Month: June 2017

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Youtuber Erica Hoff shares this video of a motorcyclist having a very bad day.

This guy merged onto the I-80E (Sacramento, CA) on his motorcycle as we were driving in the fast lane. As he merged, his bike would shake and wobble. He sometimes would only have one hand on the handle bars while it was shaking!! We couldn’t figure out why it was shaking, but we noticed it would only do it once he hit high speeds. We paced him for 5-10 miles after watching him “almost” loose control (about 5 or 6 times), so I got my phone out, thinking “its only a matter of time before he crashes” and I wanted the video as evidence in case anyone else got hurt. Sure enough the very moment I get my phone out, happens to be the time he loses control. We pulled over immediately…..called 911, and help the man (and his bike) off to the side of the road as quickly as possible. He did walk over to the right shoulder by himself. His face was really mashed up (his nose looked broken) and arms covered in blood. Crazy road rash!!! I still wonder how he’s doing 🙁

Oh, and the sirens you hear in the background aren’t because he’s being chased by the cops….my kids were watching peppa pig…..it was just a coincidence 😉

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Starting July 10, you can bid on TRS-80 computers, dot matrix printers, Realistic speakers, shortwave receivers, old catalogs, and company “memorabilia” from the bowels of bankrupt RadioShack. From the auction site:

From humble beginnings in Boston in 1921, over the past 95 years RadioShack established itself as a globally recognized leader and the go to retailer for consumer electronics. RadioShack has always been known as the place for answers to the American public’s technology and electronics questions. “You’ve got questions, we’ve got answers.”

Over the years, RadioShack introduced consumers to exciting and affordable gadgets and electronics that have become household items. As we cleaned out our historic archives in Fort Worth, Texas, we uncovered a cache of iconic memorabilia in 12 huge safes, including: unused original TRS-80 Microcomputers, Realistic Transistor Radios, Tandy computer software games, original brick cell phones and so much more. We all remember coming into RadioShack whether it was for the battery-of-the-month, new walkie-talkies, or to check out the newest RC toy cars. Now we reintroduce many of those nostalgic items and more with our rolling online memorabilia auction.

RadioShack Auction #1 (thanks, Charles Platt!)

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Gotta make 25 burgers for a whole bunch of tykes? Increase the speed and control the consistency of your burgers doneness with a grill press!

This cast iron beauty will apply heat directly to the top of your burger, speeding its cooking and making it cook more evenly. Simply heat the press up on your grill before you start cooking, and put it on top of the meat, or veg, that you want to see finish up fast.

I also use a press for making bacon completely flat, when I go full-on compulsive about my bacon.

Update International New 8″ Barbecue BBQ Grill Steak Weights via Amazon

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William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer is far from forgotten; the times seem almost uncannily like an interregnum between the world he wrote in and the world he wrote. But the 1988 video game adaptation is another matter. [via]

Mark Hill:

The game’s developers were challenged with portraying this futuristic nonspace while still creating an accessible and interesting game, and all with computers that were barely a step up from a calculator and a potent imagination. The end result is surreal, abstract, and lonely. It’s a virtual world that’s simultaneously leagues beyond our internet, yet stunted and impractical, a world where you can bank online before doing battle with an artificial intelligence yet won’t let you run a simple search query and forces you to “physically” move between one virtual location and the next. It’s cyberspace as envisioned by a world that didn’t yet have the computing power to experience it for real, a virtual 2058 that would look archaic before the turn of the millennium.

Hill gets it, especially how the game seeks to understand cyberspace as a city. But I think he’s wrong in suggesting that contemporary hardware limitations (“a step up from a calculator”) were the game’s undoing. If anything, I feel that the cusp of the 16-bit era was perfect for implementing Neuromancer as a solipsistic, non-networked adventure game. Indeed, much of the history of the 16-bit era can be read as increasingly successful efforts to implement the vision of Neuromancer as a narrative experience rather than a labyrinthine multidimensional bulletin board.

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Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced Wednesday that it plans to land an astronaut on the moon by 2030, joining China in a new manned race to space.

It is the first time JAXA has revealed an intention to send Japanese astronauts beyond the International Space Station, and it will mostly likely be part of an international mission, the agency said.

The announcement from Japan Wednesday is just the latest in a series of ambitious space exploration plans by Asian countries, with the increasing competition for space-related power and prestige in the region echoing that of the Cold War space race of the mid-20th century.

In December 2016, China announced plans to land a rover on Mars by 2020 as well as a manned mission to the Moon at some point in the future.

Pictured here is one of JAXA’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries rockets, via Danspace.

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Kevan Davis’s Wikitext is an incredibly clever mashup of Wikipedia and Infocom-style text adventure games: starting with a random Wikipedia entry, it gives you the article summary, an 8-bit-ified version of the main photo, and “directions” to the articles referenced by the one you’ve landed on. (via Waxy)