E just pointed me to Panoye, where I joyfully wasted half an hour uploading a couple of my panoramas and crudely manually geotagging them: Hotham, with snow, and Walhalla Cemetery.
Panoye: Teh Niftah
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Best. Toy. Ever.
E bought me a toy. 🙂
I told her about my oldest obsession, my first obsession, and she fulfilled it to the greatest extent physically possible: She got me The 8421.
This thing is like the god of lego sets. Sure, you can spend more on Mindstorms if you want the ultimate in sophisticated geekery, and there are doubtless exotic and ancient themed lego kits out there worth much, much more to collectors. I don’t care.
There’s no lego quite as powerful and awesome as real Technic, and as far as real Technic goes, this is it, the larget, most sophisticated (heaviest!) lego kit there is now, or ever was.
It:
- Has pseudo hydraulics (pneumatics).
- Has one of the new 9v electric motors.
- Has the complete six-cylinder piston-engine block.
- Has a working differential.
- Has proportional eight-wheel steering.
- Has two independent safety-clutches.
- Took me about twelve hours to build.
- Weighs about three kilos.
It’s a kind of Lego nirvana. 🙂 Thank you love!
Forever posessed by the eighties
I was born in 1975, so I can’t really claim to be a “child of the 80’s” like my brother, but that decade will always have an insuperable hold upon my soul.
I know this because I listen to a very modern radio station, but when they incongruously play Huey Lewis and The News’ – The Power of Love, I am unaccountably electrified (It’s not a genre I’m usually into) and beset by vivid mental images of Michael J Fox on a skateboard, stealing momentum from passing cars and wearing magnificent dark sunglasses…
I have been justly mocked for my strong childhood feelings about that movie, that music, and that decade, and I find myself at a loss now to cogently defend them, but they remain.
There was some damn fine stuff in the eighties, and I think in another decade we will look back and appreciate the eighties in the same slightly surreal way that the sensibilities of Pulp Fiction’s Jack Rabbit Slims Twist Contest scene idly worships the fifties.
<yellow> Ohhh Yeeeah </yellow>
Thinking like a villain
I think like a continuity checker, but E thinks like a villain!
While watching Robin Hood, Season 2, Episode 9: Lardner’s Ring: (Warning, spoilers below!)
.
.
.
Me: So how do they know which tree to go to?
(Two scenes later, the group in question are very dramatically stumbling about sherwood forest looking for the aforementioned tree).
(Guy of Gisborne threatens to chop off a woman’s finger if villagers don’t come forward with information. Robin’s gang distract Guy, then turn and run, leading him away.)
E: I’d just turn around and chop her finger off.
(Robin Hood and maid Marian are stuck up a tree with a much sought-after homing pigeon, surrounded)
E: I’d just burn down the tree. It would be quicker.
Me: But wouldn’t that kill the pigeon?
E: They (the bad guys) don’t need the pigeon alive!
(Robin and Marian use delaying tactics, counting on their sturdy tree to be slow to fell, but are caught by surprise when Guy douses the base of the tree in pitch, in preparation for burning them out).
(Later, the pigeon seems to be escaping with its vital message. Guy’s archers are unable to hit it. The sheriff rides up)
E: I bet he’s got a falcon.
(The pigeon soars, triumphant music sounds, then the sheriff’s henchman pulls the hood off a falcon, and the sheriff says ‘fetch!’. The Falcon does so.)
Of course, neither of us are quite as villainous as Robert Llewellyn. The next show we watched was an episode of Scrapheap Challenge, in which teams must devise vehicles for carrying a full, open topped barrel of yellow goo around a 4WD course without spilling any. The catch? Each team must complete three rounds, and will be scored based on the total amount left in their vehicle’s barrel at the end. In the final round, the teams drive each other’s vehicles.
Evil!
Geocaching for Nokia Symbian phones!
This post has been a long long looooong (
) time in the making.
I tried a vast multitude of Symbian GPS tools. I found a plethora of mapping tools which don’t quite do the job. I found tools which do the caching part, but not the GPS part. I spent numerous futile dollars on tools which are actually long dead and utterly unsupported ‘ghost-town-projects’. I even began writing my own J2ME tool, with frequent pauses to despair at the grotesque complexities involved.
Finally though, I came back to a tool I had seen before, and ogled from afar: It was only available for phones on US networks Sprint, SouthernLINC, Nextel and Boost Mobile, at the time. Now though, it is free for Series 60 – 3rd-edition Nokia phones, such as mine!
