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Monthly Archives: August 2011

The Merchants’ War by Frederik Pohl

The Merchants’ War is the much later (thirty-one years!) sequel to The Space Merchants. It continues the story after the settlement of Venus has become established. The novel revolves around the continuing conflict between the Advertising Agency controlled earth and the Anti-Huckster Venus. The Merchants’ War is a pretty good continuation of The Space Merchants, [...]

Customizing Safari Reader in 5.1, the solution

This is the current version of my article on altering the appearance of Safari Reader. The version for Safari 5.0 is still up, as is my original request for help with 5.1. When Safari 5.0 was released, I was excited about the new Reader feature, but had to edit a file inside the application package [...]

The ’70s oil crises

Yesterday I mentioned that a car met the goal in the Vetter Fuel Challenge. This 100 mpg car is the MAX, a very small diesel car created by Jack McCornack. I was skimming his development blog and saw a good summary of the 1970s oil crises: Back in the ’70s, we experienced what I’ve been [...]

AMA Vintage Days Vetter Fuel Challenge

I’ve been following Craig Vetter’s motorcycle fuel economy projects for a couple years, and just noticed that he posted impressive new results. His goal is to create a vehicle that can safely and comfortably carry four bags of groceries on the highway on a windy day, and still get over 100 miles per gallon. In [...]

The Space Merchants by Pohl and Kornbluth

The Space Merchants is a very good short novel (158 pages) presenting an early 1950s view of what the world would look like in the near future if it became dominated by advertising agencies. The book is written from the perspective of the marketing executive who is in charge of promoting the soon to be [...]

Renewable Energy for Your Home by Bryan and Belli

I saw this book on the featured shelf at the local library and it looked interesting. I only read this book quickly, so here is a nano-review: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Renewable Energy for Your Home is a very basic intro to the different categories of home energy production and conservation for people who [...]

Prairie Dock

I took some pictures of Silphium terebinthinaceum, also called prairie dock or prairie rosinweed. This is a fairly tall prairie plant, so I had to stand on a step ladder to take the pictures. Balancing on a ladder while trying to take critically sharp pictures of bees on flowers that are six to nine feet [...]

Fuelly

I just found Fuelly, and I immediately thought “Why didn’t I create this website?” Fuelly looks like a nice simple (and easy to write) site that allows users to track their fuel economy. It uses this data to generate histograms of mileage for any model of car with a sufficient number of entries. Of course, [...]