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A visit to an amazing aviation museum

evergreenlogoIf you're an aviation enthusiast (as I am), and you're ever in Oregon, you owe yourself a trip to the Evergreen Air and Space Museum.

Despite living here for nearly 20 years, I'd never been until last week. The kids had a day off school, and we had some tickets we'd bought during a fundraiser for OMSI, so we went and made a day of it.

The museum has a large collection (100+) of aircraft, all in impeccable shape. In addition, there's quite a collection of space memorabilia, including a full-size Titan rocket. The star attraction, though, is the Spruce Goose, Howard Hughes' massive flying boat. There's also a waterpark whose key feature is four water slides that drop out of the side of an actual 747, which sits on top of the water park's building. Our passes included cockpit access to the Spruce Goose as well as a tour of the cockpit of the 747 sitting on top of the waterpark.

As you might expect of an aviation enthusiast, I snapped a ton of pictures. The more bearable of my efforts can be seen in this album (set to open in a new window). You can navigate with the on-screen buttons, the arrow keys, or by clicking directly on each image; you can also resize your browser window, and the image sizes will adjust.

If you enjoy all things aviation, you should put the Evergreen Air and Space Museum on your list; it's definitely worth the time and effort it takes to get there.



The Tesla Motors Model S is one incredible machine

Last night, thanks to a friend (let's call him Jake, since that's his name) with a position in the buying queue, I was able to get some extended (passenger only) time in a Tesla Motors Model S—more specifically, the Model S Peformance, loaded to the gills with pretty much every option available.

Jake was concerned about the car's clearance into and out of his somewhat steep driveway, so the dealer agreed to let him (with an onboard sales rep, of course) take the car home to test it out. I rode out as a back seat passenger, and got to ride back to the dealership in the passenger seat. So what was it like? In short, it's an amazing technological tour de force that elicits grins with every punch of the accelerator.

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Siri, why is Google voice search better than you?

In case you missed it, a month or so ago, Google added voice search capabilities to its free Google Search app for iOS devices. If you haven't tried this out yet, I highly recommend you do: I find it so useful I've given Google Search a spot in my Dock.

What's so good about Google's voice search, especially on a device that comes with Siri already? To demonstrate the answer to that question, I made a little video, wherein I used my iPad mini to ask both Siri and Google four questions:

How do you spell exuberant? Who won the Trailblazers basketball game last night?
How do you make vanilla ice cream? How high is Mount Kilimanjaro?

So how'd it work out? See for yourself…

Watch the full-size version
[mp4 only • 1024x768 • 11MB]

(Production aside: Yes, I realize you can use Siri from anywhere. I toggled back to the home screen each time simply to give different backgrounds to Siri and Google.)

Read on for my thoughts on how these two tools compare.

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Does the Tooth Fairy exist?

This morning, when I woke Kylie, our nine year old daughter, she hit me with some Tooth Fairy questions: "Do you believe in the Tooth Fairy?" "How can she be real, she'd be busy all the time with millions of kids losing their teeth every day!" "If she's real, she'd never forget a kid, right?"

Odd, but with Kylie, you're never sure what you'll get in the morning. So we went through the morning's tasks, getting ready for school, and then she hits me with: "Dad, there's no way the Tooth Fairy is real, and I've got proof…right here!" And she pulls out her Tooth Fairy pillow, where you place teeth for the Tooth Fairy to collect and replace with coins.

She then pulls a tooth out of the pocket of the pillow, and says "This is my tooth; it fell out yesterday, and I didn't tell you or Mom. Then I put it under my pillow last night, and the Tooth Fairy didn't take it!"

Ummmm…errrr…ahhhhhm…

At that point, I took her into the other room, so our younger daughter wouldn't hear, and explained that yes, the Tooth Fairy was really Mom and Dad, and we did it to help our kids through what can sometimes be a bit of a traumatic experience. I asked her to keep this secret from her sister, and she merrily agreed.

This one's got a future in science, I think! (I also realized that had I noticed the missing tooth, and managed not to say anything to her, she would've woken up today absolutely convinced that the Tooth Fairy really exists!)



How to use Safari to track The Masters leaderboard

In general, I don't use Safari—mainly because I'm addicted to the add-ons I get with Chrome and Firefox. (Yes, I know Safari has extensions…but they're underpowered and feature limited compared to what you can get in the other browsers.) However, during Masters week, Safari has a key role in my following the tournament, thanks to one key feature: web clip, i.e. Open in Dashboard.

