How to Spot a Psychopath

I'd be smiling too

14 August 2008 — dan

Found among my referrer tags, thanks to a comment:

The picture's from the guy who runs Fleebnork; oddly enough, his other photos have something of a Lego slant to them, too.

The custom spaceman itself came from the guy who runs the bespoke-minifig-accessory emporium BrickForge.

Shameless commercialism

14 August 2008 — dan

Herewith, a duplicate of the bit I just put on the front page of Dan's Data, in accordance with my ancient tradition of slightly padding my PayPal account by pimping Photon sales:

Again with the Photon Light special offers. But there's something different about the current sale:

Shipping to the US or Canada is, until the end of this month, free. And shipping to anywhere else is only four bucks, this month only.

No matter how much stuff you buy.

And yes, this includes Photon's larger lights, batteries, chargers, and so on. Anything you like.

The price you pay for this is that the prices of the actual products aren't any cheaper than normal for the duration of this "sale". But you can still get Photon's standard volume discounts, which start from only five units and are obviously interesting when shipping's this cheap.

If you're in Australia like me, or in Europe, or in some other place that isn't North America, and have gotten as far as the shipping prices on previous Photon sales before deciding that you perhaps did not need a collection of funny-coloured key-ring lights quite that much: This is the sale for you.

And, as always, if you follow this link and then buy something, I'll get a cut!

Quote from front page ends.

My reviews of the mainstream Photon products are all a bit elderly now; I've had some newer Photons sitting on the to-review pile for lo, these many moons. It's not as if Photon have suddenly started making laser pointers or nose-hair trimmers, though; their key-ring lights remain rock solid and highly reliable, and just get newer, brighter models of LED from time to time.

(Although they have recently released a freaky rechargeable four-LED key-ring light; you charge it by clicking magnetic contacts onto the ends of any standard 1.5-volt cell!)

I continue to highly recommend the odd colours of Photon light, although I don't think they've actually got a lot of brightness advantage any more, since lots more development money has been poured into white LEDs than coloured ones. But you can still get a "turquoise" Photon II or Freedom Micro, and it'll still be surprisingly bright (from fresh batteries, at least), and make the world look like a cheap sci-fi movie.

Posted in Affiliate pimpage, Toys. 2 Comments »

Scam magnetism

13 August 2008 — dan

Apropos previous mentions of lazy spam-scammers, here's one who's working harder.

I got three copies of his "order", sent to my domain-registration e-mail address, my private iiNet address, and dan@dansdata.com. The man's thorough!

From: "Bill Jackson" <rev.billjackson@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2008 16:11:41 -0700
To: sushilmehta0072000@yahoo.com
Subject: order

Hello good day my name is Rev.Bill Jackson i will like to order some Fuel
Savers from you and will like to nop the cost for each plus tax and dont
include shipping cost

Thorough, but dumb.

Perhaps there's a little symbiont circle out there, of scam artists making worthless fuel-savers and other scam artists buying said fuel-savers with fake bank cheques.

(See also.)

Oh, and the New South Wales Office of Fair Trading has announced an investigation into fuel-saving devices. They somehow managed to not mention the word "firepower" anywhere in the press release.

Posted in Scams, Spam. 3 Comments »

New arrivals

11 August 2008 — dan

Nothing helps you get over the death of a pet like getting a new one. So right after we buried Mickey, we found ourselves a new cat in need of a home.

I know this looks like two cats, but they're so closely connected that they probably actually qualify as one. Tentative names: Charley and Susie.

The little soft house technically belongs to Joey, but he doesn't seem to be missing it. He's engaged in some perfunctory dominance behaviours in the direction of the new ginger twins, but I imagine he'll be using them as a heated mattress...

...just as he used Mickey, soon enough.

Posted in Animals. 17 Comments »

Headline: LED Spotlight May Actually Work

10 August 2008 — dan

When I read about the 11,000-lumen, 200-watt, two-kilometre-naked-eye-range, waterproof, $US7400 FoxFury Sunbolt 6 Mega Spotlight, I naturally assumed its specs were pretty much 100% claptrap.

It's very hard to make a super-powered LED light. Durable, efficient, bright-for-its-size, not-terribly-expensive; all that, LEDs can do. But they're not quite there for spotlights yet.

