Border blaster
A border blaster is a licensed commercial radio station that transmits at very high power from one nation to another. Border Blasters should not be confused with international broadcast stations.
The term is perhaps most widely used in the United States of America to describe radio stations broadcasting from various Mexican cities near the border; however, the term is also widely used in the U.K. and Ireland.
With broadcasting signals far more powerful than U.S. stations, the Mexican Border Blasters could be heard over large areas of the U.S. from the 1940s to the ’70s, often to the great irritation of American radio stations, whose signals could be overpowered by their Mexican counterparts. These are also sometimes referred to as X Stations for their call letters: Mexican stations are assigned callsigns beginning with X, whereas American stations begin with the letters W or K and Canadian stations with C or VO.
Conch Republic
The Conch Republic is a micronation declared as a tongue-in-cheek protest secession of the city of Key West from the United States on April 23, 1982. It has been maintained as a tourism booster for the city since.
While the protest that sparked its creation, and others which have occurred periodically since then have been described by some as “tongue-in-cheek”, they were motivated by frustrations over genuine concerns. The original protest event was motivated by a U.S. Border Patrol roadblock and checkpoint which greatly inconvenienced residents and was detrimental to tourism in the area.
Aqua regia
Aqua regia (Latin for royal water) is a highly corrosive, fuming yellow or red solution. The mixture is formed by freshly mixing concentrated nitric acid and concentrated hydrochloric acid, usually in a volumetric ratio of 1:3 respectively. It is one of the few reagents that dissolves gold and platinum. It was so named because it can dissolve the so-called royal, or noble metals, although tantalum, iridium, and a few other metals are able to withstand it.
When Germany invaded Denmark in World War II, the Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy dissolved the gold Nobel Prizes of Max von Laue and James Franck into aqua regia to prevent the Nazis from stealing them. He placed the resulting solution on a shelf in his laboratory at the Niels Bohr Institute. It was subsequently ignored by the Nazis who thought the jar—one of perhaps hundreds on the shelving—contained common chemicals. After the war, de Hevesy returned to find the solution undisturbed and precipitated the gold out of the acid. The gold was returned to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation who recast and presented the medals to Laue and Franck.
Hide Subversion directories with .htaccess
When doing any sort of work with a computer, it’s always a good idea to use some sort of revision control and backup system. I’ve gotten in the habit of keeping my school and projects directories in SVN, and I’m currently in the process of transitioning my website to use SVN. One issue that arises, is that inside each revision controlled directory lives a .svn/ directory, that has a file called entries that details your repository URL, and perhaps even the last username to make changes.
If your Apache install has ModRewrite installed, here is a simple snippet to go in your top-level .htaccess file, that will redirect all attempts to access any .svn/ directory to point to the official SVN website.
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule \.svn/(.*)$ http://subversion.tigris.org [R]
</ifmodule>
Magnetostriction
Magnetostriction is a property of ferromagnetic materials that causes them to change their shape when subjected to a magnetic field. The effect was first identified in 1842 by James Joule when observing a sample of nickel. This effect can cause losses due to frictional heating in susceptible ferromagnetic cores.
Internally, ferromagnetic materials have a structure that is divided into domains, each of which is a region of uniform magnetic polarization. When a magnetic field is applied, the boundaries between the domains shift and the domains rotate, both these effects causing a change in the material’s dimensions. The reciprocal effect, the change of the susceptibility of a material when subjected to a mechanical stress, is called the Villari effect.
Magnetostrictive materials can convert magnetic energy into kinetic energy, or the reverse, and are used to build actuators and sensors. The property can be quantified by the magnetostrictive coefficient, L, which is the fractional change in length as the magnetization of the material increases from zero to the saturation value. The effect is responsible for the familiar “electric hum” which can be heard near transformers and high power electrical devices (depending on country, either 50 or 60 hertz, plus harmonics).
Cobalt exhibits the largest room temperature magnetostriction of a pure element at 60 microstrain. Among alloys, the highest known magnetostriction is exhibited by Terfenol-D, (Ter for terbium, Fe for iron, NOL for Naval Ordnance Laboratory, and D for dysprosium). Terfenol-D, TbxDy1-xFe2, exhibits about 2000 microstrains in a field of 2 kOe (160 kA/m) at room temperature and is the most commonly used engineering magnetostrictive material.
How to avoid DNS leakage in Firefox
You’ve been there before. Work. Grandma’s house. The coffee shop wifi. The neighbor’s unsecured access point. Places where you want to use a web proxy to hide you web traffic from the local authorities. With the newer versions of OpenSSH, which can be used as a Socks5 proxy server, you can even encrypt your web traffic back to your home computer.
One issue remains, that of your DNS queries. If your DNS requests are still going out locally, your local administrators can still see what webpages you are visiting. With firefox, there is an easy way to ensure that your DNS requests go out over the proxy connection.
Quick Tutorial:
Go to “about:config”, and set “network.proxy.socks_remote_dns” to “true”.
