By Antoine, on November 11th, 2011%
I recently inherited my sister’s “defective” (but fixed for 5$) 120GB Classic Ipod and managed to partition it the way I wanted. It was not a trivial process so I tought I’d share my experience with the web so others can benefit from it.
My music library is far from being 120GB so even if I feed the Ipod all my tunes, I’d still have a lot of free space on it. Granted, you can mount the Ipod as a mass storage device and stuff the rest with anything, but here’s the catch: Ipods will only format to FAT32 or HFS+ file systems if you use iTunes. As a consequence, if you pick HFS+, you will not be able to use them on windows and some *nix (if they lack the HFS+ support module) and if you choose FAT32, backup solutions such as backtintime will not work (they need a journaling file system).
So I took to partitioning my Ipod with two different partition using a different file system for each, FAT32 and EXT3. I tough it would be a simple task, but turns out that it wasn’t. Just formatting the Ipod and letting gtkpod rebuild it did not cut it; . . . → Read More: Partitioning an Ipod
By Antoine, on September 14th, 2011%
Posted here: http://climaterealityproject.org/2011/08/26/what-climate-change-deniers-and-carbon-dioxide-have-in-common
Friends!
I think we let ourselves carried over by the first’s commenters’s misconception about CO2. The debate (if there is to be one) should be about the post and in there, it’s indicated verbatim that CO2 isn’t toxic to humans and that it’s the greenhouse effect that is potentially harmful for the earth as a closed system.
Climate change is in my opinion part of a bigger issue: one of resource management. The earth can certainly afford a bit fossil fuel burning and resource usage as anyway, it will one day be engulfed by the heat of the sun as it expands towards its red giant state.
However, the alarming rate at which we are conducting those activities will very likely make us fall prey to Malthus’ law (population grows until ressources are all consummed, famine occurs and then population resorbs massively) very soon instead of us as a species living to see ourselves getting cooked by our star.
Technology (not policy) has certainly helped us averting that for while, but it won’t last forever if we keep consuming and growing like we are right now. As Carol Pullitzer clumsily suggested, it is not cars . . . → Read More: Climate change (again)
By Antoine, on May 19th, 2011%
Too bad I work alone and mostly at nighttime. Otherwise, I would have some people around to share the sheer joy that I am experiencing right now. For a lack of that, I’ll turn to the web. Just an hour ago, I completed a major milestone in my main project line. I am ecstatic as with work of this magnitude, the light at the end of the tunnel is always months away( and right after, you get into another tunnel…) Here is the writeup on the situation.
I have had a fascination with oscilloscopes for a very long time. While being incredibly useful (for those who are into electronics that is), they have a mysterious sense to them that still gets me after all those years of hanging out with complicated machinery. I remember clearly seeing rows and rows of them during my first university year, having only a very rough idea of what they were for but still knowing, judging by their numbers, that they must be very useful for every electronics bench to get its own. They are what epitomizes the knobs and dials (screen in this case) strange and obscure apparatus of the modern age.
So much so that . . . → Read More: A milestone
By Antoine, on October 18th, 2010%
It recently occurred to me that the job of a manager (so often praised in our knowledge economy) is essentially a paradox, as its ultimate objective is to make itself obsolete.
A manager is essentially a problem solver. While the nature of the problems is certainly very vague, it goes from implementing a measure pushed down from higher up in the organization to dealing with a sick employee, but essentially, it all falls under the umbrella of problem solving because managers only have a very indirect responsibility on the product or service delivered by their organization.
It follows as a logical conclusion that a well managed entity will not have any problems, but that would be no permanent achievement to the manager as he knows very well that issues will soon reappear in the changing environment he works in. Incidentally, the best manager will not only have made his organization problem free, but will have implemented the mechanisms to solve them without any sort of oversight or implication on his part, since such are the characteristics of ideal processes. At this point, he will have fulfilled his role has a manager, he will be laid off or moved elsewhere, and the group of . . . → Read More: The paradox of management
By Antoine, on August 6th, 2010%
It looks like a cockroach but it has no antenna and appears to have its abdomen shell sutured preventing it from flying. Nonetheless, its by far the largest insect I’ve ever encountered in nature. While at my friend’s place, I grabbed the latest issue of National Geographic, opened a random page an saw a big photo of this very bug in all its splendor. It was part of a small feature on entomophagy. Turns out this is a benacus deyrolli, or a giant water bug as its commonly referred to. I should have been more careful, the Wikipedia article mentions that
Their bite is considered one of the most painful that can be inflicted by any insect (the Schmidt Sting Pain Index excludes insects other than Hymenoptera); the longer the bug is allowed to inject its saliva, the worse the resulting bite, and as the saliva liquefies muscle tissue, it can in rare instances do permanent damage. [...] Occasionally when encountered by a larger predator, such as a human, they have been known to “play dead” and emit a fluid from their anus. Due to this they are assumed dead by humans only to later “come alive” with painful results.
