Axodys

The Futuristic Segway Scooter Is a Publicity Success. The importance of Dean Kamen’s “It,” may have as much to do with the scooter’s future engine as with the scooter itself. By Teresa Riordan. [New York Times: Technology]

When I think of an engine I naturally think internal combustion like we see in cars and more importantly, direct mechanical power. But I’m almost positive that won’t be the case here. When and if Kamen starts incorporating his version of the Stirling Engine into the Segway and iBot it’s probably going to be as a replacement/supplement for the batteries that power the scooter. I wonder how efficiently a Stirling Engine in conjunction with a generator can convert fuel into electricity?

The Science of Pitching, Redux. In baseball, a pitcher’s motion has long been the subject of scientific analysis. Now, the coach of a talented staff is getting even closer to figuring out what works and what doesn’t. By Steve Kettmann. [Wired News]

As far as I know the Mariners aren’t doing anything with this yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if their excellent young pitching coach Brian Price gets them up to speed shortly. From what I’ve seen and heard he seems to be a pretty computer savvy guy and puts it to good use when working with his pitching staff. I give him a lot of credit for the M’s success over the last few years.

A Top-Secret, One-of-a-Kind Mac. A private computer museum in an old barn may have the rarest Mac ever: an apparently unique computer evidently made for a spy or military agency. It’s so secret, no one knows anything about it. By Leander Kahney. [Wired News]

That’s pretty wild. It’s too bad they don’t have the motherboard anymore. The Black Mac would be even cooler if it was still functional, but I guess that is kind of unlikely.

Mary and I caught a showing of Big Trouble this afternoon. It was pretty entertaining at times, but unfortunately as is the trend these days, most of the really funny scenes had already been revealed in the previews and advertisements. I think I would have enjoyed the movie even more had I not been familiar with those scenes.

Horatio
The Horatio system is a firewall authentication tool. The premise: Legitimate users want to attach laptops and other mobile hosts to the network, but security demands that illegitimate users be prevented from accessing the internal, secure network and from abusing the general Internet. The approach taken by Horatio is to provide a separate, untrusted, network that only connects to the internal network (and thus to the Internet) through a firewall that by default does not pass any traffic.

I wonder if Horatio could work behind a wireless access point or if it would just be kind of redundant?

I managed to be fairly productive yesterday afternoon and finally cleaned of the top of my desk. It’s not perfect, but now I actually have room to put my external drives (CDRW, HD) somewhere.

Next task: Cleanup, organize, and then backup my laptop’s hard drive. It’s getting pretty cluttered and I want to clear up some space to start doing some iMovie video capture.

I’ve actually had problems capturing MiniDV video clips directly to my external Firewire drive, but I’m not sure whether I’m dealing with a MacOS X issue, a Firewire2go/Cardbus issue, or a 5400 rpm drive speed issue. I hate rebooting into MacOS 9 these days, but with the Quicktime video issues that a Lombard PowerBook has to deal under MacOS X that’s probably the way to go.

Another video editing possibility that I’ve considered is upgrading my old revision A iMac. I can add a Sonnett HARMONi 500Mhz processor card (with a FireWire port!) for around $300 and that way I could have a dedicated video editing machine.

Does anyone else find those retro Enzyte commercials disturbing? That poor Enzyte user’s perma-grin is just sick and wrong. And don’t even get me started on the neighbor watering his yard.

A List Apart: “Fixing Your Site With the Right DOCTYPE” [Daypop Top 40]

I’m going to have to keep this link in mind for my upcoming redesign project.

Rock. I haven’t really paid any attention to the Interactive Fiction scene for a few years, but today Mark Pilgrim mentioned having lunch with Stephen Granade (a text adventure author and a pretty visible figure in the Interactive Fiction scene) so of course I had to see what he was up to these days.

That in turn led me back to the IF Arcvive and the Zoom interpreter for MacOS X. Zoom allows you to play classic Infocom games or modern text adventures written in Inform.

I’m staying home this weekend and I’m hoping to be very productive when it comes to all the projects (computer and otherwise) I’ve got floating around in my head. We’ll see how that goes. The main thing is that it’s finally Friday. Yes.