By ‘eck, that was a fun show. I don’t usually like The Phoenix, but we didn’t have to hang around too long until the show started.
I didn’t record, before you ask.
Month: May 2005
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burlington beer
I just bought a 12-pack of Nickel Brook Ale from Better Bitters Brewing Co, just near the GO station in Burlington. It’s pretty good. Nice with food.
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happy mailing : Blat online
need to send simple mail messages from the Windows command line, optionally with MIME attachments? Blat is your friend!
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faster mac
I upgraded the memory in Catherine‘s eMac last night. It was deathly slow with the original 128MB, but now runs good an’ fast with 384. CPUsed isn’t the cheapest place to get RAM (it’s the same 8-chip PC133 that mini-ITX boxes use), but at least it’s a Mac place, so I could rant at them if it didn’t work.
See how propriteary systems beget proprietary systems …?
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TTC Subway Rider Efficiency Guide
The TTC Subway Rider Efficiency Guide is an example of some really helpful nerdiness. I like it.
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Plaintive GO Train phone
“Please Call”, they say, but at $0.95/minute, I’m not suprised the phones on the GO train are moping. -
paranoiac-critical turtle
Snapping turtle, as seen as a paranoiac-critical image in a discarded gyro wrapper, Chester TTC -
Oh say kha-nyou see …?
New rodent species discovered at Laotian market, known locally as kha-nyou. It looks a bit like Roland Rat to me.
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ride comes before a foal
Zoë’s horse Molly gave birth this morning, much to everyone’s surprise. Everyone, I suspect, except Molly, who knew but wasn’t telling.
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sometimes I wish awk had a print-range operator
‘cos it gets tiring to do this:
awk -F, ‘(($13 > 202.5) && ($13 < = 247.5) && ($9 > 0.0)) {OFS=”,”; print $1,$2,$3,$4,$5,$6,$7,$8,$9,$10,$11,$12,$13,$14,($5/$9);}’ infile
Too many $$s …
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cheap RAM in Burlington
Just scored a PC133 512MB stick for my mini-ITX project for just $101 from Sonaggi. That’s about $30 less than anywhere else.
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Swift Turbine Specs Look Dubious
“Oh no, not again!” I’m saying to myself, and really hoping that — just once — I’ve done my sums wrong.
You’ve seen my rant about how the initial public specification of the WindSave rooftop wind turbine was an impossibility (and, in fairness to them, how the corrected specs are much more like the thing). And you may have seen that I’ve written about the Swift before. But the Renewable Devices Swift was all over the blogosphere (a hateful word, I must say) today; both Treehugger and sustainablog were on it.
So I download the very pretty PDF spec sheet. Here’s the technical table from the document, which is dated 19 November 2004:
So that’s a diameter of 2m, rated wind speed of 10.5ms-1, and a rated power of 1.5kW. Plugging that into my simplified Cp equationCp = P / ( 0.48106 d2 v3 )
which gives:
Cp = 1500 / ( 0.48106 × 22 × 10.53 ) = 0.67
As this is higher than the Betz Limit of 0.59, the claimed power output of the Swift wind turbine is theoretically impossible.
I don’t know how to put this, but rooftops are sheltered places; if they get any wind at all, it tends to be turbulent and highly directional. You get huge updrafts, none of which help generate power. I know of some very open sites that struggle to get the 3.5ms-1 cut-in speed of the Swift, and that speed is at 50m+, not on a rooftop.
Renewable energy, for me, is about using the appropriate technology for the right location. Devices like the Swift are a distraction from the whole conservation/renewables agenda.
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bad cables / wasted power
Don’t be tempted to use the enormous heatsink assembly on an Athlon XP to support the power loom from the PSU. I did it last night, in an attempt to free up the airflow (and noise) from the CPU. Mistake. It flexed the mobo enough to unseat the CPU, causing wacky power-up errors (with no diagnostics, since there was no CPU to be seen).
I’m getting kind of sick of wasted energy in computers. That’s partly why I’m building a fanless mini-ITX system. It’ll have all the power I need, while being small, quiet and unobtrusive.