While The Masters has an excellent iPad app, I don't like having the iPad locked into one app for hours at a time. So, to follow the leaderboard, I turn to Safari's Open in Dashboard feature, along with a favorite old Mac OS X Hints hint that allows me to drag widgets out of the Dashboard. Using these two things together, I can view the full Masters leaderboard, floating in a window all its own.

Best of all, the interactivity of the leaderboard is preserved, so I can re-sort the list, expand a player's scores, and do all the other things I can do on the actual leaderboard page.

Note that you'll need some spare monitor space for this trick: the dragged Widget floats over every other window, so it will get in the way if you're using, for instance, an 11" MacBook Air.

If you'd like to do the same, here's how…
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Wallpapers: iPad 3 and newer

The following wallpapers are 2048x2048 pixels in size, and designed for use on third-generation iPads ("the new iPad"). Note that the images shown in the image sliders below (hover and click to cycle) are low-quality 256×256 JPEG representations of the actual photos; to get the high-quality images, download the entire bundle [29MB] and install only those you wish to use.

Home Screens (5)Lock Screens (24)

License: All photographs in these wallpapers are © Rob Griffiths, and are freely provided for personal use only. You may not include these wallpapers on other sites, nor in any commercial product, without my prior permission. (I hate having to put this here, but prior experience has shown it to be necessary.)



Wallpapers: iPad and iPad 2

The following wallpapers are 1024x1024 pixels in size, and designed for use on the first and second generation iPads. Note that the images shown in the image sliders below (hover and click to cycle) are low-quality 256x256 JPEG representations of the actual photos; to get the high-quality images, download the entire bundle [9MB] and install only those you wish to use.

Home Screens (8)Lock Screens (30)

License: All photographs in these wallpapers are © Rob Griffiths, and are freely provided for personal use only. You may not include these wallpapers on other sites, nor in any commercial product, without my prior permission. (I hate having to put this here, but prior experience has shown it to be necessary.)



Wallpapers: iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S

The following wallpapers are 640x960 pixels in size, and designed for use on the iPhone 4/4S. Home screen images feature a slightly darkened navigation bar (where the paging dots appear), along with a fade-to-darker gradient in the Dock area below the navigation bar.

Note that the images shown in the image sliders below (hover and click to cycle) are low-quality 256×256 JPEG representations of the actual photos; to get the high-quality images, download the entire bundle [6MB] and install only those you wish to use.

Home Screens (9)Lock Screens (32)

License: All photographs in these wallpapers are © Rob Griffiths, and are freely provided for personal use only. You may not include these wallpapers on other sites, nor in any commercial product, without my prior permission. (I hate having to put this here, but prior experience has shown it to be necessary.)



A Rube Goldberg-inspired garage parking assistant

We recently started parking our truck in the shorter of our garage bays—it's short due to shelves at the front that can't be moved any further forward (as they'd then block access to another portion of the garage).

The amount of wiggle room available is quite small—about two inches of leeway, at the most. So parking in the same spot every time is quite important. (The frontmost item on the truck is the bracket that holds the license plate, so that's the part that needs to be watched.)

While there are many ways to solve this issue, here's how I chose to do it:

Sure, I could have hung a tennis ball from the ceiling (I did that first, actually), or put a block on the ground in front of the tire. But I had issues with both of those methods, and I like semi-geeky do-it-yourself solutions. Read on, if you wish, for the details on the project…

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Thanks and goodbye, Tatters!

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I was never a cat person growing up; my family always had dogs. Once I got through college, I lived in shared housing arrangements for the first five years of my work life (the joys of living in Silicon Valley)—so that meant no pets of my own. My jobs were also such that having a pet would be difficult, as I traveled a fair bit. So I remained petless for many years.

In January of 1994, though, I purchased my first home (shortly after moving to Oregon). In all ways but one, it was a very typical starter home: 1970s three-bedroom two-bathroom ranch with too much dark wood, not enough light, horrendously outdated kitchen, and and orange-and-white marble-look-but-plastic guest bath.

The one way in which it differed is that the home came with a guilt trip, which led directly to my first-ever experience as a cat owner…
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