Plantagenet Penguinista

OK, here we are tickling the keys on our trendy state-of-the-art laptop, where they are flipped across the house at tens of megabits per second encrypted wireless, to be stuffed into a less state-of-the-art desktop, plunged down through a dial-up modem which is calling Western Australia (hi from Tasmania), to send the keystrokes to the LA server now sitting in the Eastern States somewhere. This technology flips its electrons past a steam-powered locomotive (hi, Wee Georgie Wood) in a town with its own water-processing plant & ironically getting its power from nearby hydro generators. We have a resident drinking black coffee because he doesn’t get on well with either the shop-keeper or the service-station attendant (which charges Nullarbor prices of $1.37 a litre). And the harder you look, the worse the dischord gets. (-:

Sad but true. No ADSL in this town . The community connection office uses ISDN. Thanks, Nathan, for one of your modems. Tasmania has repealed all flat roads — except for a few they keep along the northern coastline to fool visitors with. They also appear to have repealed sunshine, at least temporarily. (-: Our seatainer has arrived, which means furniture, electronics, some food & a distraction. The truck driver was great, he turned up while Roadworks were resurfacing our street, & put up with it in good humour. He also helped us find some thick concrete tiles to put the seatainer down on so it rusts less. Ah, the wonders of modern technology: my USB cable for the camera’s card reader has dropped a connector, so it will be a while before I can send any more pictures. It’s rarely the technically-exciting things which fail. I learned a fair bit about OpenOffice Writer’s forms-handling capability, setting up a local lady with a set of invoice forms as templ...

Stayed in this small, neat, well-attended motel on the way into town. The people here are very helpful, pointed out food joints & shops etc, & incidentally this place, a small shop with Tux on the front window which does Internet cafe stuff. Nyryl, it’s called, pronounced "Nigil". Click on the motel pictures for larger images; I can’t recommend them too strongly.

How to get there? The obvious answer is to surf . Admittedly, it’s a chunk of magnetism you’d be surfing, not a chunk of polystyrene, but the principle’s still there. (-: Quotable quote: “We’d like to be able to modulate the charge,” says Peck. “But how do you turn off an isotope?”

Is there anything worse than over-filling a sea-tainer? Well, yes, there is: under-filling it. Why? Well, these things aren’t exactly skated along on silk, so an under-full one will rattle . What this means for the contents doesn’t really bear description. Just let “destructive” stand in for what happens. We’ve 3 / 4 filled our sea-tainer, & even with “padding” from seldom-used items, we’ve got about 2 hours tomorrow morning to pull most of it out again & rearrange it to sit together while the box is tipped each end up, shaken & rattled. Doing that with maybe 8 tonnes of furniture is going to be kind of exhausting. After that, it’s the Nullarbor via Kalgoorlie for fun & profit. Or something like that, anyway. I’ve been assured that there are some great photos available on the coast between Eucla & Ceduna.

Farm visit this week, so I got to scrape together about 2 tonnes of electronics junk and toss it out at the local tip, a skip-based operation at Porongurup. What was sitting at the bottom of this agricultural mecca’s rubbish skip? Kangaroo corpses? Ploughshares? A stack of wine vine cuttings? To my great surprise: a large (20”?) monitor, & a keyboard rack (with keyboard & sliders) for a 19” rack. No kidding. Sitting right there amongst (now) scores of half-working televisions, chunks of ancient telephone exchanges, ancient radios (two-way, car & desk), obsolete PCs & so on. This amongst burnt-out tree farms at the back of several kilometers of dirt road on a tourist drive along the north of the Porongurup Range. A drive through countless vineyards, sheep farms & so on. So who, I wonder, graces this patch of countryside with their highly technical existence?

You may be strictly correct in doing so . Copenhagen University researchers have reasoned twice, once that electrical impulses should generate heat as they go (and there isn’t any), & twice that certain structures will reliably transmit sound-waves without savagely dissipating them. The end-result is that nerves probably use sound to transmit impulses, not electricity.

This little gadget — about the same size as a largeish bar of soap — feeds 4A to your laptop at 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 22 or 24 volts from a car cigarette lighter. 6A for 20V or less. Better yet, it runs cool. Not bad for a bump-it-up switched-mode power supply. I got mine from Altronics , who do mains versions as well.

Auto Extra fitted some Rola roof racks to our Camry wagon. When I say “fitted” the technician involved reminded me very strongly of Peter Edwards AKA “Sch4dow”, a bloke who could fix anything that ever worked (& I’ve seen him fix things which had never worked, too) in that he measured everything out carefully but quickly, eyeballing stuff off as he went to make sure that it was “just so” when he was done. The shoes (clips) from the rack sit neatly, quietly & waterproofly in the door seals, & the rack whisks along through the air silently & smoothly. We bought a “fit kit” from Auto Extra to suit a set of racks we were given from a 4Runner, & accepted their invitation to have the racks precisely cut & fitted for free, which they did... even after I rolled up at 17:00 after having to wait to pick up my laptop’s power pack beforehand. If you want good racks (& bike racks, carriers, lights, camping gear...

C & A Autos (tel 0414-803-185) did a wonderful job on the cranky radiator, took it from overheating at 100km/h or with the aircon on to blasting along at full bore with aircon & roof racks (see next post ), cool & steady. On top of this, it cost about half what it should have. These blokes do such a wonderful job that I wholeheartedly recommend them for any mechanical problems. They’re good with the finicky new stuff, but willing to cobble something together which makes the old Ford go reliably, & competent across that whole range.