And lo, it is everything I could hope for: you put your details in, link it to your geocaching.com account, and say ‘show me the nearest ten geocaches’, and it does. 🙂
The only tiny hitch I would war of (so far) is for those who, like me, have a compatible phone with no GPS built in: the ‘download directly to phone’ mechanism won’t work for you; it will spuriously say ‘unsupported device’ or some such. You will need to download the app to your PC and install it to the phone from there.
A Dutiful Juror, I
Last week, for the first time ever, I had jury duty. I was part of a group of twelve random strangers who, over three days, made a decision which largely determined the length of a young man’s jail term, changing it from a matter of six to twelve years to two to three.
It was all a bit confronting, a detailed glimpse of a real life story which was entirely understandable, evoking plenty of empathy and more than a few quiet tears on my part. All viewed through two surreal lenses: the thoughts and feelings and daily trivia of eleven vague, bored, angry, sad, vindictive, uncomfortable, strangers, and the cold, impersonal, disinterested banality of the court staff, the barristers, and the judge himself.
I suppose I was fortunate to get such a brief, harmless case: Nobody was harmed or even particularly traumatised in the commission of the crime we were trying, and the whole case took three days. The jury drafted immediately before mine was for a supreme-court rape case expected to run for fifteen days!
Australia being a country with (mercifully) no compulsory military service, the idea of a compulsory period of service to the very wheels of government is unfamiliar and a bit strange, but I found it to be a real education: you’re forced to face a real crisis in one or more real lives, and make a decision of vast importance and significance. As a mere consulting sysadmin, many steps removed from important decision-making or the personal effects thereof, this was refreshing, and more than a little terrifying.
Talking about it with E, she remarked that her profession makes her more-or-less exempt from jury duty. Somehow that makes sense to me: If anyone faces real people in crisis and makes terribly important decisions on a daily basis, she does. However, for those who don’t share her chosen career, I think I can recommend jury duty: It’s a jolt to the system, a harsh clarity of perspective which really throws ones own life into proportion. It’s coming face-to-face with the rule of law we all take for granted every moment of our lives, shaking it by the hand, and walking away forever changed, and perhaps a little wiser.
I would not call it fun though.
Laptop convergence idea
On a very geeky note, I have been following a number of rather cool new trends in laptop, phone, PMP and PDA design in the last year or so: tiny laptops, cheap laptops, highly sophisticated smartphones, crazy UMPC/PDA crossovers, the relentless rise of increasingly huge Solid-State-Disks, and, of course, the whole iPhone thing.
Just this morning it struck me that there’s a relatively simple way in which one could combine all of these things!
If your modern laptop is going to have a touchpad, a solid-state-disk and a comprehensive set of radio comms gear (wifi/mobile broadband/bluetooth) and so is your uber-phone-PDA, why would you need more than one of each of these things? They’re all relatively expensive bits of electronic kit, you can only use one at a time, and there’s a bunch of very strong reasons why the data in particular should be shared: keeping your music, your calendar, email, etc. in sync between your PC and your PDA is a pain, so why not just have one copy?
Briefly, the idea is to plug your iPhone-like PDA into a hole in front of the keyboard in your otherwise hard-drive-less, radio-less laptop.
When unplugged, your PDA runs some dinky little PDA OS on the same disk you run your laptop from, using the same organizer database, email storage, web-browser cache, contacts database, etc. When you plug it in, the PDA becomes a rather nifty touchscreen with built-in second display. The disk hooks up and boots into your real OS, or restores it from a sleep-state, or whatever. It runs and recharges off the great big battery in your laptop, provides all the wireless comms functions for your laptop, and so on.
Problems:
- There is some serious software development to be done for an idea like this, but the hardware is patently already with us, but for a little matter of chassis-fabrication and one hell of a docking-plug-connector.
- The release which disconnects the PDA from the laptop chassis is going to need some manner of software-controlled lock, to ensure that the ‘big’ OS can suspend or shut down before handing over to the PDA. Likewise, the PDA OS will have to have control after it’s plugged in, to get itself packed away before the ‘big’ OS takes over.
Benefits:
- Only paying for one SSD means you can afford to have a much larger chunk of storage in the first place. I like the idea of my cameraphone having a fast 120GB+ disk in it.
- Your PDA can plug into more than one chassis! You can plug it into your laptop at work, into a PDA-slot on your desktop PC at home, your friend’s PC at their place, and so on. You carry the canonical copy of all of your data with you wherever you go, and access it at full fast-disk speed.
- You only need one account/ID with all your various communications providers. One 3G data account for your PC, your PDA and your phone. One wifi-MAC address for your laptop and PDA. One bluetooth device ID to bond your headset to.
- Your laptop gains a snazzy new UI device, a big (multi-touch?) touchscreen.
I would so buy such a device!
disclaimer: I lay absolutely no claim to this idea whatsoever. If you like it, I wholeheartedly assign all rights to you, go nuts, patent it, call it yours, whatever, I don’t care.
