A Bigger Hat for Mickey
Category Archives: Interesting Stuff
This category is reserved for interesting bits of information that don’t fit anywhere else, but are really pretty cool.
Better shots of Tinkerbell’s flight this year…
Saw the Live Stream of the ‘Rivers of Light’ Soft Open
Looked great and giving animal kingdom a night time show should make that park a bigger experience. Looking forward to seeing the show in person and with my SLR in tow.
DIsney theme parks always boost my spirits, even here in the slow and cold part of the winter. I’m currently kitting up for our DIsbey vacation in May. Going to hit the parks, do a short cruise (two days at castaway key, yay) and then return to the parks for a short stretch.
Lorna has done her usual, masterful job of putting all of the details together. I’m looking at lightening the hardware load a bit. I normally wind up hauling my laptop along with us to transfer pictures from CF and SD cards to a pair of external drives at the end of each day. I have an Intel NUC that I use as a ‘test target’ for software stuff. I’m hoping that I can use the NUC with my tablet (remote desktop) or the TV in the room and a bluetooth keyboard and mouse in place of the laptop.
So far its looking promising. We’re going into Boston next weekend for Boscon and I’m expecting to use that as a dry run. Ideally I won’t need to use the hotel TV as a display (I can’t really count on having access to the HDMI connector) and can use my Pixel-C tablet instead.
I may try to put together some software to facilitate this process. I’ve tended to use either the desktop explorer or lightroom to transfer files. A small C# or C++ application (or service) that looks for the appropriate drives and then transfers the pictures automatically would be a pretty nice thing. I’ll probably also try to dig up my copy of the Canon application for manipulating images as I’m not going to transfer my lightroom license to the NUC.
Interesting, Disney park attendance down but revenue up…
according to this article.
I’d expect the price hikes to have trimmed down the number of people and I would have assumed that this was somewhat intentional. I’m a bit bemused that Disney is cutting budgets if park and resort revenue is up on fewer total guests. I’d be guessing that they’re trying to squeeze more profit out of operations and that this is an excuse more than a necessity. Continue reading Interesting, Disney park attendance down but revenue up…
AR is a cool thing so…pokemon go
Tonight while listening to reviews of Pokemon GO it struck me just how much potential AR technology has on the entertainment front. Pokemon Go seems to be getting huge traction and I expect that there will be follow on apps from other companies and in other domains. Continue reading AR is a cool thing so…pokemon go
The Things You Learn…
I just found out that there is a way to calculate the ‘nth’ digit of pi (and various other constants) without calculating the intervening digits…see here on Wikipedia for the details. Cool stuff.
Science Fiction and Science Fact…
I was just talking with someone here at work and they mentioned being introduced to the works of Charlie Stross and in particular the laundry files. That got me thinking about some of the tangential things that I discovered after following Charlie’s blog for a while. The book Ignition is a very cool walk through the early work in developing rocket propellants…particularly fun is anything that is ‘hypergolic’. Hypergolic fuels ignite spontaneously when fuel and oxidizer are mixed (a little thought make the importance of this clear as the consequences of dumping a few dozen pounds of fuel and oxidizer together and THEN having them ignite can be unfortunate in a boom! sort of way). Another connection near to this one was the hop to Derek Lowe’s medchem blog with particular attention to his things I won’t work with articles (which have been few and far between of late 🙁 ). The items in these articles are more diverse than the stuff in ignition, but no less interesting…