ANDREW PENG

Here’s a lazy liner that I cooked up to rip music from MixRiot.com – simply replace the URL variable with the page that contains the music and it will dump the music using wget with an MP3 extension!

url=”http://www.mixriot.com/category/essential-mix/browse-show/broadcasts/bbc/radio-1/2009″; IFS=$’\n’;title=();id=();for i in `GET $url | grep FlashVars | egrep -o “mixriot.com%2Faudio%2Fplay%2F[0-9]{4}” | cut -b 30-`; do id=( “${id[@]}” “$i” ); done; for j in `GET $url | egrep -o “<h2><a href=[[:print:]]{1,} title=[[:print:] ]{1,}>[[:print:] ]{1,}</a></h2>” | cut -d\” -f4`; do title=( “${title[@]}” “$j”); done; for (( k = 0 ; k < “${#id[@]}” ; k++ )); do wget -O”${title[$k]}.mp3″ http://www.mixriot.com/audio/play/${id[$k]}; done;

I found myself needing to take some photos with my webcam because it was a simple setup and had excellent image quality when given enough light. However, when using the default webcam application in Windows XP/Vista/7, it will only capture images in 320×240; hugely disappointing when the webcam will do up to 2MP. Enter the DefResCh tool – which I found in this thread on the Logitech developer forums. Of note, you will need to install the Logitech webcam drivers to make this tool work; the default drivers that Windows installs does not work with this tool.

Modeled after falling maple seeds, this tiny autonomous monocopter has one asymmetric wing and rotates along it’s center of mass to produce lift. On-board camera at about 5:40 into the video, Hack A Day suggested using the microcontroller to take a snapshop at the same position of rotation to make one stable video.

NASA’s launch of the Ares I-X, the experimental prototype of the new launch vehicle. Pay special attention to around 0:45 into the video and look at the USS (Upper Stage Simulator) – where you can see the effects of the Prandtl-Glauert Singularty, where the sudden massive drop in pressure in the cone of the sonic wave causes water to condense out of the air into a visible vapor cone! Here’s to returning to the moon!

Signs of a culture moving forward, or just frivolous waste of government money? Finland has announced that by next July, 1mbit broandband internet access, which is roughly 20 times quicker than dial up (assuming a generous 50kbps assumption for dial-up) is now a legal human right. While it’s certainly a step towards the future, Finland still plans to blast us away by promising 100mbit internet connections by 2015. With this announcement, Finland joins the ranks of Estonia, France, and Greece where internet access is considered a human right.

[Source: cnet news]

Right here, thanks to Telegraph.co.uk

8th ring discovered around Saturn. Well crap, why didn’t see see this sooner? It turns out that the ring is only visible in the thermal band, not the visible spectrum that we’ve been staring at it for so long with. When you point Nasa’s Spitzer Space Telescope (which observes in infrared) at it, you get the grand view of the rings, which start at 3.7 million miles out from Saturn and extend an additional 7.4 million miles. Composed of simply space dust, it was observed at a chilly -316F, or about 80 Kelvin.

Thanks to @waybis for pointing this out!

So long “Chronos”, it’s been one hell of a five year (going on it’s sixth) ride. All the abuse you took from me, being more or less on 24×7, overclocked from 3.2GHz to 4Ghz, watercooled, and on it’s 4th motherboard and second CPU.

This computer has carried me through countless nights of Starcraft and Counter-Strike, then Counter-Strike Source. This computer has brought me to level 60 in WoW, then level 70. This computer has made countless videos, websites and edited countless pictures. This computer has taken me through BattleField 1942, Battlefield 2, then through EverQuest II, Eve Online, Team Fortress 2, and Left4Dead.

You have helped me produce endless amounts of term papers, exhausting hours of research, Catia, Rhino3D, MatLab and Maple. I have received job offers from you, found friends with you, and resurrected you from the dead more times than I can remember.

Now you don’t remember your BIOS settings, nor do you stay working for more than a few minutes at a time without the BSOD or eerie crackling and beeping noises. I miss you already

Things I like about Houston:

1. Elevated driveways to help prevent local flooding
2. Road labels and signs painted on the road itself
3. EZ-TAG also integrates a real-time traffic monitoring system
4. Every day is bright and sunny

Things I don’t like about Houston:

1. When it rains, it rains
2. Elevated driveways are like small mountains to my car
3. Traffic.
4. Traffic. No, really, it’s terrible

4 years, over 100 grand, and endless repetition “you must use your e-mail account”, then after graduating and 6 months later, they delete it. I was too busy in the midst of relocating my life halfway across the country, never mind accepting a new job the education helped to provide, and now my account was nuked.

I called up their tech support line, hoping to get it reactivated for just a week or two, so I can move services that were associated with that account over to a new email account, but it’s a no-can-do. They’ve killed it for good and were unwilling to re-activate it. I even offered to pay, since working at the school I also know that the services their email servers provide aren’t free. Come on guys, I just need it turned on for a week.

Honestly I was hoping they would treat their alumni better, but they still don’t mind calling every now and then to ask for money. To make it worse, I can’t sign up on their alumni website either.

What a bunch of jerks. FYI any recent graduates, your account expires in 180 days.