It is, however, very easy to throw around some weasel words concerning the capabilities of a non-super-powered LED light, so that's what I assumed FoxFury had done.

But I was wrong. They're actually only fibbing a little bit.

Their first bit of close-to-the-wind sailing is their claim - which I presume came from a press release, since it doesn't seem to be mentioned on the Sunbolt's product page - that the spotlight has the power of "7 car headlamps". 11,000 lumens is indeed about seven times the output of the 1962-vintage basic "H1" halogen headlamp bulb, but many more powerful and more efficient automotive lamps exist today.

The "naked eye distance vision" part is questionable, too. The Sunbolt is claimed to have an eighteen-degree beam, which at the stated maximum throw range of two kilometres will light a circle about 634 metres in diameter, with an area of 315,696 square metres. Distribute 11,000 lumens over that circle and you get 0.035 lumens per square meter, or lux.

The average dark-adapted human naked eye can see - in grainy monochrome - in light levels down to 0.1 lux; 0.035 is just barely possible, but practically speaking it's completely useless for spotlight applications. That's because dust in the beam will glow much brighter than the beam can light such a distant target.

It's possible that the FoxFury beam is sufficiently centre-weighted that there's a smaller spot in the middle that makes it to 0.1 lux at 2km, but it's disingenuous to pretend that this gives it a real, useful, two-kilometre throw. Much better to specify maximum throw as the range at which it averages one lux over its whole beam circle; going by the quoted output and beam-width numbers, that'd be a range of only about 375 metres, if I haven't flubbed my inverse-square-law calculation.

The raw power and output numbers, though, are usually where the claptrap lies in LED-lamp publicity. But getting twelve LEDs to draw (very slightly) less than 200 watts and output 11,000 lumens actually is a plausible specification, today - provided you use multi-die fifteen-watt LEDs. Those are technically each six LEDs in one package, so this is really more of a 72-LED spotlight. But who's counting.

The basic luminous efficacy number - 11,000 lumens from 200 watts gives 55 lumens per watt - is nothing special these days. If the LEDs are reasonably well-cooled then they ought to last a long time, too. They'll slowly lose brightness, which could cause problems for scientific or movie applications, but won't be perceptible to most users for a long time.

So yes, this really is a pretty serious spotlight. Don't expect it to actually create a circle of daylight at two kilometres, but the rest of the specs seem pretty much kosher to me.

Posted in Electricity, Nerdery. 10 Comments »

Bye bye, Mickey.

9 August 2008 — dan

Mickey the cat - the subject of the famous kitten review - is dead. He was about five and a half.

I found him like this. He looks as if he's just asleep - only the little bit of purple tongue sticking out gives it away.

He was stone cold and stiff as a board, though. So I dug a hole in the garden and put him in it. Then we sprinkled some flower seeds on top and watered them in.

This isn't the way it's meant to happen. Mickey was a big strong healthy boy. Really big; he was quite lean, but very long and tall, for a cat. He weighed seven and a half kilos just a couple of weeks ago.

Perhaps that was it; perhaps he didn't have a strong enough heart for a body that size. I'm at a loss as to what else it could have been. Cats that know they're sick hide themselves away somewhere, but Mickey just curled up on the spare bed as normal. And there was no vomit, no signs of distress; I don't think he'd even been off his food, though I might not have noticed.

Perhaps the last time he went out, for only about ten minutes before he decided it was too cold and came back in, he ate a poisonous mushroom along with some grass. Those are famous for killing people half a day after they eat them. Or perhaps he picked up a tick, though it's freezing cold here in Katoomba right now, so there shouldn't be any ticks around. I don't think it was rat poison or slug bait or something like that. But who knows.

When you own a pet, you expect - or should expect - that at some point you'll have to pay quite a lot of money to buy that pet several, or at least a few, more years of happy life. Look at Tom, with his arthritis and diabetes and a bout of hyperthyrodism, too. It cost a bloody fortune to get him repaired, and he still needs injecting twice a day. But Tom's happy as a clam, settling peacefully into the prolonged geriatric period that's normal for elderly housecats.

Mickey, on the other hand, was the picture of health, as far as I could see. But he was there last night, and gone this morning.

