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Submission + - Linux, Apache, Perl, X10, Webcams ... and Christmas Lights (komar.org)

An anonymous reader writes: Clement Moore writes

'Twas the night before Christmas,
and while not a creature was stirring (not even an optical mouse),
/.'ers were posting & moderating with squeals of delight.
When out on the Internet there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from my keyboard to see what was the matter.
I knew in a moment it must be Alek's Controllable Christmas Lights Webcam.
But remembered in previous years it was a hoax - /. said damn.
And then, in a twinkling, I realize Alek has done it for real — W'OH!
With 20,000 lights plus giant inflatable Elmo, Frosty, Santa, SpongeBob, and Homer Simpson — D'OH!
The X10 controls and 3 live webcams provide such clarity,
that it has raised over $70,000 for Celiac charity.
"Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!"

Comment Related Anil Dash Blogs and earlier /. discussion (Score 5, Informative) 206

The Sydney Morning Herald article may have been sparked by Anil Dash's recent Blog Post - The Web We Lost ... which was discussed on /. last week.

Anil also wrote a followup titled "Rebuilding the Web We Lost" that may be worth reading.

Speaking of the "lost web", we no longer see as many offbeat websites like this one ... HO-HO-HO! ;-)

Submission + - HULK for President - X10'd Halloween Display (komar.org)

xmas2003 writes: "Alek's Controllable Halloween Decorations Webcams for Celiac Disease is back again with three live webcams and X10 power technology that not only allow you you to view the 10,000 Halloween lights, but also (in real-time) turn them on & off, plus inflate/deflate the giant Pumpkins, Skull, Frankenstein, and Homer Simpson — D'OH!

And since it is an election year, Internet surfers can "cast" a vote for Obama, Romey, or THE INCREDIBLE HULK. Right now, the Green Party candidate has a slight lead over Romney and then Obama ... although there has been quite a bit of ballot stuffing going on. Surf on by Halloween Night to see all the trick-or-treaters (online starting at 5:00PM MDT) and help put a Big Green Monster in the White House."

Submission + - U.S. Population Passes Pi Times 100 Million

xmas2003 writes: The US Census Bureau reports that the U.S. Population is now more than PI times 100 Million. The monthly rate of deaths is 185,000 is offset by the gain from births of 324,000 and net immigration of 56,000. At that rate, it will be over a 1,000 years before there is another digit of precision for Pi. World population is currently 22x the US's at over 7 Billion.

Comment Video: Eclipsed Sun setting over Colorado Rockies (Score 2) 116

Tough viewing conditions in the Republic of Boulder, Colorado as lots of clouds - check out this image showing a lotta crud between me and the sun.

I was hoping to catch a time-lapse of the partially eclipsed sun setting over Longs Peak and it re-appeared literally at the last minute ... if I had been just a little bit farther South, I probably would have been totally skunked. Plus we weren't in totality, so never got the ring-o-fire. But still very cool to watch and here's my time-lapse video.

BTW, since I didn't have an ND filter, mine was total makeshift ... cut out one of the "eyepieces" from my Son's Eclipse Glasses and wedged that into the 2xTC teleconvertor! ;-)

Submission + - Just how big are porn websites?

xmas2003 writes: ExtremeTech has an interesting piece about how big are porn websites. They get some actual traffic/bandwidth data from YouPorn.Com (only NSFW link here) which I'm sure has plenty of naked chicks and Boobies in their 100 Terabyte archive of porn. Every day, they handle over 100 million page views and almost a Petabyte of data transfer — one metric says this is about 10x of Slashdot.

While Sebastian Anthony has some fun with the subject matter — "While it's difficult domain to penetrate ... hard numbers are few and far between" — he plays it straight and provides some interesting facts about some of the most trafficked parts of the internet which present some real scalability challenges (PPT preso) using software such as Redis & Nginx. It's certainly a complicated industry as outlined in the Geek-Kings of Smut.

Comment Re:Question is.. (Score 1) 204

Ditto that - salient point here is a much larger sensor which has a big effect on reducing noise. It's still not anywhere near the size of a DSLR, and at least in the pics I saw (all taken in daylight), there was a lot of "smearing" at 100% ... so diffraction is coming into play here.

Note also that the samples were all "wide-angle" - the "telephoto" is not optical - basically just using a subset of the sensor to do it electronically. So makes the device much simpler (no moving parts), but in essence is digital zoom, so image quality is going to suffer as you zoom in.

Nifty idea though.

Comment Re:Cataract Surgery (Score 1) 149

As the person who has Ultraviolet vision after Cataract Surgery, a reminder that many IOL's (Intra-Ocular-Lens) actually do filter UV light - this is also mentioned in TFA. I've read quite a bit of Mainster & Turner's work and while I'm a wanna-be-eye-doctor at best, believe they are "right" in that you should not filter UV with an IOL.

Comment Re:Cool (Score 1) 311

LOL on the "engineering masterpiece and marketing nightmare" - shame this type of stuff happens. I actually spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to find flashlights that don't bleed into the visible spectrum - it's really hard to find spectral power distribution ... plus if you have flaws in the glass/plastic covering (or "wrong" material), it will fluoresce into the visible.

So give me a holler if you have an extra one of those lights around - "Captain UV" would love to take it for a spin! ;-)

P.S. Your description of how other people would see it as black and I see it as violet is exactly correct - I tried to show that on the first picture of my webpage - note the poly carbonate glasses and UV filter, both of which dramatically change the look for me ... but not for others.

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