02.22
Allright.
We’re coming up on the fourth Satuday of February, which means that its time to flip over the framed photo of Bill Gates you keep on your night stand before heading over to HAL-PC for the Houston Linux Users Group Bi-Monthly Meeting. The group gets together from two to four in the afternoon this Saturday at the HAL-PC headquarters, located at 4543 Post Oak Place Drive. If you’re new to Linux, never fear. The meeting takes the form of an hour and a half presentation over some *practical* aspect of the Linux operating system or the applications that support it. If you still feel like Socially Awkward Penguin, know that 1) Linux people love penguins. And 2) Adobe is abandoning future updates of their flash player for Linux. Going forward, they will remove all Linux downloads from their website and will offer the player only as part of Google Chrome for Linux.
So, you’re now armed with a feeling of social acceptance *and* an appropriate level of Adobe angst. You should fit in just fine…
If you want to show up an hour early, you can check out the Robotics Lab. This group takes a step by step approach to building and programming robotics, and will even prepare you to observe or even participate in nearby robotics competitions. The lab is actually a four hour session set aside for lab work, assembly, programming and individual
instruction.
Both meetups happen at HAL PC, the Houston Area League of PC Users. Hit www.hal-pc.org for details and directions.
And with high powered microcontrollers coming down in price, many roboticists are turning toward Linux as a robotic platform rather than rolling their own operating systems from scratch.
Which could play out very well for you if your plan for world domination requires the use of robotic armies. Of course, I’m talking about the March installment of the Technology Bytes Geek Gathering. It’s not for another two weeks, but I wanted to raise the alarm early so that everyone has an ample amount of time to get their blueprints for world domination converted to Power Point.
If this is news to you, then you haven’t seen the brilliantly big flyer for next month’s Geek Gathering featuring the Penguin (A-ha! A theme!) and the Joker being photo-bombed by some guy in an eye mask and a spandex shirt. If you happen to know the identity of this man, please let us know. Until then, it will have to remain an Enigma.
Hit www.geekradio.com to make a positive identification and get details on the next Gathering.
And lastly, a birthday. If you’ve had to Google anything today, then you’ve probably noticed the squiggly moving line on their home page. If that reminds you of how you drive a rental car while vacationing in a new city, then you’re on the money. The man who pioneered the rental car industry, John D. Hertz, was born on April 10th, 1879, just 22 years and 12 days apart from Heinrich Hertz, the German physicist who clarified and expanded the electromagnetic theory of light. The scientific unit of measurement for frequency, or cycles per second, was named Hertz, in his honor.
For example, the speed of the processor in your computer is measured in gigahertz, a combination of Hertz, again meaning cycles per second, and Giga, named after Joseph Giga, the man who invented very large numbers.
So, does anyone know the clock speed of Technology Bytes?
I’ll give everyone a second to do the math while that one listener at home fact checks me on the Joseph Giga reference. (I made it up.)
OK. Let’s do this The Price is Right Style: whoever comes closest without going over wins. No negative numbers, please.
Answers or guesses, gentlemen?
Groove: : ABSTAINS
Dwight: : 89.5
PhliKtid: : 901MH
Peter: : 9.01
JayLee: : 90.1
The actual retail price, as expressed in hertz, is:
One – Six hundred and four thousandths and eight hundredths hertz.
That’s .000 001 65 hertz.
Oh no! You’ve all over bid!
If you’d like to see the new TechBytes is Right in person, send yourself, sans a self addressed stamped envelope to Tickets, at 2503 Bagby, Houston Texas, 77006, on Friday March 2nd, but for now…
That’s it for your missive of mis-info and that’s that for BarretTime.
