Ultra Wide!

 My older computer monitor was having trouble synching, so time for a replacement.

https://www.lg.com/uk/monitors/lg-35wn73a-b

The hardware is fine. Like other LG products however it has no manual! Let's run through this using the product page linked above.

The video refers to speakers - this model has none. No problem for me as the computer has an external sound system.
The USB cable supplied has a mini connection both ends, so it won't plug in to USB HUBs or a PC.

The OnScreen Control app is not available via the LG website, I had to Search for a link to download it.
The assembly instructions are of the IKEA kind - a diagram with no text.

LG controls differ widely between models - they seem to be designed from scratch every time! In this case there was a hidden button on the bottom that accessed an onscreen menu.

 My color test screen is an Excel spreadsheet (!!) that has primary colors, on defaults they are a match for the smaller LG monitor next to it.

My Nvidia 1060 copes. It runs at 45C idle and at 70C for reasonable game settings.

Ultrawide is 21:9 as opposed to 16:9 widescreen. Most programs react intelligently to this, in Second Life for example peripheral vision increases.

Trikassi Enterprises 2020

The 2019 recession slowly lifted leading to more favourable market conditions. However in 2020 there was a significant raw material shortage that created continuing uncertainty.

As our headline figures below show, there was an overall improvement in growth.

Headline figures (2019 in brackets)

Year on Year Net Growth 17% (8%)
Before PLEX Profit: 28% (18%)
End year corporation book value 348 (304) Billion ISK

TV update

Sony doesn't rush with updates, this is Android 7 to 8.

They have also changed their custom GUI. The 'Discover' button on the wheel which used to do not a lot now tries to do everything. Sometimes it uses the Satellite Box channel guide, sometimes the TV guide. However, there is no need to use it that I can see.

It hadn't occurred to me to try before, but my Bluetooth keyboard pairs up fine with the TV. No more awkward onscreen text entry! The Back button on the TV is actually ESC, I guessed that, and on the keyboard that is fn+SQUARE, the bottom left and top left keys, which is weird.

Trikassi Enterprises 2019

The recession that began at the end of last year continued through most of 2019. Our Raitaru has been the only active capsuleer owned factory in Sobaseki until recently. There are some signs that economic conditions may be improving, but sustained recovery is not yet certain.
Whilst the corporation is still profitable, our growth has been at a much reduced level.
The price of PLEX was high in summer, reducing net profit.
We had one nuisance War Dec that did not affect us significantly due to robust contingency planning.

Headline figures (2018 in brackets):
Year on Year Net Growth 8% (47%)
Before PLEX Profit 20% (109%)
End year Corporation book value 304 (274) Billion ISK

Solar Panels - progress report

See Installation Report from six years ago.
I have had no generation problems apart from a couple of breaker cut outs.
The annual output has been constant.
The investment return has been about 9%, lower than was suggested but much as I expected as the facing is not due South.

One unfortunate snag was that after several years the roof below them started to sag. I called in the builders who installed joists in the loft that better distributed the weight and, ahem, plastered over the cracks. So far, all is now well.

The ongoing effect has been to wipe out my electricity bill with around £20 a month to spare.

Snail racing

Giant snail racing! Some good scenic shots of the Realm of Rosehaven. My castle is the one with the round tower in the opening shots.

Trikassi Enterprises 2018

Manufacturing conditions in Eve have been sub-optimal this past year. Technological innovations in moon mining caused a flood of minerals onto the market, depressing prices with a knock-on effect to manufactured goods.
Towards the end of the year this overproduction was augmented by falling demand resulting in an economic recession in Hisec. The result can plainly be seen locally, with factories being shut down and mothballed.
In the third Quarter we suffered an annoying war declaration which disrupted our activities for several weeks, though fortunately no assets were lost.
The price of PLEX fell significantly in the first half of the year, then rose to its previous level.

On the good side our station remains open, attracting an increasing number of users by having the cheapest rates in system. We acquired Blueprints for several new lines such as Battleships and various Modules. Our old products continue to be profitable though at reduced sales volumes.

Headline figures (2017 figures in brackets):
Year on Year Net Profit 47% (55%)
Before PLEX Profit 124% (99%)
End year Corporation book value 274 Billion ISK

Hi-Fi upgrade

Looking back I see it has been six years since I did this. Time marches on...

So, it's a Sony DN-1080. It doesn't look much different to the previous, just improved software really. It is set up for 4k and has Dolby Atmos and is thus a match for the TV and disk player. Let's test!

Atmos is good if the sound engineers take the trouble to set it up. If they just pick a few sound effects and put them behind the listener but otherwise use the old surround positions, not so good. There are Demos on YouTube that show what should be happening.

It comes with the two current surround systems, Dolby Surround and Neural:X. In different ways these do the same thing, spreading the sound out to all the available speakers. In my case that is 5.1.2, with the 2 being front height. The A/V uses a sound test to work out where these are.
As with Atmos, results are variable. A lot of prestigeTV programmes and movies are broadcast in 5.1 these days.

And one by one they faded away ...

The Rosehaven 12th Anniversary Ball. As befits Halloween the grid failed and one by one the guests vanished!
Clever GIF by Princess Selena

War! No one killed shock horror

Finally, I got the "nice space station you got there, shame if it should get blown up" message.

In EVE hi sec, within the territories of the big NPC empires, there are police. However a contribution to their benevolent fund will cause them to turn blind eyes to shenanigans. These are called WarDecs.

The rules for blowing up space stations are intended to prevent Corporations in different time zones from making surprise attacks when the other guys are fast asleep. First, attackers have to knock down the station's Shields. A week later, they can come back to destroy its Armour. Finally after another week, and that was today, they can destroy it.

Now my corporation specialises in arms dealing not combat, we are small, defenceless but wealthy so we hired mercenaries to defend us and the extortionists backed off without a fight. Hopefully they won't try that again, it cost them money and a complementary Bounty on their heads. It cost us a few million ISK as well, mostly in lost production, but we can make that up in a few days.

... and 4K disks!

It's Sony again, the X700
This is the budget player so it has some esoteric features removed, mostly stuff a smart TV has anyway.


4K disk buyers beware! There is a lot of 'Ultra HD' in the shops that isn't 4K at all, it uses HD masters and upscales them to 4K which is what a 4K TV does anyway.

The player has been updated to Dolby Vision but weirdly via a settings switch. Since most providers don't say if they are using Vision this is a chocolate teapot.


YouTube has 4K demos such as
Wildlife in 4K

Spacesheeting 63

The transition of EVE downloadable data from XML tables to SWAGGER has reached the point where the old system has been discontinued, which leaves me no choice but to convert.

SWAGGER is more complicated as it uses temporary tokens to get access to private data. This allows third-party apps to display your secret stuff without having access to your password, and that isn't easy to implement with a spreadsheet! However, a nice person wrote a guide:
SSO_Authentication_in_Microsoft_Power_Query

Right now I have the tables up and running, the next task is to get the many spreadsheet references to point to them. Which, with INDEX MATCH arrays, is a pain.

[added] Finished! Took six weeks!! Everything seems to be back to normal, updating generates a lot of error messages but these can be ignored.

New TV

Santa gave me a new TV this year, a Sony Bravia KD55XE9005
It's pretty, but let's quibble!

The control system is labyrinthine. The most used bits are in an "Action Menu", the rest is buried at the bottom of the Android Home page that has the Netflix/Amazon pay us $$$ links I don't use.

