Here’s the twitch stream, and here’s the official website. For me, as a Zeta Shift regular (midnight-6am Cascadian time), things really start getting hilarious late-night. But Dawn Patrol, Alpha Flight, and Nightwatch all have their things.

2: Mystery Science Theatre 3000 is attempting a comeback; here’s the Kickstarter. They broke US$1,000,000 in the first day. They’re hoping to break US$2,000,000 today, and they’ve announced the new host. Joel is driving this, and he specifically wants a new host, because it’s no good if it doesn’t stay fresh. But some of the old crew will be involved, so the flavour doesn’t go away.

As Joel said, ‘you can take MST3K out of Minneapolis, but you can’t take the Minneapolis out of MST3K.’

Anyway, those are fun, there are updates, enjoy and possibly donate. “Think about it, won’t you?”

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Glowstick – or in this case, glow-tube – durability in storage is highly variable by colour! This is unsurprising. But it is still interesting to see in real life – I found these behind a bunch of other stuff in a closet, they’re probably… six to eight years old? Somewhere around that, I think.

already activated, not that you can really tell

yep, that’s all y’got

still kinda pretty tho’

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Hey, remember that show last Friday? We got a really nice review from Howlin’ Hobbit. Thanks for coming and for the review! 😀

I’d write a longer post, but, well, Fallout 4 got here. So, yeah. Oh, so did the new couch, which is nice, because I moved the old couch up into another, more remote room in the Lair (electronics and sewing, if you really want to know) and along the way kind of duplicated the main couch room’s arrangement, which means that we now have an Auxiliary Backup Couch Room.

And that means we need an Auxiliary Couch Room viewscreen, since the primary Couch Room has a viewscreen, which, if you want to go old school, means the Auxiliary Couch Room viewscreen really ought to look something like this thing from Star Trek, right?

And I was thinking “well, this seems to be important now,” and I was thinking about what to do about that (if anything) when I realised that oh hey, we have a really old sunflower G4 iMac lying around, and I seem to recall something about its screen being all thick-border and curved-corners, and I bet I can figure out at least one of its passwords (success!) so…

…there we go. Sorted.

Incidentally, did you know there’s a Firefox branch specifically for PowerPC OS X antiques? It’s called TenFourFox, because it’s for OS X 10.4. (And 10.5, but presumably it’s 10.4 users who care.) So I have installed a modern-standards browser on its 80gb hard drive (lol 80 gigs) and wow does it eat CPU, but it works if you give it time, and VLC 0.9.iforget is still on the archived builds site and so it has that now, and talks to the Lair’s media server, and that actually works okay! So, well, yeah! Auxiliary Couch Room viewscreen engage.

I spent way too much time on that today. Also too much time on this post, if I want to be honest about it. ‘Scuse me while I try to actually get some work done now. XD

UCSB digitised 10,000 old wax cylinder recordings and has put them all online. Since they’re all public domain, which is awesome, the opportunities to play around with and even insert into recordings is essentially unlimited.

BoingBoing has an article up which describes how they still have 2,000 in their collection to record. You can help by “adopting” a cylinder. Or, you can just go straight to the online archive. Some of them are just bizarre.

The craziest and best thing about these – conceptually, anyway – is that they were all recorded mechanically. Electric recording didn’t exist yet, so microphones what even are those? No, these were recorded using giant funnels aimed at the performer, who performed as loudly as they reasonably could – at which they had practice, performing in unamplified halls – and a needle etched the grooves directly into the cylinders.

And with the earliest cylinders, those would be the ones sold. They’d do however many at a time they could manage to fit into a room, so you’d get maybe 40 recorded at once, then perform again. Some cylinders kept being recorded that way for years – Edison’s Concert series in particular.

Very quickly, they moved to recording a master that they’d then physically replicate, either using copying or casting techniques – copying yielding awfully poor results, casting techniques doing far better. But either way, cylinder recordings are basically fossilised sound waves, and that is pretty much just deeply awesome.

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Happy Halloween from VAULT-TEC!

And we’re all ready. Dozens of nice little candy gift packages from VAULT-TEC, with candy and a surprise inside – instructions on building your very own back yard nuclear reactor. Heat your hot tub, water your plants to get extremely unusual flowers, and saving on heating bills – it’s wins all around.

I’ll be answering the door as a VAULT-TEC sales rep, of course, which in the actual pre-war Fallout world would probably make me the worst house on the block. But hey, at least it’s actual candy, right? Everybody likes Atomic Fireballs. (Well, I like Atomic Fireballs. Not even ironically, I’m just fond of cinnamon. It’s yummy.)

This is probably the first Halloween I’ll have worn two separate costumes. Historically I’ve only ever done that at conventions, and even then, rarely. SCENE CHANGE!

Guess who got a PROMOTION?

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I haven’t posted many leaf pictures lately, but I took a couple recently that I liked. Here’s one that really needs to be seen bigger – click on it to go to the large version on Flickr.

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Waiting for the 308

I have no idea how she got there. I can only presume she was waiting for a bus. I’m also presuming it’s the 308. Because I have no idea how the 308 would get there, either. It’s the wrong stop.

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Yesterday, I got poking around the Lair’s wifi with some signal analysis tools. The interference and terrible signal to noise ratios I had to fight in the recording studio are just as bad in wifi, if not worse. It’s really terrible.

But check this out – I think I’ve sussed part of it. In the illustration below, the red bar is the giant cement retaining wall. The bar is not actually to scale, sorry about that – it should be thicker, because it contains a lot of rebar. The gradients of colour are wifi strength, from a nearby hotspot which is not ours. I picked this one because it shows the effect best, but it shows up in imagery of other transmitters as well.

Do you see what’s going on here? The rebar in the retaining wall appears to be acting as a crude parabolic reflector. This relatively-hot-spot is showing up in all of the maps, pretty clearly, except for the ones where that area shows up as a shadow of reduced strength. I think those are signals from transmitters from the other side of the wall.

I mean honestly, look at this. Am I wrong? This is so neat. And I’m wondering if this is the cause of some of our other interference problems as well, like possibly even the BBC-World-Service-on-the-house-mains issues.

All sorts of wireless things act very strangely here. Even AM/FM radio. And I’m starting to wonder if there’s a way to improve the grounding on the rebar. I can’t imagine how, but still.

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The funniest possible Vine has been made. Great job, everyone. Well done!

(I was literally on the floor with laughter. The hard cider I’d been drinking wasn’t a major factor, it was less than half a glass. On. The. Floor.)

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Sometimes I take pictures of flowers, or leaves, and mushrooms are kind of flowers, right? We spotted these on the way to the final Sunday Market of the year down the hill from the Lair.

What’s your autumn look like? Or spring, if you’re in the southern hemisphere, and a couple of you are out there, I know because facts.

Gossimer

Gills

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