Monthly Archive for May, 2008

Good Luck Phoenix!

Published
by
David
on May 25, 2008
in Madness
.

2 hours and 30 minutes before humanity’s newest mars lander will touchdown - hopefully unharmed. One of the highlights of the mission is the search for past lifeforms in the polar ice. Some nice links if you’re interested:

Let’s hope Phoenix will fare better than his predecessor. Sleep tight tonight, because we just might awake to a whole new world.

1.30192108E+94K

Published
by
David
on May 25, 2008
in Madness
.

A year ago, while drunk, a friend and I were discussing temperature scales. Turns out Fahrenheit used his body temperature to define 100°F, which is totally ridiculous from a scientific point of view. Fahrenheit was actually having a little fever when he developed his scale, which is why 100°F is slightly higher than the normal human body temperature of 98.2°F.

One could say Celsius was more sane, using the boiling-point of water to define 100°C. If you think about it, though, this isn’t optimal either. Water boils at differint temperatures depending on the atmospheric pressure. Seen through the alien eye it really doesn’t make any sense at all: why H²O? Why bound by the conditions of one planet (Earth)?

Mind you, we were drunk.

So off we went and created a new temperature-scale. We figured Kelvin was spot on with defining 0K as the absolute zero, so we used that in our scale. Furthermore, using probably bogus science, we calculated the highest temperature possible in our universe, which turned out to be 1.30192108E+94K, and used that to define 100°.

Out came Astix, including basic HTML-page explaining the calculations done and Kelvin-To-Astix converter. Enjoy our crazy brainfart.

Make your PC wake you up

Published
by
David
on May 23, 2008
in Linux
.

It’s a little known feature of a BIOS: You can set it to start the PC at a specified time and date, practically like an alarm clock. Even lesser known is the fact that you can set this same setting in Linux by writing a date and time to this special file (as root):

$ echo "+00-00-00 00:05:00" > /proc/acpi/alarm

Now shutdown your PC. It should boot up again 5 minutes after you executed that line.

Let’s harness this awesome power and turn it into a poor man’s complex alarm clock:

  • sudo sh -c ‘echo “2008-05-24 06:59:00″ > /proc/acpi/alarm’
  • Start a media-player and make it play a song
  • Quickly put your PC in hibernate

Now when your PC is booting in the morrow, it’ll return from hibernate and continue playing the song, waking you up in the process. Yay.