The best advice for Video settings is to leave them alone unless there is an obvious problem - and I've not noticed any.

The computer's graphics card is willing to display 2160p but with my present three screen setup (!!) runs hotter if it does, more so with games. EVE would be unplayable anyway due to tiny text, a known problem.
Setting up the computer for HDR has to be done at both ends to work properly. Windows 10 will tell you if everything will work.

The previous TV couldn't cope with 1080p, no problem with this one. 4K is presently only broadcast by subscription. There is plenty of it on YouTube, including some wildlife and travel channels.

The Humax Satbox and Sony disk player link in OK. The TV comes with an "IR Blaster" that ingeniously attaches to devices and replaces their remote controls to some extent. I have it attached to the Satellite box so the TV's programme guide can operate it.


Mirroring from tablet to big screen is easy - one button.
Tablet remote control app? Fine!

Holiday Ball 2017

 Some photos of our Holiday Ball 2017  from Patty Poppy. It was held in a big icy structure up on the sky platform.

Windows Fall Update Annoyances

Yes it has several for me...

A new security section "Controlled Folder Access" stops "unfriendly apps" from changing files in certain data folders. By default, these are any non Microsoft program and everything in the User folder.
Oh dear! Some programs store data in User folders, so they need whitelisting. EVE Online was one such, and it was generating alerts as it tried to Save its chat logs. I suspect this might have been causing crashes as well.
Another was, mysteriously, a Microsoft program... msiexec.exe is the Windows installer program which I get repeated alerts about for trying to access the Desktop folder. There are only shortcuts there.

I'm not that wealthy!

According to her EVE Character Sheet, Ori is worth 82 Billion ISK. Now while as a corporation CEO she is not short of funds that is plainly untrue, so what was going wrong?

There is a Character Assets XML table that can be downloaded via the EVE API. This doesn't include some things which are on the Character Sheet such as cash and escrow but still...

The XML had a column with mixed Tables and nulls which Excel wouldn't expand, so I had to create a second table to get this flattened out, it held the contents of containers and ship fittings.
Annotating the tables revealed an accounting glitch. The corporation transports goods from the factory to the market where they sit in a warehouse before going on sale. A corporation warehouse would be absurdly expensive to rent at a trade hub so the corp uses Ori's personal storage hanger which is free, and this comes up as her assets.
So that was around 40 billion located. Where was the rest? It turned out that sales orders were also being credited to Ori, only when items were sold did the cash arrive in the corporation bank account. And there on the order sheet was another 37 billion!

Another glitch was found whilst doing all this - the API ignores personal stuff in player owned space stations. This is unlikely to be corrected as XML is being phased out.

Spacesheeting 51

'51' being the version of the EVE spreadsheet I've reached!

Following the conversion to Power Query all seemed well. There is a bug I created myself by deleting worksheets without disconnecting downloads on them, but that just requires pressing a button twice.

Meanwhile the devs have progressed from one API front end, CREST, to another, SWAGGER. Noticing that it had a useful price list I ventured into it armed only with my shaky knowledge of JSON and it was as tricky as I feared. Why is every entry called 'Record'? Much searching followed until I realised that the 'List to Table' button was the magic one.

Luncheon at Trikassi

An al fresco luncheon at Chateau Trikassi.with friends.

Some of our guests live in Aislinn castle, top left.

Dame Litta and Oriella with tomato soup:

Time to upgrade

After seven years, a new desktop PC! The previous one has served well with only one hardware failure, the power unit.
So as before something middle range for about the same price and rely on Moore's Law to make it better.
250GB SSD
GeForce GTX 1060
Intel i7
Aero Cool DS200 case+fans

It is, as advertised, silent.
I could have used a shift everything over utility, but that would have taken accumulated junk with it so I'm only moving specific files and where possible downloading and installing from scratch.
So far, no drama. If anything over enthusiasm, since Windows was grabbing settings from the old machine without asking!

And then I hit an Excel snag. Excel 2016 has integrated Power Query into the main program, it was an optional Addon for earlier versions. In doing so the old XML table downloader seems to have been broken, it fails to Save Maps correctly.
So I had to convert. Power Query is more generalised and is indeed powerful, but it's a complicated pain to learn. There is a button for everything, but where is it?
Today came the big test, running the converted sheet on Excel 2016. Success!

[added] Time to check really old programs: Webedit and WS/FTP are both Win95 vintage, mirrors of their folders have followed me faithfully and... they still work. A test edit of a website page uploaded with no complaints.

The sad demise of Daisy

My very old Email address daisy.freeserve.co.uk will be no more in a few weeks. My ISP has decided to no longer provide a mail server.
So, since I already have a Google address Google it is.

Oops

Oh dear - not been killed in EVE for a long while. I forgot that War Declarations only expire 24 hours after the clock runs out and got ambushed in my big fat freighter.
In EVE you wake up in a new clone minus your expensive implants and with a depleted bank balance, a totally unpleasant experience.

Nothing of Interest

The big change in EVE last year was a new range of player owned space stations, so my Corporation built one. It's a robot factory called "Nothing of Interest" orbiting the innermost moon of a gas giant, a pretty spot.
Editing the spreadsheet to take account of the various advantages not renting factory space provides has been tricky, but if I've got it right the green lights say we are in for a profitable year. Assuming no one decides to blow it up that is.

Administrator!

Yes, here we go again. Civilisation VI runs fine, thinks it has Saved, no error message - but doesn't. 'Run as Admin' fixed this, because presumably it was trying to save into a protected folder.

Dust in the machine

A friend was having computer power cutouts - possibly the power supply - but I suggested checking temperatures first. So we both installed Speedfan and goodness, it was my machine that was overheating!
So off with the cover and in with the vacuum cleaner. Success! The CPU fan is now speeding up properly.
Speedfan can also adjust speeds and do other geeky stuff, so I tweaked to slow speeds when not busy.
[added] ... and in my friend's case it was dog hair!

Android fun

The new phone came with standard Android, so I've so far added
Google Maps
Prime Dice, for polyhedral dice rolling during roleplaying games
Greenify, a battery saver. It does just one thing, puts apps into hibernation when the screen is dark.
SyncMe, for transferring photos to the computer
Flashlight

And yes, I had malware already despite only downloading from the Google Store. A screen asking to install 'Facebook Patch 4' was popping up after boots - and I don't have Facebook installed.
[added] Two anti-virus apps found nothing but the third - AVG - said to disable a preinstalled Google looking file and that worked.

Smarter Phone

My old phone was not dumb, just old and its memory was limited. I don't use my mobile much, it's for emergencies not nattering, so this time something cheap.
Haweel H1
A Chinese Android device. It comes with everything except the expensive bits - no 4G, no hi-res screen.
No it isn't a standard SIM slot as the spec says, it's a mini. No problem, I had a spare SIM card. Which means... new mobile number and wandering through the EE website to get it registered.
The battery had clear tape stuck over its contacts that has to be removed and that's the thing the manual doesn't tell you. Fortunately Amazon does.
It came with a Europlug, but I have spare UK adaptors.
For the rest see the link page which has good reviews.

Run as administrator

So I just spend another happy time wrestling with a program that hung when run - the skin installer in Rainmeter. And yes, setting 'Run as administrator' solved it. Microsoft really don't like users changing this, so it's in the basement with the faulty light switch in the folder marked 'beware of the leopard' (© Douglas Adams).

