One of the things I like about my job is that I get to play with x-ray machines, and you can get interesting pictures of things using x-rays. I think x-rays always give an interesting perspective on the way things look.
This is what the insides of a Tungsten T3 look like with the slider opened. Click on the image for a larger version. I’ve annotated some of the more obvious bits that can be easily recognized. The rest are just components on the motherboard. If you look closely, you can even see the ribbon cables on the right side of the button pad and lying over the battery.
For those of you wanting the technical details on how I took the image, I used an 8″x10″ CR cassette, 40″ source-image distance, 80kVp 1.5mAs, small focal spot (0.3 mm) in a Siemens Axiom RF room. Tungsten T3 was placed on the cassette. Cassette was read on an Agfa ADC Compact+ CR reader using flat field processing.
Blogging by PDA
Testing a Palm conduit (plog) that lets you write blog entries in an app you load onto your PDA, then sync them to your blog. It uses MT’s XML-RPC interface to create the blog entry. So now you can blog from anywhere! Of course it doesn’t show up until you sync, but for us non-wireless PDA plebe/owners, it’s better than nothing.
My T3 is here!
My T3 arrived today! Woooo!!! Gotta wait for it to charge before I can play though. Looks pretty cool though. Got the wireless keyboard to go along with it. The keyboard is bigger than I expected…it definitely isn’t a Stowaway keyboard.
Next task is to find a decent case for it.
Charge T3, charge!
TopicExchange: Conversing via Trackbacks
Discovered this interesting website that takes Trackbacks to another level. TopicExchange.
The concept seems to be kind of similar to Usenet newsgroups, but not nearly as many newsgroups at the moment. To post to a topic channel as they’re called, you make an entry in your trackback-enabled blog, and ping the URL for the group. Or you can create a new topic channel. Each channel also has an RSS feed, making it easy to keep track of with your favourite RSS aggregator.
A very nifty concept. Shall have to keep track of this one.
Testing PHP in entries
Just testing MT to see if it will allow me to do code in entries.
Inspired by a thread on the MovableType support forum, I want to see if I can display a text string as an image inside a blog entry.
It works! Well, it used to work until something broke on the server…
Nothing terribly complicated, but the ability to use PHP inside a blog entry does have some interesting potential.
For those of you interested in seeing what I did, I just embedded the following in my entry
$text = date("F j, Y, g:i a");
echo "<p>Today's date: $text</p>\n";
// Set the image size based on the font size and text
$font = 8;
$width = ImageFontWidth($font) * strlen($text);
$height = ImageFontHeight($font);
// Create the image object
$im = imagecreate($width,$height);
// white background and blue text
$bg = imagecolorallocate($im, 255, 255, 255);
$textcolor = imagecolorallocate($im, 0, 0, 255);
// write the string at the top left
imagestring($im, 5, 0, 0, $text, $textcolor);
// output the image
// write the image to a file
// Change /path/to/image/dir/ to whatever path you're using
if (is_writable("/path/to/image/dir/")) { // Check to see if the directory is writable
imagepng($im,"test.png",75);
echo "<p>Today's date as an image: <img src=\"test.png\" height=\"$height\" width=\"$width\" /></p>\n";
}
else echo "<p>Don't have permission to write to the current directory</p>\n";
imagedestroy($im);