xword faxtx: toadfish

Today, my crossword puzzle taught me that there is such a thing as a TOADFISH. All I know about them is that they are "grunting, slimy-skinned swimmer[s]" and they are uuuhuuuhhuuuggggly:


Wikipedia


Encyclopedia Brittanica



Science Friday

rain

Rain is still a somewhat foreign concept to me, as I live in southern California (for another week, anyways!). I did live in Boston for a few years as a semi-adult, but I seem to have blocked those years out rather successfully. Anyways, it is raining here! Rain! For like a week! Can you imagine it? I've basically had enough of the rain, but it is still kind of interesting. Here are some things I can tell you about rain.

• It makes a nice sound when it falls on your umbrella.
  
• When you walk under trees, there is both more and less of this nice sound -- less drops, but the drops that fall are big and startling. The bottoms of tree trunks don't get very wet.
• Umbrellas work when it is not too windy! They are ineffective in Boston.
  
• Rain makes the slight curves and slants of everything super-evident. There will be torrential rivers in some places. You do not want to walk in these places. Sometimes these places are hard to see in the dark. Especially when you are almost to your destination and not paying as good attention.
  
• Boots are a pain to wear, but it is nice not to have wet feet. The best solution is to carry a pair of flip-flops in your bag, wear the boots while walking outside, and then change into the flip-flops when you get inside. You would think that wearing flip-flops in the rain would be okay, but the problem is that the cuffs of your pants will get wet, and this is extremely unpleasant.
• Wet pant cuffs and wet shoes and wet socks are the worst.
• The only part of your body that cannot be protected from the rain is the upper part of your legs. These are called your thighs, I suppose. Chickens also have thighs.
  
• Things that should not get wet in your backpack (like your laptop) should be put inside a plastic bag inside your backpack. Your backpack provides only a thin layer of protection.
  
• It is often cold when it rains. It would be nicer if it was warmer.
  
• Walking to school is an adventure in the rain.
• I hope it stops raining before I have to move. I bet it would suck to move in the rain.
  

use gunzip to uncompress a file to a different location

Here is how:

gunzip -c myfile.gz > newdir/mynewfile

More info:

If you use gunzip to uncompress a file, it will by default replace the old .gz file with a new uncompressed version of the original file name. If you want to rename or move the file, this may be an issue. For me, I wanted to uncompress a file that is on an external hard drive and store the uncompressed version on a different external hard drive. The -c option sends output to stdout and does not remove the original .gz file. Then, the uncompressed data is piped to file with the > part of the command.
[Image by Hayv Kahraman, from A Journey Round My Skull]

why aren't my videos playing in powerpoint?

New Powerpoint-video-embedding tip: I've just figured out why some of my videos were refusing to play in Powerpoint. Here are the original symptoms. The videos were encoded with Xvid (using VirtualDub). Other videos encoded in exactly the same way were playing. If I uncompressed the videos (i.e. converted to uncompressed BGR format or whatever it is called), the videos would play in Powerpoint. Here was the problem: apparently Powerpoint didn't like the names of the videos. They were too long or something. Of course, the names were the same for the uncompressed versions, so apparently the names were too long to use the Xvid codec with Powerpoint? I don't know.

[Picture by Alexander Alexeieff, from A Journey Around My Skull]

everyone wants to know why luke wilson got fat

hot stuff coming thru ... 2010!

Here are some stuffs that I have liked recently.

• 70-minute review of why the Phantom Menace is so bad.
  
  I have seen most of this review at least twice while various members of my family watched it at my recommendation. It is very correct.
  


• Some guy pretends to be a 1920's reporter named Scoops Callahan and asks professional athletes silly questions at press conferences.
  
  I think only Eli comes off looking stupid.


• Lots of goats in a tree. More goats than I expected (before seeing this video, I would have expected to always see zero goats in a tree).
  
  


• Hipster Runoff: The Most Authentic/Relevant/Successful Artists of the Decade (The Best Albums/MP3s/Songs/Artists/Bands/Humans of the Decade). This is quite the stream of consciousness on what we like and why we like it and why we think we like it and what we like we like and why we like to tell others what is hot stuff with a hatpin. For the aughts. Yeah.
  
  

• The Awl "End of the 00's" Retrospecticus. There are some thoughtful end-of-the-decade essays on The Awl. Here are two of my favorites:
• The End of the 00s: The Ballad of That Guy From Titus Andronicus (As Told To Matthew Perpetua)
• The End of the 00s: The Experience of Dishonorable Debates, by Seth Colter Walls


• Photo History of the people of Earth 1839 to 1853:

  The entire public domain photo records of all the known surviving photographs from the beginning in 1826 to development in 1839 through to 1853. Montaged into ten minutes...

  
  


• Frog Legs Dancing With A Little Salt. I would like to try this.
  
  
  


• Colouring of Pigeons by The Knife. I had never listened to The Knife before, but "Colouring of Pigeons" is one of the craziest, rockingest new songs I have heard. It is, apparently, from an opera based on Darwin's "On the Origin of the Species". I have never been so excited for an opera based on a historic scientific work.

Xvid encoding restrictions

I spent some time just now trying to figure out why I couldn't get VirtualDub to compress a video using the Xvid codec. The issue apparently was that the frame width and height had to be a multiple of 4 (maybe only 2, I just tried 4). This is not listed in the video format restrictions, and I feel like this used to not be the case, but also that at some point it was the case, or maybe that was just for Divx. Who knows? Anyways, if you are trying to compress a video with VirtualDub and are getting the error:

VirtualDub cannot start video compression:
An unknown error occurred (may be corrupt data)
(error code -100)

try resizing your video to be multiples of 4.

milkcicle

Here is a milk-cicle that formed in my fridge because our milk container came with a tiny hole somewhere in the bottom.

segways

I am thankful that we don't live in a world in which Segways are popular.

What is the opposite of a miracle?

Do you know a word that means the direct opposite of a miracle? Like a divinely inspired terrible thing? A plague? A curse? Not quite, right? Anyways, we need that word.