October 5, 2009
Long weekend craft
This weekend I discovered that when unfolded, the cardboard from a beer carton is almost precisely the size of the sky window I'm having quoted at the moment. In fact, the excess cardboard fits into the gaps to produce a template with such precision, I just had to stick it to my ceiling.
Given that this whole measuring/quoting/waiting on builders process means that I'm not actually getting any construction done, I've had to make do. And given that my imagination can often use a little assistance, this is a useful exercise in making an informed decision about sizes and positions.
Basically my options are the size of the cardboard template, 550x980, or with some extra constructions work, the next size up, 780x980. In a room so small, 780x980 is a big window. Think it would be a better choice?
Posted by LightYear at 4:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
September 24, 2009
Newsstand, you're dumped
No response from my enquiry to Newsstand's developer, posted here, but as fortune would have it NewGator silently released their iPhone client with Google Reader sync a couple of days ago.
I make a point of saying "silently", because for the past month or two they've been very vocal in assuring us loyal users (I've used NetNewsWire on the Mac for yonks) that phasing out of their own synchronisation service would be followed by updated support for Google Reader sync instead. We'd be first to know, they said, when the iPhone client was ready. Somehow I missed the release until tonight.
And the results of synchronisation of my entire 47 subscription feed list is clear (test done with one unread post):
Newsstand: >5MB
NetNewsWire: <47KB
There's just no question about it. Newsstand is unusable and NetNewsWire is usable.
Technically, the difference is this:
Both readers start by grabbing the feed list from Google Reader. Newsstand then grabs all of the last 25 posts of every feed through the Google Reader api. Stupid. NetNewsWire on the other hand, grabs the feed list and then uses the Google Reader api to find out if any feeds have unread posts. Then, instead of grabbing 25 posts from all the feeds, it uses the 'xt' flag to only grab the unread posts from only the feeds with unread posts. In other words, NetNewsWire uses Google Reader for what its designed for!
Now I'm a bit peeved that I paid $6 (and $5 for 40MB of wasted data) for Newsstand after reading the unequivocal buy recommendation on Wired. And on a wider scale, I'm peeved that I'm relying on a Wired article for iPhone app recommendations. Either the reviews on the App Store need to become better informed and more reliable, or there needs to be some way of trialling apps! At least NewsGator have got the model right - I used their free, ad supported version to conduct this test, and once I've finished writing this post I'll be straight back to the App Store to buy their "Pro" version. I wouldn't even care if it was any different to the free version - it's only a couple of bucks and the value to me is immense.
Oh - unlike Newsstand, NetNewsWire only supports Instapaper, not ReadItLater. Argh, it appears I signed up for the wrong one. Great... another sign up process to battle through.
Stay tuned for a more considered report on the shortcomings of the iPhone.
Posted by LightYear at 11:40 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
Newsstand for iPhone download stacks of data?
Sent to the Newsstand developers:
I noticed a large spike in my iPhone data usage, and on investigation I find my recently purchased copy of Newsstand is transferring about 5MB during every refresh of my feeds from Google Reader, even though only one or two new messages are downloaded.
When I sniffed the traffic, I find Newsstand is passing the parameters "?n=25&ck=535895056" to each feed on Google Reader, which downloads a heap of data every time. For example, "GET /reader/atom/feed/http://feeds.feedburner.com/WhereTheHellWasI?n=25&ck=535907056 HTTP/1.1" returns over 225KB of data.
I don't know alot about Atom, but shouldn't Newsstand be passing the "r=o" and "ot" parameters as well, to only get the posts since the last check?
If Newsstand has to download the last 25 message from everyone of my feeds, every time I want to check for new posts, it's useless to me. That's why I'm hoping I've missed something!
Posted by LightYear at 3:35 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
September 22, 2009
Rafto's Rapid Recovery
or the meal for when you couldn't be stuffed preparing a meal:
3 raw eggs
2 peeled bananas
1/6 cup desiccated coconut
1/6 cup sugar
400mL milk
Throw it all in a blender. Blend. Consume.
Experiment with the coconut and the sugar to get the balance just right - you want enough coconut to get the flavour, but not too much you're choking on the flakes. And you want enough sugar to offset the tang of the eggs but not too much to make it sweet. The second banana helps.
The rest you can just use as you have available.
I'm really surprised I hadn't discovered this earlier. Just the thing after a night of climbing and martial arts, when the thought of cooking a meal is too much. Delicious once you have the balance right, and second only to a beer for soothing aching muscles.
Posted by LightYear at 12:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
September 9, 2009
The Fragility of Curiosity
In the early 20th century Albert Einstein lamented that “it is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education”. Last Saturday, about a century after Einstein voiced his concerns about the fragility of curiosity, I had the grand pleasure of being uplifted by the hoots, gasps, laughter and feverish involvement of juvenile curiosity at the ABC Family Science Fun Day in Ultimo. There was no sign of a damaged sense of curiosity, as hundreds of children raced from display to display, touching scaly and spiky reptiles, wielding soldering irons, crawling through a large scale stomach model and interacting with scientists.
