Bag of Beans

Published in Wired in 1996, this is still an excellent article written by Neal Stephenson, who travels across the globe to document how undersea communications cable are laid. While the article is very long (56 pages), it makes for fascinating reading.

FLAG, a fiber-optic cable now being built from England to Japan, is a skinny little cuss (about an inch in diameter), but it is 28,000 kilometers long, which is long even compared to really big things like the planet Earth. When it is finished in September 1997, it arguably will be the longest engineering project in history. Writing about it necessitates a lot of banging around through meatspace. Over the course of two months, photographer Alex Tehrani and I hit six countries and four continents trying to get a grip on this longest, fastest, mother of all wires. I took a GPS receiver with me so that I could have at least a general idea of where the hell we were. It gave me the above reading in front of a Chinese temple around the corner from the Shangri-La Hotel in Penang, Malaysia, which was only one of 100 peculiar spots around the globe where I suddenly pulled up short and asked myself, “What the hell am I doing here?”

• Link to printable version (via mental_floss)
• Regular version

The New York Times has an article commemorating the life of science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who just passed away.

The author of almost 100 books, Mr. Clarke was an ardent promoter of the idea that humanity’s destiny lay beyond the confines of Earth. It was a vision served most vividly by “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the classic 1968 science-fiction film he created with the director Stanley Kubrick and the novel of the same title that he wrote as part of the project.

His work was also prophetic: his detailed forecast of telecommunications satellites in 1945 came more than a decade before the first orbital rocket flight.

Other early advocates of a space program argued that it would pay for itself by jump-starting new technology. Mr. Clarke set his sights higher. Borrowing a phrase from William James, he suggested that exploring the solar system could serve as the “moral equivalent of war,” giving an outlet to energies that might otherwise lead to nuclear holocaust.

• Link

If you’ve ever wondered why most staplers have the feature to bend staples outwards as well as inwards, here’s your answer.

And now for what may be the most prosaic post in Eternal Recurrence history: examining your stapler! Yes, your stapler. A simple object you’ve used thousands of times and probably feel like you’ve mastered. Well, think again. Your stapler may possess a mysterious feature…

• Link (via Lifehacker)

Matthias Wandel built this clever adder that uses marbles. It is quite pleasant to watch it in action…check out the video.

It had occurred to me that perhaps with an insane amount of perseverance, it might be possible to build a whole computer that runs on marbles. My second marble machine was however much less based on logic - more on just making lots of noise.

But a few months ago, I had an idea as to how the divide by two mechanisms from my first marble machine could be cascaded together to actually function as a sort of adder or counter. Once I had that idea, I knew I had to try it at some point, and recently, I finally got around to building my marble binary adding machine.

The core of the invention is a modification of the divide by two flipflop to retain the marble that falls off the right side, and retain it until the flipflop is flipped to the left by the next marble. See small diagram above right. The retention of this extra marble allows the state of the marble accumulator to be dumped. The adder would just as well add without it, but the number would have to be read off by the angle of the rockers, rather than have the device dump the count out. Really, if such an adder were integrated into a hypothetical marble computer, reading out the result as a series of marbles would be an essential element.

• Link (via MAKE: Blog)
• There a few more amazing marble machines on the site here.

Related:

• The Computer/Domino Connection

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet
by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon
Touchstone, 1998

In Where Wizards Stay Up Late, Hafner and Lyon take us all the way back to the earliest days of computer networking. We are introduced to all of the central figures that were responsible for building the precursors to the internet we know today. In contrast with the rapid growth we see now, the early days seem glacial. The equipment was primitive and had to be custom built. No one had any idea initially how they could connect disparate computers together and make them talk to one another. The fact that the protocols that they eventually came up with are still in use on the internet today, and have managed to survive its explosive growth, is a testament to the genius and vision of these pioneers. The authors have managed to capture not only the tough technical hurdles that needed to be overcome, but also the motivations and the leaps of insight of the people involved during this historic time. This is an enjoyable book that moves at a fairly brisk pace, but I wouldn’t have minded seeing a little more of the technical details.

Rating: 8/10

Links:

• Amazon.ca
• LibraryThing

Related:

• Book: The Computer: An Illustrated History

Adventures From the Technology Underground: Catapults, Pulsejets, Rail Guns, Flamethrowers, Tesla Coils, Air Cannons, and the Garage Warriors Who Love Them
William Gurstelle
Three Rivers Press, 2006

This is a wildly entertaining book filled with colorful characters and powerful, dangerous machines. Gurstelle takes us on a tour of what he calls the Technology Underground with concise run-downs of many awesome devices and the science behind them. Driven by creativity and passion, the builders like to push the boundaries with inventions that have little practical purpose other than to entertain and excite. With any complex and frighteningly powerful contraption, things don’t always work as planned, and this just makes their stories even more amazing. Those who have felt the DIY maker’s urge will enjoy the profiles of these extreme tinkerers. At just over 200 pages this is a short, fun read.