Rainmeter is a free system that behaves rather like Gadgets, adding assorted little apps to the desktop.

Spacesheeting 2.0

The EVE spreadsheet continued to grow last year and now has graphs. This one measures the progress of my manufacturing corporation Trikassi Enterprises. Spotting bad trends that can be corrected has been a considerable help, overstocking (the orange line) for example.
The dark green line is the book value of the corporation, currently about $1,500 in RL money though unlike Second Life I can't cash it in. The Corp does pay for the game subscription, $30/month for my two accounts.

New website provider

Oh dear - my old website host who were excellent were bought out and migration is under way. So far so good - Nominet mailed me to say they'd registered the transfer and the website just came back on line.
Now I have to learn how to use a different access panel, or preferably get my elderly Win95 FTP program connected.
[added] The FTP setup was not obvious, but I just needed the existing ID/Password with a mystery address. And  WS_FTP is still working.

Auto hide Taskbar Windows 10

There is a tick box for this but sometimes it stops working, leaving the Taskbar up and hiding vital buttons in full screen windows. Go away!
The solution for me was to go to Task Manager/Processes, right click on Windows Explorer and Restart it.

The last Windows...

...installed today. From now on, continuous small updates.

It was painless, just one "this is taking longer than expected" message. Subsystems then rushed in to do this, that and the other and it's been a slow day. I'm now down to the system using about 5% CPU but a lot more memory.

Runtime broker.exe is apparently a major offender, a W8 housekeeper that looks after Metro but grabs lots of CPU. Google for it.

Microsoft depreciates Gadgets now, but there are third party clones that will display them such as Gadget Installer

Nothing has refused to run yet! My test program here is WebEdit a Win95 HTML editor and it's fine.

EVE Online FPS was dreadful, but I knew the answer to this - run as Admin to allow it to access files in protected folders. It is now running amazingly fast, even at extra shiny spaceship setting. Second Life was unaffected, just lost its password file.

Buried under the new interface is unchanged W7 stuff, Backup for example which just ran out of schedule without asking.

Where did my Libraries go? W10 doesn't display them in Explorer by default, but I managed to find them.

[added]
After several weeks memory use is back to W7 levels and background stuff is only running when I'm AFK, I suspect Microsoft are still tweaking this not quite out of Beta system.

Visible clothes

AMD graphics drivers have for some time had a bug that makes rigged mesh clothes in Second life invisible. This has been fixed in the latest 15.7 driver which is now out of beta testing, I updated today and so far all is good. Yay!

Second Life uses Open GL which AMD don't support that well, though fortunately I've never had the problems others struggle with. The biggest visual glitch is with visually overlapping alpha textures which are often displayed the wrong way round.

Android lollipop

My Sony tablet is at the back of the queue now for updates, but Android 5.0 arrived unexpectedly last night. Could I stay awake (I was in bed already) to install it? Of course!
OK it took maybe a half hour and that was mostly checking apps (>300 of them?).

Lollipop is a 'back to basics' version, gone is the 3D look which looked nice on a tablet but maybe phone users were not so enthused by it. The App icons are bigger with a row at the bottom staying on screen whilst the rest scroll. The update went back to default so I had to spend a happy time this morning putting my favorites back and removing Google things. Folders are now easier to edit.
There is now just one drop down menu, Google put the Settings button as one of the permanent ones so I'll leave it there.
The running Apps button now displays as a window cascade, not sure about this but it does have a 'Clear All' button now.
Sony as usual haven't tweaked Android much. The Camera menus have changed (again!). A new App 'TV SideView' integrates the Remote Control with a TV Guide, though I have an App for that already.

Oops! SychMe my excellent folder App lost its settings as well... but rebuilt successfully.

Spacesheeting

To make stuff in World of Warcraft you need a hammer. In EVE Online you need a spreadsheet.
This is just a corner of my currently 1.2Mb monster, which pulls down data from game databases and tells me what's worth manufacturing. It also does stock control.

I had old XML maps that weren't being used and Excel wouldn't tell me how to delete them. I was looking in the wrong place, the DATA menu and not DEVELOPER which has the XML management section. Bah.
The next step will be to compile a raw material shopping list.

Books 2014

I don't read as much as I used to, but here are the best:

The Particle at the End of the Universe - Sean Carroll
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Particle-End-Universe-Discovery/dp/1780742320
An account of the confirmation of the Higg's Boson by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in 2012. Carroll makes a crucial and often ignored point about Science when he quotes:

 "My hope for what the LHC will find is 'none of the above'. I honestly think it's going to be a surprise, because I think nature is smarter than we are [...] and we're going to have a hell of a fun time trying to figure it all out".

As it turned out, the theorists were correct. But sometimes they are not, and unlike politicians, economists,  priests, quacks, frauds and the rest they aren't looking for confirmation of what they already believe. They want to be wrong.

Why Nations Fail - Acemoglu and Robinson
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Nations-Fail-Origins-Prosperity/dp/1846684307
The basic thesis here is a simple one. Trying to avoid the conventional Left vs Right axis, the authors coin two terms with less emotional loading, 'extractive' and 'inclusive'. Successful polities they propose are those in which citizens believe that if they work hard they can make money and use it to better themselves. They are 'included'. Extractive regimes by contrast offer no incentives aside from basic survival to most workers.
One example taken is Nogales, a town on the USA/Mexican border. Another is the two Koreas.

The Book of Barely Imagined Beings - Caspar Henderson
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Book-Barely-Imagined-Beings-21st-century/dp/1847082440
Inspired by Borges' famous bestiary, equally extraordinary but nevertheless real creatures become a springboard to all kinds of subjects.

Bird Sense - Tim Birkhead
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bird-Sense-What-Its-Like/dp/140883054X
What is it like to be a bird? Each sense is considered including one humans don't have, being able to detect the Earth's magnetic field.

The Signal and the Noise - Nate Silver
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Signal-Noise-Art-Science-Prediction/dp/0141975652 
Having tried various predicting money making schemes - poker, baseball, the stock market - the author found fame by being getting every State right in the 2012 US election. He covers these and other subjects in which we often try to fool others but only succeed in fooling ourselves.

Another boring committee meeting!

Monthly Moot in Winterfell: Her Bunnyness Miss Eilidh, Beware Hax the CEO of Haxworks a Cosplay costume store and a faun with a waffle.

Another world

Recently I was persuaded by some Second Life friends to take a look at Inworldz. It uses the same Open Source coding as SL to the point where third party viewers such as Firestorm run OK with it, and indeed it looks much like SL did a few years ago. At present it is in Beta so land is much cheaper - $75 monthly for a Region as opposed to $295 and there are other advantages, uploading is free for example. The devs seem to be making some sensible decisions based on SL hindsight - not renting out small land plots themselves for example which should cut down on land blight.
The obvious snag right now is content, but SL merchants and creators are starting to open up stores ready for the official startup next year. Here's an example of what is being done already, sunrise at the Waking Edge, Castle of Lar.

TVR - Humax HDR1010

Since I last checked Freesat have put some effort into improving their service in areas where News Corp's bigger budget for Sky can't stomp all over them, such as technology. The latest range of satellite boxes is the result.
This one has "Freetime" a front end for the various TV players that gives seamless access to past programmes via the Internet. Back space on the TV guide and any programmes from the past week that are available are shown.
The HDMI connection is now handshaking properly and outputting Dolby sound. The picture is flawless, software having caught up with the BBC's sneaky tweaking of their signal that messed up HD for many users.
HD channels are now up to 11 on Freesat.
 One neat trick is that the hard disk makes a temporary recording the current program so if you get interrupted you can press Record and it has the whole thing.