He was a very good boy.

A couple of irretrievably soft-hearted readers have asked if there's any particular animal charity to which I'd like donations to be made in memory of Mickey.

Mickey came from one of the Cat Protection Society "aquariums" full of kittens that you can see in the window in some Australian vets.

(Yes, they do let the kittens out regularly to run about. But it's amazing how many of them will be perfectly happy in a thousand-litre Perspex box for hours on end - though at least one bright spark does always seem to end up sleeping in the litter tray.)

The Cat Protection Society would, of course, be very pleased to receive your tax-deductible donation or volunteer time. And then there's the RSPCA in Australia, the UK and elsewhere in the Commonwealth, and their equivalents the ASPCA in the States.

These sorts of organisations always run shops. The "op shop" type with low-priced used stuff can be fun but, given the prices, can't actually add much money to the bottom line of the charity. I highly recommend you patronise the other kind of shop, like the RSPCA Shops here in Australia. Those shops sell the usual sorts of "pet shop" animal supplies - toys, food, tennis ball chuckers, noisome dried pieces of pig or bull (not, for very good reason, cow...) of which dogs cannot get enough - at the usual rip-off pet-shop prices. You can get all of these things much cheaper if you shop more carefully - but the profit from the charity-shop rip-off pricing all goes to the charity, so when I'm there, I specifically seek out products which seem to be the worst value.

If you can't afford to donate, buy overpriced catnip mousies or spend a lot of time having your heart rended by the predicament of abandoned animals, but you live near an animal shelter or veterinarian that has a Room Full O' Kittens, be advised that they may be very happy to have you just visit and play with the kittens for an hour, provided you don't seem too likely to eat any of them.

Kittens need to get used to being picked up and patted and played with, and veterinary and animal-shelter staff are likely to be pretty busy. So the terrible responsibility of being covered with kittens for an hour a week may, I fear, fall to you.

Posted in Animals. 38 Comments »

Cheap USB box du jour

6 August 2008 — dan

The other day, I added another component to the haphazard patchwork of storage devices that've sprouted all over this house by buying the finest, cheapest external USB drive box m'verygoodfriends at Aus PC Market had to offer.

I probably should have dusted the N299.

The box in question carries the international mega-brand "Astone", but doesn't seem to actually be mentioned on their Web site. It is, superficially, yer standard slimline external box for 3.5-inch SATA drives. Here in Australia, it's available in silver for $AU38.50 including delivery (but not, of course, including a hard drive), or in black for $AU37.40 delivered.

[UPDATE: As of the end of 2009, the black version of this box is no longer available, and the price of teh silver one has risen a bit, to $AU49.50 including delivery to anywhere in Australia.]

So I bought the black one, obviously.

Along with the "750Gb" (real formatted capacity 698Gb) Samsung drive I also bought (selecting the "Assemble" option in Aus PC Market's checkout system, which tells them to connect together any things you've bought that can be connected, at no extra charge), the black box will set you back a total of $AU167.20 delivered.

(I get a small, and I do mean small, discount.)

So far, so ordinary. OK, it's astonishing that this much plug-and-play drive space costs so little these days, when I were young it were all trees round 'ere, et cetera. But I'm not the first person to notice that.

The Astone box, though, is a wee ripper.

It looks nice, it's made from aluminium, it's not big, and it doesn't contain some stupid 25mm fan that'll start making a noise like a blowfly after two months. It's passively cooled, and seems to have a decent thermal connection to the drive inside; the box gets a bit warm, but I think it'll probably keep the drive tolerably cool even in an Australian summer, not least because it comes with one of those little add-on stands that lets the box stand on its edge. That'll greatly improve convective cooling, and will probably be important when it gets hotter here in the Blue Mountains.

(As I write this, that Flash weather doodad is telling me that it's snowing. It actually does occasionally snow here - there was some lovely sleet the other day, too - but I just went outside to check and I believe that the form of precipitation that's actually occurring at the moment is more commonly referred to as "rain".)

Note that small drive boxes which tightly thermally couple the drive to the enclosure have, of necessity, no real impact protection at all. Any 3.5-inch external hard drive is likely to die if you knock it off your desk (2.5-inch and smaller laptop drives are tougher), but slimline boxes like this are the most fragile. Handle with care.

