Category: Geekishness

Physical activity

I read yesterday about a couple of cool things in the world of physics.

Firstly it appears that they may finally have observational evidence of the presence of dark matter. There is a really good explaination of the results and some of the background of the science here. It also contains links to the academic paper and the NASA press release. Given that this has been such a bone of contention in modern physics it’s nice to see it starting to pan out one way or another.

Secondly, an Irish company (those crazy crazy Irish) believes it has stumbled upon a way of producing “clean” energy from some system involving the interactions of magnetic fields. It’s a superb advance if it can be validated independently, although if that happens it will also confuse the hell out of a lot of people, because superficially at least it appears to violate the first law of thermodynamics (which states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but can only be converted from one form to another). They have publically advertised for independent physicists to validate their system, and it will be interesting to see what the eventual outcome is.

Simone can’t come to the phone

She’s off hanging with the cool people now.

On saturday (after a week of tech troubles, the details of which I won’t bore you with) Simone bought herself a shiny new white MacBook macintosh laptop.

It does everything her old computer did, just without her having to know anything about settings or configurations or the like.

And of course since all the cool people have Mac’s, she’s been getting invites to avant garde poetry readings, exclusive coffee tastings, and other understatedly cool social events since then.

Don’t know what Jack and I will do while she’s off at these. Maybe there will be a bland movie on TV for us… 🙂

(Of corurse the other thing is that as it has been a while since I last used a Mac to any great extent, I will be ringing all my Mac user friends and relatives to find out how to do all the tricky and fiddly little things I can never remember how to do. Mac owners – you have been warned).

Very uncharacteristic

Historically, I have had… how should I put it… something of a nack for turning my computers (individually or collectively) into very expensive paper weights for short periods of time, while trying to do things that wiser people would avoid (usually involving playing with bits of operating systems in ways they probably weren’t designed to handle).

I play with the registry, and then have to reinstall my computer.

I resize partitions, and when it fails (as it usually does for me) I have to reinstall my computer.

Sometimes I don’t even do anything particuarly exciting, like upgrading software, or moving files, or upgrading hard-drives, and.. well I think you’re probably sensing a theme by now.

Now my family and friends know this is how I do things, and just point and snigger that “Dave’s done it again”, while I find it a (generally) a combination of a great way to learn about how operating systems are set up, and a pleasant little activity to keep me happily amused for a period of time usually equivalent to an afternoon (if you ignore the irritation when my efforts cause me to loose old emails or files or the like).

To quote Douglas Adams “I have a well-deserved reputation for being something of a gadget freak, and am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand. Ten seconds, I tell myself, is ten seconds. Time is valuable and ten seconds’ worth of it is well worth the investment of a day’s happy activity working out a way of saving it.”
So to get to the actual point of this blog entry, I have (and I should probably touch wood right now, although the fake veneer on my desk will have to do) somehow managed to navigate my way through a veritable mine-field of re-install-your-computer prone activities this afternoon, and have somehow managed to come out the other side without having to reinstall anything.

Having finally gotten a computer with a large enough hard drive for me to reasonably run two operating systems at once, I decided to install Linux to dual boot on my machine (ie. my machine can load Linux or Windows, depending on which one I select).

Now to set this up I had to resize the partition that Windows is currently installed on, create 3 new partitions, and install Linux, making sure it didn’t do anything stupid (like putting the program that allows you to choose which operating system you want to load onto the same drive as Windows – apparently windows really really doesn’t like that).

Any one of these things could have (and historically would have) gone wrong and required me to delete everything and set everything up again from scratch, and yet strangely they didn’t and here I am, writing this blog from within Linux.

Totoro and the Cat Bus

A few weeks back I saw this random movie in a DVD store, and after reading the back I thought “When I have some money I’ll get this”, and this week I had money, and I wasn’t disappointed by my purchase.

The Movie is another Hayao Miyazaki animated movie (he’s the guy who made Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke and Howls moving castle) called My Neighbor Totoro, and chronicles the adventures of two young girls who move to the country with their father so that they can be near the hospital that their mother is in while she recovers from an unspecified malady.

In the forest near their house there lives a forest spirit who the youngest girl decides is called Totoro, who looks like an enormous gray rabbit with small ears and human teeth. Together Totoro and the girls have various adventures, but the bit that I thought was the coolest was how Totoro gets around: which is in a giant cat with 8 or 10 legs, and windows and seats inside (ie, he’s a cat bus).

It’s so ridiculously absurd that it’s hard not to love the concept.

Anyway, it left me wanting to wander around singing little ditties of my own devising about Totoro and the cat bus (Jack got briefly subjected to one of them), and excitedly anticipating the next visit to see my nephew and niece, who I will show the movie to as I feel that they will love it too.

More thoughts on copyright

The BBC has an interesting discussion piece about the appartent push by certain industry lobby groups in Britain to extend copyright from it’s current 50 years.

Regular readers will be quite familiar with my opinions on matters of copyright and IP as it pertains to popular culture, so I will forgo my usual tired tirade, but the piece is certainly an interesting and quite fairly balanced discussion of the issue.

Sticking it to China

Being someone who hasn’t let the fact that china has the world’s fastest growing economy distract me from the fact that it also has one of the most repressive systems of goverment*, I am mighty pleased to see this article in slashdot, which talks about a new piece of software which passes encrpyted packets to allow people in china (and other countries that monitor internet activity of individuals who want to read about such subversive ideas as “freedom” and “democracy”) to read pages that would otherwise be blocked by government firewalls, and to read them in a way that is theoretically undetectable.

Here’s hoping it works, and that it inspires others to release other pieces of subversive software to encourage freedom of information.

*which of course sets me apart from numerous other people, companies, organisations and governments who seem happy to turn a blind eye if there is a profit or advantage in it for them (microsoft, google, US government, we’re looking at you…).