The box can play media off the computer, something that Windows 7 blocks by default and then hides permission setting in a nest of menus:
Control Panel - Homegroup - Choose homegroup and sharing options - Show devices on All Networks - Allow All.
Windows Media Player can now be used to set up which folders are accessible to the TVR, which hides them in the 'Humax - Media Share' menu.

PGP revisited

Since PGP Corp was bought out by Symantic I've not updated my old version which still happily encrypts my sekrit files but no longer works with Email, something blocking it in Win7 I guess.
So I finally got around to installing an Open Source PGP, which seems to be working after the usual installation glitches.
First I needed GNU Privacy Guard for Windows. It's installation wizard rejected my existing key, but it was willing to add it once up and running.
http://www.gpg4win.org/
Then I added Enigmail, a plug in for Thunderbird, told it to check my Address Book and there were my security minded friends again:
https://enigmail.net/home/index.php

Solar Panels - first year

I received £569 in the government pay back scheme. My electric bill is down by £144, so that's £713 savings in total, a 10.5% return on my investment.
The panels have been almost fault free - the circuit tripped out once.

Ascot

Ascot 2014

One of our Relay for Life Events - a day at the races! From the left Professor and Countess Eldemar, Admiral Beaumont, the Duchess of Trikassi and Lady Oriella. A fine build by Countess Cassie, except for the green starting gate which my own creation. More pictures at Ascot slideshow

Android Kitkat

4.4.2 arrived today for the tablet as a direct download. So far so good...

There is apparently a battery drain problem caused by a Google App. That would explain why it says I only have 8 hours on a full charge! Sony has proposed a temporary fix until Google can sort it out:
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/sony-acknowledges-battery-issue-xperia-z-zl-zr-tablet-z-android-4-4-2-fixes-available-1451677

Maps of nowhere

A map exhibition at New Kadath lighthouse.

Tablet update

At Christmas Sony offered a major update to the tablet, not over wi-fi but via PC. This requires using their 'PC Companion' program to download and then transferring to the tablet using the USB cable that doubles as the charging connection. I guess this is to avoid "Oh noes my internets just died!" problems.

Anyway all went well, Android went from 4.2 to 4.3 and several Sony bits changed. The most obvious change is that the camera interface is a lot easier to use.

Squareworld

Another wonderful Aley creation, it's Squareworld! Anyone who can identify the maps on the walls gets bonus points.

Wireless and useless

The wireless keyboard wasn't working. Oh wait - some keys were, some not.
So I searched the house for PS/2. This is the second temperamental wireless setup I've had, maybe all the other wireless things are interfering. Yes, there were my old gunged up ones, and they worked. Except - why was the mouse running round the screen on its own? Naughty mouse! Could it be... yes, it needed a different surface, light colors but not shiny.
So now all is fine, except for the sticky 'b' key and several unreadable ones that if I don't think my fingers can find by themselves.
Enough of this Mr Tesla, I'm buying a new set with wires.

Solar Panels

Installed three weeks ago.

The UK has referral websites that promise three quotes. The two I tried were both poor - one got me a single reply with a sales visit but no quote, the second also a single reply with an on the spot quote from the salesman. Neither referral site contacted me again. Based on that experience, you're on your own.

I went for my only quote which matched what I was expecting. Installation took half a day with the only problem being that the original plan for 15 panels had to be amended to 13 as the roof was inches too short. That gave me a capacity of 3.4 Kw.
The panels are connected to an Inverter in the loft that converts from DC to AC and that joins the mains supply next to the existing meter under the stairs. A new meter records the panel output.
Right now (computer on) I'm using 0.6Kw. The panels generate 0.2Kw through thick cloud, 1Kw with thin and a maximum of 2.6Kw with a blue sky.
[added: maximum midwinter is 1.9Kw]
So where are the savings? The Government pays a subsidy for 20 years for every KWh produced, plus a lower rate for each KWh exported to the Grid. And, of course, the electric bill goes down. Estimates suggest a 12% return, ie the system will have paid for itself in around eight years.

One thing I looked into was batteries, but they are not cost effective yet. Like panels the technology is improving, and in a few years it might be worth adding them.

Privateers Ball

The nearest Saturday to Pirate Day is the Privateers Ball, and here we are on Nepenthe Bridge again.

World cut off

Sunday, pressed PC ON button, nothing.

So, another good excuse for buying the tablet I thought, activating the Email App.

Tuesday engineer arrived, pressed ON button - fine! Fortunately he didn't assume I was an idiot and as I was paying for an hour of his time tried again, it was indeed a dodgy power supply as I suspected.

Tablet!

Sony Xperia Tablet Z

The new toy! The Tablet Z is a 10" Android, I have the Wi-fi only version. There are plenty of reviews published ranging from 'good' to 'excellent', this is just a personal impression.

Yes, it's pretty: awesome black, thinner and lighter than an iPad, easy to hold one handed. I bought the Sony docking cradle with it, recharge is slow - overnight is recommended. It will recharge while switched off. There are plenty of cases on Amazon for it, I got this one, a bargain at £10.

It is uniquely for a Tablet waterproof as in "drop in a bucket for half an hour", or in my case "coffee spill alert!" On the minus side, that means the ports are sealed by fiddly plastic bits that I hope Sony have tested for durability. The cradle uses contact points to connect. The glass front is a finger grease trap, but this doesn't interfere with vision. The screen has slightly larger pixels than the iPad but not so much as to be noticeable.

The manual... no manual, just a minimal start up guide. Wifi connected easily to my router, and the Support App links to online help pages.

I've never used Android before, this implementation is the reviews say fairly standard. I soon discovered how to delete the free crap and load up some goodies. It comes with 16GB of memory of which I presently have 9GB free.

Apps synchronised easily with their desktop PC counterparts.

Google Maps said it needed a permission switched on to use GPS and that took a while to find:

Settings/Personal/Location services/ON and GPS on

and

Settings/Accounts/Google/Location Settings/ON

Once activated however, fine. I now know where I am if I step into the garden.

I've only caused the OS to get confused once, losing the Wifi connection, and a reboot cured that.

A built in universal IR remote was easy to set up. It does its best to be quick to use, and for simple changes it is.

Apps?

Skype. "Better picture" my first video contact reported, "sound keeps fading though." The microphone is on the top edge, I assume a compromise for the front and back cameras, so tilting affects it. Sony have promised a control with the next update.

Lumiya, a gallant attempt at a Second Life Android Viewer, is a dancing bear. It took several minutes for Ori to work out where she was standing! For checking messages, fine.

Office Suite Pro is an Office substitute.

The Google keyboard is for me simpler than the supplied SonyXperia offering. I tried a Bluetooth keyboard but it keeps disconnecting the WiFi.

SynchMe is a simple folder synchroniser.

Castle in the Cloud

A fairytale castle in Second Life, built for the Relay For Life charity weekend. We all walk round a big course and do silly things - just like in Real Life!

Tall Ships Race

Today was the Tall Ships Race, one of the Privateers Weekend Events for Second Life's RFL charity drive. Here the winner receives her Trophy on Nepenthe Bridge in Winterfell, the map shows the course around our islands.

