...or any low-lying places around Brisbane. Here on the Gold Coast things are quiet, no flooding anywhere. But with the crappy weather of the recent weeks just about anything starts growing mould and mildew. I'm pretty sick of the humidity...

Tomorrow I'm going camping for a few days. The weather forecast is pretty average but it'll be fun nevertheless. I'm going to join up with some friends at Bundjalung National Park (in the Black Rock area - camping right behind the dunes and the beach) and I'm loaded for bear, gear-wise.
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...just single-minded focus on the one thing that matters: not stuffing up that landing.

that's what Xeni at boingboing says, and I totally agree: blocking is futile, information wants to be free and all that.

The mirror list at http://anonymitaet-im-inter.net/wiki/wl-mirror seems well-updated.

My recommendation: also check out the Tor Hidden Services for wikileaks/cablegate (only a few so far, but that'll surely change - in this case Tor is great because it also protects/hides the mirror operator).

The ones I know of right now:

• http://6nst4qcscq6y4zrg.onion/
• http://sx3jvhfgzhw44p3x.onion/
• http://gaddbiwdftapglkq.onion/ (a bit intermittent)
• http://suw74isz7qqzpmgu.onion/ (a bit intermittent)

A few months ago Rob gave me his gumstick camera when he upgraded, and since then I've been thinking about recording some flights. These cameras are dirt-cheap (a few dollars on ebäh) and not bad spec-wise, this one records 640x480@30fps onto a microsd card. Lots of variants and they all look like this.

Last weekend I finally tried it out, velcro/rubber-banded to my helmet's chin guard, and the results are quite ok. Primarily I did it for Conny, but others might want to see how paragliding looks like from my perspective (but of course there's lots more interesting pilot videos out there!).
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yesterday evening i did my usual 26km cycling round just before sundown and at pizzey park i came across two kids with two dogs, one leashed and one not (the dogs, of course). and just as expected the unleashed oversized rat (something terrier-like) had to decide that i'm an Evil Menace Who Must Be Hunted Down.

so the damn thing raced me down the track, barking and growling continuously and jumped around my bike, always very close to being run over. stupid bugger - if i had hit it, it surely would have sustained more damage than me.

eventually one of the two kids cycled after us and hauled the megalomaniac critter away.

This Sunday Conny is going to run her first marathon, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed for her. Go Girl, GO!

Am I proud of her? No - because pride doesn't apply here, at least the way I see the concept of 'pride'.

• First, I haven't got anything to be proud of here: it's all her achievement and not mine. I've done my half 16 years ago to cause her existence in the first place, but she is her own person and does her things (or not).
• Second, running isn't something I could have shown her as a lovable exercise - I don't like it at all myself, and I'm a very inept runner and much prefer a bicycle (which I consequentially do a lot more of and more readily and happily - the last two months I've been doing a 25km round almost every day).
• Third, she's doing something that I can't do. So I'm a tad envious of her ;-)

But I'm really very happy for her, and I find it great that she likes running and does well at it.

So, Conny: Good Luck! I hope you have a good time and enjoy your marathon - which I'm sure you will, especially once it's over :-)

Today I saw the following photo (funny: on a russian blog)

and found it really captivating, more so than the classic photo of Sharbat Gula (the 'Afghan Girl' on the NGS magazine cover).

And digging a little deeper, there's quite a lot of story here: the photographer, Lewis Hine did some remarkable work on child labour in the USA before WW1 - only to be shunned later on, and to die in poverty.

Eventually I found larger versions of this photo at the Library of Congress together with the original caption:

One of the spinners in Whitnel Cotton Mfg. Co. N.C. She was 51 inches high. Had been in mill 1 year. Some at night. Runs 4 sides, 48 cents a day. When asked how old, she hesitated, then said "I don't remember." Then confidentially, "I'm not old enough to work, but I do just the same." Out of 50 employees, ten children about her size. (Dec 1908)

Most of these photos and their subjects would be forgotten today if it weren't for Joe Manning who dug up lots of history on many of these kids' later life - amongst others, the story of Cora Lee Griffin.

This is very cool: the World Sunlight Map combines current cloud cover, night and daylight sat images into one beautiful composite.

I use the rectangular projection version as my desktop background and as a handy tool for roughly checking the time in europe (parents, siblings) or north america (kid).

Today I learned that the survival kit carried in the Mercury space capsule contained, amongst useful things, also "1 Bar Soap".

I don't know about you, but I would have traded that soap for more of "1 Container of Matches" or desalination gear for more than "8 pints".

