A DEFCON talk “The Secret Life of SIM Cards” that covers running apps on your SIM card. Surprisingly they run a subset of Java and execute semi-independent of the Phone’s OS.
Possible combinations to shuffle a deck of cards is 8.0658X1067 compared to the number of times a deck of cards has been shuffled thus far in
history 1.546X1023
2010 Dec 8, 5:43This that lets your PC read four digital encrypted cable signals at once with a cable card from you cable company. This is cool although expensive. What frustrates me is the lack of choices in this
area.cablecablecardhardwarepctechnicalmediacenter
2009 Dec 7, 3:25Cool, I've been waiting for this: "Twitter creator Jack Dorsey’s Square application, which is like a smartphone PayPal for credit cards, attracted lots of warranted attention for its potential to
enable peer-to-peer and merchant credit card transactions in the real world far beyond what’s capable today in most countries." Oh, never mind... "As a customer, all you need to buy from a Square
merchant is a credit, debit or pre-paid card"credit-cardmoneyvia:louiscellphonesquare
QFC, the grocery store closest to me, has those irritating shoppers cards. They try to motivate me to use it with
discounts, but that just makes me want to use a card, I don't care whose card and
I don't care if the data is accurate. They should let me have my data or make it useful to me so that I actually care.
I can imagine several useful tools based on this: automatic grocery lists, recipes using the food you purchased, cheaper alternatives to your purchases, other things you might like based on what
you purchased, or integration with dieting websites or software. At any rate, right now all I care about is getting the discount from using a card, but if they made the data available to me then
the grocery store could align our interests and I'd want to ensure the data's accuracy.
2009 Sep 1, 4:57"Protect the wonderful convenience of RFID enabled cards with the Flipside Wallet." Looks like the Jimi but does RFID shielding and looks fat enough to hold US paper money folded once
vertically. productwalletrfid
2009 Jul 24, 5:29Contains a few operators I hadn't seen, like '~[word]' for results that contains the synonym of the word, '*' for wildcards within quoted phrases, and 'info:[URL]' for their cache results, links to
and from the page, etc.via:sambrookgooglesearchoperatorstechnical
2009 Mar 25, 1:03Finally more storage for all those virtual console games I download: "What is going to interest gamers, however, is the expanded support for storage on the Nintendo Wii. The new update for the Wii
Menu allows you to download and launch content straight from an SD card, and there is now support for SDHC cards, meaning you can cheaply add as much storage to your system as you'd like. A game was
shown launching from a memory stick, with only a short loading time."nintendowiivideogamestorage
2009 Jan 22, 9:48"Revocation presents another challenge. If a system relies only on a biometric for both identity and authentication, how do you revoke that factor? Forgotten passwords can be changed; lost smartcards
can be revoked and replaced. How do you revoke a finger?"articlemicrosoftsecurityidentityauthenticationbiometrics
Another use for my new phone is as a replacement for my grocery
card, those little plastic cards with a bar code on them that the grocery store gives you to track your purchasing habits. I've previously gone to great lengths to increase space in my pockets by
removing infrequently used keys and reducing my wallet to the essentials. So I was glad to get rid of the QFC card and replace it with a photo of its bar code on my phone. Since the important part
of the QFC card is the bar code which is just an image of black lines, if your phone has a camera and a screen with a reasonable resolution you can take a photo of the bar code and later display it
to a reader. I've so far been able to try it once and successfully at a normal checkout line, but the reaction from the checkout lady was enough that I may in the future just keep a card in my car.
She was very excited, asked me what kind of phone I had, called over another checkout person and generally made a large fuss. Also the checkout people generally don't mind giving me a new card if I
don't have one with me.
The Goodwin family, except for Michelle who is taking a class trip to Washington DC and New York, was in Seattle this week. Sarah and I met up with them for dinner last night at the Icon Grill. I
enjoy the Icon Grill in general and last night was no exception especially having dinner with the Goodwins which was a lot of fun. It was particularly cold and at one point snowed. The Goodwin's
are seeing all the classic tourist attractions in Seattle some of which are depicted in the following 1962
Seattle's Worlds Fair postcard. The postcard is featured on Paleo-Future and unsurprisingly the 1962 Worlds Fair favored Seattle's Space Needle and
monorail.
2007 Nov 19, 3:47I really appreciate that the first gen Zune's get the new Zune's
firmware and software. I like the updated Zune software personally because its faster and simpler, has better podcast support, and the whole social thing has is on their website now. So, I guess
I like the software because it has new features that should have been there in the first place.
The social thing is like a Zune social network. It uses your Xbox Live friends to seed your Zune friends list, lets you do the expected social network stuff, lets you preview songs, and unlike first
gen Zunes which required face to face time with other Zune owners, allows you to send songs to people. It also lets you display your recently played tracks and your favorite tracks, similar to what
Last.FM has, via a Zune Card. I like the Zune Card from a technical perspective because it
separates the
Zune Card view, written in flash from the User Card data which is in XML. I hope
they intend to keep the XML available via this UserCard Service because I think there's potential to easily do cool things.microsofttechnicalmusiczunesocial
2007 Oct 12, 3:20And now to fit in better with the rest of the emo kids on LJ, in no particular order here are some reasons why I feel old:
I've attended friends weddings sorted chronologically by when I met them: Lucas from high school, followed by Carissa from college,
and then Palak from Microsoft.
I rarely get carded for alcohol.