All of the above drive-box features are nice for the money, but not amazing. There are plenty of eBay USB boxes sold by cheap-'n'-cheerful Hong Kong retailers that have the same feature list.

The Astone box, though, supports spin-down.

Regular readers will know that this is a bit of a hang-up of mine. Home and small-office hard drives, especially add-on external drives, are often powered up for far more hours than necessary. This is exactly the purpose for which "sleep mode", spinning down the platters and thus saving power and component wear, was created.

But, generally speaking, sleep mode only works for internal drives. Cheap external drive boxes just don't support it. Their drives are either spinning whenever the box's power switch is on, or spin down only when the host computer is turned off or disconnected. Neither is a good solution.

Realistically, many cheap desktop drives will probably last at least a few years even if they're spinning 24/7. I resigned myself to this when I bought the Astone box.

But it turns out that the blighter spins down!

I don't know whether the spin-down feature is a simple timer, or whether it's getting it from the host computer. It's possible to send a drive-sleep command over USB, but I thought that Windows generally didn't do it, and that almost all external boxes ignored the command anyway.

Perhaps there's a new wave of cheap drive boxes that all support spin-down - wouldn't that be nice? I'll look into the issue in more detail when I get a moment in my busy schedule of writing very important articles.

In the meantime, be advised that AusPC's cheapie drive boxes are well worth buying.

Shoppers from Australia or New Zealand (and, I'm afraid, nowhere else - AusPC don't deliver outside these two countries) who'd like to order the black Astone box for $AU37.40 delivered can click here to do so. [UPDATE: As of late 2009, that version of the box isn't on sale any more.]

Big spenders willing to drop the extra $1.10 on the silver model [which is still available as of late 2009, but now costs $AU49.50] can order it here.

UPDATE: I've taken the box apart now (easy to do; just remove two little screws and the drive and little electronics module slide out, attached to the rear bulkhead), and squinted through my Optivisor at the tiny bridge chip.

Its markings:

INITIO
INIC-1606L
A3328P
A94857
200811

Apparently the Initio 1606L is well-thought-of (especially by people who don't speak English), and Mac-compatible - I'll give it a shot on the tame Mac here shortly.

There's a little light guide in the front of the Astone box that looks as if it ought to be an activity light, but the box does not actually have an LED in that location. If the drive you use has its own LED that lines up, you'll see something there. There's an activity light on the electronics module, though; it's a blue LED that shines out of the back of the box, next to the DC-in jack.

UPDATE 2: I'm having a hard time finding ways for people outside Australia to buy this box. But you should be able to get one that works the same.

"Astone" is the house brand of Australian IT distributors Achieva, whose Web site is much better than the mummified Astone sites. Here's the page for this particular box, which they call the "ISO GEAR 360".

The box is actually made by Noontec. Finding the identity of the OEM source for yum cha gear usually makes it a lot easier to find that same gear under other names in other countries - but wouldn't you know it, Noontec is another brand that seems to be unknown outside Australia.

I just noticed that the small print on the Astone packaging actually says "Designed in Australia, made in China", so I suspect this particular enclosure really is pretty much impossible to find outside this country.

Fortunately, that's not a huge problem - all enclosures that use the same chipset should work the same. If you find another enclosure that uses the Initio INIC-1606L (and, preferably, also lacks a tiny short-lived fan), I bet it'll work just like this one.

If you're not in Australia or New Zealand, though, don't bother clicking the AusPC order-this-product links above; AusPC don't deliver outside AU and NZ.

Posted in MiniReviews, Nerdery. 23 Comments »

Holy crap! A legal letter!

5 August 2008 — dan

On the Internet, threats of legal action - justified or otherwise - are about as common as pornography.

(Essential NSFW link.)

Actual legal action, however, is about as common as measured and careful explanations of the many good points that've been made by someone with whom you strongly disagree.

But wouldn't you know it, the other day, for the very first time, someone who'd threatened to sue me actually stumped up the cash to get a real live lawyer to send me a letter.

Well, actually just an e-mail, not a paper letter. But this still went above and beyond anything I'd ever seen before.

