How to Spot a Psychopath

"My client's too ill to come. And he's delusional. And, um, he doesn't exist!"

3 December 2009 — dan

Recent developments in the soap opera that is legal authorities' attempts to get Firepower principal Tim Johnston to show up in court:

Firepower boss avoids night in jail, despite a warrant for his arrest having indeed been issued. "Our client has every intention to voluntarily appear before court on Friday", says his lawyer.

Firepower boss delusional, court told ("I'm sorry, m'lud, but it's entirely impossible for my client to attend these proceedings. He's hopelessly delusional, don't you know. The man actually believes himself to be innocent.")

Oh, and one Geoff McDonald, erstwhile spokesdude for Firepower's liquidators, has himself been struck off for two years over a conflict of interest.

I presume there's somebody, somewhere in the world, who had a business relationship with Firepower and wasn't in some way crooked. But I don't, off the top of my head, know who that somebody might be.

UPDATE: Tim's (finally) been arrested.

Posted in Firepower, Scams, Strange Tales. 12 Comments »

My little-known Caribbean travel writing

2 December 2009 — dan

I do like a nice slab of spam in the morning.

From: "Alex P. @ expo-MAX" <alex@expo-max.com>
To: dan@dansdata.com
Date: 1 Dec 2009 10:56:37 -0600
Subject: Google Images search "walling's reservoir"

Hi there,

I came across your site while researching Google Images for keyword "walling's reservoir" and one of your pages (http://www.dansdata.com/phototute3.htm) was ranked on the 14th page of the Google Images search results.

I'm sure there are plenty of your other images in Google Image Search for many different keywords as well, it's just I came across this one first.

Really? You came across the FOURTEENTH PAGE of the search results... first?

(And, of course, my site deserved to be way down in the results for that search, because I have never written anything that has the slightest relevance to "Wallings Reservoir", which appears to be a place in Antigua. The closest I come to talking about it on that photo tutorial page is using the word "walling", as in "walling off", in one place on the page, and having this picture of a PC water-cooling reservoir somewhere else.

Oh, and note also that "Wallings Reservoir", the place in Antigua, has no apostrophe. More attention to detail from the good Alex P. at Expo-Max-dot-com!

Anyway, I looked through your site and correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like you are getting a lot of your visitors from image search, like Google Images, Yahoo Image Search, etc.

OK: You're wrong.

What if I told you that my team and I have developped a tool that reports on your site's rank (position) in all search engines for all keywords? Meaning, you know exactly where your site is ranked in Google, Yahoo, Google Images, Google News and so forth for each and every keyword.

Well, if you were to tell me such a thing, I'd say "I don't care. Get lost." It's lucky this is just a theoretical question, isn't it?

Alex's e-mail continued, with screenshots and stuff about what may actually be a perfectly good piece of free Web stats software. I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole, though, because of how idiotic this e-mail is.

And it's so close to being good. Good grammar, almost-immaculate spelling, clear presentation of the product, no hard sell... all let down by machine-generating a form-letter top section and not running it past a human to see if it's ridiculous.

D minus. Must try harder.

UPDATE: Thanks to the obscurity of Wallings Reservoir, this blog post is now on the first page of the search results!

I'm still way down the image-search results list, but I think this is still a search-engine optimisation result for Alex to be proud of.

Look what happened when he just told me about his service! Imagine what might happen if I actually used it!

Posted in Shop talk, Spam. 7 Comments »

Give the (free) gift of The Secret Life of Machines!

1 December 2009 — dan

A quick update on the subject of the Secret Life of Machines series...

...which, for the information of newcomers, is

1: fantastic,
2: legal to download for free, and
3: large.

A couple of years ago, I made a torrent of a high-video-quality version of this excellent science series, which total 3.3 gigabytes.

Of late there have usually only been one or two seeds for the torrent, though, and one of them is me, and my little home DSL account can only upload at a peak speed of about 25 kilobytes per second. So it takes me a couple of days to send the whole bulk of the three series to someone (technically, it's two six-episode series of The Secret Life of Machines, plus one six-episode series of The Secret Life of The Office). And when the transfer finally completes, the recipient will then usually not bloody seed it.

So if you've still got that torrent sitting in your BitTorrent client, I'd be grateful if you force-seeded it for a while.

(A reminder for readers who're dubious about this, or protection-racketeers from one or another content company who're champing at the bit to send me a nastygram: Tim Hunkin, the creator and principal presenter of this show, wants people to download it for free. He makes this clear in many places, like for example his pages for the three series of the show. The shows are still copyrighted, but free distribution is expressly permitted.)

