dhenke – Page 10 – Small Golden Sceptre

Netbook Décor

If this site has a topic at all, then it’s technology and dragons. (It’s right there in the tagline, after all.) Usually I have to make do with one or the other. This is the rare post where I can get both involved. Pictured right is my Acer Aspire One netbook. You might note (“Just look at it!”, etc.) that it has gone from being plain and corporate and boring to being attractively decorated. The process involved a Sharpie permanent marker, and the considerable skill of an artist (not me) who made me swear to conceal his identity, on account of — and I quote — “not being able to draw dragons.”

Much happiness. Your netbook is not as nice as mine. (If you believe otherwise, I want to see pictures.)

CAT Scan

More fun and games with medical imaging. I got a lumbar discogram followed by a CAT scan. I was able to get a CD of imaging data from the latter. Gallery of images and some animated 3D visualizations after the cut.

Yes, I’d Drink That

Look at this dragon latte.

Just look at it.

From The Vulcan & The Unicorn, via Art in My Coffee by way of Metafilter.

Nuke-u-lar Magnetic Resonance Imaging

You may recall with some indifference my immediately previous post, wherein I mentioned how impressed I was with some paltry digital X-ray images. That, dear reader, was the impression of a younger and more easily awed version of yr. humble narrator.

For I have now been imaged, in the nuclear magnetic resonance manner, known to the vulgar as an MRI.

Beyond the jump are images: 156 of them, with inline thumbnails (so please use discretion and have patience if your link is slow). Despite my earlier unseemly levity about the JT sign, all said images are impeccably safe for work.

Throckmorton Indeterminate

Technology is freakin’ amazing.

Thanks to some lower back pain, I got a hands-on experience with digital radiography today. For five bucks — that’s five US dollars — they gave me a CD with the Dicom image files to take home.

Am I going to share those images? Converted to JPEG format on this very website? You bet I am, after the jump.

Found in Space

Over on Boing Boing they’re having a drabble (100-word fiction) contest on the theme “Found in Space”. Apparently one can win a computer. But more to the point, everyone who enters wins a useful writing exercise.

I don’t expect to win; there are a lot of strong entries, some of which I’d choose over mine, were I judging. (I deliberately didn’t read any of them before I composed my submission. Good thing, or I’d probably never have started.)

Read the full text of my story after the jump.

Update: The winner and runner-up have been announced. Congratulations to them, and to the surprisingly large number of other worthy submissions. Thanks to Rob Beschizza and to BoingBoing for running the contest. (Older updates moved to the end of the article.)

Needle-felting: Critical Success!

User tallydragon on deviantART has created a wonderfully detailed little green dragon using wool, wire, glass and crazy-mad needle-felting skills.

Don’t miss the other dragons in her gallery as well; good stuff.

(My thanks to Kanashimi-shi for the link.)

In Soviet Russia, Dragon Uses eBay to Buy You

I’m allergic to “cute”, but the little fellow to the right doesn’t read that way. (Not cute; much fierce!) He was a steal on eBay, and came to me all the way from the former Soviet Union. This is the kind of global economy I can get behind: buying a one-of-a-kind item from the opposite side of the globe. (Don’t worry; I still support local dragon-sculptors whenever I can.)

He showed up in an actual, literal brown paper package tied up with string, too. More pictures after the cut.

Lego Dragon Necromancy

Using the blackest of all dark rituals and a whole lot of expensive Danish plastic, Flickr user “necromancer7” from Seoul, Korea has brought this creature to terrifying un-life. You can see a number of other shots of this bone dragon (as well as other good stuff) on his photostream.

(Via Gizmodo.)

Linux on Zipit: Debian

This is a followup to my original article about using a general-purpose Linux distro on the Zipit Z2 messenger. In this post, I’ll discuss my experience installing Debian (specifically, Emdebian Grip) on the Zipit. This is a significant improvement over the previous process, as it means you can automatically upgrade and install new packages from an extensive repository of pre-compiled software. You can just “apt-get install whatever” instead of having to create a cross-development environment and compile everything yourself. Details after the jump.