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WebTV Anecdotes
This brought back some memories–my first encounter with the internet was via WebTV, and I remember it being a delightful, if limited user experience. I lasted about 4 months with it before buying my first Gateway computer, and I’ve been online ever since.

This, of course, never happened to an actual WebTV user, but was caught in testing, just before rollout–luckily.  It’s a coding error, and the article explains it all.  There’re several more anecdotes on the site.  Enjoy!

I spent most of my day replacing the heater/vent/light in the bathroom. What a pain in the butt. this one seems to be slightly better made than the previous two, so I’m hoping that the heater lasts longer (which is why I had to replace it). Last time I just replaced the heater, but this time, the insides are totally different, and actually the dimensions are slightly different also, so I had to do some cutting in the ceiling. Two things that suck about the unit:

1. 1. The wiring box needs to be bigger, so that you can actually close it when you get all the wires in.
2. 2. The way the light reflector is held in is engineered stupidly–you screw a cap nut onto a bolt until it’s tight and then keep going until the bolt unscrews itself out of the cross bar it’s in until the cap nut pulls the reflector against the bar. Why not just use a short sheet metal screw like they always have? Why make it difficult, and non-obvious? Jeez!

For those who wonder the unit is a Nutone 665RP.

It looks like males will soon be irrelevant to the survival of the human race.

Eugene Sargent

All sorts of funky coolness, like this computer case:

He, also, shows his process in some of the items in the gallery.  Even cooler.

Of course I’m sure I couldn’t afford it.

via Make

Rabies Virus Helps Deliver Drugs into the Brain | GNIF Brain Blogger

Freaky Cool.

Mad Materials Science: Translucent Concrete Lets The Light Shine In

What’s particularly impressive about translucent concrete is that the optical fibers only make up 4% of the mixture, which is what allows (they claim) the concrete to retain the same “technical data” as normal concrete. In layman’s terms we’re assuming this means “Pretty light shine through, house not fall down.” Based on the photos of the concrete in action, and if this load-bearing claim holds up (get it?) then we imagine that this would get put to immediate use in the construction of formerly boring government buildings everywhere.

More from a google search.
Hehe, this looks pretty cool, and vaguely useful. Like you can see how big a mob as amassed outside your walled fortress, and never have a baseball-shattered window again.

Mechanical Chic - the Jewelry of Connie Verrusio
Fascinated by the way things work, Connie Verrusio creates radical new jewelry forms from leftover functions.

Connie Verrucio who uses mechanical “junk” to make fine jewelry.  Gears, lugpins, screws, nails, old film–they don’t sound like the subjects of fine jewelry, but that’s just what Connie Verrusio turns them into.

“I am fascinated by all things mechanical,” she says, “and the choices I make reflect a deep reverence for the quality of workmanship, all too often a thing of the past.”

It’s steampunk without the attitude.

Cool Tool: Five Good eBooks

1) A book (even without its paper pages) is a long argument that coheres as a whole, and whose argument or story is made by integrating well-selected parts.
From Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of The Well (The WELL was an early, influential, and pioneering outpost in what later came to be called cyberspace.), an editor of Whole Earth Review 9and actin publisher after Stewart Brand left), and one of the founding editors of Wired magazine, among other things (for those who don’t know who he is). This is from his Cool Tools blog which is about Cool Tools for everyday living–sorta a continuance of the Whole Earth Review.
Check out the blog, and his other stuff.

Snorting a Brain Chemical Could Replace Sleep