As I've mentioned before, you can help out with seeding even if you don't have the torrent in your BitTorrent client any more, provided you still have the files. (Which, by the way, are in the "M4V" iPhone format, are not nasty VHS rips, and are playable on all platforms; use VLC if you have problems.)

To seed if you've got the files but not the torrent, just get the torrent started as if you were going to download it again (so your BitTorrent client creates the appropriate download directory and empty files), immediately stop it again, copy the video files from wherever you've put them into the new download directory over the top of the new empty files, and then restart or "Force Re-Check" the download (depending on which BitTorrent client you have). Provided the files are the right ones for this iPhone-format version of the series, and have the right names, the download will now be 100% complete and you can force-seed it for a while.

Oh, and don't worry if your BitTorrent client says the download is only something like 99.8% complete, and it has to download a bit of data before it's "finished". That just means your computer has modified some header data in one or more of the files, so that tiny bit needs to be re-downloaded to overwrite the changes. It doesn't mean the files are corrupt.

(If you don't have a BitTorrent client at all but do have the files, perhaps because someone gave them to you on a thumb drive or something, you can also help out. You just need to install a client - µTorrent, for Windows and Mac, is excellent - and then do the starting-stopping-copying-and-then-seeding thing. The default settings for a freshly-installed BitTorrent client may stop it seeding after it's uploaded 200% of the data size of a torrent, or something; upload-ratio checking goes weird when you do the stop-copy-and-seed thing, too, because you'll have the whole download but won't have actually downloaded anything. Just right-click the torrent and select "Force Start" or "Force Seed" or whatever it's called in your client, to ignore upload limits.)

Here's a magnet link for the Secret Life of Machines torrent. (You may need to associate your BitTorrent program with magnet:... links to make this work, or manually copy and paste the link into an "Open Torrent..." dialog.)

You can also download the torrent file from isoHunt or The Pirate Bay - it was on Mininova, too, but they decided to go legit the other day and removed pretty much all of their torrents, including legal ones like this.

The BitTorrent community is moving away from .torrent files, just as it's moving away from trackers - The Pirate Bay have actually shut their trackers down altogether now. If you've got the little magnet URI for the download you want - it's ?xt=urn:btih:D62CLPSEYNRN74FRZDUC5GYVKTOOUKGE for the Secret Life of Machines torrent - then your BitTorrent client can use it to get other people who're downloading the same thing to send you the data that a .torrent file would have given you. This may take a little longer than downloading a torrent file would have, but it shouldn't actually fail unless there's nobody seeding the torrent, in which case you obviously wouldn't be able to download it anyway.

Once you've got the torrent info, the distributed hash table (DHT) system that all modern BitTorrent clients support can go on to give you the rest of the data from other users, without needing a central "tracker" system to keep everything organised.

And then, before you know it, you're watching Tim stand on the accelerator and the brake at the same time, and Rex brutalising that poor innocent refrigerator.

Tim Hunkin has done a lot of stuff since The Secret Life of Machines. Here's...

...some posh bird enjoying the latest in Tim's long and inimitable line of penny-arcade amusement machines, "Whack A Banker".

Posted in Electricity, Hacks, Nerdery, Science, Toys. 24 Comments »

Your UFO sightings for today

30 November 2009 — dan

The fewer blades a propeller - or helicopter rotor - has, the more efficient it is. (Essentially, this is because the more blades you have, the more turbulent becomes the air each blade's trying to push around. Helicopters with lots of rotor blades have so many because a rotor with fewer blades would be unmanageably large, or require a radical redesign.)

So, ridiculous though this sounds, one-bladed propellers are actually the most efficient kind. Just one blade sticking out from the hub, on one side. Like a football rattle.

I think one-bladed props have actually been used in ultra-fast control-line model planes for ages, with just a counterweight on the other side of the prop from the blade. (And yes, they do also use pulse-jets!) There's at least one swishy-looking counterweighted one-bladed ceiling fan, too.

If you want large size or high power from a one-bladed prop, though, you're out of luck, because the single blade creates unbalanced thrust that'll wear your shaft bearings away in no time. (You may also have some difficulty finding test pilots.)

The single-bladed helicopter may be coming into its own, though, now that we've got tiny, powerful jet and electric motors, and somewhat better batteries, and low-power super-lightweight computerised control systems.

All this means we can now make a one-bladed helicopter, on the "samara" or "sycamore seed" principle, except powered - it's spun by a little normal propeller, on an outrigger.

