I get letters, I get letters...

23 December 2008 — dan

There is still a drought of letters to me in my capacity as Atomic I/O letters answerer. (Probably because people just switch to e-mailing me at dan@dansdata.com after I answer one question.)

But my two Atomic addresses - dan@atomic as well as io@atomic - do receive the occasional missive. Usually they're spam. This time, there was this:

From: "bo"
To: dan
Subject: pg64 atomic magazine.
[That's the page my Ground Zero column fell on in the most recent magazine. This column was about sci-fi batteries and their theoretical limits. If you don't get Atomic, you'll have to wait another six months before I reprint it on dansdata.com.]
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2008 19:55:36 +1300

Hi Dan-

I can get you the battery technology that will take you well
beyond your 10x Lithium - ion battery.

New - Technology- in comparison hundreds of volts compared with an ordinary 12 Volt battery

Yes its real. real technology and yes you can own it -

Let me know if you are interested.
Price is NZ$50,000 - and it is the knowledge of making
new materials that will enable you to construct a battery
that is well well beyond the current technology..

So for that money I will give you the new material Knowledge
for to construct as many batteries as you require -
which is new material science..
-
Tradionally batteries have been made by top scientists -
the likes of Sandia National Nuclear Labs USA. - Using a lifetime of
knowledge and equations - substance purity and property etc etc

So if you want it - its yours for $50,000-
just a method ( which is the new material science) to make much better batteries.
Note: There is some Trial and Error - but you will get there in the end.

Let me know if you are interested.

Its a matter of Trust - just like Auctions on the Internet -
you send me the money - and I will send you the method-

Thanks

Beau
[an address @ xtra.co.nz]

Wow! Hundreds of volts, you say! Unprecedented!

Regrettably, I lack the resources to pay anybody fifty thousand dollars in any currency but that of Zimbabwe.

If anybody reading this would like to invest in this very promising-sounding enterprise, though, I suggest you send the $50,000 to me, so that I can pass it on to Beau.

Just like auctions on the Internet.

Posted in Electricity, Strange Tales. 4 Comments »

Die Legoroboter

21 December 2008 — dan

(Via.)

Most videos of Lego Great Ball Contraption modules are a bit hard to follow, but this one concentrates on only three modules, so you can get an idea of what's going on.

(The string-quartet Kraftwerk is nice, too.)

The Great Ball Contraption is basically just rules for ball-moving modules that make sure they can connect to each other - like a Technic version of the Lego Moonbase standard.

(Incidentally, you can fmt=18 this clip to get the higher-quality MP4 version, but fmt=22-ing it only seems to give you the basic FLV version at the moment. It doesn't fall back to 18. I knew there was some reason why I didn't do what the cool kids do.)

Posted in Hacks, Nerdery, Toys. 2 Comments »

Now carve a golf club out of it

20 December 2008 — dan

Behold, Theodore "Periodic Table Table" Gray's most recent Popular-Science-column adventure:

Making titanium from paint-pigment titanium dioxide, via a thermite reaction.

You're meant to put your reaction-vessel flower-pot inside a bigger pot with sand between them, so that the inevitable cracking of the pot won't allow the metal to escape. But it's more photogenic this way.

You also have to cheat a bit to get molten titanium to drip out of a titanium-dioxide/aluminium reaction. The reaction doesn't actually burn quite hot enough to melt the titanium, so it'll just give you a block of titanium-plus-aluminium-oxide slag. To avoid this, you put in extra aluminium, plus an oxidiser to get it to burn. In this case, the oxidiser is humble calcium-sulfate plaster.

And presto, a puck of pretty crystalline titanium can be yours.

(And yes, fmt=22 works on this video clip, giving you a 71.8Mb HD file which you can craftily download.)

Posted in Nerdery, Science. 3 Comments »

The Gamer Product That Will Not Die

20 December 2008 — dan

I reviewed the Mouse Bungee in July, 1999. And it wasn't brand new then. It's got to be ten years old by now.

It's been on sale at Aus PC Market for all of that time. They're still using the crunchy product pic I took with my DC120 in 1999, too.

Mouse Bungee

And now it's on special, yours (if you live in Australia) for $AU19.80 delivered! That's only slightly more than half what it cost when I first reviewed it!

Australian shoppers can click here to order one.

(It's too late for Christmas, though. AusPC go on holiday after Monday the 22nd of December, and they've already shipped their last 2008 orders; you can order stuff whenever you like, but your order will be charged and dispatched in January. AusPC also find it annoying when I tell people to buy things that're on special. So, uh, buy some other stuff, while you're there. I suggest you get a Core i7 PC, plus a spare in case you scratch the first one.)

If you, like me, still have a mouse with a cord, the good old Mouse Bungee really is not a bad solution to the cord-tugs-on-mouse problem.

All you really need to do to deal with that problem, of course, is to tape the cord to your desk at an appropriate point, or attach it to a heavy thing. WireWeights were the fanciest way of doing that second trick, but the company disappeared a couple of years after I reviewed their product in 2004.

The Mouse Bungee people and their surprisingly useful sproing-y product are still very much alive, though.

(Regrettably, the Batterylife Activator people have also vanished. You can still buy a Wine Clip, though, and I'm pretty sure the EMPower Modulator is still on the market, too.)

Posted in Nerdery, Toys. 5 Comments »

If you download only one 188Mb MOV file today...

19 December 2008 — dan

...make it World War, by Vincent Chai (via).

