http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097523/

I have seen Honey I shrunk the kids a number of times. Unfortunately it was completely ruined by the sequels but as a standalone movie it was actually great value. There was plenty of safe fun, lots of non lame commedic situations and jokes and a cool look at the world from a different perspective. The set design was just nuts, at one stage they walk past a huge dead fly. I particularly like the character of the dad, Wayne, who makes a great nutty scientist.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091059/

I was given this movie on vhs when I was like 7 or 8 and I found it confusing but quite incredible. The concepts behind space travel and relativity of time were simply amazing in a way that I don’t think I could experience any more. It was obviously ahead of its time and cutting edge in terms of special effects and plot. Be flexible to 80’s ness as you would with back to the future and you will enjoy it much more. Also, see if you can spot the younger and non zombie horse Sarah Jessica Parker.

….it something unpredictable but in the end is right. I hope you had the time of your life…….

Something interesting I found while doing research for my corrosion assignment-

The “Pistol Shrimp” or Alpheidae has a special claw, just one special claw, that can cause a small pocket of cavitation.

This cavitation causes a shockwave of about 80kPa at up to about 4cm from the claw. That’s enough to blast a hole through shells!

This little blast is so powerful in fact that it produces a brief sonoluminescence which is where the water actually lights up and produces light from the sound passing through it. Awesome!

While writing I found this cool youtube video that dramatises things a bit but provides an idea nonetheless.

enjoy.

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/09/22/star-simpson-one-yea.html

Epoxied, getting ready for open day.

A friendly kookaburra in the botanic gardens.

Duckies!

Outside the engineering building.

Not going soft btw with all of these rainbows and ducks. I would have posted an Audi s5 but it was driving too fast.

Definately the brightest chunk of rainbow I have ever seen. You could actually see the definition between blue and violet clearly.

Also it looks like it’s falling near my place. Prizes for guessing the location the picture was taken st or finding it on street view.

Blades for the hawt on the CNC machine

The car got pretty dirty on the way to paintball.

I got home the other day to a pair of quite concerned parents. I had a letter, addressed to me, with the insignia and address of the ’sherrifs department’ printed in the upper corner.

They hadnt opened my mail, something which happens occasionally (probably not as much as my friend who shares the same initials as his dad), usually by accident, but they were pretty keen to find out what it was about. I was pretty scared myself. My mind thrashed crazily through the array of my less than legal doings. I’m not a crook but at a time like this, all the possibilities do tend to present themselves all at once.

I have been at court before, longer term friends of mine will remember an incident 2 years ago when a dude didn’t pay his bill. I was on the other side of the bench but its not an experience that I want to re-live.

I tore the envelope in the standard style. I dont use envelope openers, my fingers work just fine. The first of 2 pamplets enclosed fell out to reveal the title ‘your rights regarding legal counsel’ or something like that. Very ominous. It was at this stage that I suspected that it could be something regarding my (old) business. Maybe one of my computers burned someones house down.

Ill relieve the suspense. I do have to go to court but I’m on a completely different side of the table. I have been summoned for jury duty! I didn’t even realise that we had jury duty in Australia. I thought it was just an American thing associated with their sue everyone system. My initial thought is to try and get out of it because quite frankly, it’s on a friday and I really dont want to miss a whole lot of lectures. You get paid $20 for the day, plus your employer has to continue to pay you. Unfortunately I don’t have work on Fridays so that isn’t much good.
If you have any clues to what case it might be then let me know. Ill see if I can get out of it first. I have to find a JP and I forgot to bring the form to work today so I don’t know if I will be bothered. Either way Ill keep you informed.

I know there a lot of people who don’t know about newsgroups or have become completely frustrated in using them. The thing is… they’re great and probably provided by your ISP for free. Finally something that uses all the potential of ADSL2+.
If you are still confused with what im talking about, its like torrents but faster and better.

What’s so great about newsgroups?
- You download from a server so it is super fast- essentially maxes out your connection. I get 1.5MB/s at home easily.
- There are no ratios to worry about
- You download over SSL so people can’t tell what you’re downloading
- You done have to seed to other people
- You are not slowed down by the number of other people downloading

What can I get from newsgroups?
- everything!
- Bluray movies
- Xbox games
- other large isos
- tv shows
- music
- when someone posts something to any group it will appear on all servers and stay there for however long the retention of your server is (100 days or so for astranews).

