In response to this ‘article’ (which is entirely old hat anyway) and inspired by the stupid comments they published, here is my contribution:

I’ve heard of some horrific head injuries incurred while walking down the street. Trips and falls, and of course muggings and other violence, can even be fatal, and most of these deaths could have been prevented by the wearing of a helmet.

Thus, I always wear a helmet when out walking, and consider anyone who does not to be a fool.

I urge the government to make walking helmets compulsory with immediate effect. The law can be enforced, and fines handed out, by traffic wardens and litter inspection teams – thus no additional staff will be required, and a tidy profit can be made by the local council too.
R Perrin, Climthorpe

Something I forgot to comment on was this:

“It’s plain and simple that helmets are effective,” Ms Lee continues. “If you think of people who have mobile phones, computers, I bet they all have covers on to protect them. You have a skull protecting your brain and if you know anything about computers you know that if you damage a computer you can’t load the programme. That’s exactly the same with your brain.”

Then again, there’s not much to be said in response to that mindless babble is there? Stick the the nursing, love Ms. Believe it or not that quote came from the actual article, not a comment from some passing halfwit.

Today’s invention is Plum Roulette. Place your bets…

The wheel is part of a washing machine I dismantled. It spins very well. No more bets now…

Jake supplied the plums, straight from the tree. They’re not quite ripe yet, but that doesn’t really matter when you’re not eating them.

The Linksys SR224G is a 24-port network switch. A bit excessive for what I needed, but I couldn’t resist the price of £4.99 on ebay. One problem – very noisy indeed. This would be fine in it’s normal environment, a rack full of other noisy equipment but I wanted it in my office, because that’s where most of the Cat5 cabling in the house terminates.

The source of the racket was the two cooling fans, so the first thing I did (once I figured out how to get the case open) was disconnect them. I decided it didn’t need all that cooling, because it wasn’t stuffed into a rack in a hot room, with lots more hot things above and below it, it was free-standing on a desk. Also I wouldn’t be putting all that much load on it. I ran it for a day without the fans, and I couldn’t detect any excess heat building up at all, but it seemed wrong to have no cooling at all.

The two power connectors on the motherboard are 5V, but the nice silent (a marketing term meaning quiet-ish) fan I had wanted 12V. I thought it might work run at 5V, albeit slowly, and it did – but only with a manual kickstart. As I didn’t want to have to be around to do that after a power failure, I needed 12V. Unfortunately the power supply in the switch only supplies 3.3V and 5V, so the power had to come from somewhere else.

I had a 3.5mm jack socket lying around – probably the worst possible option, as will become apparent, but the only option at the time. I ‘drilled’ (with my penknife) a hole in the metal case and fitted it there. Only then did I realise that the metal barrel of the socket is connected to one of the terminals, so I’d be connecting the chassis AC ground to the power input’s DC ground, which seemed like a bad idea.

This picture shows it up and running, using a Sinclair ZX81 power supply, which happens to (insanely, if you ask me) also use a 3.5mm jack. This was good for a test, but a) I need that PSU for the ZX81 (no, really!), b) it’s only 9V, and c) I don’t want a another hot energy-wasting thing taking up yet another mains socket.

There is a perfect source of 12V nearby though, in the form of a PC that’s always on. I bodged together a cable and hooked it up. The first problem was that the ATX power supply in the PC immediately shut itself down in an act of self preservation when I connected it up. This was quite puzzling, until I re-opened the switch case and noticed that the inside of the plastic front panel was a strange non-plasticy copper colour. I tested it, and it was conductive – some kind of spray on stuff, which I scraped off from the area surrounding the socket.

The only other problem is the 3.5mm jack – it’s almost impossible to insert one of these without momentarily shorting the contacts on the plug. I guess the ZX81 power supply doesn’t mind this, but an ATX power supply does, and instantly shuts down. That means that as it stands I can’t take that plug in or out of the switch’s front panel without rudely powering off the server, which is not ideal. At some point I might use a different kind of socket, although another idea I had in mind was to power the switch entirely from the ATX power supply, since it already supplies the 3.3V and 5V needed for the switch itself, as well as the 12V for the fan.