Science based websites

Contrary to what Google Search often indicates, there are plenty of good science based websites and blogs. They aren't however dedicated to making money by selling you snake oil and blue sky, so they don't try to get themselves onto that all important first page. Here's a few:

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/

Blog for veggies

http://rawfoodsos.com/

Vaccines, fallacies etc

http://www.skepticalraptor.com/

Various nonsenses exposed

http://www.hoaxorfact.com/

Quackwatch

http://www.quackwatch.com/index.html

What's the harm in pseudoscience?

http://whatstheharm.net/

Alliance for Natural Health

http://www.anh-usa.org/

Mostly chemistry

http://blog.everydayscientist.com/

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/

Upbeat stories about how technology can save the planet

http://www.smartplanet.com/

Second tier nonsense

We all know about the quack and fraud industry and its use of the Internet. The front line offenders are regularly debunked and refuted, as Searching on 'mercola fraud' or 'natural news hoax' shows.
Nevertheless they thrive because many people believe anything they agree with.

Backing up the top rankers are a wide network of lesser 'information digest' websites. Below is a selection of them, collected mostly from Facebook friends who posted links to them. This is no reflection on those people, the articles they recommended were generally harmless.

I'm not directly linking to these sites so as not to add to their popularity. Copying, Pasting and looking at them will reveal from their menus that they cover similar ranges of subjects: activism, economy, health food, politics, poverty, rights, GMO, climate, fracking, fluoride, vaccines... you get the demographic. What you won't find is the underlying reality that the quacks hate: critical thinking, basic science, logic and reason.

Some of them appear to be auto-generated, picking up articles from elsewhere and linking to them with no original content. Others are 'citizens' websites, depending on material sent in by others with no editorial oversight. The rest are just unselective, if the content fits it will be printed no matter where it comes from; one of the easiest ways they can be spotted is that they regard the flagship woo sites as reliable sources.

http://www.trueactivist.com/

- Reprints from Natural News

http://www.zengardner.com

- Everything woo in one place

http://www.knowledgeoftoday.org/

- Mostly quantum woo, just reprints nothing original.

www.whydontyoutrythis.com

- Mostly OK but no fact checking, includes the GMO rats, super food cures for cancer and vaccine autism court stories

http://beforeitsnews.com

- Citizens Press website, unedited.

http://tv.greenmedinfo.com/

- Anti-vaxx, chem trails, fluoride mixed with random science that looks alternative

- General niceness and positivity with woo. Anti-vaxx etc

http://naturalsociety.com/

- Another clone. Anti-vaxx. Gullible, unselective.

http://www.collective-evolution.com/

- Anti-vaxx

http://www.wakingtimes.com/

- Health orientated, aggregating.

http://www.realfarmacy.com

- Chemtrails, diet cure for cancer, GMO rats again

http://tv.naturalsociety.com/

- References Natural News and Alex Jones, positive, run by gun nut.

http://naturalsociety.com/

- Generalist, quotes Natural News

http://www.undergroundhealth.com/

- Front for homeopathy store

Being careful with links

You come across a webpage with something useful you want to share so you Post, Tweet or Blog about it on your Social Media of choice. Everyone does this, it's what the Internet is all about.

Yes, but... There always seems to be a "but" doesn't there.

We all want lots of people to visit our webpages - to read good advice, buy our stuff, whatever. To do that they have to find them, and that means Search Engines.
One parameter that Search Engines go by is Links. If lots of people are linking that means they found what they wanted so most likely other people will find that link useful too. Of course they might be saying "I just found this horrible webpage" but let's ignore that one.

So let's suppose you are a conartist, a quack, a fraud, whatever - you are offering something that isn't legit. Your website looks good, you put in all the right phrases like "morphic resonance", "quantum orbs" and "100% natural organic", now you want more traffic. Here's one way - add some pages that aren't nonsense, just general good advice like "eat more vegetables". You don't have to research this stuff yourself you just use someone else's work, with pictures and a video if possible, and maybe put "Source" at the bottom. Like this:
http://news.msn.com/science-technology/
I'm using MSN as a template example. Look carefully and you'll see that the articles come from news agencies or are writeups of information from elsewhere. MSN staff are reporters not scientists, which is fine and good because that's their job. Nevertheless it's always sensible to check the Source out as reporters can slant stories, oversimplify them or simply make errors.

So, I want to find news about Vegetables, I do my Google Search, find what looks to be (and actually is) a rational article and post a link to it. What's the harm in that?

The article was on the quacks-r-us.org website. By linking to it I just helped Dr Evil PhD(Arkham) with his evil plan to stop people vaccinating their kids and buy his homeopathic bottles of magic water instead. OMG. I just killed someone's child!
Now I'm not going to be fooled by Dr Evil and nor (I hope) are you, but those links help more gullible people than us find him. Please don't do it - use reputable Sources for your good advice.

Where's my Start button gone?

So I power on (me cup of coffee, computer big button) and log in and up comes the background pic but nothing else. Uh, oh... CTRL-ALT-DELETE, black screen. Eek. Manually switch off, reboot, everything's fine.
It turned out to be a video card two screen problem, it looks like the latest update of Catalyst, the AMD control program, has deviously changed something that isn't happy with my switching off with two screens and restarting with just one.

Need

Here's a simpler word that has also aquired a new meaning that isn't in dictionaries.
We all know what 'need' means, it expresses a requirement for something. Thus "I need a drink" indicates that the speaker is thirsty.

However consider these:

"You need to read this book"
"What you need to understand is that ..."
"You need to be quiet folks"
- which is a less aggressive alternative for the command "Be Quiet!"

The emphasis here has shifted to the speaker telling others what the speaker thinks they need. The shift in meaning has in some cases reached the point where in context the other person plainly doesn't want to comply:
"You need to give me all your money right now!"

Smirking

Chatting on the Internet gets one close and personal with language as she is spontaneously typed, including an often ignored factor - the differences between dictionaries and how we actually use words. Here's an example I finally got puzzled enough to look up just now, "smirk".
Online dictionaries agree about this word:
Verb: Smile in an irritatingly smug, conceited, or silly way.
Noun: A smug, conceited, or silly smile: "a self-satisfied smirk".

However when 'real people' are asked to define it the negative content mostly isn't there:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090413212934AAMHIBK
"Smiling very slightly, like you are trying not to. Usually one side of your mouth is smiling more. And it usually means that that person is up to something"

Americans use this word regularly, Brits do not, and dictionaries have yet to notice that its meaning has changed.

40Mbps!

The BT Engineer arrived to connect me up to Fiber Optics. It was quick and painless, and my black EE router now has a white BT modem next to it feeding it stuff. I went for a 40Mbps connection (could get more) and that's what testing says I'm getting.

Of course what I get back is unlikely to be that good!

Trikassi in winter

Chateau Trikassi, winter 2012, photo by Wildstar Beaumont. Serra Anansi, Seneshelf of Winterfell, brings snow overnight to her land of dreams.

Do not Press this Button

It was the 'Sleep' button on my keyboard, and it was accidental honest... anyway the system glitched and refused to wake up so I had to reboot. The BIOS decided it was Level 1 Diagnostic time and reset to its defaults.
Fine, except - noisy fans! I had to venture into the BIOS to switch variable speed back on. I hate doing this, even though BIOSes have help screens these days they are in, well this being ASUS it's Chinese English.
So far so good, I tweaked the chassis fan speed down one step from 'whine' to 'hum'. ASUS have a free program called PC Probe that displays this kind of stuff and can set off alarms if things go wrong. Next I'll try going down to Super Quiet Mode!