Rating: 8/10

Links:

• Amazon.ca
• LibraryThing

The Computer: An Illustrated History
Mark Frauenfelder
Carlton Books, 2005

This is computer pr0n at its finest. This large, beautiful coffee-table book chronicles the evolution of the computer through hundreds of photographs. Following the earliest counting devices, hulking mainframes, personal computers and game consoles, the book documents the seminal figures who shaped the industry and the complex machines they created. It’s a delight simply flipping through all of the pictures and reading about the genius and vision behind these fascinating devices. The historic photos and the evocative writing both really draw you into the book and make you feel like you are reliving the golden age of computing. The Computer is a wonderfully nostalgic book that belongs on any computer geek’s shelf.

Rating: 9/10

Links:

• Amazon.ca
• LibraryThing

Founders at Work
Jessica Livingston
Apress, 2007

This book contains 32 interviews with founding members of different tech startups. Most of the interviews follow the same general format: how they got their idea, their first steps in forming a company, how they executed their plans, and what major obstacles they encountered. I think the author captures the character of many of these startups quite nicely in the introduction to the book: “In its plain form, productivity looks so weird that it seems to a lot of people to be ‘unbusinesslike.’ But if early-stage startups are unbusinesslike, then the corporate world might be more productive if it were less businesslike.”

Far from being a dry business book, the stories are engaging and inspiring. There are lots of great insights to be found in these interviews. Max Levchin tells us how much effort they spent to find ways to combat credit card fraud at PayPal, which became their main advantage as their competitors bled money from chargebacks. Mike Lazaridis was able to leverage their technical skills at Research In Motion to build a robust and reliable system for delivering wireless email. Philip Greenspun’s interview is a cautionary tale on what can happen when venture capitalists bring in incompetent managers to run your company.

Founders at Work is a good read for anyone curious about turning a wild idea into a sustainable business.

Rating: 7/10

Links:

• Amazon.ca
• LibraryThing

A 9 minute video on how they make camera lenses.

• Link (via Strobist)

This firmware hack for some models of Canon A- and S-series cameras with DIGIC II processors adds additional functionality to your camera - the biggest being the ability to shoot in RAW format. You also get a battery indicator - I can’t believe Canon doesn’t put this feature in by default.

The good thing about this hack is that you load it off your of memory card every time you turn your camera on (in some cases you can also enable auto-loading) so the original firmware of the camera is not touched, making this a fairly safe hack.

Q. What does the HDK firmware do?

A. After loading of HDK firmware you can get the following functionality:

• Shooting in RAW
• Live histogram (RGB, blended, luminance and for each RGB channel)
• Zebra mode (blinking highlights and shadows)
• DOF-calculator
• Battery indicator
• Scripts execution (exposure/focus/… bracketing, intervalometer and more)
• File browser
• Text reader
• Calendar
• Some fun tools and games

• CHDK FAQ
• Shooting to RAW with Canon PowerShot (DIGIC II - based only)
• (via hack a day)

Just like CRTs, someone can eavesdrop on the electromagnetic emissions from your LCD display.

Back in 1985, Wim Van Eck proved it was possible to tune into the radio emissions produced by electromagentic coils in a CRT display and then reconstruct the image. The practice became known as Van Eck Phreaking, and NATO spent a fortune making its systems invulnerable to it. It was a major part of Neal Stephenson’s novel Cryptonomicon.

CRTs are now well on the way to being history. But Kuhn has shown that eavesdropping is possible on flat panel displays too. It works slightly differently. With a flat panel display the aim is to tune into the radio emissions produced by the cables sending a signal to the monitor. The on-screen image is fed through the cable one pixel at a time. Because they come through in order you just have to stack them up. And Kuhn has worked out how to decode the colour of each pixel from its particular wave form.

• Link (via Slashdot)

Read ComputerWorld’s list of over-hyped failures of the tech industry.

Hype is the coin of the realm in the technology business. If you listen to vendors and the media, it may sometimes seem as though every new product, service, concept or even security threat will be the Next Big Thing. Some live up to all the fuss, but many don’t — and some fail spectacularly.

• Link (via Slashdot)

This in-depth article has some recommendations for which media to use for archival purposes. It explains why DVD+R is superior to DVD-R for data, and prefers Taiyo Yuden as only media worth buying.

As I said earlier, DVD-R sucks for data preservation for three reasons: inferior error correction, inferior ‘wobble’ tracking, and the fact its data writing methods look like an un-needed halfway point between CD-R and DVD+R. The wobble tracking I shall explain first, then the error corrections method, then the specifics of ATIP/pre-pit/ADIP optimum power settings.

