February 2006 Entries
You know you are doing okay when your boat has a boat. … A Shadow Boat basically a boat that follows your yacht around and holds all the toys (helicopter, cars, boats, etc.) that might otherwise take up valuable lounging space on your megayacht. … [via Luxist]
The thing this seems to be missing is some kind of Starship Enterprise style docking mechanism. Ideally you’d build one mega-yacht and then detach the crew and copters and whatnot when you wanted to head into some remote bay for some quiet time. Heck, the crew would probably prefer it too, they’d have their own...
My MP3 collection / iTunes library is moderately poorly tagged.
I have tried all kinds of automatic tagging tools in my day with very limited successes. MusicBrainz in its original incarnation was useless for my needs. I could name all the rest, but why, since hardly any of them work well.
The other day my brother Kevin mentioned a new alpha-stage product from them called Picard. From their overview:
Picard is the next generation tagger that will soon completely replace the classic MusicBrainz Tagger. Picard is an album oriented browser (as opposed to track oriented) and thus works quite a bit...
DFL is a blog highlighting the last place finishers in Olympic events. [via Kottke]
For those unfamiliar with the term, DFL = Dead Fucking Last.
For “light duty” and running and whatnot, I have a 1gb iPod shuffle. Since my regular iPod is temporarily out of commission, (that is a story for an upcoming article) I’ve been using the shuffle day to day. I loaded some kick-ass songs on it, but no matter how kick-ass those songs are, once you’ve heard them all a few times an overwhelming need to get new songs appears.
I popped the sucker into an available USB slot and load iTunes. Once there, I cleared a bunch of songs and added some new ones. It would take 2–10 seconds per...
An airplane taxies in one direction on a moving conveyor belt going the opposite direction. Can the plane take off? http://www.straightdope.com/columns/060203.html
[via this Straight Dope hacked RSS feed I found]
Is the situation clear? A plane, 747 say, is put on a giant treadmill in such a way that the plane is stationary to an outside observer. The plane gets going faster and faster and the belt and wheels spin furiously, but the theoretically the plane is supposed to be able to take off. Supposedly the engines will pull the air backwards and allow the jet to takeoff normally.
Here’s a good...
Thermodynamics 101, brought to you by the warmup sequence of a Formula 1 motor
Here we have an V10 F1 engine being revved hard, without the carbon fiber engine cover, on stands, at night. They manage to get the exhaust pipes to a seriously beautiful glow before they have to shut it down.
Normally you would never do this without either running the car — F1 cars like sharks in that they have to keep moving to keep cool or else they overheat in a matter of ninety seconds or so, engine idle speed is around 8,000 rpm — or having dedicated...
Slip, scoot, spin, slide - go for a ride on your own backside. A fun new twist on sledding, Sno Slider's like growing a tough plastic shell just for winter sports. Attaches by a simple harness - no more dragging a heavy sled up the hill; just walk to the top and sit down - you can't fall off. Comes in red or blue - we'll choose for you.
For ages 3 and up.
Size13-1/2" x 11"
$9.95
Cool. Now, is “3 and up” literal? I mean, 30 is up from 3 right?
Plus I’d imagine that holding that position going down the hill...