Maybe McD-D were expecting their craft to crash-land somewhere tropical, so they packed that soap to ensure the astronauts wouldn't repel the admiring female lovelies.

I love well-written manuals, and the Mercury familiarisation manual is a pretty nice example with great diagrams and drawings. Pity that there's nothing comparable for Vostok and Soyuz (and even if it weren't classified it would be in Russian, which I don't understand more than a few words of...)

As I wrote earlier and long ago, the beauty of good 70s audio gear is that just about everything is done using discrete components only - which makes these beasts eminently repairable (if you have the service manual as I obviously do).

My Sanyo had developed a very bad left channel (not just crackling but bangs that threatened my speakers) and I figured it was a problem with the main amplifier, likely close to the power transistors.

The relevant NEC 2SB541/2SD388 transistors have of course become unobtainium long ago, but reading up on these in various transistor substitution documents I found that Motorola MJ21195/21196 are workable replacements (with somewhat better ratings). It cost me just $11 for two transistor pairs, $4 for new insulating/heat-conducting rubber pads and about half an hour including the offset/bias adjustment to revive the DCX. As far as I can tell the problem was the rotting, super-thin insulating material between the transistors and the heatsink, but I replaced the transistors nevertheless.

Good as gold again, and it may yet outlast me.

A few more photos of Conny's recent vacation over here, plus some vid clips of two happy kids :-)

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One of the banks I deal with uses one-time transaction numbers which they send in bulk by paper mail every now and then. (Pity that the local banks aren't as enlightened...)

The notion of "TransAction Numbers" I like, carrying the paper slip I don't - because paper encrypts so very badly and I'm lugging my Palm with me all the time anyway.

gocr takes care of the OCR, and generally works fine but BSTS...if comparing two sheets of meaningless numbers wasn't so ridiculously, mind-numbingly, dull. Can't have that.

So I had to look for a cheap, quick and dirty solution for that not-quite-problem, and after ten minutes I had it: espeak.

It's a fairly simple speech synthesizer, which unfortunately insists on pronouncing numbers as numbers, not individual digits, but a trivial half-line of perl data massaging took care of that.

Sure, espeak sounds like a post-lobotomy HAL 9000 with a hangover, but hey, it makes sanity-checking of the OCR results a lot faster and easier.

(Enlightened) Laziness is a virtue :-)

This human universe is a mess, what with the authoritarian assholes always lusting after (& usually getting) control, and I for one am quite sick of it.

Therefore Tor appeals to me, a lot: no logs. decent crypto. grass-roots. hard to subvert completely. Good.

So in an attack of unwarranted altruism I'm doing my tiny bit to improve this bloody place. (mind you, with limited bandwidth and not as an exit router just yet, cause I want to monitor that experiment a bit longer before I extend the service)

Just like owl - who knows how to spell its name: "wol" - wol.snafu.priv.at doesn't know much. More specifically it knows nothing about whom it is relaying Tor traffic for. Since today, wol also serves as an exit relay for a small number of well-known services.

I don't get it why people pick an Arduino for their electronics projects: they're expensive, fat gadgets in all senses of the word fat: bootloader, IDE, board size, dev environment complexity...

A $5 PIC can do the same things and exposes you properly to what you're doing - preferrably in assembler, not C. Sure, large projects are better coded in C - later on, after you've mastered the low level; until then there's nothing better than assembler for learning how a computer works.

Here are some shots of the progress of the Wheely King towards a decent-strength bumper:

This 2008 version in metal didn't last a day (or more precisely the epoxy resin didn't hold it together long).

Shapelock is a pretty cool stuff: malleable from 60°C upwards and pretty strong when cooled down. This metal-plus-plastic bumper survived a good two years and quite a few rammings caused by a certain Kid Who Loves Full Throttle ;-) - but eventually the metal supports succumbed to said kid (the shapelock parts were still fine).

And this is the latest version: a bumper make from shapelock only, no more batteries high up but shortened packs low and on the side of the frame, a fully locked rear diff, a grease-and-blutack-LSD in front, and decent tires on beadlocks. Looks dud but it works pretty well now :-)

Concrete apparently doesn't cut it anymore, We Must Have More Sandstone.
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Today's xkcd is pretty good - depressingly good, in fact.

...of three weeks ago when I last had an opportunity to do so (sigh). Bringing my Personal Photographer (Conny) with me got me a few pics of myself having fun. The site was Beechmont.

