*spews*

London metro police poster:

Mark Frauenfelder:

Numlok says: “This is an actual British Government poster outside a London Metro. Looks like they ripped it straight from the set of ‘Brazil.’”

It’s a gorgeous work of art. The colors in the bus windows are appealing.

Link

(Via BoingBoing).

This example is really cool.

Rube Goldberg- like tea machine:

James writes ” Me and my friend made a machine that puts a tea bag into a cup… physics, kinematics, mechanics, energy, interesting, amazing, machine, marble, run, contraption device…” Thanks JS! - Link.

Related:

• Ramen cooking Rube Goldberg-like video - Link.
• Make Podcast: Rube Goldberg Contraption Machine Made …. - Link.
• HALF LIFE 2 Rube Goldberg Contraptions - Link.
• Rube Goldberg contest - Link.
• Phil Salkie’s “Rube Goldberg … - Link.
• Marble rolling - Link.

[Read this article] [Comment on this article]

(Via MAKE Magazine).

There’s also now a short clip of the Hitchhikers’ Guide to explain the name of the weblog. Check it out. But don’t sue me.

There are a lot more photos of it on Flickr - the ones by BigRedBall are mine. This set by JISC InfoNet is particularly good.

It’s a university, but not as we know it:

The Guardian featured our new Saltire Centre in its recent Educational Supplement (published Tuesday the 19th of September). The review is a very positive one and highlights on how the building is changing the way in which students interact with each and how the building is a sign of things to come and is paving the way for other Universities employing such a forward thinking approach to student learning and learning environments.

The Saltire Centre, a futuristic but people-friendly learning space at Scotland’s fourth largest university, has a serious purpose. But its impact on visitors and users, from the talking lifts to the inflatable igloos, is anything but solemn. It lifts their spirits and makes them smile.

Read the full article here.

(Via Spoken Word Matters).

This site is now hosted by DreamHost. The move went very smoothly - and everything’s working now, including nice permalinks!

It should load a bit faster now too.

And so it comes round again, international Talk Like A Pirate Day. This year’s a little more special than most, with so much piratey memorabilia available. For starters, Apple is making a contribution thanks to this graphic, and the availability of Piratey (or should that be Richards-ey) movies on the DRM-laden iTunes store.

Piratey translation:

Yarr, it be upon us oncemore, the Daye when landlubbers succumb their wretched Speach t’the way of the Salty Seadog. The riggin be sound on this here Daye - yarr, Davy Jones’ Locker’ll take me now if there ain’t a grand booty on them thar Inter Nette, of Squiffies who be postin’ plunder of Gentlemen o’ Fortune.

Aye, me parrot concurs.

Yes, indeed the Internet has given us some great things: RSS; instant communication across political and cultural boundaries; Chuck Norris facts and more, but it is surely in this area of piratey camp humour in which its faculties as a medium for increasing human understanding truly shine.

Just look at the piratey songs; dictionaries; thesaurus (and wiki) lesson plans; clothing; Flash animations; offical TLAPD songs; movies; online Piratey translator cartoon (one of my faves); Slashdot story; and more the Web has to offer. And if all this Piratese confuses your English-accustomed tongue, see this helpful Pirate grammar how-to video.

Ask not what pirates can do for you; ask what you can do for pirates.

And don’t forget this guy.

Update:
Turns out it isn’t K2 after all - it’s WordPress. I’ll post again when I have a fix. Also, permalinks are broken too. I think it’s WP’s internal URL rewriting engine going screwy.

If anyone has ideas please let me know.

Update 2
Ah. It isn’t WordPress, it’s my host - NetFirms, who are cheap but crap! Basically they don’t allow overriding certain Apache directives, which are essential to pretty permalinks ( /2006/09/11/post-title/ ) working. Lots of other folks are reporting the same thing. I’ve been unhappy with the speed of uploading to Netfirms, and with the constant HTTP and FTP timeouts.