When I . . . → Read More: An impressive find
By Antoine, on July 20th, 2010%
The final product
One of my friends, who creates music as a hobby, recently bought a pair of AKG 601 headphones. While I do listen to a fair amount of music, I would not consider myself an audiophile or anything close to that. However, those headphones do make a difference I can notice in the quality (or lack thereof for low bit rate MP3s) of whatever is being played. There is only one small problem with them. Being massive open headphones, my friend’s sound card is only able to put out an acceptable level of sound at maximum volume; his MP3 player, on the other hand, is simply incapable of driving them. The AKG 601 have a rated impedance of 120 Ohms while normal earbuds seem to be around 20. As a result of a soundcard’s output impedance being too high, a normal speaker output is not capable of providing enough current to the headphones.
They are huge, expensive and leak a lot of sound, so he does not plan to use them on bus rides, but there are still some serious downsides with having to drive them at maximum volume:
Levels of distortion . . . → Read More: CMoy headphone amplifier
By Antoine, on February 18th, 2010%
In Wikipedia, articles are evolved word by word by contributors to a stable form that reflects consensus. Hence, the rate of change in articles not about ongoing events will tend to diminish over time. Trough having spent a considerable amount reading a vast array of articles, I am confident in claiming that Wikipedia maintains a consistent agnostic point of view with regards to religion (as mandated by its encyclopedic nature). Divinity is definitely present, but it is constrained to where mentions of it are pertinent. In other words, Wikipedia is a secular organization and has become so solely by the consensus of its members; consensus trough discussion and reason.
On the hypothesis that Wikipedia is contributed to by people of all walks of life but with the common characteristics of having been educated in a modern schooling system and being intelligent enough to achieve the level of writing implicitly required. I think I can advance that any society or group of individual that attains a similar level of knowledge, regardless of where they started will, given enough time, necessarily become exempt from irrational belief. Only with Wikipedia, this stabilization came about much faster due to its relatively small size, its virtual nature . . . → Read More: Wikipedia as hope of an agnostic society
By Antoine, on January 25th, 2010%
If the world really is seven thousands years old or not no one can say for sure. But then again, we might all live in a Matrix and our lives are only a massive conspiration… Conjecture aside, I found out that Evolution is in a sense compatible with Creation. Actually, not the Creation as portrayed in the Bible but nonetheless an act of creation. Anyway, the Bible is a big metaphor and thus should not be taken word for word: the world is way too complicated to have been created piece by piece. I would want my God to be a smart individual, and just like any other individual with brains, this God would have devised a technique to generate this universe without making too much of an effort.
However, there are absolutely no signs that would make Creation remotely plausible. Creation is in a sense only a philosophical possibility. Everything points towards Evolution as the key process that generated complexity. But what if God had used it to save a bit of time? As a process and most likely a mathematical one, Evolution could be an equation that feeds back on itself, be chaotic and would self-generate complexity. It also would . . . → Read More: Reconciliating Creation and Evolution
By Antoine, on December 4th, 2009%
In America, Most of the people are atheistic about gods like Thor, some daring individuals go one god . . . → Read More: Atheistic about Thor
By Antoine, on November 30th, 2009%
The link between demographics and climate, although logically evident (more humans -> more pollution), has been spoken of very little during the whole debate until now. The new report on the state of population and climate change that has been published by the UN, while being full of euphemisms and very careful about its words, it finally challenges the taboo and sheds the light on this issue. We can attribute the difficulty of bringing this argument to the table on the bad reputation population control policies have and it’s obvious conflict with more conservative religious organization, but the time for screwing around is up. This problem, while caused entirely by our actions as a race, can have consequences that are far bigger than humanity and only science has so far been capable of solving problems of inhuman scale. Now, I can see from miles away the great organized religions coming to interfere with resolving this crisis.
Everyone with a half-decent knowledge of psychology and philosophy will know perfectly well that us humans have a natural aversion to all that is dehumanizing. Yes, I can understand why birth control and abortions are considered immoral by some, but now is not the time . . . → Read More: Climate, demographics and religion
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