Fnord.

Good pictures of the salvaged Kursk. More info:

1. Submarine Kursk on Wikipedia
2. Kursk explosion on Wikipedia
   

The inimitable Chase, in the beer hall in Urbana, 2003 or maybe 2004. A good picture of him.

As noted in my previous PSP post, one annoyance of the PSP was that video from Memory stick was limited to less-than-full resolution, probably to push UMD video sales. It took a while, but hackers cracked that limitation, and shortly thereafter official PSP firmware version 3.30 removed it as well. Full-res 480×272 16 by 9 glory can be yours!

I trundled off to the Visualhub forums, and put in a feature request, and commended myself to patience. (After, of course, trying to hack the advanced settings in visual hub, which produced a file soundly rejected by my PSP. Sigh.)

Anyway, today the Tao of Mac solved it for me:

Converting video to the new PSP 3.30 480×272 native resolution (16:9 ratio):

* PSP / AVC / Go Nuts
* In the advanced panel: set res to 480 x 272
* In the ffmpeg options: “-bf 1 -level 21″

I’m-a encoding now… Man, I hope this works. I have some travel coming up, and a few hours of ultra-res widescreen would really help.

Tip from last trip: Avoid JFK. Period.

Via BoingBoing, an excellent post by a paramedic on newtonian physics, seatbelts and NJ governor Corzine:

Do you know how we can tell the difference between people who were wearing their seatbelts and those who weren’t, at the scene of an automobile accident? The ones who were wearing their seatbelts are standing around saying “This really sucks,” and the ones who weren’t are kinda just lying there.

The comments are amazing - this is a long page, but really worth reading. The Bastard Stop in particular:

Back in college, a few of my more invincible friends would stubbornly refuse to wear a belt. To counter this I developed a simple technique called the ‘Bastard Stop’ which would quickly affirm the importance of seatbelts to my passengers… Just after you pull away (doing no more than a walking pace) slam on the anchors. Once they’ve clambered out of the footwell, they’ll generally comply.

The technique got it’s name for obvious reasons and makes an excellent demonstration of newtonian physics.

Other than the gelato pic, I still need to post the Italy pictures. Mike, however, has a hilarious writeup of the big dinner:

Then they just leave chilled bottles of limoncello and a sardinian booze called mirto–which looks and tastes exactly like robitussin–on the table and walk away. I guess they assume that you won’t/can’t drink a lot of it; they are wrong.

I have a theorem that the Italians and French are the only ones who can make decent loaf of bread because they’re the only ones who can consistently make decent sauces that are *worth* licking the plate clean of. But as you know, noses get in the way of plate licking, thus bread was invented.

Via VSL, an interesting collection of author-read poems by Billy Collins, set to animations. (Quicktime movies)

So far, I’ve watched a couple and been favorably impressed. Quite good, and a novel way to present poetry.

VSL is a once-daily email, and tries hard to be concise and interesting. I’m still subscribed, so I find it a net win, check the archives and see if you agree.

usul:/etc# wc -l hosts.deny
29836 hosts.deny

Holy cow! All this since May 14th 2006.

Non-nerd translation: If you try to login to my server via SSH, Denyhosts adds your hostname to the block list after a certain number of bad usernames or passwords. Since May 2006, there have been 29,836 such hosts added to the blocklist. All are botnet-driven Windows boxes, trying dictionary and default passwords, but its still pretty annoying. I wonder how well tcpwrappers, which has to parse this file for every connection, scales?

This is probably the best of the pictures from the work trip to Italy, gelato in Arona (Google maps link) on Lake Maggiore. More on the way…

From a thread on SCWF, an insightful post into the psychology of collecting. Here’s a (long) snippet:

Though the word has strong negative connotations, collection is akin to addiction: acquisition does not satisfy the craving. It appears to, but only briefly.

I began to realize that I was not collecting pens: I was collecting sensations of craving; I was collecting and trying to maintain certain mindstates: wonder, amazement, fascination, involvement, curiosity.

The problem however is that one confuses the mindstates with the objects. I realized that I don’t love fountain pens per se; nor do I love watches per se. I love the wonder, amazement, fascination, involvement, and curiosity that is excited in my mind when I consider them, hold them, and use them.

That is why one grail is not enough: because it’s not the object; it’s the sensation associated with that object.

Realizing this allows me to approach watches with moderation, just as I have returned to fountain pens with moderation. That eternal and inevitable feeling of “lack” that can lead me to buy, to seek out, to wait for, to associate with an object (or heck, a woman, a book, a car, a bicycle, etc): that “lack” cannot be filled in any permanent way by an object. What I am after is not an object, ultimately, but a sense of wonderment. And I must find other ways to cultivate that sense of wonder, fascination, amazement, involvement, enchantment, and curiosity. The root of the issue is not the object, but the sensation. My collective impulse is not about what I collect. It’s not about grails. Or fountain pens. Or watches. It’s about my sense of connection to the day, to my life, and to an underlying feeling of lack, dissatisfaction – and, heck, maybe even fear about the passing of time.

This insight has saved me thousands upon thousands of dollars. It has in fact helped me feel content in the midst of all manner of discontent (not getting this or that outcome professionally, personally, intellectually, emotionally, etc).

That is why this forum for me isn’t just about watches. It’s about wonder, curiosity, joy, and the enriching of life through the disciplined appreciation of these shining and small machines. I’m new to Seikos – about five months into this thing – and because of the above insights, I have purposefully kept my “collection” at two Seikos. Instead of acquiring more, I have chosen (for once) to discipline my approach into this new hobby, and I do so by, well, musing about watches. I purposefully stopped and chose to use my fascination in Seikos and automatics in order to stop, pause, and study. I’m now trying to understand the technical and commercial history of watches, the changing conceptions of time throughout history, etc. I expect one day I may begin tinkering in their guts, like a lot of you have.

In the meantime, I’m trying to be very careful about cultivating a sense of craving for more watches. Because I know, from a past collection passion, that such craving is a bucket that cannot be filled. No grail will satisfy me. Wonder cannot be bought. I must find other ways to cultivate a mindstate of contentment and curiosity:

If I consider a watch or a pen to be the source and end of my wonder, I’m making a perceptual error.

The BM on my wrist as I type this is, frankly, awesome. But it’s awesome because it’s an *idea*, not an object.

I don’t confuse the two any more. And I’ve more money because of it!

The entire thread is worth a read.