Earth: Mostly Harmless

Company claims to have generator with more than 100% efficiency

I’m calling bullshit on this one. So is this reasonable analysis. Would any of my more technical readership care to confirm?

Be sure to check out the 0% information, 100% marketing Google-hosted video.

Company claims to have generator with more than 100% efficiency:

Mark Frauenfelder:

An Ireland-based company called Steorn claims it has a turbine technology that generates more energy than it uses, aka perpetual motion. Check out this video, not for an explanation of how the technology works (because there is no explanation, besides a little animation of a fuzzy green circle dancing around three horseshoe magnets) but for the ways the use a variety of emotional tricks to sucker people into believing in it.

The company’s credo is a George Bernard Shaw quote: “All great truths begin as blasphemies.” But I’m sure Shaw would also agree that the overwhelming majority of blasphemies that go against bedrock principles of science are utter bullshit.

Link

(Via BoingBoing).

20Q machine

20Q machine

Originally uploaded by BigRedBall.

After A G showed me his one of these last year, I decided to ask for one as part of my birthday this year. It’s so frustratingly smart….

Part 3 of RIPA Act - consultation

More on the proposed enactment of section 3 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. Looks like some parliamentary types are starting to catch on to the reasoning coming from the computing communities.

“But the draft code of conduct has no guidance on weighing privacy against the demands of law enforcement,” said Caspar Bowden, former head of FIPR.

He questioned how police could balance the rights of victims, suspects and the general public if this was not made explicit.

Mr Bowden also questioned the wisdom of making it an offence to refuse to unscramble evidence. He said there were many scenarios that made it possible for a suspect to deny they ever had the key that unlocked encrypted data.

Already, he said, there had been one court case in which a suspect was acquitted after claiming a computer virus under someone else’s control had caused the offences for which he faced trial. Mr Bowden speculated that other suspects could use the same tactic or would fake a virus infection to get themselves off the hook.

Some fear the powers will stop people taking care with data
He also asked how someone would prove they had genuinely lost or forgotten a password and wondered if the threat of a jail sentence would hamper efforts to make users take more care of personal data.

“Will it deter the mass of honest users from properly securing their data?” said Mr Bowden.

You bet.

BBC story

Current activities

I haven’t posted anything of substance here for a while, so I thought that a general update post might be a good idea.

My birthday has, after two weeks, begun to cease being the central focus of my life… I had a great time out with friends on on the 1st August (those who remember more of it will attest to this). And I was pleasantly surprised at the turn-out level

21sts seem to go on and on - and since my cousin’s 21st was yesterday, it felt like the dust had barely settled from mine before the whole gravy train started up again. It’s all very nice though, and I think he had a good time. there’s something tangibly different this birthday from the others I’ve had. I suppose the most obvious thing is that people treat it as sort of watershed - the beginnings of some new stage of your life. I expect that for me this is probably true. I’ve changed a great deal in the past few months, and though I won’t bore you with the details, I rather like the way things are going for me just now.

Oh, and come the 18th, Sharon and I will have been together for 18 months.

A few small updates and errata:

I’m working at Spoken Word three days a week just now, splitting my time between fixing bugs in Padova, and working on our squeaky-clean and brand new installation of the excellent Fedora repository software. Fedora is an interesting, though opaque environment. Lots of challenges ahead…

Loving Muse right now. I have tickets to the Edinburgh gig on the 24th and also to the Glasgow one in November. Should be excellent.

My friend Ross won a silver in the high jump at the Scottish Athletics Championships today, and also became under 20s champion. Though if I could jump my own height, I think I would put it to some form of criminal purposes. Not sure what, but there’s gotta be a fence somewhere that needs jumped over.

I also got my phone pretty much sorted out. I received a refund for the original E61 and thanks to a miraculous bit of timing I only had 24 hours ‘downtime’ between sending away the ‘old’ one and receiving the new one from a reseller. So I only had to use the yucky WinMo T-Mobile MDA Vario (right)for that short period. Euughh. It *should* be an okay phone, considering the specifications, but that OS - horrible. That one’s being eBay-ed ASAP. The new E61 is great.

I started reading Great Expectations. My literary criticism skills are about as advanced as that of a house-brick, so I will make a stark generalised comment and say “what a wonderful writer old Charlie was”, and leave it at that.

TTFN, dear readers. I love you all in exactly the way that one does not love him.

Results

It appears that in some cases, asking questions can be more effective than engineering.

Due to the construction of my building and the placement of T-Mobile transmitter towers in my area, I was unable to get a signal in the back of the house (where my bedroom is).

My now world-famous antenna, coupled with sometimes leaving the phone in the living room, together pass as somewhat workable (but inconvenient) solutions. Aiming the antenna is a big challenge (especially without a cell tracker application available for the E61), and tethering the phone to the living room window or to the antenna rather removes the ‘mobile’ part of the concept.

As part of my holy quest for increased coverage, I used the Government’s Sitefinder mobile antenna mapping service to locate the antenna giving me issues. I submitted a trouble ticket as a matter of course about the poor reception, thinking that it’d end up in the gunnels of some ASP mailing script on an arcane civil service network.

To my surprise, today I received a very nice email in response to the ticket from Richard at T-Mobile, who is arranging a drive-by test of the signal in my area. He also let me know that they’re building a dual-mode GSM/UMTS transmitter 200m from my house, though he couldn’t give an activation date for it. Not only that, but he let me know that T will be increasing the signal strength on the 2 existing transmitters ‘as we increase our customer base’ - probably quite a gradual thing but it should help as well.

And after all the effort building the damned aerial and the attention I’ve received for doing so, the phone itself is going back to the seller - it has the wrong keyboard language, and I’ve been negotiating for a swap or refund…