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My rocket powered brain in slow motion
(August 25, 2009)My brain rocket car is shown at 21 seconds to 34 seconds of the video.
Rocketcar Day 11. Slow Motion Montage from sixty40 on Vimeo.
updating Movable Type
(December 27, 2008)I'm presently upgrading from 4.01 to 4.23 of Movable Type, hang on for fixing of commenting and anything else that broke.
Twitter fun
(July 13, 2008)I'm getting a lot out of running twitter thanks to Matthew Hall @aDb who put me on to the Sydney Twitter Underground Brigade STUB or @stub on twitter. They're a very interesting bunch of people, and they meet up in meat space very often. I'm using the very creative nick of @IanWoolf.
Twitter is a 140 character microblogging platform. The experience is a little like instant messaging, because people who follow your entries in the twitter window are able to reply to you and have a conversation. Unlike mailing lists you don't have to read every single message, and it doesn't clog your inbox. You can sample what is going on in your spare moments of rest or in the background. However unlike instant messaging, every tweet on twitter is a broadcast unless you flag it as a direct message. When you tweet a message on twitter, you don't just broadcast to every person who is following you, but also to the web at large. This means if someone is running a keyword search and you trigger a flag on their search, then they will notice you.
In my first week on twitter, I had just upgraded to Firefox 2.0.1.4 and it wasn't working. After spending most of a day trying to resurrect my customised profile, I complained on twitter. Straight away someone from Mozilla replied with a suggestion to fix things. I had a conversation and shortly restored my browser to working order. They had a constant search for all mentions of "firefox", so I just had to complain and the Gods of Mozilla heard my whine and came to my rescue.
I also have my twitter feed piped through to my facebook status timeline, so that my facebook friends also receive the messages I send. I'm currently following 79 people, a large number of whom I've met at STUB meetups or technical conferences such as PubCamp and BarCamp. Not all of these people follow me back. Such as @MarsPhoenix who tweets updates from Mars. In the same way I don't follow all of the people who follow me.
You can send and receive twitter updates on mobile phone as well as on computer, either by SMS, email, or internet. I just signed up for the beta version of a message by voice service as well, so if I get stuck in a lift again like I did the Wednesday before last, I will be able to broadcast my call for help to my twitter and facebook friends, and not have to rely on the indifferent service of the hotel staff or the lift company.
The social networking world is crazy with services in beta at the moment, all invitation-only while they get the bugs out, like gmail used to do.
Woohoo!
(January 2, 2008)After a long series of unfortunate events, I've finally visited the far side of the bell-shaped curve. I won a free laptop (when I desperately needed but couldn't afford a new computer), and it was delivered on my birthday!
I have 10 metres of ethernet cable to keep me mobile until I get a wireless connection at home. Now I just need a remote control (unless there's one hiding in the packaging?).
It comes with video out, so I can run GeeXboX on it.
The machine is a Dell Vostro, and the bank running the promotion which required no skill or virtue was ING.
No Comment
(November 25, 2007)There were over 2300 attempts to post comments to my blog on Saturday alone,
from a broad range of IP addresses. I'm turning commenting off, for now. It looks like an attack, as the comments were empty of spam.
Make a solar cell from scratch
(November 1, 2007)Over at scitoys.com they have detailed instructions on how to make your own solar cell at home from ingredients you can buy from a hardware shop.
Basically you buy some cheap copper sheeting. Cut two pieces.
You heat one piece for 30 minutes until its covered in thick blackness.
Let it cool slowly for 20 minutes in the air, so the blackness will flake off easily.
Gently remove the black bits under the tap. Don't scrub or it won't work.
Attach an electrical lead to each copper plate with an alligator clip.
Put the two plates in a container with hot water with table salt dissolved in it.
Clip the heated copper plate to the negative and the clean copper plate to the positive terminal of your ammeter.
Expose to sunlight and watch your panel generate microamps of electricity with no fuel!
The flat panel version uses a CD case for the container
How much power does it generate? Simon Quellen Field says:
"Don't expect to light light bulbs or charge batteries with this device. It can be used as a light detector or light meter, but it would take acres of them to power your house. The 0.0000125 watts (12.5 microwatts) is for a 0.01 square meter cell, or 1.25 milliwatts per square meter. To light a 100 watt light bulb, it would take 80 square meters of cuprous oxide for the sunlit side, and 80 square meters of copper for the dark electrode."
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Connected
(October 30, 2007)I now have a landline and ADSL2+ connected, but I accidentally let the magic smoke out of my computer, and they tend not to work so well after that. I bricked my hard drive while shorting out my power supply. Fortunately I have an old small hard drive I can boot up using Ubuntu linux. No space for downloads or editing, but I have basic computer functions. I can use the internet and write and print and play media.