Anyway, the end result is that the switch, which previously sounded like a hoover, is almost completely silent.

Introducing Baby 3.0. He’s called Tom. I’m still not getting involved in the very strange but apparently compulsory “how much did he weigh?” thing. I was going to mockingly suggest that our lovable NHS bureaucrats would have already ticked a little “overweight, prone to diabetes, and will probably die of a heart attack next week” box on their clipboard. No mocking is necessary though, because I put his details into their stupid calculator thing and sure enough, he is off the end of the scale, and “obese”. They are telling me he is at risk of cancer, and needs to eat less burgers and chips, and get more exercise. I guess we need to hope he drastically loses some weight by the time he’s four weeks old, but in my experience these babies just keep on getting bigger.

You might need a good connection to view that video. I tried to reduce the bitrate, but it came out too blocky and spoiled it when I went too far. The quality of the original video (96MiB of it at the original resolution of 1280×720) is amazing. It was recorded on a Panasonic DMC-ZS3, which I think is a superb almost-pocket-sized camera, the only downside being a shortage of manual controls. Unfortunately the cameraman wasn’t of the same quality, but you get the idea – after a few seconds of pondering its predicament, the baby starling can indeed swim.

Note to self: I converted the video using the following command:

ffmpeg -i /shares/pictures/2010/2010-05-29/P1010955.MOV -ar 22050 -s 400x226 -qscale 5 -f flv waterwings.flv

Next question – do they like swimming. I think the expression on its face says it all:

It let me get very close to take that picture. I suspect it sat on that rock for a long time, drying out and coming to its senses. Again, only the original uncompressed image at 3648×2746 really does the camera justice, but the version I’ve butchered for the web doesn’t look so bad either. Click it twice to get to the 1024×768 version. Any arguments that it’s not a starling will be happily accepted if you know better – I’m not 100% sure.
]]> http://ciarang.com/posts/water-wings/feed 0 http://ciarang.com/posts/books-chapter-four http://ciarang.com/posts/books-chapter-four#comments Thu, 13 May 2010 21:55:45 +0000 CiaranG http://ciarang.com/?p=1012

In which I present, for no apparent reason, a list of books I’ve read since the last list.

The Secret Agent – Joseph Conrad: This is the fourth of his books that I’ve read (the previous three are here, and it’s now level pegging, with two of them (this included) being very enjoyable, and two not so much.

Dead Souls – Ian Rankin: First of a set of “three for five quid” picked up in a bargain bookshop that’s conveniently near where I was waiting for the old Merc to pass it’s MOT test. This one was picked because I’ve read quite a lot of Rankin’s stuff. A fairly standard “Rebus” novel, but with an unexpected twist – I spent quite a lot of the time having a strange sense of deja vu, like I’d read some passages of the book before, and some bits of the story were familiar too. It turned out that it was adapted from a short story I’d already read, which was published in Beggar’s Banquet.

The Front – Patricia Cornwell: The second of the bargain-bookshop-three. This was ok, but it deserved to be in the bargain bookshop.

Roman Blood – Steven Saylor: The wildcard entry from the bargain bookshop. I’d never heard of it (or him), or any of the other books on offer, so I picked it up almost at random to make up the set of three. It turned out to be the best of the lot by a long way. Very good indeed. Luckily it’s also the first of a long series, of which I’ve already purchased the next book.

The Turn of the Screw – Henry James: This was ‘recommended’ by my wife. Recommended as in she read it, then passed it on to me, but failed to inform me beforehand that she didn’t really like it. There are two stories in the book. I got about halfway through the first page before I asked if she’d read them both, and she said no. I wondered why not, but with hindsight it was a valiant effort even reading the first in its entirety. I lasted about three chapters then gave up.

Brave New World – Aldous Huxley: An astounding vision of the future, for it’s time, although it doesn’t seem so far away now. Also, in my opinion, an astoundingly bad piece of writing.

Set In Darkness – Ian Rankin: More of the Rebus stuff. Readable enough, as always.

The Falcon Flies – Wilbur Smith: Without any reasonable grounds for doing so, I always had Wilbur Smith down as some kind of author of junk fiction. I only read this because I found it lying around. I thought it was great, and I’ll be reading more of his books.

