HotTop
Is it just me or do most laptops these days have the effect of burning your lap? I’ve used laptops which get so hot that the edge of the touch pad gets too hot to touch. Like it burns. Most laptops have the guts of the thing on the bit which sits on your lap and just the screen that folds out. Because the heat is being generated down there and it’s sitting on your lap, it makes it really hard to dissipate the heat and burns the user in the process. Even if it’s using a fan, if you sit the laptop on something with an uneven surface, for example a bed, it’ll be doing nothing at all. Meanwhile the back side of the screen sits out there in nice ventilated open space and does nothing to help dissipate the troublesome heat. If we can’t shift the processor up to the back of the screen, maybe we can shift the heat? It seems like a really simple idea, but we’ve seen some really simple ideas coming out recently which could change laptop computing forever. I’m talking about the ASUS XG Station and the ATI Lasso. It’s a really simple idea - make a dock with a powerful graphics card so you can satisfy the gamers needs whilst making the laptop light enough away from the dock to satisfy portability needs. Simple, but brilliant.
Sony have made the Panel Pc, which is the opposite of the normal laptop - the screen has the entire computer in it and the keyboard folds down at the front. It looks odd, and I don’t think it’s meant to be a laptop, but it seems to be on the right track. Surely, these heat issues can be looked at. Here’s an idea along the same lines as the external graphics card station: create a standard for a pluggable heat sink. Just a hole in your computer thats attached directly to the CPU heatsink. If you’re at home and you’re running processor intensive applications (such as games) you can plug in a nice big copper heatsink (and maybe fan) and it’ll lend a hand to dissipate the heat. When you’re on the run you leave it at home. If you wanted something portable you could have a little foldable piece of copper which plugs into the same slot. It’s small so you could take with you and use it when you feel the heat start to burn through your pants. It could fold out like an antenna to radiate the heat into the air as opposed into your pants.
Awesome Storm
We had an awesome storm last night. On the bom weather radar it was a big black dot. I’ve never been in a storm like that. Wow it was impressive. Here are the photos. The storm was great, but it sure smashed up my veggie patch =(
Yes thats me in my boxers.
The End of the Shower of Innovation
This drought is killing off innovation in Australia. A bold statement, and backed up with very little scientific evidence. But thats whats great about a blog, you don’t have to be right.
I was in the shower today and I started to drift off into a magical world of thought. I was thinking how the world could be better off if I just did…. Oops, don’t want to waste water, I better get out of the shower!
How often have you thought of the solution to a problem, had a great idea or an invented something that could potentially change the world? With reduced shower times due to our conscious effort to save water due to the drought, we’re killing off thousands of innovative solutions and ideas every morning and night. Sometimes the shower is the only place you can really relax and let your mind wander because your life is so busy.
Where will Australia innovate now?
Well there’s only one place left….. A place where you can not be disturbed. A place where you have the time to let your mind to wander. A place you can relax. A place where there is nothing to do but sit and think. A place to innovate. Where? The good ol’ dunny of course.
On Death
We live in a privileged society where death is but a remote possibility. It’s something that happens, yes, but it’s something far off and distant. We don’t even think about death. When someone who’s close dies suddenly and unexpectedly it is an affront to our fundamental view on how-things-are. We are not prepared, and when it happens we are so unaccustomed to such strong feelings of sorrow and grief that sometimes it leaves us completely altered.
Death can come at any time - this was highlighted last week by the death of a guy who was in the year above me at school. He died of an aneurysm whilst traveling in Canada. No warning signs, no sickness, BANG - brain dead before he hit the tiles. He was 27, just one year older than me, and far younger than the average life expectancy (at birth) for males of 78.5 (83.3 for women). Sure, he’s not close to me; He is that far off distant guy who dies and you actually hear about. But he’s close to somebody. He’s someone’s son, and someone’s boyfriend.
He’s about the 5th person I’ve “known” who’s died. I say “known” even though I couldn’t tell you a thing about him. I’d met him, talked to him at a couple of parties, and that’s about it. I’ve only been to two funerals, one was for my Grandad (obviously not the blogging Grandad), and the other was for my good friend’s brother who committed suicide. The first death was semi-expected, people get old, and they die - so you don’t get that great sense that somethings gone terribly wrong in the world. Sure you grieve, but it doesn’t leave an open wound: you get over it. A sudden death, and in particular a suicide, leaves you wondering what part of society failed. It leaves you feeling cold. It makes you ask yourself some pretty confronting questions. It was a real head-fuck for me and I barely knew the guy. I can only imagine the feelings my friend would have experienced for the loss of her brother.
