Couloir
Not sure if I’ve linked this before, but Couloir has some vey nice hiking photos.
Palm has a new wireless PDA: the i705. But you need a Palm.net subscription.
“This page features the circuit schematics and instructions to creating infrared remote control emulation and sampling circuits, controlled from your PC.”
I think this Panic PIN idea is a damn good idea.
I thought the A-Plot of this episode was rather pointless. An enemy that doesn’t talk, and above all acts irrationally. Its guerilla tactics were a little puzzling, but at the end, they practically allow themselves to get shot up by Enterprise. The only real outcome of the whole encounter was to point out that yes, the Enterprise is woefully equipped and armed to deal with the hordes of aliens out there that all seem to have better technology than them. That this is explicitly acknowledged is commendable.
This episode, and those leading up to it, also provide a reason for why humanity seems to have accelerated in its technological development so rapidly. In TNG they are one of the more advanced races whereas in Enterprise they are effectively space newbies. The reason seems to be the extroverted and social nature of Captain Archer, and one would expect, all Starfleet captains, given Starfleet’s charter. Their willingness to chat to absolute strangers and invite people onto the ship (as in Cold Front). I suspect that in future episodes, some diplomatic alliances will be forged that provide tech upgrades to Enterprise.
The B-Plot is somewhat amusing, but really just a bit of fluff. Finding Reed’s favourite food doesn’t let us know him better, it just provides another trivia question to ask fans at the next Trek convention.
Enterprise premieres in Australia in February.
Obviously an episode for Bigger Things To Come. By using a temporal cold war as one of Enterprise’s arcs, the writers are opening up a bit of a Pandora’s box. Actually, any episode to do with time travel is asking for trouble – a whole arc is crazy. Anyway, this episode exposes Archer to two sides of this war – humans (“more or less”) from beyond the year 3000, and mysterious guys from a little before that who haven’t yet perfected time travel. Given that a recurring theme in time travel in previous Trek series is to give those living in the past as little information as possible (stemming from the “temporal prime directive”), it’s a little strange how forthcoming Daniels is with providing info. He also shows off an array of magical gadgets, including the phase-shifting walk-through-walls device which conveniently gets lost by the end of the episode. Ultimately, the episode resolves little, so we will all just have to wait and see what develops. How it fits in with the entire Trek universe will also be interesting, and most probably, contentious.
Ok, talk about comebacks. At one stage down 6/82 chasing 245, Australia beat NZ with 3 balls to spare. Extremely entertaining cricket last night.
Was pretty relaxing. Movie and a 21st on Friday, a small LAN party on Saturday through Sunday (network hooked up to freshly installed Optus cable still on its 14 day grace period… the modem was smoking after we had finished with it), tennis on Sunday, down to the beach yesterday. Makes me wish I was still on uni holidays and not working…
Reuter’s Oddly Enough area is another good site if you like reading Ananova’s Quirkies.
This is an interesting snippet – a Nokia senior exec was fined over $100,000 (US I’d assume) for exceeding the speed limit by about 25km/h. That’s because in Finland, those fines are based on your average income. Ouch.
That’s right, today marks four years of Hear Ye! That’s 1461 days…
Well, as you can probably tell, my posting rate dropped off somewhat last year but infrequent posts is more due to lack of time rather than lack of motivation. This year is fairly big for me, being my final year of uni. The Great Job Hunt starts in a couple months and the industry is not looking flash… Nonetheless, you’ll be reading about it all in due time. So, on to the 5th year. Gee, this site sorta feels ancient!
My girlfriend turns the big 21 today. A huge Happy Birthday to you Soph!
National Geographic 100 Best Pictures. Features some incredible photos, including the world-famous Afghan girl. Such piercing eyes… I think I’ll buy this issue.
