city of glass

Probably my last plane flight of the year, arriving back at Heathrow today and taxi-ing back through drizzle to a glowing Terminal Five.

The newspapers were full of the news of the imminent strike by the plane crews, so I may have to reacquaint myself with some other airlines in early 2010.

blackberry powered

Working today, but my laptop has a temporary wobble.

Its been doing automatic updates and flashing its disk light for about an hour. No access to office facilities until its finished. I've quite a few things to do, and its a little irritating that its chosen now to do some kind of major maintenance.

There are some things that can't be done using a blackberry.

so tyred

Not my local Tescos this weekend. Some shopping though. Mince pies, cream, crisps, luminous vests, tyre chains.

Job done.

Saturn untied

The acceleration of December is occurring.

There's that point somewhere in mid November when Christmas and the end of the year seems far in the future, but then an initially imperceptible acceleration occurs across the next two or three weeks.

Shopping and general social preparations alongside work-related deadlines. And weekends pre-allocated. I've some extra business trips to work in too.

This year its not been so cold yet either. Hardly any frosts in the morning.

Early darkness, long midday shadows and glittery stars and orbs festooning the streets as give-aways of the season, but surprising sunshine and blue skies between the rain.

I've realised that I still have plenty to do before the holiday season starts. I must somehow compress time for the varied tasks of the next two weeks.

Whoever first thought of the reasons for celebrations at this time of year, it somehow feels right, as we approach the point where the days will start to lengthen again.

viewfinder for Lumix cameras

This is really a 'rashbre snapped' post, but I've added it to rashbre central as well.

Something I've wondered about for a while, but haven't wanted to spend lots of money on, was the effect of adding a small direct viewfinder to a compact camera.

Sometimes I'll use big SLR cameras with bulky lenses, but its also good to have something more portable. I typically use a little Lumix camera (LX3 or GF1), which can be unobtrusive, but both only have a rear screen for taking pictures. Its OK, but sometimes a 'to the eye' style seems more natural.

I've just received a little clip on viewfinder from an inexpensive eBay auction and added it to one of the cameras.

Its amazing.

It won't give me the exact view through the lens, but is a good way to frame a shot like a using a traditional film camera. It even has markings for three different lens lengths, 35mm, 85mm and 135mm.

It's a great match for the Lumix 20mm f1.7 (40mm equivalent lens) and surprisingly accurate for framing.

I'm hooked.

the wall to wall is calling

Another time capsule arrived today from Apple and seems to be working.

That's one dead and gone, one dead to return to the Apple Store and one dead and replaced. Maybe I should have switched technologies? Actually, I do separately back up my photos and music to another RAID5 system, but that's a manual process.

The idea of the time capsule is pretty good. The device to be backed up knows when the time capsule is accessible and quietly backs up everything that has changed, more or less continuously. Its a great model because its completely 'hands off'.

When it works.

time capsule overheating fix

Stop apple time capsule overheating. Lay old disk drive on top rear of case as heat sink. Inelegant but practical.

santa north pole norad xmas physics stats update

I was interested to see a sudden unexpected boost in my readership over the last few days and realised it was linked with an old post about Santa Claus.

Unfortunately, the post no longer linked to the latest Santa Claus tracking system, so I suppose there could be disappointed children of all ages wondering where the proper link has gone.

Well, its here, complete with English, Spanish, German, French, Japanese and Chinese language support and a little festive tune.

An ideal gift this year is, of course, this.

And for those of you who are more interested in the technology, NORAD's FAQs provide the following:

Plenty of people have calculated Santa's speed to cover the world, famously Joel Potischman and Bruce Handy who did the physics of the speed and payload performance criteria for Santa's sleigh. Like most, I'm respectful of this but am also intrigued by some of the assumptions in the original calculation:

The most notable corrections to be applied are:

- Santa delivers no gifts to naughty children (not even coal)
- Naughty to nice ratio is 1:9
- As confirmed by NORAD, one Santa distributes all of the gifts.
- There is only one family per household.
- Santa bypasses non Santa belief system houses.
- Reindeer have recently eaten fresh magic acorns.

Calculation Assumptions:

- World population = 6 billion
- Children under 18 = 2 billion
- Global Santa based belief systems: 33%
- Max children requiring delivery therefore 667 million
- Children per household: 3.5 (may seem high?)
- Number of households requiring distribution 189 million
- Eastern orthodox using Jan 5 instead of Dec 25 = 16 Million
- Target Households = 173 million on Dec 25
- Target Households after naughty to nice = 156 million
- Estimated child bed time 21:00 (9pm) with 7 hours sleep.

(child sleep duration on Dec 24 may also require revision)

Gives circa 31 hours (24+7) for all deliveries
Time is 1860 mins or 111,600 seconds

Average number of homes to visit per second = circa 1400.
So average delivery per household is 715 microseconds, which is why Santa normally appears a bit blurry (I previously thought it was the sherry)

Land surface minus Antarctica is around 79 million square miles. Distribute destinations evenly = 0.7 miles between households creating a total distance of circa 110 million miles.