So here’s my advice to you. Think about death. Think about the death of a loved one when you lay in bed at night. Think about what would happen if they were taken away suddenly. What would happen? Would you have to tell the parents? How would you react if they blamed you? Could you make a speech at the funeral? Would you write on your blog about it? What would it be like lying in your bed at your house knowing that they’ll never be back, that you’ll never see their smile again, hear them talk or feel their touch. Think about every detail - what happens when you go to solicitors office to sort out inheritance? Would you be relieved to inherit something? Or distressed?
You’ll choke up, at least I hope you do. It should make you feel bad, woeful in fact. Don’t dismiss these feelings just yet - follow them through. What would happen afterwards? Would you move away to try and bury the pain? Or would you stay close to your friends? How would you feel when someone asked about it? Would your friends always look at you with a sense of pity? How would you react to that?
Maybe instead of a quick death, think about long, slow, painful deaths like cancer. Say your partner gets a tumor, what does it feel like to know that they’re going to die? Could you even stand it?
Do this alone, in a place where you can fully experience the grief, anguish and pain that is associated with the thoughts. Immerse yourself in the situation. Do this, because you can always just tell yourself that it’s not true, and that it hasn’t really happed. Your loved one is fine and sound asleep right next to you. You can still reach out and touch them.
Death is final, it’s resolute, there is no going back. No Ctrl-Z Undo or F7 restore-to-last-save. Maybe these thoughts will spur you to change some things, maybe try to get to know your parents or grandparents a little better. Maybe you can just sit back and appreciate that they are still alive and you can enjoy some time with them. Maybe you won’t feel like changing anything, but you’ve now experienced the tip of the ice-berg, you know what it might be like if you encounter the sudden death of a loved one. Maybe it won’t be such an affront to your core being because you’ve actually thought about it before. You have felt what grief and anguish feels like and will be able to recognise and deal with those feelings when they well up when/if the real thing happens.
Aquaponics
Ok, for those who haven’t heard of aquaponics, this site gives you a good introduction on how the process works. I saw it on Gardening Australia once, when Joel Malcom was on there and it made so much goddamn sense that I thought I’d give it a go. Its like a little eco system of it’s own, almost a closed loop (you still need to feed the fish and provide sunlight). It uses less water than conventional veggie gardening because anything not used by the plants goes back into the tank instead of sinking into the earth. In addition to veggies, you get edible fish out as an end product. By virtue of the fact that it’s a closed loop it has to be organic. It’s a cool idea. I even went out and bought the guys book.
So this week I actually started. Here is my post on the backyard aquaponics forum. I’ve also uploaded some photos to my gallery. Check ‘em out.
This is going to take me a long time to build, and even longer to get right. I’m going to try and do it on the cheap, so far it’s cost me all of $10, but I need to buy pumps, piping, and all sorts of other expensive bits. We’ll see how I go.
Paddles and Poetry
I’m off to work, there I row
It’s a little strange I know
But thats how I do it, thats how I go
Sure its tiresome and a little slow
Learning was hard, but now I know
Lucky for me the river doesn’t flow
And the water level isn’t too low.
So I get out there and make a show
Paddles and poetry, rhymes and … doh
Ahem, sorry about that guys. Got a little bit “inspired” - once again, my apologies. Yes, I paddle to work (and I’m quite aware that technically I’m not rowing). It’s really quite hard, it takes me an hour to paddle to work. It takes Josh 10 minutes to ride from the same start point. Admittedly I’m probably not the best paddler in the world, but I’m getting there. In the mean time, I’m finding muscles I never knew I had, and seeing an aspect of Canberra less travelled and quite pleasant.
Death by fruit, AKA: I think I am a bit loopy for thinking about this
If a family member was killed by a particular animal, fruit or vegetable, would the rest of the family eat the aforementioned organic matter? For instance, if a coconut fell out of a tree and knocked me on the head, killing me instantly, would my family ever eat a coconut again? Or would it be too much to bear to be confronted by the killer at the table? Or maybe they’d eat as many as they could to get back at the coconut. Well, that might work for animals and things since the animal would be slaughtered, but maybe not coconuts.
Stepping back up the thought-stack, I was in Goa, India [fade in the flash back music]…. I was chatting to some fellow travellers just outside my beach-shack after ducking inside to get some more sunscreen when THUD, we heard a coconut smack into the sand not 5 meters from where we were standing. We went over to check it out and lo and behold, it had landed on my towel. It was still stretched out on the pretty white sand where I had been lazing in the sun not 5 minutes before. We worked out it would have hit me fair in the head, probably giving me some pretty serious head injury. Would my family be embarrassed and not release the details of my death?