In the olden days there'd be no way for an aircraft like this, whose whole airframe spins, to do anything very useful. But nowadays... well, just look:

It's probably not even tremendously difficult to shoot video from such a thing, today. In the olden days it would have required a nicely constant rotational speed, at the very least - but now if you want to look in a particular direction, it's pretty easy to just grab a fast frame at roughly the same spot in the rotation each time. Then you rub a little cheap digital signal processing on the output, to stop it jiggling from side to side or "tearing" as the platform spins too fast for the sensor chip to grab a whole square frame.

It probably wouldn't even be hard to run a few-hundred-frame-per-second camera (or a few cheap 30fps ones) with no position detection at all, and just stitch all the video together into a 360-degree panorama, with variable frame rate in all directions, back at base.

I have this image of some game-company 3D artist trying to get a thing like this put in, as a recon tool, in a sci-fi shooter set in the year 2100, and everybody telling him it was way too crazy. I bet powered sycamore seeds will actually be dropping bugs through people's windows inside five years.

Posted in Science, Strange Tales. 6 Comments »

With a site like this, it MUST be good!

30 November 2009 — dan

When I'm looking at the Web site of a tradesman or small business, I actually take it as a good sign if the site looks like crap.

As long as it's got all the information you're looking for - often little more than basic "brochure" data - then the presence of dodgy table-based formatting, GIF animations, Comic Sans and so on just means that this particular house-painter, lawn-mower or solar-panel-installer probably hasn't spent much time or money on site design, with any luck because they were too busy doing their job.

There are, however, limits.

Allow me to present: Biomile Australia!

Or maybe "MOTORTRONICS H20 COMPANY PTY LTD", which is one of the bits of text peeking out from behind the two large images in the middle of the screen. If you've loaded the page, you've loaded the full-size images, which are just sized down with height="320" width="240" to fit on the home page. So I urge you to click on the second one and see it in all of its Web 0.2 magnificence.

Whoever the Biomile (not to be confused with BioPerformance!) people are, they're in the miracle-fuel-additive business, with - once your eyes stop bleeding and you manage to read the page - the usual claims about economy, emissions, power and so on. And, also according to the standard fuel-pill script, they say that Biomile pills "have been tested and approved by the epa in the Usa"! (I choose to pronounce that as "by the eep-ah in the ooh-sa".)

Well, the EPA does seem to know that Biomile exist, and the EPA actually has tested quite a lot of fuel-saving power-boosting gadgets and potions. But they have never found one that works. The EPA does not, in fact, endorse fuel-saving products at all.

(I was disappointed to see that Biomile pills also do not seem to have been tested by California Environmental Engineering.)

Never mind these quibbles, though. Let's get back to that awesome Web site!

I like to browse with the text size set a bit larger than the default, which somewhat breaks the formatting of some sites. I've also only got Firefox and Chrome here, plus Internet Explorer 6 hanging around for testing purposes. So I wasn't completely confident that the stunning broken-ness of the Biomile site wasn't, at least partly, my fault.

Compare and contrast the Australian Biomile site with the US one, for instance. The US site is a giant blob of Flash, but it looks quite good. And has, you know, page titles and stuff.

So I bounced biomileaustralia.com off a selection of different browsers on the immensely useful Browsershots.org.

The results are here, and they are not good.

(I did rather like Dillo's minimalist interpretation and Flock's even more minimalist one, though.)

Perhaps the Biomile Australia site is a devilishly cunning scheme to actively repel intelligent people, because they're nothing but trouble for the modern questionable-product entrepreneur.

Hmm. Probably not.

Posted in Cars, Humour, Scams. 4 Comments »

Protecting your delicate brain from YouTube comments

30 November 2009 — dan

We all know what YouTube comments are like.

Exactly which site boasts the Web's stupidest commenters is a matter for debate, but YouTube is unquestionably right up there.

You can try to ignore the comments on YouTube; if you've got a small enough browser window and don't page down, you may be able to avoid seeing them altogether. You can also tell YouTube to only display comments rated "excellent (+10 or better)" until it forgets you're logged in or the cookie's cleared or whatever. I think that setting leaves a grand total of about eight comments visible on the whole site.

One way or another, though, most of us at least catch a glimpse of YouTube comments, out of the corner of our eyes, from time to time. Sometimes we even look there on purpose, for the same reason people look at other such... things. Every glance corrodes your faith in humanity a little more.

May I, therefore, suggest the Firefox add-on YouTube Comment Snob?

It ain't perfect, but it's fighting the good fight.

There are a few Greasemonkey scripts that do similar things. YouTube Comment Cleaner, for instance, and (as I write this) three scripts that replace comments with quotations, including one that hybridises with YouTube Comment Snob, replacing any comments the Snob blocks with quotes from Richard Feynman.

The Comment Snob options...