They’re The Ghosts Inside My Head And They Control Me…
Warning: meandering content beyond this point. May contain traces of blather.
I have raved here about the marvel that is SkullCandy before. Alas, my Smokin’ Buds finally packed it in the other day due to excessive mechanical abuse, and became suddenly monaural.
I have come to depend on their supernatural powers of noise-removal in my office, since the nature of cubicle-farms leads to a workplace which is never quiet, where there’s always someone talking, often more than one someone.
It is not entirely coincidence that I bought myself a new pair of SkullCandy Full Metal Jacket ear-buds at roughly the same time I bought Nine Inch Nails Ghosts. It is wonderful though.
Ghosts is a lyrics-free album. That should be stated up front for those of you who were hoping that Trent still wants to fsck you like an animal. 🙂
It’s also not especially danceable, a trait which much of their previous work is valued for.
I have heard it said that the album is an accoustic one. This is not the case. In fact, there’s so much of NIN’s trademark distortion and static that you can get seriously alarmed if Ghosts is the first thing you listen to on your new earphones.
I’m not going to rave here about the way this album is being distributed, or licensed, except to say that both are rather cool.
As music to fill the silence inside your head while you work, I have yet to find better.
As mechanisms for doing so, the SkullCandy Full Metal Jacket buds are well worth five times the $70 I paid for them: crisp, clean and packing more base than any speaker stack. They also seem, if possible, better than the Smokin’ Buds at obliterating the sounds of my office.
With this in my ears, I can work, no matter how much it all falls apart around me.
Engaged!
Yes, that’s right: …beep, beep beep, beep, beep, the number you have dialled is irrational, and does not compute…
No, the other kind! Grievous bodily hugs with willful intent to marry!
Engadgety…egadgism…enginage…engorgenous…engargle…english mustard?
Engagedness, we has it!
In fact, the combination of being on-call and being freshly engaged has been so overwhelming that I have only just gotten around to blogging about it, that task requiring fractional additional gorms beyond what is needed to click a button on facebook, sorry Damien!
E and I, coming to a marriage venue near you, or possibly after C! 🙂
…CHANGE THE WORLD…
I am frequently guilty of ranting, panic, and gross hyperbole on this blog. I get carried away with some ideas, especially political ones, and make a bigger noise than is in any way warranted. I’m not sorry: This is my blog and I’ll rant if I want to, because it’s fun.
In my opinion, this post is not hyperbole and not a rant:
In my considered opinion, I honestly believe that I have just watched the dawn of a new age.
WARNING: This video is blurry footage of a wizened old physicist with lots of charts and diagrams and high-energy-physics jargon. If you’re not into the physics (which are seriously funky if you are into that kind of thing) then the ramifications of this system are beautifully summed up in the ten minutes from 59:30 to 1:10:00, and the practical considerations and somewhat embarrassing politics of the matter are well discussed in the questions after 1:10:00.
For those disinclined or unable to do the streaming-video thing for ten minutes, I would sum it up thus:
Dr Robert Bussard’s research group have been looking at a lateral approach to the magnetically confined fusion problem for the past eleven years. They have been doing this in a DARPA-funded laborotory in relative secrecy because their approach is practical, feasible and relatively cheap, making it anathema to the dual vested interests of conventional Tokamak-based fusion research and fossil-fuel economics.
Their system uses a spherical magnetic containment field to produce a clean (radiation free) fusion reaction, without molten lithium or multi-billion dollar building-sized toroids.
The important point of the video is that they’ve already done it. They made it work in a machine the size of a domestic oven, on a shoestring budget, with a team of five people.
Some weeks ago, when I started reading Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla I was struck by the attitude of the great minds of the time, one which saw physical science as malleable and controllable, a field in which one brilliant idea in one ordinary human mind in one brief human lifetime could reshape the world.
This attitude, I recall saying to PFH at the time, is something which seems to be missing in modern science: That kind of glory is seen as being firmly beyond the reach of individuals, or even individual research groups. Everything is to be refined and tested in infinitesimal steps, and there will never be another great revolution like Tesla’s AC power system, or so our scientific community is expected to believe.
Seeing this talk has convinced me that I was wrong, or at least partly wrong. A lot of Dr. Bussard’s concluding comments say exactly the same thing: he’s been closeted with his research group behind closed doors for eleven years, and now it’s very rare to find anyone experienced in this kind of science.
I was wrong though, because Bussard and his team exist. As he says during the questions, somewhere, somehow, the concluding research is being done. A viable fusion power source is being perfected, and I will probably live to see it come to fruition.
It’s hard to be calm in the face of such things.