New Zealand artist Zarathus recently completed a commission for me: the wonderful one-of-a-kind dragon mask pictured at right.
Additional pictures and information after the jump. As always, click the image thumbnails to see a larger version.
Spring Dragon
May 20
Dragonlords of Werner, Werner & Fulk. Winner of the 2003 Business Fantasy Award. An intense, gripping tale of swordplay, magic, romance and intermarket sector spread. You won’t be able to put this one down, unless it’s for the latest issue of CEOWORLD Magazine.
(From Sean Tejaratchi’s LiarTownUSA. Click image to right to enlarge.)
Pogoplug SAN using AoE
Mar 8
The Pogoplug E02 is a Linux-capable embedded computer with gigabit Ethernet and USB connectivity. It can be found quite cheap (US$35 or so) on the secondary market. As it was originally sold as a storage appliance for home users, it ships with somewhat inflexible factory firmware. However, it is reasonably easy to replace the bootloader with one which can boot an arbitrary Linux distribution.
Once I got my Pogoplug running Debian, it was surprisingly easy to set it up as network storage using ATA-over-Ethernet. Details after the jump.
Raspberry Pi, GPS and NTP
Feb 18
The Raspberry Pi is an inexpensive ARM7-based single-board computer that runs Linux. Using it, together with an almost-equally-inexpensive GPS receiver module from Adafruit Industries, I was able to set up a reasonably good NTP server for my home network. While the hardware side was almost ridiculously easy, the software required a bit of effort, including building a custom kernel and building ntpd from sources. Full details after the jump.
Note: Reasonably heavy UNIX-geekery ahead. Mostly Linux-specific, somewhat Debian-specific and a little bit Ubuntu-specific. Skip if that isn’t your cup of ichor.
I recently did something incredibly ill-considered while logged in (as root, natch) to my Ubuntu server box at home. In essence, I told the package manager to uninstall libc.
On a scale from good to bad, this is bad.
Now, I could have booted up from a rescue disk and fixed it. I could have re-installed easily enough (using the trick where you just keep your existing partitions and don’t format them — though this would have inevitably led to some fallout as various config files and customizations got clobbered). Heck, I even had a reasonably recent backup at hand. None of these sounded especially fun, mostly because the machine was in a place where it’s a hassle to stick a head on it. I had three things working in my favor: an open root-privileged shell prompt, Internet connectivity and my native cunning.
Read on after the jump for the full tale.
Karotz: Movies Application
Aug 22
The Karotz (née Nabaztag) is an Internet-connected embedded system in the form of a stylized mechanical rabbit. I received one of these as a gift, and it’s actually kind of cool. It lacks any kind of display (other than a single multi-color LED), but does have such amenities as a camera, microphone, RFID reader, motorized ears, robust text-to-speech and a Javascript API.
My first application for the Karotz is called Movies. It scrapes the Google movie listings, and reads you upcoming titles and showtimes for the theater of your choice. Full source download and additional discussion after the break.
CD Dragon
Jun 21
A fine dragon sculpture, made by an anonymous Imgur user. Medium: CD shards, hot glue and wire mesh. More images after the jump. Via Obvious Winner.
Read the rest of this entry »
Dragon RC Aircraft
Apr 30
My command of Italian is pretty limited, but I’m pretty sure I’ve just been reading about a radio-controlled model aircraft named Mythical Beast which just won “Best of Show” at an exhibition in Toledo, Ohio. More details and video of a flight are available from the Hobby Media site. (Via BB.)
Update: Another video (somewhat better) is available on YouTube. English-language audio.
Viinturuth Papercraft
Apr 19
DaiShi made an incredible papercraft model of the dragon Viinturuth from the video game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. More pics after the jump. (Via Win!, via Reddit.)
Dragon Guitar
Apr 5
This dragon guitar is not a bearer of the false metal. The body? A dragon. The headstock? Dragon. Tuning pegs? You get three guesses. (Via Obvious Winner; follow link for additional pictures.)
