Monthly Archives: October 2009

Science

Scubacraft

18 Comments

So I think I decided what I want for Christmas… A Scubacraft (I saw it in Wired magazine).

It’s basically a boat that you can hit a button, and it will go underwater (up to 100 feet). It would be pretty awesome to go scuba diving and instead of leaving your boat at the surface, just take it under water with you when you get to the dive site. 🙂 It’s not pressurized, so it’s not a submarine (you would still need scuba gear of course).

It also has an onboard computer that controls your ascent and descent so you don’t go to quickly and give yourself the bends.

I love you, Santa!

Tech Stuff

Google Ups AJAX Search API To 8 Pages

6 Comments

It seems Google has quietly raised it’s limitations on how deep you can look into search results for the AJAX Search API. It’s always been 4 pages (8 results per page), so you could only see the first 32 results.

All of a sudden it was changes to 8 pages (still 8 results per page), so now you can look at the first 64 results. This is quite handy.

Thanks Google, you’re swell!

Tech Stuff

iPhoto ’09 Faces Spinning Forever

6 Comments

Someone I know uses iPhoto, but the Faces part of it wasn’t working. New pictures wouldn’t get scanned for faces and the spinning icon next to the Faces label on the navigation bar would just spin forever (and apparently it’s always been stuck like that).

I Googled the issue, and came up with hundreds of people having the same problem, but no one seemed to figure out a solution.

After a lot of digging and poking around, I think I found the solution. She imported large folders into iPhoto from her old photo management application, and she had some movies in her photo folders. So this is how I fixed it…

  • Quit iPhoto first.
  • Then get into the guts of your iPhoto Library (right-click the iPhoto Library file in your Pictures folder and do “Show Package Contents”).
  • Go to the Originals folder in there and get your movies out of there.
  • Delete the face.db and face_blob.db files.
  • Load iPhoto up and it will start scanning all your faces and with any luck actually get through them all and be kosher going forward.

    • Warning… this will delete all your face tags you had previously (so don’t do it if you tagged a bunch of people manually and don’t want to lose that).

Weird Stuff

Random Email #37

9 Comments

I haven’t posted a random email in awhile, so here’s a new one…

Hello,

I am Mr Mark Jo—-, I will like to make reservation for 6 people that will be coming for vacation in your area on the 20th November to 30th November 2009.

If you have vacancy for the specified period, give me the total cost for the whole period of 10 nights, with either 6 single rooms or 3 double rooms for 6 guests.

Number of Persons: 6
Mr & Mrs Alb—-{37 and 33yrs}
Mr & Mrs Ben—-{40 and 36yrs}
Mr & Mrs Ari—-{44 and 38yrs}
Arrival date: 20th November 2009
Departure date : 30th November 2009.
Number of days: 10 days
Number of Guest: 6,

Confirm availability and get back to me with your rates and total cost and if you will accept major credit card for your payment and convert the total price to British Pounds or Euro.

Thank you and looking forward to hear from you soon.

Regards,
Mark

I’m open to suggestions on how much I should charge these guys to stay at my home… let me know.