I’m planning to switch to HostMonster, but nothing should be visible from here apart from the pretty permalinks working again. In the meantime I’ve enabled query-style permalinks (/?p=109 ).

All posts from the old blog have been moved over - but unfortunately, moving your (very nice) comments over in a simple way wasn’t possible given the constrains of Blogsome - though I’ll continue to investigate ways to do this.

Many thanks to all for making this blog worth writing!

I’m still thinking up things to put here. In the meantime, here’s the best photo ever taken:

Via the K2 website

We just updated our site at Spoken Word quite extensively - take a look at our brand-new, WordPress-driven, fully-skinned blog.

Word.

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….

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.

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…

And then came a little site called /.…

Blogsome didn’t know what had hit it. I think there are a few smoking servers in Dublin right now.

It was also featured in a few other sites, like Howard Forums, Reddit, Techmeme and Mobile Magazine. There are probably quite a few more but my WordPress referrer log doesn’t go back far enough to show all of the referrers left even in the past couple of hours - there’s a total list of 426,068 at this point!

My hits have gone through the roof: I’m letting it settle for a few hours to take account of the Slashdot posting, but I was up to well over 50,000 daily pageviews at the point that Google Analytics last generated its stats. I expect a lot more than that once the dust has settled.

I must say that this is all very odd. I wouldn’t have thought that what I made was particularly innovative. As several commenting posters have said, this is just a slight modification of existing designs. However, I’m also flattered - so far the majority of comments have been positive.

Cheers to all!

UPDATE:

I forgot that I also got on Gizmodo…

UPDATE (20th Aug 2006):

Fixed Digg link

UPDATE (10th August 2006)- My antenna may no longer be needed soon!

UPDATE (3rd August 2006)- Better pics added - see bottom of post

(Or, to be more accurate, where 20ft of solid stone was blocking line-of-sight to the nearest transmitter.)

I just got a Nokia E61 on T-Mobile. When I signed up, I knew that the signal was really weak in the back of our house - the building forms a large square, and my bedroom faces into the centre of the square. I could get a signal in the living room (just), but wouldn’t it be great, I thought, not to have to go through there every time the phone rings. Although outside my house full-strength UMTS signals are readily available, the building’s construction prevents them diffracting into the internal ‘courtyard’.

All I needed was enough reception to receive and send SMS messages. I have home WiFi for data access, and I can potentially make calls over that too. I planned to aim for UMTS reception rather than GSM since: a) I didn’t know which GSM frequency to aim for and b) E series Nokia phones maintain their batteries better if they have UMTS signals (otherwise they constantly search for a UMTS signal).

I tried two car-type external antennas that I got via eBay - but unfortunately the gain on both of these was just too low (barely even compensating for the losses in the cable running to the phone). Also, neither were sufficiently directional to catch enough of the reflected signal to give me anything to work with.

The first step was the figure out what the extent of the problem was. I located my nearest T-Mobile base station using the government’s Sitefinder service. This also confirmed the frequency that the transmitter used - 2100Mhz. This is the standard frequency for UMTS (i.e. 3G) services in Europe.

By drawing a line between the transmitter’s location and my building in Google Earth, I was able to confirm the approximate distance and angle of the signal I needed to catch.

Buying a directional antenna wasn’t really an option - for a start, they are expensive - and anyway I couldn’t be sure that such an antenna would actually help. If it didn’t, I’d have wasted £60-£100.

However, in an incredibly geeky flash of inspiration, I realised that there really isn’t much difference in operating frequency between WiFi (around 2.4Ghz) and UMTS (2.1Ghz). And there are loads of different clandestine WiFi antenna ideas floating around the Internet. If I could find an easy-to-build directional WiFi antenna, perhaps I could reverse-engineer its dimensions and adapt it for 2100Mhz use.