My science festival weekend began portentously when on the train to Sydney I was seated behind three junior high school aged kids who, fortunately enough, hadn’t developed the social graces that tend to keep our conversations quiet. I was privy to every word then, and it didn’t take long for one of them to quip,
“Hey, why when you’re on the train and you stand up like this, and jump into the air, you don’t fly back?”
“It’s cause there’s no wind pushing you back ay.”
“Nah I reckon it’s cause when you jump, see, this happens and it’s like, different.”
“Like with gravity and stuff?”
“Yeah, like imagine, what if you had the train all around here and then there was a big gap in the middle here, so there’s still wind but the platform would be there…”
The conversation trailed off but it’s hardly important. It was already clear the boys’ schooling had not dulled their curiosity but indeed, invigorated it. Not only were they voluntarily discussing physics problems, but they were using their powers of hypothesis and thought experiments to do so.
Incidentally, the problem the boys were discussing reminds me of an old Hey Hey It’s Saturday skit where a cannon was used to launch a tennis ball vertically from a moving vehicle before it passed under a bridge. The experiment showed that if the vehicle maintained its velocity, the ball would in fact fall back into the vehicle after it emerged from the other side of the bridge. A rather more spectacular demonstration of similar physics principles shows that with some care, it’s possible to land a plane on a runway less than 15 metres in length:
Some time later, one of the boys piped up again,
“How many millimetres in a kilometre?”
I kid you not - the coincidence is startling.
“That’s easy, 100! No, 10,000.”
“Nah, like there’s 1000 metres in a kilometre isn’t there? How many millimetres in a metre?.
At this point, Dad gets a little fed up with all the distractions and interjects, “just, just don’t worry about it, okay?”.
But still, neither their education nor their uninterested guardian could quell the curiosity burning within, and after some silence, the conversation picked up as if it had never stopped,
“It’s 10,000! Yeah cause it’s times isn’t it? Is that like multiply? Okay… 1000 times… is it 100 millimetres in a centimeter?”
Again, the boys never quite settled on an answer, but the scientific curiosity and the scientific techniques for exploring that curiosity were evident. It was a splendid precursor to the ABC Family Science Fun Day.
Among from the general air of fascination and wonder that permeated the Fun Day, several moments remain in my mind as indicative of the unbridled enthusiasm that exists in children if they’re given a chance to explore their scientific curiosity.
- The Mad Labs were massively popular all day. Here participants were given a chance to build a lie detector or other simple device by actually soldering the parts together. Father and son teams were common and it was great to see the kids handling the soldering duties. As one of the organisers said during a live radio interview on the day, “20 kids with hot soldering irons? What could possibly go wrong?”.
- The Surfing Scientist held two hour long shows and I caught the moment in both where he asked for volunteers. Skilfully he had already involved them in his show, “shooting” them with air from a makeshift air cannon and stunning them (and the rest of the audience) by sending beautiful toroidal vortices of fog over their heads. When he then asked for three volunteers, the reaction was an explosion of outstretched hands and excited pleas. It was truly inspiring. I can’t mention the Surfing Scientist’s show without including this awesome video, which he used to end the show.
- From the walk-through stomach to the bed of nails, the line ups of kids super keen to take part was huge. They couldn’t get enough.
- The animal displays were a huge hit. But not only were the kids chomping at the bit to get to pat a blue tongue lizard or look at a green tree frog, they were just as fascinated by the preserved scorpions and spiders, and had barrels of questions to unload on the demonstrators. When I let this large leaf insect climb on my “geek” shirt, I inadvertently became one of the demonstrators and fielded a barrage of quick questions and requests for a “turn” with the insect.
The real value of days like the ABC Family Science Fun Day occurred to me while seated at the “Inventors” show. Three of the judges and two of the past inventors (of the electric water purifier and the earthquake-hardened mud brick house) from the ABC’s New Inventors show held a discussion panel on the reality of invention. The themes raised tended to concern the economics and the effort involved in producing a viable invention, but one discussion path struck a cord with me. A young girl asked the panel if they always wanted to be a inventor when they grew up. The two inventors who otherwise had quite different experiences, both suggested that they found it hard to consider themselves inventors - instead they were exercising their curiosity about the way the world works, and combining that with an innate desire to actually fix a problem when they see it.
When another audience member asked what traits they thought had led them to their success, the panel was unanimous is expressing humbleness - that they felt they had no special traits beyond the farmer that solves problems on the farm on the run with whatever resources are available at the time. One of the inventors put his success down to growing up in the country, getting a practical feel for how things work, “working out how far up the tree you can climb before you’re in danger of breaking your arm”, then coming to the city to find a hundred problems looking for a solution - and creating that solution.