Is this Fibre at last?

Orange (or EE as they now are) ninja updated my router software with - goodness - a switch to fibre button. Could this be... I looked on the website. Yes, there were the pricing options, a speed estimate (72Mbps) and a number to phone.
And they hadn't told me. Nor have BT, though I'm on their register list to be informed. Grr.
I signed up anyway, and now await a BT engineer to update my connection. In three weeks? Sigh...

BT fail. Again.

Yes, it was time last week for BT to contact me and say superfast fiber optics were ready as they had promised three months ago. And yes, the promised date has been advanced another three months.

Fun with Hi-fi

After twenty years, it was time to update my hifi system. It was sitting on one side of the living room unused with the PC and TV on the other.
I settled on a Sony STR-DH820 A/V as the hub, which though defined as 'entry level' sounds fine to me. It has more sockets in the back than Neo and is awesomely black.

Glitch #1 I managed to press the wrong buttons and disabled the remote control. A Google forum search found the remedy - press a previously untouched button unintuitively labelled 'AMP'. Yes it was in the manual but in the wrong place.

The PC, TV and satellite box connect to the A/V via HDMI cables, and the A/V turned out to have better video output: Channel 4 HD had been choppy but is fine now.

Glitch #2 was (ha!) Windows. Switching from the PC speakers to HDMI output, the only option was Stereo. Where's my surround sound? Back to Google, which suggested some complicated and suspiciously old remedies. So... update driver? Yes, there was a recent update but that made no apparent difference.
Eventually the solution hit me last night: Windows was being clever and looking to see where the sound was going. To a TV with just two speakers? OK, just stereo then. In the A/V settings I needed to disable 'Pass Through'. Now Windows could only see the A/V and up came the speaker options I wanted.

Fiber optics - BT fail

British Telecom installed fiber optics at my local exchange 18 months ago. Since then, every three months they have been promising to actually extend it to my road. A couple of days before the deadline, they push the date forward another three months.

So I've given up and signed a new internet/phone/mobile deal with Orange. 3Mb speed is fine for me, I can wait for long downloads.

Router change

My Orange Livebox has been suspect for a while, losing connection every couple of hours, so I replaced it with their new dedicated router, Bright Box.
Bright it is not - it's black! Also smaller, paperback sized. It connected up automatically once given my password and hasn't had a dropout yet.

Second Life Mesh Support

A Brief Look at Second Life Mesh Support is a short explanation of why Second Lifers are so excited about Mesh.

Up to now we've had Prims, polyhedrons which can be manipulated using an inworld editor, and 'sculpts', weird single prim objects that are created offworld. Now, finally, we can import 'mesh' objects of the kind used by other computer generated worlds. There are plenty of free editors out there and a common file format, now they have been thrown into the SL sandbox. This is going to be fun.

There is a new Mesh section in the SL Destination Guide that will no doubt be filling up fast.

Virtual reality scripting

Second Life has its own scripting language, without which nothing could move. Since SL is user created, anyone can write their own scripts using the built in editor and see them go wrong! Here is a library with some free samples.
Below is one what I wrote myself, the controller for a magic bridge. Say the password and the bridge appears!

// say password to activate prims in object
// this script must be in root prim
// activated scripts can be in any prim
// Oriella Charik 2010

// Bridge melts after (freezetime) seconds
float freezetime = 30;

default
{
    state_entry()
    {
        llSetText("Bridge Power", <1.0, 1.0, 1.0>, 1.0);
        // set channel to listen on
        llListen(0, "","","");
    }

    listen(integer channel, string name, key id, string word)
    {  
       if(word=="freeze")
       {
        llMessageLinked(LINK_ALL_CHILDREN, 0, "start", NULL_KEY);
        llSetTimerEvent(freezetime);
        }
       if (word=="melt")
      {
      llMessageLinked(LINK_ALL_CHILDREN, 0, "stop", NULL_KEY); 
      }
    }
  
    timer ()
    {
    llMessageLinked(LINK_ALL_CHILDREN, 0, "stop", NULL_KEY);
    }
}

For learning inworld I reccomend the College of Scripting.

Crowd numbers

I just spent a happy half hour googling around on the subject of crowd numbers (yes, the recent rallies in Washington DC sparked this off).

CBS News was slated by supporters of Glenn Beck for its estimate of his rally attendance (87,000), so they published the methodology and here's their estimate for the Rally for Sanity (215,000). Both have a 10% margin of error. Their estimate for the Obama inauguration was 800,000 by the way, lower than others.

• Blog by the expert partnering the survey company. It has plenty of links and information about the subject.
• Plenty of first hand accounts of the latter rally.
• Overhead view of the main crowd areas - in both cases more people were further away:

When I looked up rational estimates by supporters, one reason for disparity was obvious - crowd density. In camera shots taken from the ground (or even the top of monuments) density isn't clear, but the company CBS hired used a robot balloon camera that could do both overhead shots and oblique ones to see beneath trees. It was on the spot and could tour the whole crowd, later estimators were not.

The conclusion is much as usual. How was the data obtained? What is the margin of error? Why do you suppose you can understand any of this without having done Statistics 101 or switched your brain on before reading?

Also, take a look at who is giving you different data with no sources and no proof. If they claim that a source is wrong because they don't like what it says and then next week that the same source is totally accurate, alarm bells should be ringing in your head.

Saint Hill picket report 15th October 2010

Mostly the UK OG tag on to Anonymous protests these days, but this one we set up ourselves being on a Friday:

Three Old Guard and three Anonymous went to rain on Davey's big speech day at the IAS weekend.

After a short stint in East Grinstead High Street we arrived outside Saint Hill about 14:30. Traffic into the grounds was better organised this year with no jams, otherwise things inside seemed much the same as previous years.

Photos

The 'shatter the SPs' plan this year was two big speakers balanced on the perimeter wall connected to bagpipe music. Well, first they had to connect them which took a while but when it got going it was a WIN. Like loud, really loud, right next to Mr Mid Sussex Policeman's car. I don't think he was amused. This was death metal concert head bangingly loud.

And then... a chap from Health and Safety Environmental Protection arrived. With a meter. We didn't call him, and I don't think our glum friends across the road did either. How odd. Perhaps he heard the bagpipes from his office in town. Anyway, he wanted the speakers off, and Tony on the megaphone to turn his volume down from 11. We complied - no one messes with the man from H&S.

After a much quieter second half, we departed around 17:30.

Farmville is eating the Internet

The xkcd webcomic has a new edition out of its Map of Online Communities. Go take a look (the map enlarges if you click on it).

What the map does well is to place otherwise unconnected Internet communities into perspective. For example, political bloggers who suppose the wired world reads their every flame may be chastened to find the map needs an enlarged inset to show them. In some regions one group dominates - Warcraft on MMO island, Skype in messaging, and Facebook as the biggest nation.

Multiscreen

The only problem with my big (37") TV screen that's been doubling up as a monitor is that its text display isn't good; using programs with unadjustable text size (such as Eve Online) causes serious eyestrain. So I looked around for a reasonable size monitor and came up with a 22" LG E2250. It's an 'LED' monitor, an improvement on pure LCD.
Connecting via a DVI-D lead was no problem, Windows7 auto detected and multiscreened - that's where you move the mouse off the edge of one screen and it pops up on the other. The specific LG driver needed a nudge to install.
Text is now clearer by a lot. The LED improves on backlighting, making the picture brighter.