Anyway, thats why I was thinking about death by fruit and its enduring effect on the family.
Why is it xmas anyway?
As a side not in an email to a group of friends I asked “Why do we call it xmas? It’s not crossmass, it’s christmass. What accent spawned the abbreivation xmas?” and I get a reply from the honorable Johnny G:
I believe the x comes from the greek ‘chi’ originally, which was used as an abbreviation for christ. More recently it is used by people such as myself to take out the ‘christ’ from christmas and reflect the fact that it’s more of a secular orgy of consumerism than a solemn observation of some dead guy’s birthday… sometimes you also see people write about ‘xians’ or ‘xtians’, which riles up religious folk somewhat… (you asked!)
Verified by the blogging Reverend Collins. Stick to the top paragraph. If you read too much, you’ll turn into a xtian.
Waste water, go to jail
It’s hot. Damn hot. 36 degrees, dry as buggery. We’re going into stage 3 water restrictions on the 16th Dec, which means our veggie patch will almost certainly perish. What really annoys me is that I see our neighbours watering their grass with a sprinkler system whenever they feel like it. I don’t know if they haven’t seen the ads on TV, or if they’re ignoring it and hoping nobody notices, or they’re down right stupid, but it irks me real bad. Do they think they’re above it all?
Goulbourn is in an even worse plight than us, level 5 water restrictions! That’s 150L per person per day, no outdoor use (what so ever), and certainly no use on vehicles, with fines of $220 to $2,200. My cousin was saying her friend (lovely guy apparently) washes his car in the garage so he doesn’t get caught. Maybe he just doesn’t understand the problem? It’s not about beating the system when you’re city is turning to desert.
This guy got me thinking, how long until it really is a criminal offence to waste water? How long until people are allotted 20L a day to use or trade as they please. Will there be millionaire “water moguls” who become powerful because they own water? Maybe I should invest in some really big tanks…
When Installers Go Bad
I recently bought a brand new Core2 Duo. With this new CPU I decided I would install the 64bit distribution of Gentoo onto a free partition I have on the current hard drive. This would allow me to then use my previous installation in 32bit mode if I needed to go back to my old setup.
So I downloaded the 2006.1 Gentoo live cd and whacked it in. Firstly, because of issues with motherboard makers not including native ATA devices on the board (just SATA to ATA converters), it could not detect the cd drive (which is funny because it’s booting off it….). This wasn’t too hard to fix, a trip to the Gentoo forums and the kernel line “all-generic-ide” and she booted sweet.
So the rest of the “live” experience is great - I have a fully functioning GUI and all sorts of other things I don’t need. A tty would have done me fine actually. Anyway, I decided to use the GTK+ installer to install my new Gentoo distro. I have previously installed Gentoo many times, but always by hand. So I tell it to reformat the hdk4 partition and install on there. I assumed it wouldn’t touch any of the others, and that everything would be hunky dory.
So I click the final button, and the installation process starts….”Resizing partitions” it says. Here’s me thinking “What the hell is it resizing? I didn’t tell it to resize…” and then bleep - “Error resizing ext2/ext3 partition”. The installation stops. There is no resume button. There is no restart button. I know for a fact that the only ext2 filesystem I have is the boot partition. I open up a terminal and check my partitions with good ol’ dependable fdisk…..1 partition. HOLY SHIT, IT’S WIPED MY PARTITIONS!
I work in software, so I realise that it’s hard to make things error free, but holy shit, this is MY system THEY just screwed. Thankfully I had backed up all my photos and music, so I didn’t lose anything, but I had a great little setup and it’s all gone.
I went to work the next day and angrily replayed the previous nights events to kindred souls. Fletch said sardonically “….How much did you pay for Gentoo again?”. I reckon he hit the nail on the head right there; I can’t expect people writing code in their back yard for fun (and writing install wizards doesn’t sound like fun to me) to knock something up that is professional, well tested and robust. There just isn’t the driver for it.
Some things are tried and tested, like fdisk, mkfs and tar (which is pretty much all you need for the manual installation) and then there is the bleeding edge GUI installer for my Mum. Gentoo is not meant for my Mum, and given the horrendous mess it made of my hard drive I don’t think they should even TRY to be more user friendly. Leave that up to Ubuntu, Suse and all the others. They already differentiate themselves with the whole “meant for computer dudes” thing, I say they should stick to their guns, and not try to keep up with what the “Mum distributions” are doing. Or if they DO go down that path, do it well instead of half arsed.