We have an independent, Chris Nolan standing in our constituency. I was slightly interested when I found out about this – at least, more interested than I would be in any of the LibLabCon coalition, who all have virtually the same policies. Via the wonders of modern technology, I found his campaign web site and was put off before I’d even started by the default Wordpress theme. One out of ten for effort, but no big deal. But then came the words. Some examples:

• It is likely that no party ill have an out-right majority known as a `hung parliament ‘, and therefore…
• Im passionate about the people, communities and businesses…
• Developments at the major PowerStation’s on the edge of the Constituency.
• A stlye I will take with me to Parliament if elected
• It also co-incidedes with the start of the delivery of the official Postal Voting forms

Just a few examples, but any sentence picked at random from the site seems to be along similar lines. The strange randomly placed extra spaces add an extra touch of slapdashity to the whole affair.

Am I just being pedantic here? I don’t think so. I’m on a few mailing lists where some regular posters write so badly you sometimes can’t even understand what they’re saying. Even when you can understand it, you can’t help but be influenced by the way it’s written. This is nothing like in that league of course – it gets the message across – but it gets another message across too, one that says “I couldn’t be arsed”. It’s the written equivalent of turning up for a job interview with your shirt hanging out and mud on your shoes.

Anyway, I hope if Chris reads this he takes it as constructive criticism, although I accept I haven’t written it in a very constructive manner. As I’ve said already, the idea of an independent candidate is more appealing to me than one tied to one of the major parties, and I like a few things about his approach. I have some serious reservations about the whole independent candidate thing though, but that’s a subject for another post which may or may not materialise.

It’s planting season at last. Although we have enough runner beans saved from last year’s crop to plant out a whole field, there’s not much else, so that meant buying seeds. I put a bit more effort in that last year’s grabbing of packets from the racks in the garden centre, and the first batch arrived in the post recently.

These came from The Real Seed Catalogue, which has a great selection of proper seeds – none of your hybrid leeks bred for supermarket straightness here. Also, all this stuff should, in theory, produce usable seeds for future years. It all looks good on paper, but the proof will be in the eating and we have to wait for that.

It’s nice to be writing about growing vegetables, because unlike my recent highly controversial topic of children’s cutlery, there’s surely no way an army of clipboard-waving bureaucrats can stick their oars in and mess things up, is there? But wait, what’s this? There’s an official list of vegetable varieties. If a particular variety isn’t registered on that list, it’s illegal to sell it to ‘the public’. Needless to say, it’s expensive to get anything on to this list, what with having to pay for the hordes of ‘public servants’ needed to maintain this list, perform tests and tick the appropriate boxes. Then there’s the whole never-ending wonky vegetables fiasco. It’s probably best to ignore the whole lot of them and get back to the garden.

Here in vegetable plot #3, we have (from right to left) White Beetroot, Cabbage, Red Beetroot, Onion, and another row of White Beetroot. The first three were planted on the 27th of March, and in the beetroot rows the first seedlings have just appeared, I think – it’s hard to tell just yet, they might be weeds, but they’re in a straight line. The other two rows are newly planted today.

The strange arrangement of sticks is both so I know where I planted things, and to discourage the cat and dog from digging them up. I suspect the vegetable plots themselves are quite unconventional as well, being just rectangles dug out of the middle of the lawn, but the results have been perfectly acceptable in previous years. I don’t see any reason to make them raised beds, since the soil is extremely good, but they still have the advantages of raised beds, or at least the one I know of – you can reach everywhere from the side, which means you can plant everything closer together because you don’t need room to walk between the rows. Planting things closer together than the ‘experts’ recommend is a good idea anyway. Unless you’re trying to grow a giant version of everything to get one up on Fred and Percy at the village show, it’s a much better use of the available space to have things closer, smaller and tastier. Also, gaps are just places for weeds to grow.

Mind you, although I can’t help writing ‘experts’ in quotes and tend to ignore what they say, I have no idea what I’m talking about, so I wouldn’t advise listening to me either.

