Year: 2006

How to Be a Closet Physics Geek

July 12, 2006

Useless Update

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Jess complained that this wasn’t on my site so now it is:

In order to be a closet physics geek, you must:

  • Calculate the distance from your house to Lake Isle using a stopwatch, your eyes, and your ears and fireworks
  • Talk to Mr. Gruber and Mr. Ross about Mythbusters during parties
  • Actually invite physics teachers to a party.
  • Get yelled at by friends for being too technical.
  • Get in trouble for doing physics.
  • Post about being a physics geek at 2 AM when you have to be up at 6AM
  • Explain how waves work while at the beach, or at a concert
  • You know how 3D IMAX films work, and steal the polarized glasses from the theater because they’re cool
  • Make computer programs that generate frequencies from 20-20,000 hz
  • “Pwn” all physics tests
  • Crash the Junior Stay Awake Athon and calculate how loud the DJs speakers are in decibels
  • You own any of the following items
  • Charge a capacitor to full capacity and then short it out to make that cool spark and pop sound.

Save the Internet – Net Neutrality

July 8, 2006

Computer/ Tech Related, Rants

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Today, I am going to teach you all about a controversial issue of the current internet – Network Neutrality…

Congress is pushing a law that would abandon the Internet’s First Amendment — a principle called Network Neutrality that prevents companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast from deciding which Web sites work best for you — based on what site pays them the most. If the public doesn’t speak up now, our elected officials will cave to a multi-million dollar lobbying campaign.

This defeats the purpose of the internet. These big companies want to control internet traffic. How does this apply to ordinary people? Well, if Congress gets their way, companies can censor the internet, kind of like China does. For instance, they can allow fast access to websites that are advertisers, and slow down access to competitor sites. This can lead to a tiered internet. What do I mean by tiered? Well, think of your cable company. You buy packages with channels in them. Without Net Neutrality, your internet can become tiered. It will be awful just think. Do I get google with that package? For $20 more, I can get cnn.com? This is more proof that big business is controlling the United States with all of their money and it’s nonsense. What do redneck Texas hicks know about technology? Nothing, they just see green going into their political party.

A good resource: http://savetheinternet.com

Fireworks Should Not Be Illegal

July 4, 2006

Rants

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What is the point of making fireworks illegal? I listened to the police radio for five minutes and almost threw up. The police wouldn’t shut up about sending cars to different locations for fireworks. Guess what? It’s the Fourth of July and no one gives a shit. Supposedly, New York made them illegal because too many people were injuring themselves. This is nonsense. If you hurt yourself on fireworks, it is because you’re a dumbass and lit a 2 inch fuse or forgot to run away. Even those sparklers are illegal, which is the dumbest thing ever. It doesn’t even blow up and is no more dangerous than a flame. Actually since it’s magnesium, its much brighter and hotter, but its the same crap. Why not just ban fire?

Why should I be banned from making a nice display and celebrating the 4th, because some stupid ass blew his balls off? When something is banned, people do it more, so there’s no point anyway. When I was in Virginia, I passed hundreds of little shacks along the side of the road selling fireworks. It was insane. You don’t hear those southern fools having any problems (other than rednecks, cotton and shotguns).

Mmm…Mercury

June 24, 2006

Rants

1 Comment

First off, if I wanted to eat mercury, I’d suck on a broken thermometer, but I don’t appreciate getting it from my food. Tuna + mercury = dead brain cells which makes you stupid, and mercury also causes birth defects. I don’t care if the government sets safe mercury limits in food for people. How about this – no mercury in my food is safe mercury. So no tuna (or swordfish, or whatever else is infected with mercury) for me. And these stupid ass pharmaceutical companies need to stop putting it into vaccines. I don’t care that your dumbass company wants to preserve it longer. You cheap fools are only concerned about profits and not about people. Stop giving kids autism and get that shit out of the vaccine.

Capitalism causes problems because all anyone sees is green… not what’s best for people. Why pay to dispose mercury properly when illegally dumping in the water is free? Instead of fining these corporations, we should take the people responsible and drown them in their mercury wastes. Why make vaccines last only for a few months when we can give them a shelf life of two years? Money is the answer – and it’s the wrong answer.

MD5 File Hash Checking Tool

June 20, 2006

Computer/ Tech Related

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So I haven’t updated this site in a while and instead of telling about my life, I’m going to spend my time writing about a useless program I modded (so very early this morning).

I needed a program that checks the MD5 hash of any file. What the heck is an MD5 hash? There are two ways to describe this. It is an encryption algorithm that is mostly used to encrypt passwords stored in certain places (example online forums, etc). However, the algorithm can also be used on an input file to generate a unique string of numbers. Why is this useful? Well, it can verify that a file you’re downloading from the internet is genuine. If you rename the file, it makes no difference – the MD5 hash will be the same. However any change to the file will result in a different hash.

I found a little open source program known as MD5’Fer which calculated the MD5 hash of any file. However, I didn’t like the way it was programmed – it needed to be more user friendly. So instead of browsing for a file, I modded it so you can drag a file right into the program, or even drop in onto the exe before the program is running. Since the program is open source, I am forced under GPL to release the code to anyone who asks for it. So why did I bother modding this program? There are a few good checksum programs out there, but they annoyed me and needed to be installed. This is only 2 files and 44kb. No clutter and it works beautifully.

Download: Here (44KB) username and pw is login

MD5 Checksum (of the rar archive): 1B4890300E92C0406F83044B9E6E32D3

Simply extract the two files and then drag a file onto the .exe (or you can open the exe and drag a file into it, or you can browse for a file). It will tell you the checksum value.

If no one understands any of this, then whatever. Someone will have to find it useful.