The Millennium Shrimp

New object of Technolust:

http://www.phlatboyz.com/

a build it yourself CNC printer that can be controlled from sketchup. The build kit + parts costs about >$700.00. I really, really want this.

Archaeologists Discover Temple That Sheds Light On So-called Dark Age

ScienceDaily (2009-04-16) — The discovery of a remarkably well-preserved monumental temple in Turkey — thought to be constructed during the time of King Solomon in the 10th/9th-centuries BCE — sheds light on the so-called Dark Age.

Looks quite interesting. One of a number of sites that provide contrary evidence to the assertion that the late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age transition was disruptive. The site has evidence of cultural links to the Aegean world and the “Sea Peoples” (aka the Philistines that the ancient Israelites loved so much).

Have you always been jealous of the exotic names of NPR’s on air personalities? Wish your name was as exotic as Corey Flintoff, Korva Coleman, or Lakshmi Singh? Now you can have your own NPR handle! Liarna Kassel is here to tell you more about it.

As always, this is your host Mirchael Thomashof.

(with apologies to Now We Have All Got Elvish Names)

It’s been a rough week to be a Somali pirate. First, three of them stuck on a drifting lifeboat with an American hostage got an up close and personal demonstration of the sniping skills of a U.S. Navy SEAL team. And now they’re being pushed around by Chinese dolphins. From Xinhuanet:

The Chinese merchant ships escorted by a China’s fleet sailed on the Gulf of Aden when they met some suspected pirate ships. Thousands of dolphins suddenly leaped out of water between pirates and merchants when the pirate ships headed for the China’s.

The suspected pirates ships stopped and then turned away. The pirates could only lament their littleness befor the vast number of dolphins. The spectacular scene continued for a while.

Maybe next week will be better for them.

Well, taxes at least…Finally did my taxes this past weekend.

How I would describe the experience:
About as much fun as giving yourself a root canal with dull drill bit and an underpowered cordless drill. I actually spent a day cleaning my living room and dining room just to put it off for another few hours. And that’s after avoiding it for the past month and a half. Okay, that’s probably melodramatic. I just hate having to sit down and try to do basic math on overly complicated forms.

TurboTax
I’ve used the Free edition for the past several years and always found it an excellent tool. It takes a little over three hours to run through everything with my itemized deductions. And the state taxes are usually $39.99. Which you really can’t beat with a dead horse. It really is an insanely good deal on tax prep. Much better than actually sitting down and do it out on paper in long hand. They give you excellent guidance for running through the itemized deductions. This year, I decided to spring for the Deluxe edition since I now am a homeowner.

Overall rating for the deluxe edition:
Meh

Honestly, for my tax situation, the biggest benefit in using the Deluxe edition was importing the data from last years return. But honestly, I didn’t like this all that well, especially when it came to the itemized deductions. I probably did something wrong, but I never saw a screen where it went through the 1026 A worksheet to itemize my deductions. Instead I ended up having to input all of that data during the “error checking” portion of the session, and the error checking screens were ambiguous. It was difficult to know which questions I was filling out and there wasn’t any way to go back in and edit the worksheet data after I had gone through the error checking process. So, I feel like importing the data from the previous year is basically more of a hinderance than a good feature. But then again, my tax situation is fairly simple. My only income is wages, and from one company. I haven’t moved (and probably won’t be for a while) and I don’t need to file for multiple states and/or municipalities.

Things to avoid
They charge you $29.95 to deduct the charges for the tax filing from your return. Definitely not worth it. And the thing I don’t like is that it doesn’t really advertise that extra cost on there.

Final thoughts
On the local tax front, my taxes were much simpler this year than previous years. Only had to file for Ohio and not multiple states, and I only needed to file for the city of Canton (and not Akron as well). Thanks to the helpful auditors in both city tax departments for clarifications on how it works when you work in Akron and live in Canton.

And a shout out to Kathy for Personal Mortgage Insurance Premium deduction advice on a Sunday evening! Thank you!

So, I guess it was inevitable, given my twin interests in archaeology and science fiction, but the whole “steampunk” design aesthetic sort of ran me over, stopped, and tossed me on the back of the wagon. But, I have to admit, I’m not so much fascinated by trying to make modern technology look old as I am just playing around with old technology. The stuff people in the past actually did make is far more fascinating to me than the might have beens.

So, for the past year or so, I’ve been slowly buying “old” stuff, and I’m going to start blogging about some of the pieces here. The first one I thought I’d break out is the Underwood.

As some of you know, about a month after I bought my house, my parents bought the house across the street. They attended the auction because my mom was going to buy me a book shelf. They ended up buying the house. Which is a story for a different occasion. But in the basement of the house was an old Underwood typewriter. Now in this day and age using a term like “old typewriter” is a bit redundant. But this wasn’t some cross-breed “word processor” like what I remember from high school and college. (Yes, when I went to college young ‘ens they still had “computer labs” and only the ultra-geeky kids brought computers to school with them).

This was cast iron, steel with nickel-plated accents, the high tech of my grandparent’s generation. It was beautiful. It was covered in dust and starting to rust. No one picked it up as the auctioneer moved through the house selling off the contents. After the auction ended, I grabbed it and asked the auctioneer if I could have it. He didn’t care. He’d just sold the house to my parents.

Since then, it has been sitting in my basement, waiting patiently. I thought it would make a lovely winter project. But Winter has come and gone and there it sat.

I broke it out this evening and googled “underwood typewriters.”[1] This page[2] showed me where to look for the model number and when that serial number was made. The model number is “M5098122.” According to the website, the M stands for “Master” which was a successor to the #6 model, and it was manufactured sometime in the last half of 1939…

the repair guide is here[3]

Another interesting web site [4] that sells typewriters.

Finally gave up on figuring out how to mass-delete unmoderated comments on the blog. Went into phpMyAdmin and nuked them. Don’t know why they don’t have this feature in Wordpress. Seems like it would be relatively trivial to implement. Anyways the SQL is:

delete from wp_comments where comment-approved = 0

if you’re using the standard “wp_” table name prefixes

Here’s a video on it, if you aren’t familiar with phpMyAdmin and SQL queries;
http://educhalk.org/blog/?p=133