Hi everyone! Just want to let you know that gabrielle started a new blog, it’s called 5am je t’aime. She plans on posting cute photos and writing about girly fashion, and even has all the posts color-coded for easy matching. check it out!
Your gateway to a gold monolayer!
I set up a google email alert for “self assembly” a while back – at the time I was hoping for the first stories of robots building robots, but it turns out that nanoscale is where it’s at. This technique is simple but fantastic! The last interesting one I saw appeared several months ago; it also used surface tension, but to arrange particles in a grid of prepared grooves instead of in a monolayer.
Check out the links below for more detail.
Unlike previous techniques, Eah’s new method has no need for a vacuum.
Internet problems, and solutions
I recently moved to a new apartment, so didn’t have internet for a while and was practically going crazy having to use my phone’s tiny screen for everything. Finally got AT&T dsl setup today, what a relief! It’s feels super fast too, even though it’s only 6 megabits down and 1.5 up.
When I walked into the AT&T store with Gabrielle a week ago, all I was thinking about was signing up for DSL. There were no other customers in the 1000 sqft store, so 8 workers were all standing right at the door just hanging out, it was kind of intimidating. (It reminded me of running into a gate camp in EVE online, right before I learned what a warp stabilizer was used for.) They combined home phone, wireless, and a bunch of other stuff into one store recently and had separate people for each service, and trainees as well so it seemed like the store was crowded even with just the two of us there.
The sales lady told me I should get U-Verse because “everyone was getting it,” “it was only $50 more” and that it has guaranteed bandwidth, unlike DSL. She said the downside of DSL is that it slows down if multiple people are using it all at once… but that just makes it a better deal now since she told me they are going to stop offering it soon (no new dsl subscribers) in order to push out U-Verse (reducing existing dsl subscribers)… which in my head combines to mean that I’ll be getting all the bandwidth to myself! MUAHAHA.
To top it all off, when I called in to get a problem with our phone line fixed, the service guy offered me a promo deal if I signed a year contract, dropping the price by 75% vs Uverse for the same 6 megabits – without the $125 subsidy for the infrastructure! Almost makes me want to go out and get a couple more DSL lines.
Mass network storage, for children
Over the last few months I’ve been doing sporadic volunteer work for an organization called Outside the Lens, a nonprofit outreach program that aims to teach literacy through the arts. They operate a media lab where kids can come to learn digital photography and movie making through projects designed to give a real life context for environmentalism and diversity.
The issues OTL is having are pretty typical for IT: their files have built up over the years, they don’t have a good organization system (most of their users are temporary volunteers and children), they have duplication from file-level backups, and they have a bunch of external hard drives that are filled up and difficult to manage.
They asked me to build a NAS for them, so I installed linux on a donated pc, threw in a 120GB drive, and configured a samba share. Getting it to autoconnect at logon for 10 accounts was hard enough, but the bigger problem was how to get the kids to actually start using it…
The next step: they’re starting to do more video editing, so they’re going to need at least 2-3 TB for everything to fit on one server and it’s my job now to build it for as cheap as possible without it being unreliable. I am thinking 8x500GB 2.5″ drives in linux sw-raid, then we wouldn’t need to get an expensive controller card.
