Here in Saint Paul, the police are evidently somewhat baffled by a recent wave of church burglaries, and the mass of information they’ve provided, such as it is, gives the world a chance to sharpen its information-analysis skills on some, well, real-world data. Crowdsource crime analysis? Why not; have you seen the City budget lately? I admit, this probably isn’t what Chief Harrington meant when he said some months ago that in order to make the city a safer place, the police need the public to do their part, but why let that stop the fun? (It will be fun, I promise!)

The most useful pile of data is contained in this Google Map page, and I’d love to see what inferences people can make from it. To start with…
Read the rest of this entry »

I hang out a bit over at Head-Fi, a headphone/audio forum, particularly in the do-it-yourself (DIY) area. There, a constant stream of people keep asking about soldering irons - which one should I buy, what tips should I use, how hot should it be, and so on. They seem to think that a high-end soldering iron will make them better solderers, but nothing could be further from the truth. All the fancy features in the world won’t make up for inexperience or poor technique, and once you get a little experience and develop good soldering technique, even the crappiest soldering iron is perfectly adequate.
Read the rest of this entry »

Vinculum is a company you’ve probably never heard of; they’re apparently a not-terribly-well-publicized subsidiary of FTDI specializing in USB processors. Well, I - and they - say specializing, but Vinculum basically has just one product - a microcontroller called the VNC1L, which does or can do just about everything USB-related that a circuit designer could ask for. That, I think, it actually the idea, and it’s a pretty good one: where USB is concerned, there’s one chip to do it all, (and in the darkness, blind them?).

To promote their wonderful little chip, FTDI/Vinculum produce a couple really interesting little products of interest to the DIY crowd…
Read the rest of this entry »

It’s easy to suppose that the cassette tape begat music piracy, and in a way that’s true - but while it may have facilitated easy, cheap, and widespread music piracy, it certainly wasn’t the beginning of the problem. In fact, the issue goes back to the grandparents of today’s piracy-happy youth.

Yes, I said grandparents.
Read the rest of this entry »

As the Wikileak-singular blog notes, WikiLeaks-plural are begging for money at the moment, in a way which raises some interesting questions: They apparently are claiming to need eighty-thousand United States Dollars to remain operating for the next three months. Wikileak-singular infers this to mean their annual operating costs are around $320,000, but that isn’t necessarily the case, as there’s little transparency where WikiLeaks-plural are concerned: They imply that they are expecting an infusion of cash in September of this year, so it’s theoretically possible that they’re, say, locked into year-long server leases which are coming up for renewal soon, and don’t have the cash on hand. Eighty grand a year is $6,666 per month, which I would estimate is, worst-case scenario, enough to cover WikiLeaks’ technical costs twice over; eighty grand for three months is a bit over $26,000 per month, which is pretty much absurd, unless the folks behind the project are running it as a for-profit business, which would be more than a bit troubling.

In any event, nobody seems to know where the money goes, or what it’s used for. On the other hand, because WikiLeaks continue their grand tradition of not being as technically competent as they might wish, we now know who at least a few of their donors are…