Long Tutorial:
Avoid Firefox DNS Leak - MetroPipe WIKI
NMAP Dragon
Found at the end of the configuration of the NMAP source code package:
( ) /\ _ (
\ | ( \ ( \.( ) _____
\ \ \ ` ` ) \ ( ___ / _ \
(_` \+ . x ( .\ \/ \____-----------/ (o) \_
- .- \+ ; ( O \____
) \_____________ ` \ /
(__ +- .( -'.- < . - _ VVVVVVV VV V\ \/
(_____ ._._: <_ - <- _ (-- _AAAAAAA__A_/ |
. /./.+- . .- / +-- - . \______________//_ \_______
(__ ' /x / x _/ ( \___' \ /
, x / ( ' . / . / | \ /
/ / _/ / + / \/
' (__/ / \
NMAP IS A POWERFUL TOOL -- USE CAREFULLY AND RESPONSIBLY
Omega Speedmaster Professional
The Omega Speedmaster Professional, otherwise known as the “Moonwatch”, is a manual winding chronograph introduced in 1957 and made famous by its selection by NASA for the Apollo Program. The Speedmaster is the only watch to have been worn on the moon (except for the Waltham Watch Company wristwatch worn by Dave Scott after the crystal had popped off his Speedmaster), and the only watch flight-qualified for EVA use by NASA. It is also the watch chosen for use in outer space by the Russian space agency NPO Energia.
When the step-by-step procedures of the Project Gemini space-walks were first mapped out, NASA realized that they did not have an approved wristwatch for space travel. The normal procedure of soliciting bids for the design, manufacture and testing of special “Space Proof” wristwatches was a time consuming process. To save time, NASA sent two systems engineers into downtown Houston “incognito” to purchase several reputable “off-the-shelf” chronographs to be tested for possible use in space. A manual-winding watch was preferred to an automatic watch, as it was assumed that zero-gravity conditions would render the self-winding mechanism ineffective.
Five different brands of chronographs were purchased and returned to NASA for testing. The Speedmaster passed NASA’s numerous tests, which included exposure to extreme temperatures, vacuum, intense humidity, corrosion, shock, acceleration, pressure, vibration and noise, whereas the Rolex, Breitling, Bulova, Longines and Heuer, notably, all failed.
The tests were completed on March 1st, 1965. At the completion of the tests, three of the chronographs from different manufactures were still running, but only the Speedmaster had passed without any of the serious discrepancies encountered with the others. The Omega Speedmaster was adopted by NASA as the “Officially Certified Wristwatch For All Manned Space Missions.” At this point, Omega was completely unaware of these activities.
The Omega Speedmaster was re-certified in 1972 and in September 1978, for the Space Shuttle missions.
Today, all NASA-issued wristwatches are government property and must be turned in once the astronauts return to Earth. Astronauts are permitted to check the watches out before launch and take them home to familiarize themselves with the watch’s operation.
Omega Speedmaster Professional - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Before Present
Before Present (BP) years are a time scale used in archaeology, geology, and other scientific disciplines to specify when events in the past occurred. Because the “present” time changes, standard practice is to use 1950 as the arbitrary origin of the age scale. For example, 1500 BP means 1500 years before 1950, that is, in the year 450.
The year 1950 was chosen because it is the year in which calibration curves for radiocarbon dating were established, and also to honor the publication of the first radiocarbon dates in December 1949. The year 1950 is also convenient because it predates large scale atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, which altered the global ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12.
Arbre du Ténéré
L’Arbre du Ténéré, known in English as the Tree of Ténéré, was a solitary acacia, of either Acacia raddiana or Acacia tortilus, that was once considered the most isolated tree on Earth — the only one within more than 400 kilometres (250 mi). It was a landmark on caravan routes through the Ténéré region of the Sahara in northeast Niger — so well known that it is the only tree to be shown on a map at a scale of 1:4,000,000. It was located at approximately 17°45′00″N 10°04′00″E.
It was the last surviving tree of a group of trees that grew when the desert was less parched than it is today. The tree had stood alone for decades. During the winter of 1938–1939 a well was dug near the tree and it was found that the roots of the tree reached the water table 33–36 meters below the surface.
Commander of the A.M.M., Michel Lesourd, of the Service central des affaires sahariennes [Central service of Saharan affairs], saw the tree on May 21, 1939:
One must see the Tree to believe its existence. What is its secret? How can it still be living in spite of the multitudes of camels which trample at its sides. How at each azalai does not a lost camel eat its leaves and thorns? Why don’t the numerous Touareg leading the salt caravans cut its branches to make fires to brew their tea? The only answer is that the tree is taboo and considered as such by the caravaniers. There is a kind of superstition, a tribal order which is always respected. Each year the azalai gather round the Tree before facing the crossing of the Ténéré. The Acacia has become a living lighthouse; it is the first or the last landmark for the azalai leaving Agadez for Bilma, or returning.
The tree was knocked down by an allegedly drunk Libyan truck driver in 1973. On November 8, 1973 the dead tree was relocated to the Niger National Museum in the capital Niamey. It has been replaced by a simple metal sculpture representing a tree.
This was not the tree’s first encounter with a truck. In his book L’épopée du Ténéré, French ethnologist and explorer Henri Lhote described his two journeys to the Tree of Ténéré. His first visit was in 1934 on the occasion of the first automobile liaison between Djanet and Agadez. He describes the tree as “an Acacia with a degenerative trunk, sick or ill in aspect. Nevertheless, the tree has nice green leaves, and some yellow flowers”. He visited it again twenty-five years later, on November 26, 1959 with the Berliet-Ténéré mission, but found that it had been badly damaged after a vehicle had collided with it:
Before, this tree was green and with flowers; now it is a colourless thorn tree and naked. I cannot recognise it — it had two very distinct trunks. Now there is only one, with a stump on the side, slashed, rather than cut a metre from the soil. What has happened to this unhappy tree? Simply, a lorry going to Bilma has struck it… but it has enough space to avoid it… the taboo, sacred tree, the one which no nomad here would have dared to have hurt with his hand… this tree has been the victim of a mechanic…