Lovely long weekend in the Blue Mountains

My dear wife organised a weekend away at a "bed and breakfast" at Blackheath in the Blue Mountains. My Internet addiction was suppressed to some extent by the fantastic views just down the road at Govett's Leap.

We did a few walks, looked a lots of "old wares" as they call them, and ate too much yummy hand made food.

Having my phone point out when new mail arrived was probably a bad idea but it did spare me of anxiety about the rest of the world.

Interestingly I turned iPhone tethering on and a few seconds later the option disappeared! Presumably new settings got pushed out by Telstra. Further investigation is required but this could have been very distressing if I was relying on it for a presentation or something.

Unable to read old, crummy, CDRs

This is scary. I remember, some years back, finding that old floppy disks I'd stored had become unreadable after a few years, but this is the first time I've seen it with optical disks.

This disk was burnt in October 1999. I've tried two CD readers and will try more, but so far this isn't looking good. The videos on this CD are irreplaceable, well the original might be somewhere on VHS cassette.

To be fair, these were budget Princo blanks, but the disk still looks good and it's been well stored.

Got the disk to mount in a laptop, but copying is not going well.

I'm going to keep uploading my valuable files to the cloud, it's safer than around here.

Anyone else finding they can't read their old optical disks? What is the lifespan of CDRs?

Hey Apple, what's with these huge minor updates?

Today there was a small update to iPhoto from Apple. Even though it was a small fix the download was over 100Mb!

Now, while I have a good internet connection, and the download didn't take too long, but it still costs me money:

But really, not so long ago, there were installers that could make a diff between a current version and the new version that just contains an efficient difference between the two.

How about getting back to those efficient days again?

Digital Radio launches in Sydney

Today is launch day and the number of stations my radio finds has jumped to 38.

Many of them are giving me errors here at the moment but at last the ABC is there.

My beloved ABC Radio National is there at 72kbps mono but it does sound better than most AM radios.

Here's the list of what my radio picks up on a full scan with a whip antenna in the kitchen.

702 ABC Sydney

ABC Classic FM

ABC Dig Music

ABC Jazz

ABC Country

ABC Grandstand

ABC News Radio

ABCRadioNational

ABC dig

DigitalRadioPlus

The Edge Digital

Koffee

Mix 106.5

Nova 969

NovaNation

Pink Radio

RADAR- Get On It

Radar Radio

SBS Digital One

SBS Digital Two

SBS Radio_1

SBS Radio_1+2h

SBS Radio_2

SBS Radio_2+2h

SBS Radio_3

SBS Radio_+2h

SBS Radio_4

SBS Radio_4+2h

SBS Radio_Extra

SKYSportsRadio1

SKYSportsRadio2

SM Super Digi

Triple M

triple j

VEGA 95.3

Vega 953

WSFM ClassicHits

2CH EASY 1170

2CH - Easy 1170

2DAY

2GB

2GB 873 AM

2SM

2UE

2UE News Talk

2UE News Talk.

3G Service 1

3G Service 2

3G Service 3

3G Service 4

3G Service 5

3G Service 6


So that's pretty impressive on launch day. I'm a fair way out of town and reception isn't good so there might be more that I'm missing.

Update

On the way in on the bus I spoke to David who wears a Broadcast Australia jacket. He mentioned that the ABC transmission is coming from a temporary antenna and that the proper one will be commissioned over the weekend.

Indeed as my bus passed the impressive Willoughby tower this morning, there against a stunning sky, I could make out workers way up the tower doing things. I'm hoping that the ABC will be a bit stronger once they switch to the proper antennas.

Radio with pictures

The ABC is playing with all sorts of ways of getting its content out on the net. One way is by making a video of people appearing on radio.


Thanks in particular to Roi Huberman for his production effort.

Subscribe to the abcradionational YouTube feed and they'll write you a lovely letter.

Best Python IDE for MacOS

I keep coming back to TextMate, not because it does anything intelligent with my python code but just because it's fast and simple. For some reason the speed of the text editor makes a big difference to usability.

For the past few years I've purchased Komodo IDE which has great features but the editor is infuriatingly sluggish, to the extent that often when I try to select some text it misses the beginning of my selection or fouls it up in some way. With every update I hope they'll have addressed this and I'm not alone in being frustrated by the editor.

It's time to look again at Eclipse and the news is good. The widgets (SWT) have been ported to Cocoa and this means that in the latest release, 1.5, no Carbon is required and I understand this means the future is bright for Mac users upgrading to Snow Leopard in August.

Starting with the "classic" download I then add update sources for PyDev, Subclipse for Subversion, and jseclipse for Javascript.

PyDev also supports Google App Engine projects which will be interesting to try out.

Eclipse "Galileo", version 3.5, looks really great and runs very snappily on my lovely new laptop.

BBEdit is my choice for manipulating large text files, TextMate quickly became a favourite and I look forward to what ever Allan Odgarrd is up to with version 2, but until then I'll live in Eclipse for a while.

It's a great time to be a developer working on the Mac platform.

LED lighting for the computer desk

A few years back we made the mistake of replacing the ugly track lights in the house with halogen lights in the ceilings.

These lights are inefficient, don't last long and punch holes in the ceiling causing air to leak to and from the roof space.

