Geocaching

I've recently started geocaching. Check out www.geocaching.com where you can find cache locations and see what is happening to a particular cache. I mostly do it with our youngest son. He and I have found that it is a fun way to spend time outdoors and some of the caches require puzzle solving skills. We've also done it with other members of the family as well...our oldest son also is pretty good at it.

I bought the most inexpensive hand-held GPS I could find the Lowrance iFINDER GO, which works fine for me.

We go to the www.geocaching.com web-site, find a cache near our location, put the coordinates into the GPS and head off to find the cache. Typically we bring something small to place in the cache and in return we take something (if anything grabs my son's fancy). We then log our success (or failure if we can't find the cache) at www.geocaching.com.

Sometimes a cache contains a Travel Bug which is a registered "something" whose movements between caches is tracked at www.geocaching.com.

Apart from the joy of spending time outdoors with family members the other unexpected benefit as been that we've discovered a lot of parks/conservation areas close to us that we never knew even existed.

Planes landing in cross-winds

Some pretty strong cross-winds!

This one is looking at the plane coming in head on.




This is looking at different landing from behind.

Boeing 747 Facing Extreme Cross Wind

This is an amazing video of a Boeing 747 facing an extreme cross wind. Pretty impressive bit of piloting!

Hidden ipod commands

I can never remember the commands to turn on ipod diagnostics. You can find a nice little display at Hidden iPod Commands. Commands are listed for the various iPod models.

Anti-spam

I was reading the news at spamgourmet.com (a service I highly recommend) and they pointed to a couple of things to help combat spam and spammers. Spamspan provides some code to help obfuscate email addresses on web pages. Sharkbait can be used to feed spam email address harvesters fake email addresses that contain the IP address of the harvester in the email address so that the harvester can be reported to their ISP.

I should probably say a bit more about spamgourmet.com. I have used the free service for a number of years and don't know what I'd do without it. I've actually donated $$ to them to keep them running. :) The basic idea is that you set up an account which will forward your email to a real email address. You can then generate new spamgourmet email addresses on the fly when asked for an email address but your real email address is hidden from the folks to whom you give the spamgourmet email address. The on-the-fly email addresses can be set to expire after the addresses have been used a certain number of times and they can be "recharged" if you decide you want to continue to receive email through that address. They even have the option that allows you to respond to an email you receive via spamgourmet which will hide your real email address.

It is a great service, well executed and on top of that it is free. I highly recommend it.

Thought provoking article on understanding vs. writing code

I thought this was a very interesting article and it certainly rings true for me based on my experience.

I'm not sure quite that much time is spent understanding code but I'm sure it is a lot more than most people think.

When Understanding means Rewriting

Strong enough to hold multiple elephants!

A new superglue has been discovered which is used by bacteria to hold on to rocks in rivers. It is incredibly strong and can be dissolved with enzymes which might allow it to be used in surgery, dentistry, etc. Pretty interesting stuff...

I heard about this on the NPR Technology podcast for Wednesday 2006/04/12 and then found more info on it at this Discovery Channel link.

Cool way to move a vehicle

Check out this video at airtrax. Pretty neat way to move a vehicle.