Dear James,

Thank you for your recent election communication, in which you requested my vote in the forthcoming general election. I’m pleased to note that you would listen and work hard to represent me, and as such I have one or two queries on issues you weren’t able to cover in the brief leaflet:

Digital Economy Bill – This was a poorly drafted bill, debated by MPs who clearly didn’t understand the issues involved and forced through parliament without proper consideration or scrutiny. This would be bad enough in any circumstances, but in the case of controversial measures such as those in clauses 1-18 this is nothing short of disgraceful. The measures, which now have Royal Assent, have the potential to cause untold damage to innocent individuals and businesses, and to stifle the ‘digital economy’ in various ways – all, clearly, done at the behest large media corporations who have failed to understand or adapt to the modern world, and almost certainly will not benefit from the legislation in any case. How would you have voted in relation to this bill, what will you be doing to undo the damage caused, and what will you be doing to ensure this abuse of parliamentary process and mandate to govern is not repeated?

Home Education – Thanks to an awful lot of luck, a great deal of campaigning, and the Conservative party, the government were forced to drop Schedule 1 of the Children, Schools and Families Bill. These provisions were badly drafted, based on a totally flawed report, and in any case totally unnecessary, yet the government ignored all opposition and persisted in trying to rush through these provisions, again with total disregard for proper consultation, scrutiny or parliamentary procedure. Furthermore, they have vowed to reintroduce the same measures in the next session, in the event they are returned to office. In that (admittedly very unlikely) event, what will you be doing to prevent this from happening?

ID Cards – I have never had any difficulty identifying myself when the need has arisen, so I have no need for an ID card. I object to both the idea that I should be legally required to carry one, and that billions of pounds of taxpayer’s money should be spent on facilitating this, despite the fact that it would achieve nothing at all beyond the further expansion of the authoritarian nature of the state. I understand that the Conservatives would put a stop to this project. What is your position on this, and does it differ from your party’s? (And in general, where your position might differ from your party’s, would you be inclined to vote according to your beliefs, or your whip? In other words, are you asking me to vote for you, or the Labour party?)

Drug Policy – I can’t help but notice that the failed policy of prohibition has continued to be followed by the government. Prohibition, now known as ‘the war on drugs’, is clearly a counter-productive policy which provides a lucrative source of income for organised crime, criminalises recreational drug users (who form the majority) and leaves problem drug users (the minority) in danger due to poor quality and contaminated supplies. This would be bad enough in itself, even if vast sums of taxpayer’s money and huge amounts of valuable police time were not expended on this foolish and phoney ‘war’. Such is the level of dogma behind all this that when a respected scientist and government advisor attempts to introduce even a small amount of common sense into the debate, he is promptly sacked by the Home Office. I would welcome your comments on this topic.

Abuse of Parliamentary Process – As I have touched upon in some of the earlier points, I am greatly concerned by the fairly recent, but seemingly growing, abuse of parliamentary process. The number of new laws introduced over the three previous terms of Labour government is truly shocking, and in the hurry to fit in as many as possible we have seen badly drafted legislation and lack of scrutiny, as well as members voting without being present at debates, and even speaking in clear opposition to measures then voting in favour of the bills. In addition, there is an increasing tendency to write ‘skeleton legislation’ along with Statutory Instruments, where the true measures are later filled in and amended as the relevant Minister of the day sees fit, thus circumventing parliament entirely. While I personally believe that the state has little function other than to keep the peace, where laws that restrict the liberty of individuals or place requirements on them are truly necessary, I expect the whole process to be conducted with the thought, care and precision it deserves. I would be interested to learn whether you share my view that things have gone very badly wrong in this department over recent years, and if so what you hope to see change and how you intend to contribute to that change if elected.

Obviously this is just a small and random selection of the issues that concern me, but I’m confident it is a good enough sample for me to gauge your appropriateness for the task of representing me in parliament, and I look forward to your response.

Yours etc.

It turned out to be a bit wordy but I reckon that many words would have fitted on the leaflet, if most of the space wasn’t taken up by publicity photos and VERY LARGE WRITING, but I daresay substance is not what people really want in a leaflet. I don’t expect James Lewis to have time to read my letter during his campaign, let alone reply to it, but writing it kept me amused for a while.

A task he takes very seriously:

Every day: