The Insomniac Coder

Well, not really. I was activating a replacement check card and about to go through my usual card destruction routine (file off the magnetic strip , file off the signature strip, cut the card into little bits, melt the whole damn thing) when I got curious as to what I could find with the microscope: The main number at 10x Center of Master Card hologram at 150x.  Signature strip at 150x. Notice the overlap of the signature lines, whenever signing a card I always feel like the strip is too hard and it won't take the ink , but obviously the material handles the ink perfectly, this card was signed at least two years ago and the ink looks pristine. 

Since I go through so much trouble whenever I want to shoot macro, I decided to take a look at maybe a cheap microscope and try to figure out how to shoot it with my camera. I was delighted to find out that you can now buy a 150x USB microscope for less than $70. The imaging sensor is rudimentary when compared even to my phone's camera, but in this case the important part is the lens and focusing. This is a Celestron 44302 handheld digital microscope. It is mainly designed for hobbyists that want to inspect things like coins, stamps and other collectibles, and professionals doing quality assurance inspections. Installation was simple: pop-in the CD , install the application and then plug it into USB . There, it's done. The microscope has a shutter that can be triggered by the software, and a focusing wheel. There are no markings or any kind of indicator to tell you your zoom level, and focusing is a pain in the ass. It took me maybe one hour of screwing with it unti...

It's been a few weeks since the upgrade to SSD , and I was starting to be concerned about my external USB drives . I have two Iomega Prestige USB2 drives (one bought by my robot overlord employer, one bought for personal use). I am scared to death of single-drive data storage on laptops , because wrecking the drive not only kills your OS but also all your data. I like how in desktops and servers pretty much everyone I know tries to use multiple drives, and leaves the OS on its own. Under reasonable conditions (properly filtered power, nobody working the case over with a baseball bat, etc.) it would be extremely rare to lose more than one drive at a time. With the laptop we don't have that luxury. Since we do all of our programming work with a centralized repository, a disk failure is not a catastrophe: whatever was checked into the repository is on a much stronger server that goes through a reasonable backups regime (I pray to God). If the work was not checked in, most of ...

Or, as we call it in the company, "penis envy." A coworker that I am positive reads this blog hit his new machine window a few weeks ago. We are all entitled to a brand new laptop , to our specifications, every 3 years and as a norm Dear Leader buys whatever the hell we ask for. My first to-spec machine was a loaded Mac Book Pro , the second one was a kickass (or so I thought) Dell. I already upgraded the Dell to 8GB through Dear Leader's very generous threshold for bitching about capital expenditures (if you request for something reasonable under a semi-classified dollar figure, he approves it on the spot). My coworker simply followed instructions and asked for the most laptop he could wish for. And he got it. With a fricking quad-core CPU , 8GB of RAM and SSD. He's one of the good guys, so I can't be a player hater, but that didn't protect me from penis envy about the SSD. So we came up with a plan: every X hours or so he would tell anyone that listened...

OK, this is both useless and desperate. Why are we still putting up with this cabling nonsense? Why not develop a secure means of replacing USB with a wireless technology , even if it is even shorter range than Bluetooth ? We don't need a new cable that goes 3GB/s because even if we had a device that could use such a connection, or computers can't sustain such a channel for long periods of time.  Instead we should be able to take a hard disk , pair it with our PC wirelessly , and then it would work at whatever speed, but only as long as the drive was within 3 feet from the PC. If we do this right, our PC will have one wire coming out of it, the power cord. Control devices should use a slower channel like Bluetooth or 802.11b/g/n, and all data channels should go over this high speed wireless channel. Even the Internet connection! We have had routers with push-button device pairings for a while, I don't see why we can't have it also work over this theoretical ch...