Quartz City

macnews.net.tc describes my dream laptop:

A notebook. Style: 12″ PowerBook. But smaller. 10″ widescreen display at, say, 1024*600. Display type would be active-matrix greyscale. Yep, greyscale. Those were the only displays one could use under any light-conditions. But they don’t make those any more. So: Transreflective colour TFT. Processor: 500 MHz G3. Or higher, if a more modern processor uses less power, that is. RAM: 256 MB. Harddisk: 4 GB flashdrive, as mentioned above. Optical drive: None. (No need. You’d put the thing in FireWire-TargetMode for synching with your main Mac and could also install the OS etc. like that.) Form factor: About the size of one of those old VAIO picture-books. And battery power for more than eight hours.

Sure, the thing wouldn’t run OS X like a king, but hey: What speed do you need for TextEdit? And it’d still double as an iPod that could also display DivX (erhm, MPEG-4, legally acquired in some or other way, *cough*!) movies. The harddrive, of course, could be replaced by a ‘normal’ notebook harddrive with up to 60 GB. You would sacrifice battery life for space then, of course. But that thing could still last for more than 6 hours. End of wishlist. – Oh, and the other nostalgy part: This could be called “eMate 500”. 😉

Speaking of Godzilla, it’s obvious no surprise that every country needed to get in on the “giant monster crushing city” game – Denmark had Reptilicus crushing Copenhagen way back in 1961, Hong Kong released Thunder Of Gigantic Serpent, and the Thai film industry is about to release Garuda .

Buried in obscurity is Pulgasari, the North Korean monster who eats iron, helps the farmers defeat their imperialist oppressors before turning against them by eating their farm implements. File it as an inadvertent must see along with the Turkish Star Trek.

The cold war was ripe for all kinds of black humor, but this one blows me away. Especially given the basic computer security paranoia about changing your default passwords.

The Strategic Air Command (SAC) in Omaha quietly decided to set the “locks” to all zeros in order to circumvent this safeguard. During the early to mid-1970s, during my stint as a Minuteman launch officer, they still had not been changed. Our launch checklist in fact instructed us, the firing crew, to double-check the locking panel in our underground launch bunker to ensure that no digits other than zero had been inadvertently dialed into the panel. SAC remained far less concerned about unauthorized launches than about the potential of these safeguards to interfere with the implementation of wartime launch orders. And so the “secret unlock code” during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War remained constant at OOOOOOOO.

I have seen a great deal of badfilm over the years, but never have I seen anything like The Apple before. Or will again, as there’s only ever going to be room for one biblical dystopic glitter disco movie. I can’t remember the last time I laughed so hard at a horrible movie that didn’t have Mike and the bots peeking up from the bottom.

According to Movie Geek (of Beat The Geeks fame) who hosts the midnight movie series at the Nuart, there is going to be a DVD release. I can’t wait!

Stock prices in real-time = tired. Area gas prices in real-time = wired

Taking a cue from French regulations on bread making and German laws on beer production, the Italian government is creating legislation as to what is and isn’t real Neapolitan pizza.

It decrees that a Neapolitan pizza must be round and no more than 35 centimetres in diameter. The centre should not be higher than 0.3 cm and the crust cannot rise over two centimetres.

The law specifies what kind of flour, salt, and yeast and tomatoes have to be used. The sub clauses go even further.

Margherita, the classic type, must be topped not with just any type of mozzarella but mozzarella “from the southern Appenine” mountains.

And restauranteurs beware, you can’t call a pizza a “Margherita extra” unless it is topped with mozzarella made from buffalo milk, a southern Italian speciality.

Rolling pins are blasphemous and dough machines are heretical. The law says the dough must be kneaded by hand.

The CNN story is somewhat derisive and files this story under “News > Funny” but let’s hear it for a country that actually considers it’s cuisine to be part of it’s cultural heritage and worth protecting.

The manned space program (at least the non-NASA part of it) returns to where it all started – the dust, mothballed airplanes, tortoises, and old diners with magnetic flatware of the Antelope Valley.

The Federal Aviation Administration’s Associate Administrator for Commercial Space Transportation (FAA/AST) is expected next month to certify that the Mojave Airport Civilian Flight Test Center as a non-federal spaceport to handle horizontal launches of reusable spacecraft.

Check out Alan’s Mojave Airport weblog while you’re at it.