I should probably post here more often…
Who knows if that will happen. 
In the mean time, we are about to embark on Road Trip USA III with Ze’Neon.
Read all about it – and track us across the country – over at rallynotes.com
All posts by Kris
Weighted Companion Cube – totally sweet sew craft
Here he is! Our new, life-size, Aperture Science Weighted Companion Cube – ready for action in the portal of our living room. Properly weighted and built to scale, our Companion Cube will help us with lots of mundane tasks around the apartment.
Take 2 yards of $1 dark grey fabric, 15 light grey felt squares*, 3 chopped rhubarb, 2 pink felt squares*, 1 Faux Suede Buff Storage Ottoman, about 4 hours of pattern cutting and easy stitching, and you too can have your very own! It’s basically a spiffy slip cover on an already cubed ottoman. The five sides are cut 16.5″ square (to accommodate for sewing), and then there are really only 4 other pieces: The 5.5″ corners, the 4″ centers, the 6″ circles, and the 4″ hearts. Check out my pattern for the Companion Cube here. (*aptly named felt “squares” were 12″ X 9″ at your local crafty store)
Check him out chillin’ in the living room. ♥
After playing the game Portal for 3 days straight a couple months ago, Christine and I remarked that these cubed ottomans (that we’re strangely so fond of) could easily be upgraded to Companion Cubes. As a surprise to Christine when she returned home from a conference – I sewed one up. Enjoy!
Reminder – Field Day this weekend!
I’ll be over at Gilleran Park in Mission Viejo with the South Orange Amateur Radio Association. If you want to see some cool radio technology that will be used to save you during the ‘flood, fire, earthquake, etc.’ Stop by and check it out! If you’re no where near my location – use the ARRL Field day location locater and find one in your area! I’ll be teaching the educational session on APRS, making our 100 point satellite contact, and probably working late night DX on the big bands. Have tent and a Honda Fit full of equipment, will travel. 
Icom IC-2200H cheap fan mod
I wanted an elegant and not so permanent way to attach a 12v fan to my rig. It’s going to see use as net control and even at 5 watts – it gets hot after transmitting for a half hour. It’s also going to serve as a digipeater at an upcoming rally. I’ll show off the thermal controller once it’s built, so the fan is not running 100% of the time.
Parts: coat hanger, zip tie, $6 PC fan, $2 dust cover w/foam.
Pictures: IC-2200H fan mod here
Basically bend the coat hanger into this: |_|
Slide it into the back heatsink and tilt it forward.
Bend the ends into hooks. Hook the fan onto it.
Tilt it down and around the outside of the rear heatsink.
Zip tie it into place.
– Enjoy
random.hidden.uci.edu.subdomains
Search engines make webmasters lazy. Why take the time to index all the groups, organizations, and programs at the university, when you can just throw them all up there. I think the liberal use of subdomains makes it a lot harder to find stuff. In a folder hierarchy you can see what’s below. With subdomains it’s all over your head – literally. Just how many are up there?
As Christine is in Graduate School here at UCI, we often need to look up a service, site, number, notice or document pertaining to the: shuttle, class, administrator, help desk, parking. I’ll spend hours trying to figure out if I need to call Housing, ResNet, NACS, or ICS when the cable goes out. Tons of silly acronyms and even more websites on silly subdomains.
The UCI network group [at one time] published sixty or so of them – turns out there are more then 400 uci.edu subdomains. This was one of those side projects that started out like “hmm – I wonder…” and rapidly evolved into several hours of throttling my connection just enough so that every web server on campus wouldn’t report my IP. “shit… That’s a lot more then 60…“
My list:
hidden.uci.edu.subdomains
They apparently hand them out like candy. There are no rules for wildcards or leading with www. Sometimes they have both, sometimes only one. How frustrating is it that you have to remember the www on some and not others? Some sites are updated daily, some sites have seen more work in the late 90’s. I’ll bet that a lot of this is unavailable to those outside of the uci.edu domain. A lot of services and hidden extras to be found I’m sure. Enjoy this fascinating list of hidden uci.edu.subdomain goodness. Just finding out that we had a passport office on campus was worth the time.
UPDATE: There was at one time no approval process, but one is in place. It is up to the approved group to setup the DNS to respond to www or not.
OMG-mittromney-WTF?!
Fabulous doublespeak Orwellian quote from someone who just stopped running for office in the US:
And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror. – Mitt Romney
So, if the republicans don’t win the terrorists do?
Oh I see… Did you mean that the terrorists don’t vote republican?
A vote for a some other party is a vote for terrorism? Yes? No?
Let me get this right… Don’t vote for democrats because they ARE terrorists?
Dude… STFU
I’m hoping that no mater where you stand politically that you would never flatly agree to that statement. I believe that this country was founded on people who loaded up on wooden ships and sailed the fuck away from people like Mitt Romney.
*Now back to our regularly scheduled programming – already in progress…