The high-res MOV version is right there on Chai's site, which could get just a leeetle bit overloaded in the near future. One thousand bonus points for the guy, though, for making that high-res version available.

Usually, you find some awesome short film on YouTube or Vimeo or wherever, and then you go to the creator's site, and there's nothing there but the same squished-down Flash-video version. You can format-equals-18 it on YouTube so you can download a better-than-nothing MP4 version, but that's it.

Vincent, though, has the whole HD enchilada right there for download, like the Code Guardian guys who inspired my last post like this. And like the Exploratorium guys with The Secret Life of Machines, for that matter.

Here's a direct link to the MOV file, which if you're reading this some time after I wrote it will either be nice and fast, or broken:
WW_VincentChai.mov

I hope he puts it on archive.org or makes a torrent or something. I e-mailed him about it, but have not yet received a reply, possibly because he's got better things to do than hover by the computer waiting for e-mails from me, or possibly just because it's the middle of the night where he is.

(See also.)

Posted in Humour, Movies, Nerdery. 3 Comments »

God's a bastard, instalment 34827

18 December 2008 — dan

I just put out some more bird seed, because I noticed that this morning's supply had been depleted by the usual mob of colourful creatures, but also because one of the birds still picking at the few seeds left clearly needs all the help it can get.

It's a cockatoo with a fairly advanced case of "psittacine beak and feather disease". I could have taken a picture of it, but it always makes me so sad to even look at a cockatoo with this disease that I just couldn't stand it.

It also makes me sort of aimlessly angry, wishing God existed so I could ask Him what the bloody hell He thought He was playing at.

Psittacine beak and feather disease is, in brief, a virus which takes one of the most beautiful creatures in the world, and makes it uglier and uglier until it is so ugly that it can no longer eat, whereupon it dies. If opportunistic infections of the bird's devastated feathers and tumorous, necrotic beak and claws haven't killed it already, that is.

There is no cure, or even specific treatment, for psittacine beak and feather disease.

There are hundreds of diseases of humans and animals that're just as horrible. But few are as purely and plainly awful as this one. It's like a metaphor for the unfairness of life.

Right - I'm off to Cute Overload for a while.

Posted in Animals, Religion. 49 Comments »

Dis way. No, dat way!

18 December 2008 — dan

I would have mentioned this earlier, but the excellent Illusion Sciences blog went over its Google Pages hosting quota, so I couldn't snag myself a copy of the SWF file to host on my own site.

Now the blog's back, so here it is:

Brilliant, huh?

More info at Illusion Sciences.

(See also.)

UPDATE: Here's a nifty HTML5 version of the same illusion, as per caerphoto's comment below.

Posted in Hacks, Nerdery, Science. 16 Comments »

Pushing a wombat down a garden hose

17 December 2008 — dan

Jeff Atwood's new post about Easy, Efficient Hi-Def Video Playback does not, in the final analysis, find that there's anything all that easy about it. But it reminded me of one of my own pet peeves.

I watch a lot of game-promo video clips, because my ISP has a nice fast mirror of the GamersHell archive that doesn't count toward my download allowance. So what the heck.

Many of these clips have an outrageously high bit rate. It's not at all unusual to see a clip that's less than three minutes long, but more than 400 megabytes in size.

The download time, I don't much care about. I just leave FDM ticking away in the background, with its download speed restricted if I want to get stuff done at the same time. But it irritates me considerably when I finish getting some whole-CD-sized video clip that I then can't even play, because its 600Mb bulk encodes only 2.3 minutes of video, which means the data rate is so tremendous that my computer chokes on it and I only get to see one frame out of 50.

VLC does a pretty good job on the more obnoxious files, especially when they're QuickTime format, the bane of Windows video viewers. But sometimes all the decoder-tweaking and task-priority-boosting in the world just can't cut it, because the people who made the clip decided to slide the "Quality" control to 150%.

Game PR people: Stop doing this!

I assure you that a mere 100Mb per minute is quite adequate to promote your product!

See all those pirated TV shows? See how 43 minutes of great-looking 720p video only takes up 1.1Gb? Are any light bulbs going on in your tiny minds?

(Sometimes a video manages to consume 300Mb a minute, and not even look good. I swear - I've seen composite-video-resolution clips with a giant black border all the way around that still had the kind of data rate you expect from an IMAX demo reel.)

UPDATE: Here's a magnificent example that I just discovered in my folder full of unwatched game vids. It's a promo video for the Battlezone-y Tank Universal, called TeaserSound02_2.mov. The clip is 36 seconds in length, and has a resolution of 640 by 480.

It is nine hundred and fifty-five megabytes in size.

That's 26.5 megabytes per second. A ninety-minute movie would take up 140 gigabytes at this data rate.

How did they manage to achieve this? Easy. Somebody just forgot to compress the video, or the audio for that matter, at all!

The clip has uncompressed CD-quality PCM audio, but that only accounts for 172 kilobytes per second (two channels times 44,100 samples per second times 16 bits per sample). It's the video that's the real heavyweight - 640 by 480 pixels, times 24 bits per pixel, times 30 frames per second. Hey presto, that's exactly 900 kilobytes per frame, and 27,000 kilobytes per second.

At least this means I must not have spent too much time downloading the clip. All GamersHell clips are zipped, which usually reduces their size by only a couple of per cent but which also stops people from using the GamersHell download servers as streaming video sources. Even high-speed light compression can get this clip down to 10% of its uncompressed size, though.

Posted in Nerdery. 18 Comments »
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