• Link (via Slashdot)

Related:

• Blank DVD Media Quality Guide

This is an impressive feat: designing and building your own processor.

I’ve been a software guy all my life. However, I was always fascinated by electronics, and part of my success as a programmer was due to my thorough understanding of how computers work.

Back in 1999, I put that understanding to the ultimate test: I actually designed, and built, a simple but functional 4-bit computer from low-level electronic components (TTL logic gates.) Although this machine has less then one tenth of a percent of the speed and one millionth of the memory of a modern Pentium system, not to mention that its “user interface” is just a set of miniature switches and blinking LED lights, I still consider this a proud accomplishment.

• Link (via MAKE: Blog)

Related:

• Programmable Z80 Microcomputer

Engadget has a fascinating series of articles on lock security and lock picking.

The most popular locking mechanism in the world utilizes the pin tumbler design, first developed 4000 years ago in Egypt and then rediscovered and perfected a century and a half ago by Linus Yale. There are billions of these locks in the world and they come in all sizes, configurations, and security ratings. Some are secure; most are not, and even some high security rated cylinders can be easily compromised. All that is required to open many times of pin tumbler cylinders — the kind of lock that probably keeps the bad guys out of your home — is a bump key and a tool for creating a bit of force. The bump key shown above opens an extremely popular five pin lock, and the plastic bumping tool is produced by Peterson manufacturing, although many others are now being offered for sale. With these two cheap implements, anyone — and I do mean anyone — can get into your home or business in a matter of seconds.

• The Lockdown: Locked, but not secure (Part I)
• The Lockdown: Locked, but not secure (Part 2)
• The Lockdown: Locked, but maybe secure (part 1)
• The Lockdown: Locked, but maybe secure (part 2)

Related:

• Locksport International Guide to Lock Picking
• The Document Which Used To Be Called The MIT Guide to Lock Picking

A new tool has been announced in the piracy arms race. This tool can be deployed by network administrators to monitor network traffic in order to identify people using P2P services, and can automatically boot them off the network. The question is whether or not it can distinguish legitimate uses of those P2P technologies. The price: “$1 million price tag for installation and $250,000 yearly operation costs.”

Red Lambda says that cGrid monitors “a large variety of different P2P clients, in addition to other avenues of file-sharing including Windows file sharing, FTP, IM, and others,” and that cGrid does not perform content inspection but instead focuses on the behavior of the protocols being monitored. But the company does not expand on how it differentiates between legitimate uses of those technologies and illegal ones, raising questions of its effectiveness in an academic setting where students may be using P2P and other services potentially flagged by the system for legitimate, academic reasons.

• Link (via Digg)

Gizmodo has posted a great rant on people with more money than sense.

And you guys just ate it up. Kept buying shitty phones and broken media devices green and dripping with DRM. You broke the site, clogging up the pipe like retarded salmon, to read the latest announcements of the most trivial jerk-off products, completely ignoring the stories about technology actually making a difference to real human beings, because you wanted a new chromed robot turd to put in your pocket to impress your friends and make you forget for just a few minutes, blood coursing as you tremblingly cut through the blister pack, that your life is utterly void of any lasting purpose.

Then you had the audacity to complain about broken phones, half-assed firmware that bricked your gear, and winner-takes-nothing arms races between the companies whose gear your bought and the hackers who had nothing better to do than try to fix it. Do you realize how ridiculous that is? Programmers with free time did more to help you get quality products than you ever did by buying the broken gear in the first place.

• Link

This computer-controlled waterfall is simply stunning.

• Link (via Digg)

Bill Gates made some interesting comments regarding DRM during a recent meeting with a group of bloggers.

According to TechCrunch:

Gates said that no one is satisfied with the current state of DRM, which “causes too much pain for legitmate buyers” while trying to distinguish between legal and illegal uses. He says no one has done it right, yet. There are “huge problems” with DRM, he says, and “we need more flexible models, such as the ability to “buy an artist out for life” (not sure what he means). He also criticized DRM schemes that try to install intelligence in each copy so that it is device specific.

His short term advice: “People should just buy a cd and rip it. You are legal then.”

• Link (via Boing Boing)

This is a useful guide to check before purchasing cheap DVD media.

Not all media is good. In fact, with the high influx of cheap media from Taiwan, China and Hong Kong, I’d venture to say most media is bad. This review guide is meant to shed some light on who manufactures and brands good and not so good quality DVD media.

Use this list as an assistant when selecting what media to buy and use. It shows what generally works as the best media. Individual results may very, depending on the burner and how the media chooses to cooperate, though typically not by much. Read the advanced topics guide after becoming familiar with the basics presented on this page.

• Link (via reddit)