I've been threatened plenty of times, but not one of those people has, until now, actually gotten any further than saying "I'm a-gonna sue yo' ass!".

(I'm not counting the couple of times I got e-mails from "lawyers" who had Yahoo e-mail addresses and very poor spelling.)

Because real letters from lawyers are so rare, people are likely to get scared if they receive one. But you shouldn't. It's not really that big a deal.

But first, The Letter, and my reply to it.

I've lightly anonymised this, because the identities of the person who had it sent, and of the lawyer who sent it, are irrelevant here. We've now settled our dispute (and no, not in the "for an undisclosed sum" way), so there's no need for me to draw any more attention to this guy over all the others. Regular readers will be able to figure out who it is without much trouble, but it really doesn't matter. It's the content, not the source, that matters here.

Also, do please note that I am not any sort of lawyer, and no expert on the law here in Australia, or anywhere else. If you think what you're about to read constitutes actual legal advice, you have made a terrible mistake and need to look somewhere - almost anywhere - else.

I welcome comments from any readers who do have legal qualifications, though!

Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:21:03 +1000
From: Larsen E. Pettifogger
To: Dan
Subject: [Redacted]

Attention: - Daniel Rutter

Dear Mr Rutter,

We have been referred to your web publications by Mr Smith, a resident of the United States of America.

We understand and have viewed for ourselves your posting on the internet concerning Mr Smith.

Understandably, that posting has caused Mr Smith considerable aggravation and embarrassment.

Notably also, we understand that it has given rise to a number of threats having been received by Mr Smith personally.

It is apparent from your postings and publications that you have a very low opinion of Mr Smith. In any event, that view may not be shared by others - it is certainly not shared by Mr Smith.

Whatever your views as to the matter may be, they cannot be put forward in justification of the publications in respect of the way in which you are proceeding.

We expect that Mr Smith seeks an end to this matter and wish to suggest to you that you remove the posting immediately (within 24 hours).

The haste of your co-operation may have a positive impact on the Mr Smith's views as to damages.

Yours sincerely,

--
LARSEN E. PETTIFOGGER
SOLICITOR AND BARRISTER

PETTIFOGGER Partners

I replied thus:

WITHOUT PREJUDICE

At 10:21 PM 22/07/2008, Larsen E. Pettifogger wrote:

> that posting has caused Mr Smith considerable aggravation and embarrassment.

I might suggest to Mr Smith that if he wishes to avoid embarrassment, he might like to reduce the number of bold statements about my sexual proclivities which he, or his associates, makes available for global perusal.

> Notably also, we understand that it has given rise to a number of threats
> having been received by Mr Smith personally.

Perhaps you should have a word with the people he alleges have been threatening him, then, if in fact they exist.

I certainly haven't threatened him, and I didn't ask anybody else to do so, either. I held Mr Smith up, based on what he did, as a figure of fun, not as anybody who needed to be "threatened".

If Mr Smith has any evidence to the contrary, or indeed merely any evidence of actual threats regardless of their connection to me, then I am sure he will present it to you in the very near future. If I could only be in your offices, about to receive such a wondrous bounty!

> Whatever your views as to the matter may be, they cannot be put
> forward in justification of the publications in respect of the
> way in which you are proceeding.

Your command of grammar appears to exceed mine. I am having difficulty understanding the exact meaning of this sentence.

But no matter; I shall forge ahead.

Does Mr Smith contend that anything I posted was not true?

I do not of course need to remind you, but I feel you may need to remind Mr Smith - while billing him at, I hope, your standard hourly rate - that truth is now by itself an adequate defense against defamation actions, here in New South Wales at least. If I am incorrect in this assumption, do please correct me - unless such correction is only available upon payment of the abovementioned fee, which I regret to say I most probably cannot afford.

I would be very pleased to appear in court to defend myself against Mr Smith's allegations. I do hope that Mr Smith will do me the honour of flying to Australia to face me in person.

Should he, instead, wish to bring suit against my blog hosts, I regret to inform him that he will then have to retain representation in Ireland.