This will slow down getting my podcasts edited and into the feed. I'll shop for the specs I need for a new PC while this one limps along. It looks like laptops are getting as fast and cheap as desktops. A silent PC is a high priority. It would be nice if I could run a linux that has drivers for my camera and scanner as well, and Ubuntu doesn't do that yet.
Converted
(January 16, 2007)To be able to share my videos with people who don't have a GeeXboX , I have to convert the MOV or MP4 or whatever files to something they can watch at home, like DVD-video mpg. WinFF is the free open source solution for Windows. Its a small, fast front-end to the free FFMPEG video conversion library that will convert anything to anything, even mobile phone video formats.
GeeXboX is built around Mplayer which can play any media because it is built on FFMPEG. Mplayer also has a Windows incarnation.
TV by RSS
(December 17, 2006)I just downloaded the Juice podcatcher and loaded it up with feeds from tvRSS. Now I can catch TV shows over the internet that don't get broadcast here - automatically! Juice even downloads torrents, and works on linux, windows and OSX.
I've also been looking at streaming with my GeeXbox, instead of waiting for downloads. I can stream anything from www.archive.org as if it were another TV station, without any drop-outs or delays. I watched The Power of Nightmares without having to wait for a download. In the same way, the Beyond Belief seminars can be streamed straight from the website. I used the "DownloadThemAll" plugin to find the actual mp4 video links, and then pasted them to this m3U playlist file to play on GeeXbox
Fixed the blog!
(November 3, 2005)After trying to install MoveableType at home, I had the same problem as I had on iiNet: my own username was unknown to my blog. So it wasn't just iiNet stopping CGI scipts from writing to disk as their tech support supposed. The key was that it worked on the old iiNet server, it worked on the Solaris server, but not on the new iiNet web server or on my PC web server. It turns out that the Berkley DB database isn't backwardly compatible. My blog's database was in an older version of db than the new iiNet or my PC. I wasn't able to get the recommended fix, db_upgrade from anywhere at all. Instead I exported the db from the working version, and then used the export files to repopulate an entirely new installation of the latest MoveableType. This worked! Not all of the old templates are compatible with MT 3.2 for some reason, so I still need to tweak some pages to look good again. There are some weird characters showing up occasionally and even the tables got skewed, but I'm just happy it works again.
Discovery feedburned
(September 27, 2005)I've also finally gotten all the Discovery MP3 files up to ourmedia.org and archive.org, and then fed that to feedburner.net, and redirected the old feed to the new feedburned one. The result should be not only a better podcast to catch, but also we will get the actual numbers of subscribers. I had a complaint from Boston a few weeks ago because I was slow in updating the Discovery feed! I had no idea we had US listeners. With Feedburner, we should start showing up on iTunes, and ourmedia.org provide the bandwidth for free. Subscribe here at http://feeds.feedburner.com/Discoveryradio
Ourmedia almost works
(July 13, 2005)
I have put the first link on the blog to a file I've uploaded to archive.org via ourmedia.org. Ourmedia.org offer free unlimited storage and high bandwidth for stuff you own the copyright to, or which is public domain. Ideal for podcasts.
I'd like to do this for my personal stuff like Light Fission and also for the weekly Discovery podcasts.
The only problem is that they use Drupal as a content management system, and its XML generation for podcasting is broken. So we've tried using dircaster.php instead. The problem is that ourmedia.org has a unique way of storing every single uploaded file. Instead of the traditional and functional system of a directory for the user, and then files under that, or under directories under that, ourmedia.org generates a NEW directory based on the Creator and the Title of the file. This means you can't use an automated system like dircaster.php to scan the directory for MP3 files and create the XML for us. There isn't a directory of just Discovery files to scan. There isn't a directory of just my files to scan.
Instead there is a general downloads directory and every single individual file has its private directory under this. I'm stumped as to how to automate a remote generation of the podcast XML with such a lack of structure.
The ourmedia tech guys assure me that whenever it is that they upgrade their hardware, the new server will have software that will generate XML for podcasting.
Its a shame, because ourmedia.org offers everything else we need, including a way for any of the Discovery team to upload a show for podcast. We just don't have any way to automate a podcast XML file from these strange directory structures.
