- LGBTQ Newsblog Revel & Riot — I like the layout of this news/culture aggregator. Two side by side columns, one for things to celebrate and one for things to decry.
- Manqué — Useful word. I sometimes think of myself as a physicist manqué.
- A blog post on botanical “fascination”
- “Omega and why Math has no TOEs” — Article by Gregory Chaitin on his construction omega, in which he provocatively argues that the proof standard may be holding mathematics back and it might be reasonable to pursue it more like an experimental science. (See also: Wikipedia article on Chaitin’s Constant.)
- Excerpted analysis from the book Spousonomics on why most advice for how married couples can improve their sex lives is wrong.
- A documentary on the Arduino microcontroller.
- Making a bootable hackintosh thumbdrive.
- “Space Stasis” — Neal Stephenson writes about the history of rocket science and the phenomenon of lock-in.
Tag: Hackintosh
The tiny computer in the trio was a Dell Mini 9, which I got for free from a friend who also got it for free. (He was the head of IT for a local construction company, and for a while was a high volume Dell customer. They were apparently handing out base system (4gig SSD, 512 RAM) netbooks as samples.) It would be nice if I could use it for work, but unfortunately it has a keyboard with a nonstandard layout. The quotes key is below the period key, and the top row of letters is not offset from the middle row. So no easy typing. But since I can’t use it for work, that frees me up to use if for fun experimental stuff. I did this to it:
The little guy is now a hackintosh. To make this work I had to get an SSD big enough to hold OS X, so I picked up a 16 gig for $60. I also used a lot of information (not to mention a few different bootloaders) found on the mydellmini.com forum.