Defamation actions are, I believe, rather more likely to succeed there, but I assure Mr Smith that should he silence my blog there, I will swiftly find another host - in, most likely, the United States of America. The existing posts regarding Mr Smith, not to mention several others which suggest themselves to me at this moment, will in that case, and in every other case I can at this moment imagine, remain.

> We expect that Mr Smith seeks an end to this matter and wish to
> suggest to you that you remove the posting immediately (within 24
> hours).

I cordially invite Mr Smith to stick this suggestion where I believe he, equally if not more cordially, once invited me to stick a small electronic device.

(Can you tell I was drunk when I wrote that?)

OK, here's the deal.

A letter from a lawyer is just that - a letter, from a lawyer. Even if it's delivered by registered mail and not e-mail (I presume e-mail nastygrams are cheaper), even if it's got a big "CEASE AND DESIST" printed on the top - it is not "legal action". It doesn't mean you're being sued. It doesn't even mean that you might be sued.

All it means is that someone paid this particular lawyer to send this particular letter.

If someone walks into a law firm and asks them to send a letter to someone else demanding that that other person cease and desist from beaming voices into the complainant's head via mental telepathy, the law firm will shrug, hold the complainant's money up to the light to make sure it's real, and send the letter. You can hire a lawyer to send a letter for you that says pretty much anything.

Said lawyer will, in his role as the legal equivalent of hired muscle, do his utmost to make the target of the letter think that you mess with him and his client at your peril, and that you will surely find yourself on the losing end of a billion-dollar lawsuit if you do not do exactly as you're told.

This is, in many cases, what legal professionals refer to as a bluff.

The deadly-serious, here-comes-the-subpoena, check-yo'self-before-you-wreck-yo'self attitude that legal nastygrams always project is at least half of what the client is paying for. That attitude will be precisely the same regardless of the lawyer's opinion regarding the merits of the case, and regardless of what the client's said he's willing to pay for. The lawyer will act just as scary even if he's 100% certain that the complainant is a raving loony who has obviously just paid his last $200 to have that letter sent.

It's possible to sue someone for just about anything, but actually suing is way more difficult, and expensive, than just having a lawyer send a letter. If you pay a lawyer to send Joe Bloggs a letter telling him that you sincerely believe it's an infringement of your human rights that Joe keeps wearing blue socks on Tuesdays, the lawyer will take your money, smile broadly, and send the letter. If you then want to actually sue Joe for his terrible actions, then your lawyer will start talking to you about the value of psychiatric care. (Although even then, some lawyer may take the case.)

When the case is preposterous - as many Internet Drama cases are - even the most enthusiastic of complainants aren't going to find it easy to locate a lawyer who's willing to take it on. Not even, necessarily, if the complainant is seriously wealthy and happy to spend. If the case is so stupid that the judge is obviously going to throw it out after the first ten minutes, lawyers know they won't get much chance to earn from it anyway. If a case is sufficiently stupid, the lawyers themselves could end up being punished for their violation of legal ethics.

(I'll wait for the laughter to die down before I continue.)

If you're actually guilty of some civil wrong or other, or if you're innocent but the evidence available doesn't make you look good, then you should take a legal nastygram seriously, and possibly seek your own legal advice. And if you are going to be sued, you're probably going to receive one or more nastygrams first. But just because nastygrams usually come before lawsuits doesn't mean that nastygrams are good predictors of a lawsuit. Getting on a plane always comes before crashing into the side of a mountain, but that doesn't mean that outcome is likely.

If you're neither guilty nor guilty-looking, and cannot conceive of any way in which you could possibly seem otherwise to a jury composed of people who can tell a right shoe from a left one more than half of the time, do feel free to send a snarky reply like I did, or indeed ignore the letter entirely.

Just the same, though - take this guy as a lesson, Internet nutjobs!

Step up! Grow a pair!

Put your money where your mouth is, and actually drop some dollars on a lawyer to send a nastygram to the object of your irritation!

I'm actually half-serious about this. Sometimes, Internet Drama really does have some sort of substance to it, and in that case, just dropping a few hundred bucks on a little lawyerly activity can very much be worth the effort.

But remember: All a nastygram actually means, in and of itself, is that someone is angry enough at you that they are willing to spend the time and money to get a lawyer to send you that letter.

Posted in Shop talk, Strange Tales. 14 Comments »

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