This does not fill me with confidence, but we will see how my Seagate fares…
I just bought one of those 80 GB Seagate drives myself. However, I’ve been having problems
with it not wanting to run 100% of the time. I leave my computer on always, and every few
days or so, I’ll wake it up from sleep and the system will hang. Reboot, and the 80 gigger
is gone. Leave the machine offf for fifteen minutes or so, reboot, and they come back.Needless to say, it made me very nervous the first time it happened. Of course, my
situation could be different because:a) it could be just a bug with my drive (doubtful)
b) i’m running an ATA100 card to which is connected, which could have a bug with drives
that size (doubtful)
c) i’m running Mac OS X (doubtful)
d) i’ve got bad ventilation to the drive, so it may be overheating at regular intervals
(best guess)Advice? Make sure it gets good ventilation. Or turn off your machine every few days and
let it sit overnite.
-wrongforum
Thanks Jeff!
DVD Recordable drives are now in the $1000 price range and are becoming more and more affordable. There are, however, a variety of standards still vying to be for the DVD-R world what VHS is for the video tape world. Here’s a brief summary article on DVD-RAM, DVD-RW, DVD+RW etc.
Patrick Stewart with hair looks like Richard Gere. I kid you not. If you ever see the miniseries I, Claudius, you’ll know what I mean.
Filled with in-jokes, you’ll probably want to watch at least one of Kevin Smith’s earlier movies (Clerks, Mall Rats, Chasing Amy, Dogma) before this one. Funny shit with a ton of cameos, including Mark Hamill as Cockknocker.
HP has taken out a few patents related to nanochip manufacturing techniques. For us, it means smaller chips for the future.
Virgin Blue has this offer:
More than 10,000 $1* one-way flights will be made available in Virgin Blue’s largest and lowest ever special fare offer, as part of this weekend’s Australia Day celebrations.
Australia’s only low fare carrier has over 10,000 seats up for grabs, for flights departing Virgin Blue’s home base of Brisbane to Adelaide, Cairns, Canberra, Darwin, Mackay, Melbourne, Sydney and Townsville.
Obviously you need to purchase a return ticket (so in effect, it’s a half price return flight) and the valid departing times are only available during offpeak mid-week days (Tues/Weds/Thurs), and it’s not as useful if you’re not a Queenslander, but if you are, it’s a good deal. Too bad I have to work during the week. Thanks Denise for the alert.
Does anyone know where I can obtain a thermometre or light meter that can be connected to the computer? Mail me. I used to have this neat science toolkit for my old Apple II C which had light sensors and thermometers – you could use them to do all sorts of tricky stuff with (like building a seismometer). The kit was put out by the now-defunct Broderbund software.
Responses:
A light sensitive resistor or diode might be what you want, though I cant say for sure not knowing what you want to do with it.
Try Jaycar, if you have any around Camden… I believe there’s a Dick Smith in Liverpool, Campbeltown and Penrith (from memory… I live in Melbourne though :)
-Zero—–
How much are you willing to spend? http://www.ambientsw.com/Specifications.htm
-Victor
Well I also did a bit of poking around. Vernier makes all sorts of measurement instruments that can be connected to the computer. Lares also does temperature probes. All these were a bit more expensive than I was hoping for… after all, how complex is it to make a device which reports temperatures to a computer? Motherboards can have several temperature and fan RPM headers on them, and they don’t cost $500… (RPM monitors btw, calculate fan rpm by counting the electrical pulses sent through to the fan – I think its two pulses per fan revolution). Hmm… how about Bluetooth enabled thermometers? :)
Here’s an amusing old MediaWatch transcript I randomly stumbled across, which ascerbically criticises Channel 9’s current affairs program – this time over the Robert Bogucki incident in 1999.
| 16 days spent in current location | |
| Previously | San Diego, CA |
| » Currently | San Francisco, CA (14/1/26 1:01am) |
| In 27 days | San Diego, CA |
| In 29 days | San Francisco, CA (End) |
| View full itinerary... | |
4:13pm (GMT +11.00) tomorrow from Work, Chiswick