Well, d’uh? It seems, however that it is a distinctly quiet star amongst even its own small category of stars. Its “common” stellar type amounts to about 5% of all known stars, so it’s unusual there, too. So... all of the fiery images I’ve shown you of our hyperactive Sun? They’re all relative. If our Sun was as violently active as a typical star, we’d literally get toasted every century or so. Peace, brothers! (-:

Star clusters open a pandora’s box of interesting little paradoxes. They have sets and groups which are used to track a cluster’s age and the progress of indivisual stars within the cluster. However, a 14Ga-old cluster will have orbited our galaxy more than 100 times, passing through the galactic disk twice each time, and somehow remained together & compact through all of this. On top of this, there are... oddities in how stars’ ages are tracked. Once a star has chewed through all of its hydrogen, it expands & burns redder. At this point, it no longer fits the main stellar sequence, so the point is called “the main sequence turn-off point”. The age of the cluster can be calculated by measuring stars at the turn-off point and plotting them in a sequence based on our Sun. It’s a nice theory, but there’s no way of testing it. There are also a few problems, like most of the turned-off stars have a far lower mass than they should. The ages ...

Our car made significant overheating motions, so we handed it to our friendly local mechanic instead of driving it to the farm. Sigh. We had a visit from Litoria Moorei (Golden Lipped Frog), who, it seemed, wanted to play Frogger. Sadly, we couldn’t get him to hop along the lanes. The best we could get out of him was sliming along the task-bar. Not good enough, it seems. Eventually, we fired him from the games industry & freed him into a (hypothetically) snake-free part of the back yard. From here, he gleefully leaped away. While I’m dropping photos... Here is a snap of our new car & our sea-tainer.

We’re headed off down to our farm near Albany to trade some furniture before setting sail to that little chunk of land which people forget to include in maps of Australia. It takes a stunning amount of time to take down a few beds & pack them onto a trailer, but it’s done now. I can’t imagine what the last day or so’s cramming of the sea-tainer is going to be like. Or perhaps I can imagine, but don’t want to. Next, five hours of sitting & staring into space. Whee. We do get nice farm scenery at the other end (& get to meet Uncle Ted for the first time in ages), & get to see several “picturesque” country towns on the way. Well, kangaroos for breakfast (out the window, not on the plate) & cockeys almost uninterrupted by crows. That’ll be relaxing.

New Horizons has found another surprise (well, set of surprises) on Jupiter’s moon Io: a honkin’ great volcano , dropping debris across a field nearly 300km wide. If this was scaled to Earth, you could imagine a volcano near Alice Springs chucking rocks into the water off Perth, Broome, Cairns, Sydney & Adelaide — at the same time. You can also see (at 9 o’clock) the 60km plume from Prometheus & (at 6 o’clock, foreground) the ca 150km plume from Masubi. That’s a busy little moon! One has to wonder how often it resurfaces itself.

It seems that many asteroids & about one meteor in 7 is a double — as in a pair of co-rotating bodies, rather than one. simply passing very near one of the inner planets can cause a rubbly asteroid to spin up until it flies apart. Its remnants can later recombine into multiple objects That would explain doubled asteroids, but doubled meteorites wouldn’t have time to achieve this separation, they’d hit as a kind of big spludge. The universe is almost always stranger than you expect. (-:

I’ve discovered a few inconvenient factors in upgrading a busy system — live. Yes, it can be done. But it’s not as simple as telling URPMI to upgrade everything it wants to, because then it swiftly consumes heaps of RAM (1.6GB, in this case) & then grinds to a halt as it starts to swap in search of even more RAM in order to sort out the competitive requirements of thousands of packages in one go. My way around this has been to tell it to upgrade everything, then stop it before it does the actual upgrades, select a smallish chunk (maybe 50-100MB) of packages, & tell it to upgrade just that. This works well until you select something which has some heavy requirements. My bugbear here has been the X system, which includes the basic services, drivers for a zillion video chipsets, & countless X utilities which are dependent upon the version of X itself. I have in mind a few key packages that it asks for as a part of this set of dependancies, and when I see one o...

This will make a nice change from the random Intel chipsets or throwaway graphics facilties which arrive with motherboards these days — a Radeon X1250 GPU should make quite a difference. The articles are dissapointingly unclear on exactly which CPU chipsets will be bundled with the AMD GPU.

Five THEMIS satellites went up together in what NASA calls “multitasking to new heights”. THEMIS is a project to monitor “what causes auroras in the Earth’s atmosphere to change in appearance & dissipate” — which is basically plasma at work. Hopefully, a much deeper understanding of Earth’s weather will arise, including stuff like waterspouts, dust devils (which form in clean, dry air) & the many interesting shapes with form above thunderstorms .

New Horizons ripped past Jupiter today , picking up 14,000 km/h as it did. Parking it would be a bit of a pain, but it’s doing OK on mileage (800,000,000 km on a few canisters of fuel) & speed (over 80,000 km/h). New Horizons is headed to & past Pluto, hopefully to start answering some of the many questions raised by the Kuiper Belt. It includes a trip down Jupiter’s 160,000,000 km magnetotail, which will hopefully also answer some plasma questions, too.