Jon's moving to Germany soon -- this time permanently. He's already started the process of getting rid of possessions he's not taking with him like his car and TV. However, after doing so he
couldn't maintain his smug "I don't even own a TV" attitude and ended up trading me my small CRT TV
(as mentioned previously) for his DDR pads and games. A good trade for both since we were each looking to dump these items. So far I've
only convinced Sarah to try DDR once with me. Somehow I've gotten much worse at something I wasn't that great at to begin with.
I have business cards.
I still have semi-monthly nightmares in which I'm taking a Linear Algebra course for which I haven't studied or done homework in years. This differs from the more frequent nightmares I had
immediately after finishing that series of classes in which I was taking the final and it was all on the one topic I didn't study. In reality, the prof. had done his PhD work on this one topic and
I, correctly betting it wouldn't appear on the final, didn't study it. Apparently this was a traumatic bet for me to make given the wake of destruction left on my dreams.
I have to remind myself that 2005 was two years ago.
2007 Aug 9, 5:41To satisfy my hands which have already learned to type *nix commands I like to install Win32 versions of common GNU utilities. Unfortunately, the
which command is a rather literal port and requires you to enter the entire name of the command for which you're looking. That is 'which which' won't find itself but
'which which.exe' will. This makes this almost useless for me so I thought to write my own as a batch file. I had learned about a few goodies available in cmd.exe that I thought would
make this an easy task. It turned out to be more difficult than I thought.
for /F "usebackq tokens=*" %%a in ( `"echo %PATH:;=& echo %"` ) do (
for /F "usebackq tokens=*" %%b in ( `"echo %PATHEXT:;=& echo %"` ) do (
if exist "%%a"\%1%%b (
for %%c in ( "%%a"\%1%%b ) do (
echo %%~fc
)
)
)
)
The environment variables PATH and PATHEXT hold the list of paths to search through to find commands, and the extensions of files that should be run as
commands respectively. The 'for /F "usebackq tokens=*" %%a in (...) do (...)' runs the 'do' portion with %%a sequentially taking on the value of every line in
the 'in' portion. That's nice, but PATH and PATHEXT don't have their elements on different lines and I don't know of a way to escape a newline character to
appear in a batch file. In order to get the PATH and PATHEXT's elements onto different lines I used the %ENV:a=b% syntax which replaces occurrences of a with b
in the value of ENV. I replaced the ';' delimiter with the text '& echo ' which means %PATHEXT:;=& echo% evaluates to something like "echo
.COM& echo .EXE& echo .BAT& ...". I have to put the whole expression in double quotes in order to escape the '&' for appearing in the batch file. The usebackq and
the backwards quotes means that the backquoted string should be replaced with the output of the execution of its content. So in that fashion I'm able to get each element of the env. variable onto new
lines. The rest is pretty straight forward.
2007 Aug 6, 4:07I've moved from my previous apartment in Redmond into Sarah's condo in Kirkland. Over the past week I'd been coming home from work and packing and sorting all of my belongings. Everything had a few
destination options:
Sarah's condo
Storage
My office
Recycle/Donate
I donated two carts of computer related junk (two CRTs, two desktops, six laptops, untold number of cables, piles of network and sound cards, etc) to RE-PC and
six garbage bags of clothing that I either never wear or into which I have worn holes into friendly looking clothing donation bins. Of course I still need to find some place to get rid of my 15 inch
CRT TV, VCR, DVD player, and X-Box. I finally emptied my bags of coins that had been collecting for about seven years (one of the bags was from my college orientation) through Coinstar and got ~$160.
Some items seemed to fit very well at work like my satirical RIAA propaganda poster and my Darth Vader Nutcracker. This past weekend I had movers come and actually move my furniture. Most of its now in storage except for
my living room which is moved into Sarah's second bedroom. Now all I have to do is unpack...movepersonalrepcrecyclenontechnical
2006 Dec 21, 3:21Cool photos of miniatures, toys, postcards or photos held up over their real world counterparts. Some look pretty cool.humorphotosbloggallery
QFC, the grocery store closest to me, has those irritating shoppers cards. They try to motivate me to use it with
discounts, but that just makes me want to use a card, I don't care whose card and
I don't care if the data is accurate. They should let me have my data or make it useful to me so that I actually care.
Another use for my new phone is as a replacement for my grocery
card, those little plastic cards with a bar code on them that the grocery store gives you to track your purchasing habits. I've previously gone to great lengths to increase space in my pockets by
removing infrequently used keys and reducing my wallet to the essentials. So I was glad to get rid of the QFC card and replace it with a photo of its bar code on my phone. Since the important part
of the QFC card is the bar code which is just an image of black lines, if your phone has a camera and a screen with a reasonable resolution you can take a photo of the bar code and later display it
to a reader. I've so far been able to try it once and successfully at a normal checkout line, but the reaction from the checkout lady was enough that I may in the future just keep a card in my car.
She was very excited, asked me what kind of phone I had, called over another checkout person and generally made a large fuss. Also the checkout people generally don't mind giving me a new card if I
don't have one with me.
![[Icon Grill front. Licensed under under Creative Commons. By Troy B Thompson]](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/17/22461595_7fb7e702c4_m_d.jpg)
![[Seattle's Worlds Fair Postcard]](http://bp0.blogger.com/_sGYULzoQCgA/R7NOl8B8s2I/AAAAAAAABX4/0gPURFTR4X4/s400/Seattle_Fair_Olympia_Brewing_PC_001.jpg)
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