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Fractal dinner!
Much to my surprise, my mum has turned out to be a budding mathematician and for dinner on Christmas Eve we were presented with Romanesco Broccoli! I had forgotten what a beautiful vegetable it was (the last one I’d seen I had bought from Tesco for a lecture on fractals about 10 years ago). For anyone of a mathematical persuasion the broccoli (or cauliflower as I prefer) is one of Nature’s finest examples of a fractal, although it is usually it’s poor relation the humble cauliflower that is used as an everyday example (with fractal dimension approximately 2.88). Here it is pre-cooking:
Shortened URL: http://go.dave-wood.org/e
Ксения Симонова – Sand Animation
This is the winner of the Ukranian talent show “Ukraine’s Got Talent”, Kseniya Simonova.. absolutely stunning and just had to share. No words can do it justice, just watch and enjoy.
Shortened URL: http://go.dave-wood.org/2e
Meerkat Second Life Viewer
Just discovered the Meerkat Second Life viewer brought to us by the Open Metaverse Foundation, another open source viewer but it has some nice features and layout for the standard viewer features. The reason I like it so much is that it runs very smoothly on my Eee PC, and crucially you can change the draw distance by a simple text command. E.g. typing “dd 16″ into open chat will instantly reduce your draw distance to 16m.. perfect for boosting the frame rate to work on projects when more distant objects are extra to requirements. There seem to be problems with streaming sound currently, but the many improvments on the official viewer outweigh that minor inconvenience. The latest release is July 20th 2009 and can be downloaded from the project’s main page at http://www.meerkatviewer.org/.
Latest release notes from the Meerkat viewer wiki: (more…)
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Upgrading my Eee PC 900
In an effort to squeeze some extra performance out of my trusty Asus EeePC 900 I finally got around to upgrading the memory from the standard 1GB DDR2-400 to 2GB DDR2-667. After several attempts of the poor thing not even booting with the new memory installed I was about to give up when I found an obscure forum posting that gave the solution so I thought I’d post it here too in case someone else has the same problem. The steps are easy!
- Buy some new memory.
- With the battery and power cable removed undo the two small screws at the back and open up the panel (see photo)
- Release the two clips on the side and ease old memory out.
- Push in new memory, gently ease it down and it should click into place (don’t press too hard!).
- Replace battery, press power button and immediately press F2 until the BIOS screen comes up.
- This screen should notice the new memory…. press save and exit (F10)
- That’s it! Your Eee should reboot with your usual OS.
It was the whole BIOS step that had passed me by. Still too early to comment on any increased performance, but it definately works and hasn’t blown up yet. (more…)
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