ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Fruit Flavored Power —

Within digitize.textfiles.com there’s a chipper little sales catalog for a line of fruit-themed power connectors. Really! The name of the company was Electronic Protection Devices, Inc. They produced power cables, power splitters, and power monitors during the early 1980s. As part of my endless writing away for catalogs and “more information” from computer magazines, I […]

The Little Trojan Horse —

A number of these cameras have been slowly showing up, but my eye is pretty well caught by a camera called the Canon HV10. This might get a tad technical, so I’m going to put lots of explanations into parenthesis. Using HDV compression (a semi-crappy compression scheme that has the advantage of using last generation’s […]

Snake Oil —

A little side-track on the weekend; a friend of mine didn’t believe me when I said this product was being sold in the checkout line of my supermarket, so I bought a bottle to prove it, and since that’s $13 (!!) wasted, the least I can do is amortize the ha-ha by sharing it with […]

That Time that I Cared —

The hardest part of my “job” is neither the collecting of artifacts and information, nor the by-its-very-nature obsolesence of the things I surround my life with. It’s not even the lawyer threats or the endless arranging of my time such that I can do the work of 387 meth addicts. The hardest part, by far, […]

Landscapes by the Country Gardener —

I have a little brother, and his name is Brandon. He’s 19 months younger than me, and where I went into film school and computer administration, he went into landscape design, snowplowing and construction. He works with landscapes like I work with textfiles, if that’s any endorsement. He’s really, really good at it. He’s been […]

It Is Pitch Dark —

Principal shooting finished up last night for a side-project: a music video in support of a song on MC Frontalot’s new album, Secrets From the Future. For some segment of the population, the idea of the director of the BBS Documentary doing a music video with the head of the nerdcore hip-hip movement for a […]

Homecoming —

I was chatting with one of my oldest friends, and while going over a few things, he said “TIM needs a new home”. “What?” I said. “Let me forward you the e-mail trail,” he said. When I was 19, living for the first time in my own apartment with multiple roommates, I’d started to get […]

A Touch of the Shmoo —

The weekend was spent, as mentioned previously, at Shmoocon, which is either a hacker conference, a security conference, DEFCON East, or The Potter Family Speech Extravaganza. Here’s some Potters for you. I’d normally go off here on a multi-paragraph description of Shmoocon, but knowing about Shmoocon isn’t Shmoocon’s problem. Every one of the three years […]

Shmoocon: Hackers on a Plane —

I’ll write a separate summary of Shmoocon shortly, but I wanted to highlight a most intriguing idea which the fellows from the Hacker Foundation are floating and putting together. The idea is simple enough: Hackers on a Plane. Here’s the pitch. Basically, there’s the DEFCON convention, coming this summer to Las Vegas, and shortly afterward […]