Karu’s blog

This is totally kickass! voice search…supposedly can search even if you just hum a tune. I am sitting on my desktop that does not have a mic , so have not test it.

www.midomi.com

hmm…so Barbaro is finally euthanized. Raises the question if the pain and struggle was worth it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/29/sports/29cnd-barbaro.html?ex=1327726800&en=2a5ea0286516652c&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

It finally snowed in Madison, WI after I moved here. The great weather effect I brought with me is finally wearing off.  More snow predicted Cats love it!

This has been bugging me for a long time – how to easily get reliable backup for my data. I researched a bunch of online solutions (1nad1, dreamhost etc.). They typically amount to less than a cost of 200GB disk per year. I was very tempted to choose one of them, but then among the RAS (reliability, availability, and servicability) properties their reliability is defined by when they go out of business! I am nervous using such a system as backup.

So I went back to researching rolling-my-own RAID system. Basically I know these disks are going to fail every 2 or 3 years and I don’t want to manually restore from a DVD etc. To build such a system on my own, so far I need to put down about $300 for the desktop board, CPU etc, plus about $40 for an IDE card so I can plug multiple 100GB disks, and about $250 for 3 or 4 disks. With all this in theory I should be go to go in about an hour. Still thinking if I should go down this road. I am totally frustrated by the commodity solutions which all cost more than $2000 and provide TBs of storage!

On a related note, there has been a bunch of interesting announcements – Windows Home Server, Dell DataSafe.

Amazon S3 is a good solution  http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/007624.html

Boingboing has a link on edible squid postcards. Neat!

“Produced by the Susami fishing cooperative, Surumail postcards consist of dried surume squid (Todarodes pacificus), the local seafood specialty. The squid jerky is flattened and vacuum-packed into the shape of a postcard, and an adhesive label is included for the postage, delivery address and a short message.”

I just recently moved to Wisconsin from Texas and went through the painful process of stocking my house with groceries and other miscelleneous stuff – which involves numerous trips from car to house.

And importantly you need to carry that stuff in plastic bags or paper bags in your hand. After doing a bunch of these trips I hit upon the idea of building my own cart to move stuff from car to house. I was seriously researching what types of small wheels they have in home depot, what type columns to use to support the cart etc. I was in bed, bath and beyond and lo and behold I saw photo 1 – cart0.

I was totally psyched by the icons on it! Its a pretty efficient nifty thing – folds very compactly and is pretty manouverable. See photos cart1 and cart2. cart3 shows the cart in action! I am mostly satisfied with it – the wheels are
not great at climbing small ridges and small bumps, but i like it a lot.

Hello world!

EETimes has a detailed article on Tesla Roadster’s electric car. I want to get one of these – unfortunately they are sold out for 2007 already. link

Woman with a pefect memory. ABC News article. From digg.

“It’s possible that AJ’s brain has some “disconnections” that help her recall past events from her memory bank without interference from the parts of her brain that act as general processors. But the problem is that even if they find some interesting wiring through brain scans, the researchers will be limited in their conclusions by the fact that AJ seems to be unique.

So unique, in fact, that the Irvine team has given her condition a new name. They call it hyperthymestic syndrome, based on the Greek word thymesis for “remembering” and hyper, meaning “more than normal.”