Friend Gerald is studying energy efficiency and got me inspired to look at improved lighting for home.

This morning I went out after minimal research and purchased six of these Cree LED star light modules and a 700mA constant current power unit that takes a 12V rail (which I have here on hand) and regulates the current for the lights.

I screwed them all to an aluminium bar which helps to dissipate some heat and of course wired them in series.

They are blindingly bright to look directly at, but overall probably put out as much light as a 40W incandescent bulb. This unpleasant dazzling effect is no doubt because they are such point sources compared to a bulb, they really need a diffuser.

Judging by how hard my 1A meter bashed I'm guessing it's pulling about 1.5 to 2A at 12V so that's up to 24W. Just guessing.

The arrangement I've constructed places them behind my computer screen pointing up to the ceiling.

Overall the effect is quite pleasant and provides light around the computer screen with no glare. Here's how the ceiling looks.



These LEDs cost $20 each, not cheap, the power regulator was $25. Looking at the specs now, I see that I'm driving these LEDs beyond their rated current so I guess their life will be short. The aluminium bar is getting hot.

My guess is that about 20 of these devices would provide reasonable illumination for a work desk.

Making beef jerky at home

A few of my more amusing workmates last week held a "jerky off" where they brought in home made beef jerky flavoured in different ways and we tasted them all.

I've tried to make jerky at home in the oven but it wasn't very successful and no doubt burnt a lot of electricity.

The secret is to get a food dehydrator. I paid $54 (plus $20 postage) for one on eBay and it arrived promptly.

It's a nifty device with a fan forced heater in the bottom that blows hot air up through the drying racks so that it exits via little vents in the lid.

Bought some beef stir fry strips, nothing special and a bottle of honey soy marinade and left the beef to marinate in the fridge over night.

In to the dehydrator first thing in the morning and six hours later we gobbled up excellent beef jerky. This thing will pay for itself after about ten batches I figure.

The only drawback is the mess to clean up afterwards. I think next time I'll put aluminium foil at the bottom of the dryer.

That dried marinade cooked on to the base is hard to remove.

Spurred on by this initial success, my daughter has now made dried apple:



and yummy dried banana:

Django 1.1 please finish it

For the past few months I've been re-writing a PHP application in Django.

The PHP application was built on a framework called CodeIgniter which looks very good shares many similarities with Django but the stuff that Django gives me "for free" is great. I personally prefer Python to PHP which helps of course.

As we move through UAT towards production I've been anxiously tracking the progress of version 1.1. Today the outstanding bug list is down to three. (And one seems pretty trivial).

The main feature I'm itching for is aggregate functions in the ORM, the other is the ability to do actions to multiple objects in admin - like delete multiple.

Yes, I could install the latest from Subversion but that's not a good thing for future support, mind you we all ran version 0.96 for ages.

Keep up the great work Django developers, and how about another podcast?

iPhone Tethering on Telstra

Can't believe I've lived without this until now.

I'm on Telstra and just as an experiment took the iPhone browser here and clicked the APN link for telstra.iph (which for me mistakenly reported it would use telstra.internet).

Went to Settings, General, Network and there is was.

Unplugged my desktop computer's ethernet cable, plugged the iPhone in via USB and a new network alert was shown.

On the Mac, all was smooth sailing.

Works great, seems very fast and low latency (under 130ms to ping Australian sites).

This is a fantastic feature and I can understand the carriers wanting to charge extra for it but how can they justify it? We pay for the data on the phone anyhow but for some reason they feel that if we use that data in one way we pay more than if we use it in another way. What possible justification can there be?

I'm not alone in this view.

Carriers - don't try to limit this! You'll make more money and be able to upgrade your networks if you step up and just meet this pent up demand.

Early indications are that if Apple really wants to block this re-configuration they are going to have to work very hard in the hacking arms race.

Having tried it, and thought about the use, a phone that tethers is infinitely superior to one that doesn't.

Great stuff Apple, I hope that all phones will follow suit.

For our Tibetan readers...

We do a little podcasting around here. Just launched is a series designed to help Tibetans moving to Australia to learn some English. It's called Tibetans Talk English.

This new site is the companion to the previous series which helps English speakers learn a bit of Tibetan, called Talk Tibetan.

It was a surprise to me that there are hundreds of Tibetans living around Dee Why at Sydney's Northern Beaches.

The podcasts are constructed in GarageBand with fine audio editing in Sound Studio.

Update

The ABC's 360 documentary series had a wonderful show on Tibetans in Dee Why including co-presenter Dorgee.

Journalism changed tonight

I've been listening to Dave Winer and Jay Rosen talking about rebooting the news so I'm primed for this.

As I write it seems that the election in Iran is out of step with the will of the people but the story has come out, not in the traditional media, but via "process journalism", where the story evolves in real time rather than being presented as the full story at the end.

Despite the fact that the mobile phone network was either deliberately disabled to prevent SMSs or quite possibly overwhelmed, news is coming out on Twitter and YouTube.

The Daily Show's story on the New York Times last week was very timely. One thing the Times said was along the lines of "the Huffington post doesn't have international bureaux.." and yet tonight we see that they have the best coverage.