YouTube Comment Snob options

...remind me of the old Microsoft Word Hidden Settings joke:

Microsoft Word hidden options

By default, Comment Snob doesn't block comments that include profanity, which of course is not necessarily an indicator of a lack of intelligence.

Except in fucking YouTube comments.

Posted in Language, Nerdery. 9 Comments »

Ping-pong panelbeating

27 November 2009 — dan

I have just discovered how to remove dents from table-tennis balls.

We don't have a ping-pong table here, but we do have a lot of ping-pong balls, because we've got four cats and ping-pong balls are great cat toys.

When ping-pong balls are everywhere, though, you'll often tread on one, and dent it. A dented ping-pong ball is of limited utility as a cat toy, and is of course no use at all for actually playing table tennis.

As I was making tea, it occurred to me that just holding a dented ball in tongs and immersing it in very hot water might un-dent it. Even if the heat didn't soften the ball (which, as it turns out, it will), the expansion of the heated gas inside the ball ought to push the dents right out.

And I'll be darned if that is not exactly what happens. The ball swells back up to perfect roundness, and once cooled and dried it seems to bounce pretty much as well as a brand new one.

The only time this trick won't work is if there's an actual hole in the ball, which can happen if a dent has sharp creases. Then, all you get when you immerse the ball is a trail of bubbles from the hole.

(If you subsequently immerse the punctured ball in cold water, the contracting gas inside will suck the water into the ball. This lets you partially fill a ping-pong ball with liquid through a tiny hole, but you could do that with a syringe anyway. I remember seeing a documentary about controlled burning in forestry; to reliably start fires from the air, they used a machine that took ping-pong balls that'd been pre-filled with potassium permanganate, and then syringed glycerine into them, just before dropping them.)

Interestingly, ping-pong balls also smell distinctly of camphor when you take them out of the hot water. That's because they're made of celluloid, which is principally composed of nitrocellulose and camphor. This is why they burn so well:

(Some very, very cheap ping-pong balls are made of plastic instead of celluloid. They're a bit squishy, bounce about as well as a grape, and often aren't even evenly thick all over, so they wobble when rolling. Still OK as cat toys, though.)

Sadly, it would appear that I am not the first person to have thought of this repair technique. But I'm still pleased that I thought it up all by myself.

(I also invented the differential, at about the age of nine. Unfortunately, someone else had already invented that, too.)

Posted in Nerdery, Science, Strange Tales. 11 Comments »

Now you see Tim, now you don't

26 November 2009 — dan

If you read my last little piece about the delectable Tim Johnston, instigator of the Firepower magic-fuel-pill scam, and kept reloading it to keep up with the couple of updates, you would know:

1: For some reason, Tim came back to Australia, under his own name.
2: The authorities immediately took his passport away.
3: He went to court to ask for his passport back, so he could "travel for business purposes", whereupon...
4: ...the Firepower liquidators served him with papers ordering him to appear at a Federal-court civil hearing launched by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, which body has been following Tim around for a while now, bolting each door behind him after he has galloped through.

Perhaps we'll eventually know why it was that Tim came back under his own name and then decided to appear in public to try to get his passport back; on the surface, these seem to be the actions of a crazy man. But it would appear that he's had another moment of clarity, because now he's decided to not turn up at the hearing.

(On the grounds that he's suddenly too ill to travel, which isn't very original.)

Johnston is also apparently headed for personal bankruptcy, an event that punctuates the lives of entrepreneurial scam artists with metronomic regularity.

But I like these weird, unexplained deviations from the standard scam-artist script that Johnston keeps coming up with. I wonder what he'll do next?

UPDATE: The liquidator has now applied for an arrest warrant, to encourage the suddenly-taken-ill Johnston to actually turn up in court. Oh, and apparently Mr Johnston is currently being legally represented by a man who says he's a lawyer, but does not appear to actually be one. I wonder what qualifications the doctor who wrote Johnston's sick note will turn out to have?

In a further shocking development, some bloke who gave Tim $450,000 and was "confident he would get a good return" is now a bit upset. This guy made his "investment" in 2007. I could see that Firepower was obviously a scam in 2006, and Gerard Ryle's first Sydney Morning Herald feature story about Firepower, which explained just how loudly the whole operation screamed "scam", came out at the very beginning of '07.

I can kind of understand the "mum and dad" investors who sink their life savings of $5000 or so into some charlatan's scheme without looking into it adequately. But what kind of person who doesn't own his own Middle Eastern nation would invest almost half a million bucks in something that five minutes with Google would show him is very similar to a long line of previous products, some sold by the same guy who's selling this newest one, that all turned out to be scams?

Posted in Firepower, Scams, Strange Tales. 5 Comments »

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