So I set about the task. I decided on the biquad antenna type, as it’s fairly compact and easy to build, yet provides decent (10-14dB) gain and is quite directional. My primary sources of information were the many WiFi biquad and double bi-quad antenna tutorials and blog entries, such as: Engadget’s; Trevor Marshall’s tutorials. More can be found on my del.icio.us page for the tag ‘antenna’.

Both WiFi and UMTS operate in microwave frequencies - however, there’s a substantial difference between the middle WiFi channel (around 2.4Ghz - what people usually tune their WiFi antennas to in order to give a good amplification factor across the channel range) and UMTS’ 2.1Ghz. To my knowledge no-one has built a homebrew biquad UMTS antenna before, so there wasn’t much to go on. What also didn’t help was that most WiFi biquad tutorials just give you the measurements verbatim - not the calculations of formulae.

Having done no physics since school, my expertise in antenna building is poor to say the least. Still I did realise a few things about most of the designs floating around the Web: all of the dimensions were multiples of the wavelength at 2.44Ghz (122mm or 0.122m). So then, I just needed to figure out the multiplication factors in each case and I was sorted.

My list is as follows: (λ = wavelength)

• Emitter wire total length: 2λ
• Emitter ’square’ side length: 0.25λ
• Emitter offset from reflector: 0.125λ
• Reflector width/height: 1λ
• Reflector ‘lips’ height: 0.25λ

So, at 2.1Ghz (2,100,000,000Hz - λ = 142.8mm),these dimensions are:

• Emitter wire total length: 285.6mm
• Emitter ’square’ side length: 35.7mm
• Emitter offset from reflector: 17.85mm
• Reflector width/height: 142.8mm
• Reflector ‘lips’ height: 35.7mm

I made the reflector out of galvanised steel mesh and mounted an N-type connector to the centre. I made an N-type coaxial to FME coaxial cable to hook up the phone to the antenna. The emitter itself is made from the copper centre conductor taken from a length of high-quality satellite TV coaxial cable that I had left over. I used some scrap wires to connect the ends of the biquad ‘bow-tie’ back to the reflector, and placed some of the original dielectric insulation from the satellite cable back on the ends of the bow-tie’ shape to prevent the antenna from ’shorting’ (in an RF sense). The emitter is then soldered into the N-type connector in a most slapdash style.

I didn’t have enough mesh to make the ‘lips’ of the antenna’s reflector match the measurements I’d planned, but made them the longest equal lengths that I could. In other respects, I managed to get the dimensions down to within a couple of millimeters of my target measurements.

High-quality cable is a must - I only used 50cm or so of RG-58 type cable to go between the phone and antenna, and unless you’re using something very high-grade (like LMR-400), I wouldn’t go too much further than that.

Presently the antenna is fixed and aimed in a pretty shoddy way - it’s fixed onto a set of ‘3rd hands’ - and there’s a Post-It note there to provide (some) insulation between the stand and the reflector… I plan to investigate more permanent mounting options at some other date.

The biggest problem with the antenna is aiming it - but having said that once it does catch a signal, the phone holds on to it very well. I’m aiming it over the rootfops of the building, hoping to catch some of the signal’s diffraction.

I have no idea how much gain the antenna produces. When aimed correctly (which is very tricky), it gives me a consistent 1-bar UMTS connection, or a 2 bar GSM signal. It works better at night, holding on to a signal for many hours.

UPDATE (3rd August 2006): Here are some better pics. I’ve replaced the post-it note with some pieces of polycarbonate. The pics also show the cradle into which the phone sits, and the cable which links the antenna to the phone.

Also, admire my lovely lavender wall paint :S

Originally uploaded by BigRedBall.

I just renewed my passport, and there’s an RFID tag inside.
Agghh! Tin-foil hat time!
(…)

(…)

Towels are the most useful thing it is possible to have handy in a crisis. One of the first things that Ford Prefect did for Arthur Dent after the demolition [...] (…)