It occurred to me that the inventors were discrediting the notion that they had some gift, or that their methods were unusual, precisely because they had been born with curiosity just like everyone else. Their discriminating feature then, wasn’t possession of a unique trait (although clearly they had developed expertise in their particular fields), but that their juvenile curiosity had survived formal education. From curiosity comes a desire to understand how the world works, and from understanding how the world works comes a desire to improve the way the world works. If your curiosity can survive through to adulthood, you’ll never find yourself without an occupation. As Dorothy Parker put it, “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”
And that’s why I get excited about events like the ABC Family Science Fun Day and urge you to rediscover your juvenile curiosity or stimulate it in someone else - you may just be kindling the start of a world changing career path.
Addendum: I’ve included pictures of children in this post, which lives on the Internet. I realise that’s controversial, but found it difficult to justify that the report of a family event, emphasising the important role of kids, should censor muddy pictures that happen to include kids enjoying the event. If I receive any suggestion that the photos are not welcome, I’ll remove them immediately.
Posted by LightYear at 12:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
September 6, 2009
Woolworths Everyday Money credit card
I recently signed up for a Woolworths Everyday Money credit card. I figure that I'm not the only person in the world that actually researches the impact of financial designs on their own situation, so I won't be the only person to get frustrated by the lack of useful comparison data available. For the sake of a small contribution to that cause, here is the value table for the Everyday reward program. Why every company from Qantas to Telstra insist on valuing their deals in "points", only the citizens of Pointsville will know.
Points earned - value received
3,448 (min) - $20
4,310 - $25
5,172 - $30
Each 862 points thereafter a further $5
172,400 (max) - $1,000
You earn a point for every dollar spent, double for partner shops and triple for Woolworths shops.
I'm fairly happy so far. Do your own research!
Posted by LightYear at 2:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
August 28, 2009
Scientific Coincidence
I'm on the train on the way to the Ultimo Science Festival and the kids in front of me are discussing what happens when the train is moving and you jump into the air. Why don't you move, they ask? "Cause there's no wind pushing you back ay", "Nah I reckon it's cause when you jump, like it's different", "Like with gravity and stuff", "Yeah, like what if you had the train all around here and there was a big gap in the middle, then the platform would be here..."
Isn't that great? Hypothesizing and even thought experiments!
Later: "how many millimeters in a kilometer?" (I kid you not the coincidence is startling), "that's easy, 100! No, 10000", "nah like there's 1000 metres in a kilometre isn't there? How many millimeters in a metre?". Dad pipes up, "just, just don't worry about, okay". Grr.
After some silence, "It's 10000! Yeah cause it's times isn't it? Is that multiply? Okay 1000 times... is it 100 millimetres in a centimeter?"
Go Scientific Curiosity!
Posted by LightYear at 6:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
August 25, 2009
Cabinet shopping
Snail mailed today:
To The Manager,
On the 1st of August, 2009, I visited your OzRobes showroom in Broadmeadow and purchased two utility cabinets and related materials for $499.24. That day I took home what I was told was all the necessary components.
Over the next two weeks I returned to the store two or three times to pick up parts that had been forgotten in the original package or to return parts that were incorrect. In the meantime I also ordered six shelves which were promised on a particular day but forgotten. The matter of the shelves has since been resolved.
Today two doors remain unavailable, despite many promises that they would be available on particular days. Every time I am told the doors will be ready on a particular day, I cancel other plans, prepare the worksite, travel to the showroom and am disappointed to discover the job has been overlooked.
I have been attended to by “Sam”, who has assured me on at least six occasions that I will be telephoned back to sort the matter out. On only one of those occasions was a return call initiated by someone at OzRobes.
On the 22nd of August, after another missed promise of a call and delivery, I entered the showroom and voiced my growing frustration to Sam. Sam noted in his computer system that I had grown “quite irate” and expressed sympathy, stating that the experience is unacceptable, the owners will now be involved, someone will lose their job over the events, and some sort of refund should be able to be organised. He then assured me, acknowledging my doubt, that I would receive a call on Monday.
Monday has now passed without any communication and I have no faith remaining in the service of the store.
This morning I have been unable to find an alternate provider that could match the doors. If OzRobes is unable to resolve the matter by this weekend, I will engage my financial institution’s fraud control centre on Tuesday the 1st of September to cancel the original credit card transaction and ask that you honour the cancellation as failing to provide the goods paid for. The separate transaction for the shelves may remain. Obviously this scenario leaves me with partially installed cabinets, many wasted hours and a very disappointing experience, and is therefore highly undesirable but I see no alternative.
Sincerely,
Heath Raftery
Posted by LightYear at 9:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