Googlevanned

Mr Google came round last year on a Tuesday afternoon, just after the binmen. My house is in the middle of the terrace.
As you can see it's in a cul-de-sac at the bottom of a valley, the river is at the end of the path (click on pic for full size image).

My (second) life as a film extra

A fortnight ago my Second Life avatar was an extra in a pub scene being shot for a PBS programme that aired last night, online now at Digital Nation.
The programme was wide ranging, the Second Life segment had Philip Linden (creator of SL) showing off both his offices and then switched to a surreal shot of presenter Douglas Rushkoff wandering the corridors of an empty IBM office complex. The staff worked from home now and held meetings in SL, saving Big Blue $1 million last year in travel costs.

Home Networking

Just because I possibly could, I tried networking the old and new machines via the two sockets on the router.
Vista recognised Win7 right away, and after some fiddling with permissions I found out how to add folders. Win7 however... it turned out the firewall I had on Vista was blocking access. There were passwords involved in this, but just like on TV shows guessing only took a few seconds.
Win7 has a new networking for dummies system called Homegroups, but that only recognises other Win7 machines.

More glitches

I have a couple of Win95 programs, a decade old but never bettered, that Windows 7 refused to Install - surprising, as Vista hadn't quibbled. Maybe it's a 64-bit problem. Anyway I transferred the folders over and they ran fine, complete with previous settings since Win95 programmes store those in their own folders.

Webedit is a long lost HTML editor that has enough bells and whistles for me, and WS/FTP LE is the old freeware version of that transfer program.

Windows 7 arrives

My Vista machine never really recovered from its overheating problem and recently lost contact with its graphics card, defaulting to the onboard graphics. So, an early Yuletide prezzie - a brand new Windows 7 desktop, 64-bit OS, with a Radeon 5750.
Overall I'm happy - as promised it's all rather smoother than Vista. I'm slowly loading in stuff and so far the only program that didn't want to know was PGP, I needed the 64-bit version.

Hiccups:
(1) The speakers by default had inputs off, it took me a while to find out how to connect them to Line-in enabling me to use them for the TV.
(2) My Second Life TV isn't working. This seems to be a streaming glitch with Quicktime, I can see other streams in RL and SL and Liz can see it fine - she spotted a friend of hers being interviewed ("look look it's Amber!") and all I had was a blank screen.
(3) Not a single Blue Screen of Death so far! The graphics card has paniced and reset twice in SL, both times when I was working it hard, so I'm guessing at some minor OpenGL problem.
(4) Today, the screen blanked out. It turned out the HDMI cable had come loose, the 5700s only have HDMI output plus a rather grudging DVI socket which I haven't tried. Fortunately the HDTV has several HDMI inputs since I need another for the satellite box.

HDMI is fine with graphics, not so good with text but then the TV isn't optimised for that. Tweaking text size and Clear Type has made it readable.

Winterfell pictures

The Primgraph: Issue 8 - October 2009 has articles and pictures featuring my Second Life homeland, the Dark Victorian regions of Winterfell. The link is to the First Life online edition, though I read my copy sat on the bench in my castle garden.


Er, not in this weather though - a photo I took last winter. Brrr! Click on the pictures and they will appear full size. The next one is of Port Amaranthine and Uni Ninetails Disney castle:


And finally another wintery scene, the sky garden above the clouds:

Website Stats

I use Statcounter.com, an excellent free service. It records stats for the most recent 500 visitors, and thus provides a rolling snapshot of Internet user preferences.

Browsers
MSIE 55%
Firefox 30%
Safari 5%
Chrome 4%

MSIE is split between versions 6, 7 and 8. MSIE 6 is the bugbear of webpage designers due to its many faults that require workrounds, but it is now down to 11%.

Resolution
1280x1024 40%
Unknown 27%
1024x768 25%
1152x864 7%
800x600 1%

It now seems safe to regard 1024 as the lowest width that needs to be accommodated. 'Unknown' is surprisingly high, looking elsewhere it seems to be mostly variations on 1280 such as 1280x800.

Operating Systems
Windows XP 54%
Windows Vista 28%
Unknown 8%
Linux 4%

And that with new improved Windows 7 almost here is as high as Vista will go. It remains to be seen how long businesses will hang on to XP 'because it works' and remain unconvinced that upgrading would be a financial net gain.

Spot the religion

Another contest folks! This is a graph of audience reaction to the latest adverts on American television from - let's say a certain well known bona fide religion that isn't a cult. You have guess at which moment in the advert the name of the religion was first given.

24 hours in limbo

On Friday Mr Blue Screen overran my machine and I had to call in the repairman. Fortunately I got a good (though expensive!) one as it took several hours to get everything sorted. It turned out the CPU fan was not speeding up when it should have been, the CPU was overheating and that most likely killed some memory and corrupted Windows.

So it was full reinstall time, after which Vista got down to downloading 30 months worth of Updates while I reinstalled programs. It took 3 days for Service Pack 1 to arrive, presumably Microsoft sensibly had security updates at the front of the queue.
The only glitch so far was overwriting my Firefox Bookmarks (duh). The latest Nvidia drivers didn't work well with my budget never state of the art card, so I reverted to the previous set. Thunderbird made no objection to my copying over all its data files in a single block.

The only problem that threw me was that my router had reacted to all this by dropping its Download speed, causing Second Life all kinds of problems. Rebooting it forced it to renegotiate speeds.

Let there be light

This is really just an illustration of how the Internet just works.

Houses have light switches. But can Second Life houses have light switches? I'm in the dark about this (ha ha), but let's try 'remote light switch second life' in Google.

http://code.google.com/p/secondlifelivelyscripts/
Here's not only the code I need but also two YouTube clips with the author's Avatar demonstrating how to do it. So I can download the code, Cut&Paste it into a Script holder in Second Life, and there it is.

Oh. One alteration required - American light switches are upside down. Easily changed...

Spot the Scientologist (2)

Difficult this one isn't it? The photo was taken outside the Scientology shop in London during an Anonymous protest. It inspired one of my leafleting callouts: "Scientology - the unhappy religion!"

Infinite Complacency

...you'll have to read the Infinite Complacency blog to find out where Jonny Jacobsen found the title! He's a journalist who has been observing Scientology from the sidelines for quite a while, and is now blogging his notes for what may eventually become yet another book on the cult.
Here he concentrates on David Miscavige, the violent psychopath who has led Scientology since the 1980s.

A recent work I'm presently reading is John Duignan's "The Complex", subtitled "An insider exposes the covert world of the Church of Scientology". British booksellers have refused to stock it due to a threat from the cult, it is available from Ireland where it was published.

Google is watching you

I wrote a satirical comment to a Youtube video yesterday with a :-) at the end to indicate humor and got the usual humorless replies such as "let me guess not a real person just a part of the scientology PR machine". Guessing is not necessary however - Google is your friend! My name is almost unique on the Internet, and a Search on it produced this (snipped for brevity):

Results 1 - 10 of about 2,480 for "hartley patterson". (0.14 seconds)
Search Results

1. User:Hartley Patterson - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
2. News From Bree A Tolkien interview, a medieval spreadsheet, a secondary universe and some enturbulating entheta.
3. Hartley Patterson Directory of critical information about Scientology.
4. Protest Activity in the UK
5. Picket Report, Hartley Patterson
6. User:Hartley Patterson - Wikinews, the free news source
7. User talk:Hartley Patterson - Wikinews, the free news source
8. 1972 - A Year in Diplomacy by Hartley Patterson
9. ZoomInfo Open People Directory > Patterson, Hartley
10.Patterson, Hartley | Patterson, Hazel | People Directory | Facebook

Only (9) appears to be spam, the others catch a selection of my Internet interests. but 2,480 of them? Oh no, I've just added the 2,481st! Must get out more...