So 110 million miles in 31 hours = 3.6 million miles an hour or circa 1000 miles per second or Mach 4770 at a linear speed.

This explains Rudolph's red nose because of air resistance creating around 20 quintillion Joules of energy per second, which would convert a non reindeer nose to charcoal at such energy levels.

Luckily Santa has lots of special powers so these mere physics facts are no problem to such a superhero.

And ps. my list is in the chimney awaiting collection.

unexpected retail moment

I've stayed at this myhotel in Brighton once before. I think it was only for a single night, but the pink space capsule look left quite an impression. It is very central and has a real buzz, with a bar that converts from evening chill-out to night-time hub with a mix of live music and then later live DJs.

Its also central for the varied shops, with the Laines offering the esoteric and implausible, well differentiated from the average High Street. However, even after the Happy Herbs available in the room, I still decided that the silver "grenades for your Xmas tree" decorations were probably not my thing.

And I'd describe it as happily lively, rather than like Beth's description of Oxford Street. We saw mainly good humoured groups of people wandering around, plenty of attractive and unusual stop off points mingled with glimpses of the sea and unexpected screeching of gulls. I seemed to be carrying additional bags by the time we returned to the hotel.

Postcard from Brighton

Logistically challenged mission this weekend as I find myself on tour to Brighton. We are staying in a rather bright hotel which seems to attract a particularly extrovert form of clientele.

We've already met others and managed a quick trip to Havana. Later, we head to a music gig and I suspect there will be more time in the rather unique shopping areas.

I hope I have time for at least a seaside ice cream.

the further one travels, the less one knows

With Copenhagen's energy summit getting fired-up, we are all thinking about the climate a little bit more at the moment.

One of the popular discussions is around new forms of transportation power, such as electric cars. I'm a believer in 'treading lightly' but I suspect some of the calculations will need refinement for electric cars to become mainstream.

The 'rule of thumb' equation for electric cars consumption goes something like 60mph = 20KWh. In other words, a car travelling at 60 mph for an hour uses 20 Kilowatts of power - roughly 10 fan heaters or 333 60 Watt light bulbs. As a quick cross check, the Toyota Prius peak output is between 43KWh and 73KWh, depending on model - higher than my figures.

To keep things simple, I'll assume that the 60 miles represents the equivalent of an average car's daily travel (ie 20KW) but that it only gets recharged on working days. Thats 220days x 60miles = 13,200 miles per annum or 220days x 20KWh = 4,400KWh per annum. 13,200 miles seems about right as an average.

Now for the average power consumption of a house. I looked this up on a US web-site. US homes have more central heating and are quite appliance rich, so their government statistics are a handy reference. Its around 960 KWh per month, according to the average of all of the States.

So a home uses 12months x 960KWh per annum (call it 12,000KWh) for simplicity. A single car uses 4,400KWh per annum.

Or around 1/3 of a home.

UK has around 25million homes and 33million cars. Lets make that 1.3 cars per household. That's average 5,700KWh per annum. Or an average of around a half a home of charge per night.

Now put the car electricity onto the household power grid. Most people would recharge at night. Say between 7pm and 7am. 12 hours. Thats 12 hours to deliver half of a house's average daily consumption.

Looks to me as if thats pretty much full continuous load.

So does that mean the whole grid needs uprating to support eCar charging? How big is the carbon footprint to do that? Maybe we will find out over the next few days - or perhaps it will take a three year study?

bah gum, there wern' 'arf an explosion

I seem rather unlucky with these Time Capsule dedicated backup devices. The new one that arrived yesterday has also failed. It was maybe half way through backing up an iMac, when it suddenly stopped working and the little indicator light went out. I've re-plugged it since but to no avail.

Its a trifle embarrassing, because this is actually the third one that has died. When the first one (pictured) went wrong, I put it down to bad luck. I'd had it less than two years and was a bit miffed that the backup device lasted such a short time, but it was out of warranty so I didn't think there was much I could do.

Then a couple of weeks ago another one failed in the same way. Dead except for the little lights for ethernet which momentarily flash when I plug in the mains cable. Again, its around 18 months old.

This third new one was in the middle of backing up 600 Gigabytes from one computer when it expired. Its a 2 Terabyte unit and is supposed to have a 'server grade disk' inside it.

Its pretty obvious to me that all three have suffered from power supply faults. I actually had the latest one plugged into an anti surge power adapter as well, so I've done what I can to protect it. I noticed it ran rather hot, so I'm guessing heat + electronics=fried apple.

I called Apple about the latest one and they are sending a replacement. I asked if they'd had this happen before, but was told by the technical guy that he'd never heard of anything like it.

Of course, I couldn't resist a quick google and was surprised when the Time Capsule Memorial Register popped up.



Along with the very handy link to the BBC's summary of UK Consumer Protection Law and the six year 'fitness for purpose' rule. I'll see how I get on at the Apple Store with the other dead one.