What is needed?
- Access to a newsgroup server – Try news.astranews.com. ISPs often provide a newsgroup service but often the retention is very poor. Astranews is an example of a premium newsgroup service. Internode provides astranews and giganews for free to customers.
- A newsgroup reader/binary downloader (the equivalent of utorrent for torrents) - I use grabit but it wont work behind a proxy so you might need to try “agent” or have a search, you need one that supports nzb downloading

How does it work?
- Set up your newsgroup reader (setting up the reader/downloader is pretty straight forward, you don’t need to worry about subscribing to any groups)
- Go to somewhere like nzbmatrix.com or nzbsource.com or binsearch.info (these are like mininova or isohunt) and get an NZB file. The nzb file contains a list of articles that contain your files that will need to be downloaded. You really don’t have to worry about it, if your getting it from binsearch, make sure its complete. You also want to make sure that the files you get are not older than the retention of your server (no older than ~100 days for astranews).
- Use your binary downloader to open the nzb file and it should start downloading a list of files or articles and making them into files.
- unrar your files and enjoy

How does it really work?
- Newsgroups were traditionally used to post written articles to servers but people worked out how to serialise any data and put it on there (using yenc). Even partitioned rar files are broken up many many times so that they fit to individual articles.
- There are global groups such as “alt.binaries.games.xbox” that are synchronised between all of the servers so that no matter what server you are using you can access the same content. There are server specific groups but we won’t worry about them.
- “binaries” in the group name indicates that it is really only files that are contained in the group. There are ones that don’t have any binaries and are used just for discussion.

What are these par files?
- The par files are used for checking the data.
- Since the data is split up and then put back together, it often contains errors, especially if you use a dodgy server or the posts have been on the server for ages. PAR files essentially check the parity (der so obvious) and can repair the files and even fill in missing files. It’s a good idea to get them; normally it’s an extra 10% of the download size.
- There are a number of par file checkers around. It’s good to get one with a windows shell. Quickpar is acceptable for windows.
- It can take a while to check all of the files

When I was in year 10 (or 11, I can’t remember), the school ran an after school exracurricular class for electronics. On the whole it was pretty boring but I did learn some pretty cool things. I learned how to solder, got my TAFE certificate 2 for double sided and surface mount components. We did some basic circut stuff (later superseeded by my uni studies). Most notibly though were the 6 sessions spent doing pic programming.

Pics, for those that dont know, are little microcontrollers (like CPUs) that have a small array of inputs and outputs. They have basically replaced circuts in everything. Its more cost effective these days to program a pic to delay your car windscreen wipers than it is to make a traditional little circut. We used the 16F84 which can do a whopping 20Mhz and we programmed it in asm. The timing was noutoriously hard and interfacing communication with it was pretty impossible. I tried to make a midi instrument with a more powerful version of it but still had many problems.

I recently ordered and recieved a Arduino development platform (www.arduino.cc). Its an open source microcontroller based on the Atmega168. I got the Decimilia version, the specs are available on the arduino website but in short, its USB, a heap of digital inputs, analog inputs, PWM (pulse width modulation) outputs and digital outputs. The USB is really just a serial adapter rather than a custom USB host but on the whole- its much much easier to develop for than the pic ever was.

Much of its simplicity is the premade libraries that come with the IDE that make interfacing servos/stepper motors and doing PWM much much easier. The communications problems that I had with the pic are all gone too as you can just set a baud rate and use simple send recieve buffers. In the first 2 hours that I had it I got it sending a scale thru the USB port as a midi stream, interfaced 2 servos to it and in the 3rd hour, I got a 16×2 line LCD working.

I got mine from Littlebirdelectronics (www.littlebirdelectronics.com.au) who were pretty slow and expensive ($40 or so with shipping). The Arduino nano (http://www.arduino.cc/blog/?p=39) came out just the other day. It looks like the perfect solution for compact and simple projects.

I have a few in the pipe and as soon as stufy slows down Ill have them working. The Arduino is so damn flexible (in terms of applications) that it really is a must have for anybody with a project in mind.

Yeah so I have re-jigged the ol’ blog a bit.

I dont really intend to get back into blogging about meaningless stuff though. The new format is more of a place to put some of my projects, thoughts, ideas. I seriously have so much crap that could be useful and interesing to other people.

Stuff to look forward to:
- song of the month
- arduino microprocessor
- robot arm

So stay tuned

-ash out

It takes me 45 minutes to drive to work.

This is interesting because I could reach any other point on earth quicker.

Let me explain:

If you drilled a hole through the earth and installed a set of frictionless rails (or some kind of vaccuum tube). The time it takes to go from one side of the earth, screaming through the middle and to pop your head out on the other end… is 42 minutes.

That means that I could get to the other side of the earth quicker than driving to work. It actually gets better because if you dont go to exactly the same point on the other side of the earth (ie: you make a sort of chord) it takes exactly the same time. That also means that if I had a frictionless tube that went to the other side of the room that was precicely the same distance from the center of mass, conservation of energy could get me there in 42 minutes. It also means that I would also instantly start travelling back in the other direction for 42 minutes but thats beside the point.

The point is that despite my car being quite amazing (you have seen it haven’t you?) it is no match for a theoretical frictionless tube through the earth’s crust.

The “The Avalanches” DJ “Dexter” performs a live at the wireless set at Triple J. This is incredible. Listen to it.