Ultimately, if the ourmedia.org XML doesn't happen soon, I'm going to have to find some way of searching ourmedia.org by way of username and somehow extracting the unique URLs of all the associated MP3 and ASF files. Any advice or suggestions would be appreciated
Playing with random toys
(July 11, 2005)I really like having little spots on the blog that come up with something fun and different every time you refresh the page. I've added a random photo from my flickr collection on the main index page, and random GoogleAd link words on my individual entry pages. I noticed that even Cosmos magazine are using Google Ads when I did a search recently to see what publicity was on the net about Science On Tap. So I thought I might play around with GoogleAds again, even though I didn't make any money at all with them the last time. I've discovered they can be unintentionally fun. I've put them against recommendation, at the bottom of the individual entry pages, so that you don't have to look at them if you don't want to. However, when I use the "link units", Google's search engine picks out a little haiku sentence for me based on what the algorythm thinks my entry is about. The fact that none of the entries about Cosmos summon any Cosmos ads should tell you how hit and miss it can be with my MoveableType-based blog. For my Futurian report "Technological Singularity is a buzzword", GoogleAds gave the line: Islam Invented Christianity Science Fiction Another Futurian report "Length is Important" was about a meeting on the topic of the rise and fall of galactic empires. The first Google link? "Black writers". The link ads words are picked from a pool thats partly determined by the content, and partly determined by the advertisers preferences, and partyly determined at random. So some pages will have a different set of link words every time you look, and some will be exactly the same. For my Sexy Lettuce article, it just gave up and went blank.
Blogtalk Downunder conference
(May 6, 2005)The Blogtalk Downunder conference is on from Thursday May 19th until Sunday May 22nd, at the very scenic Cruising Yacht Club of Australia in Rushcutters Bay.
Its way too rich for my blood at $175, unless I refer five other people to sign up at full price, in which case I can get in free.
Oh, and the workshops are each an extra eighty buck fee. So $335 all up.
They should blogtorrent videos from the conference for us unpaid bloggers to see.
It seems to me that because of the pricing, only professional bloggers will attend, which seems to show a distinct lack of understanding about who blogs and why.
I'll spend the money on renewing my Australian Science Communicators membership, and get invited to affordable conferences.
ljcrosspost
(May 2, 2005)I've tried a plugin called ljcrosspost, so that I could automagically cross-post from this blog to LiveJournal, which would make it easier for many of my friends to read new posts. However, the iiNet web host refuses to make the connection to livejournal.com, and so the whole thing fails, and also fails to post on this blog. Pathetic really. iiNet's web-host's refusal to talk to other computers also meant that when I use MT-Blacklist to clear away spam, I can't report the spammer to the clentral clearinghouse. No communication with the outside world is just wrong. I need a new webhost! I went to try for a new domain name, they're giving them away from at dotTK.tk.
technical difficulties
(April 26, 2005)Somehow iiNet's little upgrade interacted with some unguessable error in Moveabletype, creating some strange 5 meg temporary files, which were big enough to fill my 30 meg disk quota. Because the quota was full, I couldn't use my blog.
I've installed the latest version of MT to try and solve this. iiNet have been no help at all.
I basically have only 10 meg in which to post before the blog is full again. So I have to move the blog. I'm thinking changing ISPs is the way to go.
Some people counsel running the software on my own PC and then uploading to a website. I'm looking into it. I'll still need more than 30 meg of webspace.
Lock out!
(April 18, 2005)23-4-05 iiNet have a faulty disk quota script which says I'm using 30 meg of the 30 meg web space they give me for $50/month with my 512K/s ADSL. As a result, I can't enter new blog posts. In reality, a simple "du -ks" on the directory mirror on my computer shows I'm using 14 meg of disk space. This post is an attempt to hack an update message. iiNet have offically gone past their use-by date. Too expensive, and the service is lousy. I've made two calls to their phone line, and two emails. The last phone call recognized the problem, will escalate to their tech staff. Thats nice, but as someone who has worked in computer support myself, I know that the least they could have done was temporarily increase my quota until the problem is fixed. Instead, they've left me trying to hack into a service I've paid for. 18-4-05 My ISP, iiNet upgraded their servers earlier this week at exactly the same time I was experimenting with internet telephony software to talk with Andrew in Victoria. In fact Telstra also decided to have a planned outage, so I was given the illusion of having broken the system. I lost my PPP connection and even ADSL. For the rest of the week, I have been unable to log into MoveableType to post on the blog. I finally had time and health to troubleshoot it, and discovered that all the permissions on my web files had been changed, and that this was stopping the images, the CSS files, the javascript, and much else from working. Then I just had to find an FTP program whose CHMOD commands would actually be accepted by iiNet to fix the permissions. WS_FTP finally did the job. I still wasn't able to log in using the basic mt.cgi from my browser, although the images were visible. I ran MT-Blacklist, my comment spam destroyer, and it works. It has a menu item to "return to blog". I clicked on that, and "hey presto!" I've tunneled back into my own blog. Bizarre.
BlogMapped!
(March 25, 2005)BlogMap is a cute API that locates your blog geographically and shows how close local bloggers are. Its using Microsoft MapPoint, and it works with Atom as well as RSS feeds, so all those LiveJournal people can play with this, too. All you have to do is visit BlogMap and enter your blog address, and your geographical location, as vaguely or accurately as you prefer. They generate code you cut and paste onto your blog.
Photogallery automation
(December 23, 2003)This looks useful, but I'm too tired to play with it just yet: MTPhotoGallery