Being the over-imaginative chickenshit that I am, I usually let some other guinea pig take off first. Seems to work, I haven't had any accidents in nine years of (way too little) flying.

Alas, the Personal Photographer immediately forgot my glider colours once I was in the air, concentrated on her book and hence took only pics of Todd and Kevin, but none of me - except one, with Kevin up high and me working my way back up (just after launch).

She also missed my landing, but that wasn't a great loss: southerly winds means northerly approach over the power lines and my slightly rough fly-against-the-wall landing didn't really have to be recorded.

This is a blatant commercial plug but I don't feel bad about it.

After ages with Voodoofone I've moved over to different gang named ThinkMobile (while keeping my number: porting works fine in this country). They resell both Tel$tra and Voodoofone, but with very decent customer support and both better features and price (for low-volume users like me) IMHO.

ThinkMobile is fishing for new customers and is happy to give both newbie and referrer $24 credit each. So, if you want to do me some good why not join up, quote MATES and my name and we both benefit a little?

Last weekend Conny and I spent with Pete and Wendy, Jasper and Ula camping in Bundjalung National Park, 2 hours south of here. We camped in the Black Rocks area (open camping areas, state-owned and non-commercial, hassle-free and not too pricey). At this time of the year it's also pretty much empty of people.
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Jake Kaufman is evil. And a Bastard. A Tricky Bastard...

"IRC is a network full of chat rooms (or "channels") where a lot of scary internet people (or "perverts") hang out.
...
so i replaced eliza's tiny, boring script with a massive dumb blonde script that has like 3,800 responses on all sorts of topics, but mostly sex. jenny18 is very horny and she loves talking to horny guys. and everyone knows the best place to talk to horny guys is on dalnet irc sex channels."

And he took jenny18 there. jenny18 passed the sex Turing test with flying colors, but a lot of the dalnet denizens didn't pass anything...except pass for fools, that is.

"this goes to show that lots of challenge in AI is in speaking naturally, and on the internet most people speak like idiots, so you can sort of cheat around a lot of things."

Jake's article on speaking like an idiot is a lot of fun to read, too.

All the good links broke. I've replaced them with the latest archive.org versions - but for the logs you need to manually add the filename to the url: the archive.org pages come with a broken <base>...

Today we have: one member of the Victorian parliament, this Kavanagh troll, publicly requesting that Cat Stevens^W^WMr. Islam should not be given a visa for visiting Oz - because "He has not said I do not support killing anybody for the expression of their beliefs".

Never mind that the Oz powers are happily ass-licking war mongers like G.W. Shrub who supports killing anybody for any silly reason, but the musician, oh he must be Exceedingly Evil. (Right. I don't like his sugary music much either.)

So, how about all the people who have not stated that they don't support dousing stupid politicians in petrol and lighting them? And what about those who haven't said they don't support our new weevil overlords? And what about those who haven't said they don't support skippy's misdeeds? And what about those who'd dream of a plague that takes out every single politician attempting to represent more than 50 people? (FSVO 50)

...

...picture az wandering off to code a tiny bit of perl for listing the infinite number of things which one has to say one doesn't support before being let into Kavanagh's Kave...

Pretty cool expression. Where from? A book titled "Stiff".

Picture me wookiepedia-surfing: from Mythbusters to Dirty Jobs to Body Farms in about 20 minutes. The article on Body Farms links to a two-page excerpt from "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers" by Mary Roach. A very interesting read indeed.

Parting gem, for the squeamish:

"If you lower your head to within a foot or two of an infested corpse (and this I truly don't recommend) you can hear them feeding. Arpad pinpoints the sound: 'Rice Krispies.'"

Another very nice example of why simple things are cool.

Last week I bought an ancient Stihl FS36 whipper-snipper to replace the bloody dead one. Four weeks after the cut my finger joint still hurts and won't straighten fully. The Stihl was in so-so shape, wouldn't start easily, but at $56...

So, me being me, the first thing (literally) that I did was take it apart. Completely, down to removing the piston ring from the piston.

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For the non-natives: the proper word is "mechaniker", and this spoonerized version Stems from "machen" = to make or create and "hinig" = broken. Unfortunately the mangled version is appropriate much more often than not.
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...when I will have paid off my house loan. This week I've reached a milestone towards that goal: the outstanding amount is finally in the five-digit AU$ range.
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says I, after reading their recent announcement that they now archive all the billions of twitter µ-blobs of drivel. Apparently the yanks' excuses for 'culture' and 'significance' now also include the observation of gnat farts and what John and Jane Doe had for lunch.