Hybrid Airship

This is very cool looking. I love its "feet".

And this is a great article on the problems of designing high altitude airships

People were designing it for mean ambient wind speeds. It turned out, you have to design them not for the mean, but to account the extremes of wind speed over a long period of time. If you want to be [there] up for a year, you need design for extremes you see in a year. The extremes at altitude can be three to four times greater than the mean. The required power at stationkeep scales with the cube of the velocity. Double your wind speed and you increase your power requirements by a factor of eight.

7200RPM

Spent the weekend dismantling my slightly dented macbook pro to try and reduce the dent in the case and to repalce the stock 120gb 5400rpm drive with a 200GB 7200 rpm one. Depsite the whole experience being unnecessarily complex, Torq T6 anyone, the upgrade went fairly smoothly and the migration assistant did a perfect restore from my Time Machine backup.

The performance of the 7200 rpm drive feels significantly faster particularly during boot, when all those little application that seemed a good idea at the time are starting up. Looking forward to finally having my Itunes library back on my laptop.

Jet Lagged Sunrise

sunrise
Originally uploaded by jkprime.

One of the few advantages of jet-lag is that II get the opportunity to watch the sun rise. My room was coloured a fantastic orange this morning by the rising sun, almost an invitation to get up and go.

Nellie Bly: Around the world in 72 days in 1889

Great short piece on wired about Nellie Bly who in 1889 circumnavigated the globe in 72 days. This she achieved on her own in a time when at a time when women rarely went unaccompanied to a Manhattan restaurant, let alone around the world.

Nellie was also one of the first investigative journalists. She got her first job at the Pittsburgh dispatch after writing an angry rebuttal to a sexist editorial by one of the papers columnists.

Bly left a big footprint wherever she trod. Besides journalism and adventuring, Bly became an industrialist (thanks to marrying a man 40 years her senior and inheriting his company upon the inevitable). She radically improved working conditions for her employees and found time to invent and patent the steel drum, forerunner to the 55-gallon drum still in widespread use.

Link

11 Most bike friendly cities

Virgin has ranked the top 11 most bike friendly cities in the world. It's not surprising to see that London is not on the list. I guess I would have to agree that Portland is bike friendly unless you happen to roll through a stop sign and get 1 $250 dollar fine.

1. Amsterdam

2. Portland, Oregon

3. Copenhagen

4. Boulder, Colorado

5. Davis, California

6. Sandnes, Norway

7. Tronheim, Norway

8. San Francisco, California

9. Berlin

10. Barcelona

11. Basel, Switzerland

Link via Wired

The subjectivity of wine

Great experiments demonstrating just how subjective tasting can be. I would like to know a little more about the study but it does sound damning.

In 2001, Frederic Brochet, of the University of Bordeaux, conducted two separate and very mischievous experiments. In the first test, Brochet invited 57 wine experts and asked them to give their impressions of what looked like two glasses of red and white wine. The wines were actually the same white wine, one of which had been tinted red with food coloring. But that didn't stop the experts from describing the "red" wine in language typically used to describe red wines. One expert praised its "jamminess," while another enjoyed its "crushed red fruit." Not a single one noticed it was actually a white wine.

Link

In Portland

After a very long journey with a short sop in chicago overnight I am in Portland, well fed and caffeinated. It's raining which is I guess about right for the Northwest in November.

Stuck in Heathrow

Trip to the states hasn't started well. Informed when I checked in that the flight was delayed 50 min and that we would miss the connection to Portland. Unfortunately there are no more flights out of chicago tonight so it looks if we ever get out of Heathrow that I will be spending the night in Chicago and getting in to Portland sometime tomorrow afternoon.

Things have only gone downhill from there we are now all at the gate and the flight is over an hour later than the delayed departure time with no new estimate available. As usual maintenance are on board and we will be boarding in 10min, this was over 40 min ago.

Fortunately T-Mobile 3G network and bluetooth is keeping me sane in the wi-fi desert that is the gate.

Update: They are serving peanuts now, it's just like being in the plane without the actual traveling.

Secret Traveller tip: straight from boing boing check the cargo sites for the details of your delayed flight it had more information the delay than the ground staff were giving to the passengers. Apparently packages get more info than people.

Safety Cutlery at the Airport

This was the knife provided at the restaurant in Heathrow. Don't forget safety first.

Genius - Missing in the Mirror

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lv0-ftyMKE[/youtube]

Fake Steve on the Google Phone

Fake Steve puts it brilliantly.

Reason #2 -- the only companies that join consortia are the ones who are too stupid or shitty to make a great product on their own. It's like, Hey, we've got forty spazzo companies that can't fuck their way out of a paper bag; let's put them all together and maybe they'll magically become some kind of big bad powerhouse. More likely it'll just be some scary ass Frankenstein monster, walking around drooling and tripping over its own tongue.

I have to agree, right now this is a totally underwhelming press release with a bunch of companies that have little in common adding masses of beaurocracy to the process of developing a product. The last thing a product development team is 40 other companies trying to "help". Link

Thanks Lynda

Lynda Sketch
Originally uploaded by jkprime.

My calves look great!

UKonline Down again

UKonline, the ISP we use for the studio is proving to be fairly unrelaibe. Our internet is down again. Fortunately bluetooth dial up with my N95 and T-mobiles 3g network have got me back up and running and the speeds not bad at all. 1Mb down and about 100 kbps up.

The art of the con

Great series of videos showing how various con games, including 3 card monty and others work.

Link

Superb Infographic of Jean Charles De Menezes

The BBC has a fantastic infographic that charts the events leading up to the tragic mistaken shooting of Jean Charles De Menzes. It gives you a real sense of the confusion, timing and sheer number of people involved.

Link

Best FAQ Ever

Link

Heathrow: Worlds most hated airport

My local airport turns out to be the worlds least favourite and I am not surprised.

The world’s busiest international airport is also the world’s least favourite. Delays on the tarmac and in the terminals have led a survey of 2,500 travellers to vote Heathrow as their least favourite airport.
The airport, currently operating beyond its intended capacity, has been slowed down by increased security checks and had kept passengers waiting for their baggage, and passengers have also complained that their luggage frequently goes missing.

Link - Londonist

Ouch

Managed to crash my bike again today and this was the result for my poor laptop. Despite being in padded sleeve inside my bag it still got quite a bash. My body feels the same way. All working fine just a little uglier.

Skype phone from 3

3 has launched a 3G cellular phone fully embracing Skype. All your calls and instant messages via skype to other skype users are included in the plan so long as you add at least £10 a month top your pay as you go account. The phone itself will retail for £49. This seems to be ahuge bargain particularly if you make lots of skype calls or even call to overseas numbers using skype out. What I think will be interesting about the device is how the introduction of presence information will affect how people use and ultimately see cell phones. With skypes rich presence aware contact list this will make ordinary contact lists look very old fashioned. The big question is what will the battery life be like whilst maintaining a connection to the skype network. I am also curious as to whether the device will act as a node in the skype peer to peer architecture. As more and more of these cell phone type skype join the skype cloud will it degrade the quality of the network?

Link via [Engadget]

Mobile Version of the site

I have added the WordPress Mobile to the site. This allows you and mostly me to browse the site formatted for a mobile device and even allow posting and uploads from my mobile phone. I would love a copy of Ecto for symbian, or even a way to post from the S60 Active Notes application.

I would also love automatic monitoring of my youtube videos and flickr photos for certain tags and then auto posting them into the blog.