Do not do this in Real Life

Oriella: Oh
Liz: whatwhat?
Our neighbours have demolished their house again
whaaaaat????
lol
seriously? it's gone again??
I'm standing in a very empty field
i'm on my way
omg
it is gone
phew
I thought I might need new glasses
don't get too happy...they might rebuild

Added: They didn't and abandoned their land. Our present neighbour is an actress currently appearing at the SL Globe Theatre, but not given to drama off the virtual stage.

I don't believe this

This picture is from The Guardian 12 February 2009. The caption reads:



"A mysterious metallic object that crashed through the roof of a New Jersey family's home in January 2007 was not a meteorite after all. Scientists say it is a stainless steel alloy that does not occur in nature and is most likely orbital debris, perhaps remnants of a satellite, a rocket or some other spacecraft component".

Now come on guys, we know what space debris does. It either falls as a pile of recogniseable junk or it burns up as it descends. It does not melt into something that looks like an iron meteorite. A stainless steel object falling from a plane would not melt at all.
Stainless steel is iron with 10-20% chromium, 5-15% nickel added. Whilst all metal meteorites are iron-nickel alloys they include no chromium, hence the mystery. Chromium is mined as FeCr₂O₄, no nickel.
So what is it? I don't know, I merely don't think there is a likely explanation. Some phenomena don't presently have explanations, and 'scientists' shouldn't be grabbing the nearest available one and saying 'that must be it'.

Spot the Scientologist

On Saturday a couple of dozen protesters visited the CoS 'secret' headquarters in rural California. Lawyer Graham Berry's interview with the local Fox News station was interrupted by the Scientology PR Director who handed the reporter contact details but answered a request for a comment with "No".
Larger image, photo by cameraanonymous.
Sorry, no prizes for spotting the Scientologist - the look on Graham's face says it all...
The full story of pickets at 'Gold Base' can be found elsewhere, here's a link to a lot of videos. The current series has kept up the cult's reputation for bizarre and creepy behaviour in the face of Americans standing up for their First Amendment rights to say what they damn well want.

Cosplay

Second Life has several Rosen Maiden costumes, the Gothic Lolita Paradise shopping mall has all of them. Here is one of my avatars posing. They are not visible in the screenshot but I managed Suiseseki's dichromatic eyes by making green eyes in the normal way and then adding a red one as an attachment. Long red hair that spills over her dress would also have to be specially made, and I don't have the patience for that!

Shinku is particularly striking in her crimson outfit, and 'Feather' have a proper teaset for her.
So now I can wander about ~desuing and demanding cups of tea, to the confusion of most mundane residents.

HD TV arrives

It did several months ago actually.
I live at the bottom of a narrow and twisty valley so terrestrial TV is and always will be poor, the nearest cable is several miles away and across the Thames so satellite is my only option, doubly so when analog is switched off in 2012 as digital doesn't do poor reception. That leaves me with satellite.
Rupert Murdoch used to have a monopoly on this with Sky TV, though in a rare display of determination the government forced him to offer the channels that are normally free for no subscription and I got my dish that way. From the same satellite there is now a BBC/ITV joint service, Freesat which I recently switched over to.
Is it better? It has less rubbish channels including Sky - Sky makes its money from sport and movie subscription channels which are of no interest to me. And it does have HD for free, for which Sky charges an extra subscription on top of a normal one.

So I watched the Olympics in HD, which was excellent except that with its limited number of HD cameras that meant the BBC either showed everything or nothing, with some sports being totally ignored.

As for normal viewing, the BBC offers evening only HD and mostly endless repeats since they don't have enough cameras to do much production. ITV came up with the brilliant marketing strategy of keeping their HD scheduling secret, only putting up an 'also in HD' message up on their main channel at the last moment.
I guess we'll have to wait until the American switch to HD before more is available.

HD TVs do generate a good computer picture though, with a reasonable 1360x768 resolution.

Second Life

I have one. Can't think why I haven't blogged this before!
I had a brief look at SL several years back, but the interface was clunky and I wasn't enthused enough to continue. A few months ago I tried again, found it much improved, and as soon as I got beyond the 'new player experience' I was hooked.

I'll assume you've at least read the media accounts of Second Life, which indicate that it is populated by pedophiles, virtual conferencing business suits and land sharks. Well those people are there in small numbers, but the bulk of 'residents' do other things.

The difference between SL and other online games is that players have the in world editing program. Almost everything you see in SL is constructed by players - buildings, avatars, vehicles and so on. There is a scripting language that enables them to add animations, sound and video. So what do they do with this? Well actually they do what people do in Real Life...

Have sex. Sex in SL is (for me at least) mostly fun, but now and then a good animation with attractive avatars and a good partner can be surprisingly erotic. For others, I gather it works quite well as a masturbation aid, and good luck to them! It's also interesting as part of the overall kick I get out of roleplaying games, which is to be 'someone else'.

Learn new skills. In SL this means finding out how to Create things, something I've only scratched the surface of so far. I've extensively rebuilt my castle, modified clothes, can do textures but my scripting is still Read Only.

Make money. Well, not so far. as in RL that requires a good product, marketing and after sales service with the added twist that the relative values of things are entirely different. A castle is cheaper than a sex bed because of the time spent creating them, since raw material cost is zero.

Anonymous terrorism

My Anonymous friends have just notched up their sixth monthly worldwide protest against the Church of Scientology, and the cult still hasn't a clue about how to stop them. In most locations the cult seems to have retreated inside its buildings, stuck its fingers in its ears and pretended nothing is happening, which would have been a sensible reaction from the start if the leader of Scientology David Miscavige had effective control over his staff.

However with his rational senior staff leaving or locked up in Scientology's prison camp in California Miscavige is increasingly at the mercy of the fanatics, who are telling members that the Nazi Communist terrorists that the multinational drug companies are paying to attack the Scientology religion will be exposed as sex criminals any day, any month, any year, any decade now. Fine - except that they are telling the press the same because they really believe it.

Personally I've been concentrating recently on getting protests going at Saint Hill, the cult headquarters in the UK. It's a big mansion out in the beautiful Sussex countryside, a pleasant day out with pints in the pub afterwards.

ISP, broadband update

My ISP (Orange) like most large mass market ones offer webspace as part of their package. However as they don't actually make any money out of personal websites their wonks keep trying to correct this. Their first attempt was an ad banner, easily circumvented by linking direct to index.html. Their latest is to delete my website, scrap FTP access and tell me to rebuild from scratch using a crap online editor.
Enough! I moved to the company (Freezone) that look after the Newsfrombree domain for me. They have the dreadfully old fashioned idea that providing services that customers want is a good way to run a business.

On the Broadband front however Orange are improving. I switched to their current package which comes with a wireless router though I'm using its Ethernet connection at present, and it has an automatic speed regulator that typically has me at 3Mb. Heh, right now it's 0.7Mb, it does wobble now and then but at least the connection rarely drops.