This is what happens when I put my iPod on random during the walk into work in the morning:

• "Everything's Under Control" — Meat Beat Manifesto — Actual Sounds and Voices
• "Reveille" — The Black Watch — Proud Heritage
• "Éirigh Is Cuir Ort Do Chuid Éadaigh Cóiríu" — Clannad — Dúlamán
• "Honey Medley" — Max Q — Discovery
• "L'inverno: III. Allegro" — Nigel Kennedy — Vivaldi: The Four Seasons
• "Suite No. 10 "KA": II" — Aki Takahashi — Giacinto Scelsi: The Piano Works 3
• "Return of the Jedi: 'Jabba the Hut'" — The Boston Pops — Out of This World
• "Wie Glauben" — Carter Burwell — The Big Lebowski
• "Neon Lights" — Kraftwerk — The Man-Machine
• "Goriri" — Tortoise — A Lazarus Taxon

One of the cabinets under my kitchen sink is stuffed full of these wimpy, plastic grocery bags. There must be around a hundred of them in there at this point. The only reuse I get out of them is to take lunch into work. I decided I should start bringing my own bag, so I bought these reusable bags from Schnucks at five for $4.

They're great! It turns out I can stuff over 20 lbs of groceries into just one bag: all that stuff pictured above except the gallon of milk, which provides a good size reference. As a revealing comparison, I've lost about one and a half reusable bags worth of weight since I started working out regularly in January.

Head to Cockeyed.com to find out how much is inside other stuff.

First post from my wonderful new OLPC XO-1! It's so much more than I expected, albeit slightly tinier and cuter than I imagined. The coolest thing I've done so far: using the Measure activity to view the overtones while I practice my sygyt throat-singing.

This has got to be about the coolest performance I've seen, and not just because it was bloody cold and windy. The Continuum keyboard by itself is fascinating; it's essentially a piano keyboard with a continuum of pitches and an extra dimension of modulation. But it's clever: It can tune itself so that you don't have to be precise in order to play in tune, but it doesn't get in your way when you want to bend pitches or slide up and down. The output is MIDI, which controls a synthesizer, which in turn modulates a pair of Tesla coils!

Zounds! The crackling of the electricity through the air is music, and not just something you could generously construe as music, but totally rocking tunes, polyphonic, melodic and harmonic, expressive, and dangerous.

Here's one more short video. Hopefully EOH will post some high-quality videos with better sound; it looked like they had some decent recording equipment set up.

Congratulations to the people at the 2008 UIUC Engineering Open House who put this together!

Don't! Get KeePass (or KeePassX for Mac and Linux users).

On a daily basis, I have to provide credentials to maybe a dozen different authentication schemes. On a monthly basis, it's probably between 50 and 100. Overall, I've got more than 250 passwords that I've had to come up with. You've probably got a comparable number if you think of them all: your computer logins, websites, email acounts, instant messaging, online banking, PINs; if you're a programmer, you've got many more for databases, code repositories, servers, and the like.

What I used to do is keep a set of just a few passwords, maybe adding a number on the end to give some variety. One was my "weak" password that I pretended not to worry about, and the others were at best slightly stronger. Most websites got my weak password, and computer logins and banks got the stronger ones. Sound familiar?  read more »

On my way home from work today, I spotted my first smart fortwo in the wild! It only took ten years to make it here to America. If you haven't heard of this car, check out the Edumnds review. It may be the smallest car you'll ever see; as Edmunds points out, it's only slightly longer than the Hummer H1 is wide. It gets great gas mileage, has enough space for grocery runs, is very safe, and can supposedly comfortably fit a 6'3" person like me.  read more »

What can I say; you can really taste the goat.

I first had Blue Goat about a year or so ago at Crane Alley, and I've been looking for it (very passively) ever since. It is good stuff. It's slightly fruity in the nose, not too complex, but not subtle either. It's a doppelbock, which I have recently learned means "double bock". So I guess more bock is better.  read more »

I suppose if I'm going to spend a Saturday evening coding and working on my taxes, I might as well enjoy a Mephistopheles and some Cage while I'm at it. The Cage is "Three Dances for Two Prepared Pianos", and it's a good match for this ridiculously rich 15% ABV stout.  read more »

After a long chain of link clicking, I came across Factor today. I have been wanting a practical, stack-based language to fiddle with ever since my last HP-48GX gave up the ghost. And Factor is precisely that.

Playing around with some sample code, I discovered that rot13("jubjub") (that's "jubjub" rot13 in Factor parlance) is "whowho".

I started working on converting my site over to Drupal almost exactly a year ago. I didn't get very far. But I was inspired to have another go at it, and this is the result.