• Geek Out! - The Never-Ending Bloga

    Listening

    Bought some new headphones today for use with my iPod Mini; this is now the third set of ‘phones I’ve used, and I hope it’s the last pair I have to buy in a long time. The pair that came with the Mini are the standard iPod “speakerbud” type. I was never crazy about the sound quality, didn’t like how they kind of balanced uneasily in my ears and more often than not fell out, and they broke after only a couple of months’ use. One day, I noticed that one of the wires had kinked, and then it frayed.…

  • Geek Out!

    CES’ Redheaded, Slightly Pervy Stepchildren

    CES: Cheesy Finds at Innovations Plus:     A prototype hands-free mouse from Foottime, on sale in a couple of months. Simply place your foot in the slipper and trigger buttons with your other foot, leaving your hands completely free. Suggested use, says the manufacturer, includes "extra arm to shoot with. Bang" Would that be the "short arm" of British Naval yore? Then better get this other item from the same part of the exhibition:    

  • Geek Out! - Mini-Posts - SciFi/Fantasy

    Breathtaking

    One of these top ten images taken through the Hubble telescope is going to be my new desktop  image. I had been using one that's a color-enhanced shot of the full moon. My husband's first words on seeing them: "Whoa."  Via Dave :: Eye in the sky  

  • Geek Out! - Hot Off The Presses

    Cloudbait Observatory – January 4, 2007 Fireball in Colorado

    Cloudbait Observatory – January 4, 2007 Fireball A large object, thought to be a Russian second-stage rocket from a launch last week, broke up over the West in a spectacular display this morning may have been visible from Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico in addition to Colorado. It made the morning news in Denver because commute-report news helicopters managed to capture good video images of it. It passed very close to Grand Junction, my home town and a fairly large population center. If you saw the object, you can file a report at the Cloudbait.com site.  I don't know if it would…

  • Geek Out! - Hot Off The Presses - Uncategorical Weirdness

    A UFO over O’Hare: Dammit! I missed it!

    In the sky A bird? A plane? A … UFO? | Chicago Tribune It sounds like a tired joke–but a group of airline employees insist they are in earnest, and they are upset that neither their bosses nor the government will take them seriously. A flying saucerlike object hovered low over OHare International Airport for several minutes before bolting through thick clouds with such intense energy that it left an eerie hole in overcast skies, said some United Airlines employees who observed the phenomenon. Was it an alien spaceship? A weather balloon lost in the airspace over the worlds second-busiest…

  • Clan: McTiVo - Geek Out! - Mini-Posts

    Doctor Who: Spoilers in Linked News Item, Plus Also We Are Such Geeks

    BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Doctor Who Spoiler warning for my husband David, and for ***Dave of DDtB – we’re only up to the end of the second season here, but the linked article includes information about the third season now being filmed. And meanwhile, David is hooking up his new toy, which is some kind of mega-whizbang media hub switch thing that will allow us to view shows captured by his Snapstream software, which acts as an auxiliary to TiVo. Currently, to do this involves screwing around with some cables and his laptop, sometimes with inadvertent humor: The last…

  • Geek Out! - Random Access Memories - Uncategorical Weirdness

    Squirrelly little guy flew with the dinosaurs | Chicago Tribune

    Squirrelly little guy flew with the dinosaurs | Chicago Tribune A furry, squirrel-sized creature that soared through prehistoric skies–possibly even sharing the lofty view with birds' first ancestors–suggests that mammals took flight nearly 70 million years earlier than scientists had thought. The evidence comes in the form of a squashed skeleton found in Inner Mongolia that belonged to a tree-inhabiting creature born with a built-in hang glider–a fold of furry skin that stretched between its front and hind legs. This news item sent me Googling around to chase down an old, old memory from college: a professor of evolution who…