Nerdbloke

Every kid loves paper planes right? The other day my little girl was watching the “big kids” at her after school care compete in a paper plane competition.

Today I found the paper plane that absolutely rocks.

Well named – the “Sky King” flies straight and true. I gently tossed it from my desk out my study door and it flew 20 feet and only lost about 1 or 2 feet in height when it slammed into a wall. Sturdy construction, slightly nose heavy and good lift let it repeat the process.

Instructions here: http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Fold_Your_Own_Sky_King_Paper_Airplane

Nice story about a guy tracking his stolen iPhone. This line cracked me up: “We laughed triumphantly, adrenaline racing, feeling like the Jack Bauer trio. (Disregard the fact that we’d just left a Lego convention.)”

I stumbled across this great quote today. It’s taken from Theodore Roosevelt’s “Citizenship in a Republic” speech that was delivered in 1910:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

The original star wars trilogy told by a girl who has not seen the three movies in their entirety – funny vid as well.

Star Wars as seen by a three year old. “Don’t talk back to Dark Vader – he’ll get ya!“

A few years ago I got the skydiving bug. Did nearly 30 jumps. Never got my A-licence though. I have always been fascinated by wingsuits. Today I watched a vid of a bunch of crazy skydivers skiing off cliffs in Norway with wingsuits.

This was not normal wingsuit action. Rather than flying away from the cliff-face, these guys are flying alongside the face, buzzing along only metres above the roads that wind down the mountain. You have to see it to believe it.

Awesome.

I really enjoyed Neal Stephenson‘s “Cryptonomicon“.

I recently read an article written by Neal in 1993/4 for Wired that covers the history, technology and issues with laying cables across oceans and continents. I now know where he got a lot of the background for Cryptonomicon, and why his knowledge of submarine cabling is so detailed.

The article “Mother Board Mother Earth” is quite a long read (~42,000 words) – but fascinating in it’s own nerdy way. Enjoy.

Here’s a link to a nice story about queuing.

Was I the only one that noticed the missing segment of the movie? I can’t be – can I?

There is a scene where the joker makes a surprise entrance into Bruce Wayne’s penthouse apartment – interrupting a fund raiser dinner attended by the Rachel, the DA and the richest people of Gotham city.

Bruce Wayne stashes the DA in a cupboard, dons his bat-suit and takes matters into his own hands by kicking the shit outof all the Jokers henchmen – then finally turns on the Joker. After a few blows the Joker realises it’s all going pear-shaped, so the Joker grabs Rachel and throws her out a window, forcing Batman to stop his attack on the Joker and jump out the window to save Rachel.

As luck would have it Batman catches Rachel just in time, landing/crushing the bonnet of an unfortunate sedan on the street hundreds of feet below. They lie there on the bonnet of the car, crack a few funnies and breath a large sigh of relief.

We then cut to a scene sometime later. The next day perhaps – I can’t recall.

It’s at this point in the movie I was thinking “Whoa – what happened?! Why didn’t Batman use his funky cord-on-a-hook-shot-by-a-gun to take him back up to his penthouse and capture the Joker? Did the hundred witnesses just let the Joker – now beaten-up and dishevelled – go?! Surely not. Did the Joker just saunter out, apologising for the interruption without feeling the need to kill a few bystanders?!”

Most people I’ve talked to have said “Oh yeah – I never noticed” but some others have. I especially like this one-pane comic from deviantArt

In light of Australia being inundated by heaps of Christians for International Christian Week I thought it migt be timely to post a link to the “Official God FAQ“. Enjoy.

I discovered ‘MediaCoder‘ the other day. It’s great. I am using it to transcode all my wma audio files to mp3 format.

Previously I was using VLC and a batch file to do this for me, but using MediaCoder is waaay easier.

VLC with batch file:
@echo off
SET vlcExe="D:\Program Files\VLCPortable\VLCPortable.exe"
FOR /F "delims=" %%I IN ('dir *.wma /a:-d/b/s') DO CALL :processdir "%%~pI" "%%~nI" "%%~fI" "%%~dI"
%vlcExe% --playlist-enqueue vlc:quit
GOTO :EOF

:processdir
SET sOut=:sout=#transcode{acodec=mp3,ab=128,channels=2}:duplicate{dst=std{access=file,mux=raw,dst=”%~4%~1%~2.mp3″}}
%vlcExe% –playlist-enqueue “%~3″ %sOut%

:EOF

With MediaCoder:

1. Select where you want the transcoded files to be saved. ie <Original Folder>
2. Choose what format you want your files in: ie mp3