He covers practically every song genre, mixing it all together.

www.awam.com.au/storage/dexter

Follow this guide if you want to download movies, download tv shows automatically or access your download interface remotely.

I figure that most of my closer associates already know all about this stuff but for the benefit of all Ill share the torrenting set up guide used by pros in “the industry”.

1) Get uTorrent, its quicker, it uses less resources, its fully featured and its free. www.utorrent.com

2) Install it and set it up.

 
Yes you want it to handle .torrent files

Most ADSL2+ fiends will be able to rock about 640k upload. You might think that ADSL2+ privileges you to 1Mbit upload but guess again. For starters, its unlikely you are syncing at the full 1Mbit unless you are close the exchange and then you can only expect about 85% efficiency of your line when it comes to torrenting data. So, take your line speed, and multiply it by 0.85 and you have your capability. I have my upload speed set to 50Kb/s because I find that any more slows my http response time a bit (slows my web browsing). You might be tempted to set this higher because it might seem it will make you faster but it wont, find a point where your connectionis near saturation but not quite. You might have to play with it a bit until you find the sweet spot.

Port forwarding- most modern routers use uPNP to forward ports for you but you will get the best results if you do it manually. Take a note of the number you put in the port box, then, go to http://portforward.com/routers.htm and find out how to forward TCP and UDP on your router or modem.

3) Now you should be ready to download something. Get a .torrent file from http://www.mininova.org or www.isohunt.com and see how it goes.

4) Auto downloading. If you watch a series religiously then this is what you want to do.

Options>RSS Downloader>Feeds(tab)>Add

tvRSS has a nice syndicated feed for us to use care of EZTV. EZTV index a lot of TV shows including US, UK and Australian ones. Chances are that most popular shows are on it.

http://tvrss.net/feed/combined/ is the url that you want to enter as a new feed.

Now you want to tell it what shows you want it to download. Ill use Entourage as an example. If you haven’t seen it then you should follow this next bit and add it for yourself.

Go to the Favourites tab and click Add

Give it a name “Entourage”

The filter we want will be “Entourage*”, this means that any file with the show name starting with Entourage will be downloaded. The “*” is a wildcard which means that anything can follow Entourage for example the whole name could be “Entourage S03E05 - Some stupid title”. Use your discresion on where you put the *’s. Shows like The Ultimate Fighter need to be entered like “*Ultimate Fighter*” because they have been known to be entered as The Ultimate Fighter and Ultimate Fighter, The, the aformentioned rule will catch both cases.

Specifying the episode number will stop it from downloading early ones if they happen to re-release them. Some shows dont use ep numbers. I find it handy to not use them because then you dont have to change it when a new season starts.

Smart ep filter is a good one that remembers if you have downloaded an episode already. Many feeds, especially the combined one that we are using will have multiple copies of the same episode in different formats and sizes. This ensures that we only get the first that comes out for this episode.

We can also limit the quality of the rip that will be downloaded. This generally works on a minimum basis so it will download any better than what you have selected. This is unreliable though as sometimes the show doesn’t get release in a particular format or the particular format misses an ep. For something like Lost though, you can be pretty safe in selecting exactly what you want because there is a huge supply and demand for it.

You can get an entire list of shows that you can get to automatically download from the EZTV Show List. You can also look on there and get all of the old episodes.

You can get RSS feeds from mininova, Finalgear, diwana and all of those download sites, just go to the category you want and look for the orange rss icon. Remember that Mininova has lots of private tracker torrents and nothing is ordered and organised like EZTV.

4.5) One last thing to make this work properly is to set a download directory-

Make a seperate temp directory and it works better.

5) For those on on peak-off peak plans. Use the Scheduler from Options>Pref’s and set up your offpeak/onpeak speeds. TPG has just put out a plan with 30GB onpeak / 90GB between 1am and 6am for $70 so this should be useful to a few people.

Its pretty self explanatory.

6) If you have another computer on the net that stays on 24/7 or have a dedicated bittorrent pc OR like to check your downloads from uni. Enable the web UI. Go back into prefs, Advanced, WebUI

Give it a password and put it on port 80. Then go firefox and type in your computer’s IP and it should give you the web interface for uTorrent. Some people mightn’t have any luck with port 80 so change it to something unique then try http://yourip:port .

You should be able to do that from any pc on your network and get the same thing.

To access that from other computers on the internet can be a little tricky but if you have the right hardware then it can be simple. You need for forward the port first of all. Then you need to get a static address for your computer/connection. Sign up for one at dynDNS.com then (if you have a good router) put it’s details in.

If you don’t have a good router then you can try and use noip.com or something but it isn’t as good. Then you should be able to access your web interface using http://yourstaticaddress:yourport .

Thats it.

Good Luck

http://www.sonnyradio.com/F15.wmv

Concept car, drawn on my Toshiba m200, in a lecture (of course).