Rubenerd

A quick tip for TrueCrypt users that I just figured out for myself: if you don't want your volumes to be unmounted when you quit the TrueCrypt GUI application, go to the Preferences screen and uncheck "TrueCrypt quits" under "Dismount all volumes when".

Previous versions of TrueCrypt never used to unmount volumes unless you explicitly told it to. I can't remember which version changed this default behaviour, but it used to really irritate me! I suppose it's another case of erring on the side of security rather than convenience, the classic polar opposites.

The contrast, colour and details on the buildings are terrible, but adjusting the RAW and exporting like this was the only way I could hope to match the colour of the sky out the window this morning. I reckon the real thing was even deeper and bluer than this!

I tell you what, I prefer the climate in Singapore, but nowhere on earth has better skies than Australia :). Except maybe Ireland earlier this year, they had epic skies when we weren't trapped in a snowbank for long enough to see it.

Would that be beef wellington? I suppose if it's in New Zealand it must be a mutton wellington right? Tee and as well as that hee!

In all seriousness though, I'd love to visit Wellington. I've been to Auckland for an afternoon (long story) but that's it. Maybe it's just because I'm hungry.

Everyone hates splash screen advertisements that take up your entire browser window, so why do site owners still employ them?

Dear ZDNet Australia,

Because you have some of the best reporters in the Aussie IT industry, I put up with your universally derided splash screen advertisements. I suppose your market research demonstrates that people who immediately leave a site because they employ full screen advertisements before showing the pages people actually want are monetarily insignificant. Fair enough, it’s your site, do with it as you wish.

One thing I will comment on though, I’d suggest you take a look at your links to figure out why some people like me haven’t been able to get further than these splash screens over the last week; when we attempt to click the otherwise cheerful "Thanks for waiting, continue on to ZDNet Australia!" link, we’re redirected back to another splash screen instead. You can understand my frustration!

I suspect it’s due to my use of the NoScript extension for Firefox, but I can’t help but think one could create a hyperlink to an originating page without needing JavaScript in the first place. I suppose NoScript users are also statistically insignificant ;).

Most super-duperly graciously yours,
Ruben

Update

Since posting this entry, a tab I had left open at one of the ZDNet Australia splash screens finally redirected me to something else. Something tells me I'd better go somewhere else to find this information ;).

The rule of thirds is way off, but I like this picture for some reason. Really like all the blue, especially those random flares at the bottom which I can't account for at all. Ghosts?

Also makes for an interesting contrast with my photo of Singapore a few days ago.

Grabbing a quick coffee at our local deli this morning I happened upon an article in the Sydney Morning Herald by David Flynn talking about the utopian idea of all day battery power. Where do I sign up? :)

Quoting Mooly Eden of Intel, in the article he discusses the counter intuitive idea of having more powerful processors to save battery life given they can finish a task quickly and go back to idling which uses less power. I hadn't thought of it that way before! He also touches on SSDs which draw less power and turning off services such as Bluetooth and WiFi which make sense.

Non backlit displays?

Two small observations though; one was his description of more energy efficient displays in column three:

That said, notebook screens with LED backlighting draw less juice than the non-backlit models, while also providing a brighter picture.

Granted I'm a computer science student not a computer engineer, but AFAIK the benefit of LED displays isn't that they're brighter than regular backlights, but that they draw less power for the same luminescence. Well okay I suppose that's just a subtle distinction :).

He also mentions "non-backlit models" which technically isn't true; while contemporary laptops lack LEDs they do have florescent tube backlights. High resolution colour LCDs would be impossible to read without any backlight at all, you can try this out by turning the brightness on a notebook display to 0%.

Last year the inverter for my MacBook Pro's backlight failed which made the screen virtually impossible to use. Good thing I was able to fix it!

Notebook batteries

Finally, in the last column where he discusses old laptops and battery life he makes a good point:

After a few years your laptop’s battery will be wearing down and running at much less than its original capacity. You can buy a new battery but you’d be better off buying a new notebook.

We could make our houses more energy efficient, but we'd be better buying a new house ;). I kid in jest, it is a good point but for some of us we don't have the luxury of buying new machines every few years just because the battery is dying!

While it is true newer computers are more energy efficient and come with more sophisticated batteries, that isn't to say people with older machines can't also benefit. As a out-of-left-field example, my ancient Toshiba Libretto 70CT notebook originally came with a nickel cadmium battery which was almost as heavy as the rest of the machine, had the dreaded memory effect and simply didn't provide many hours of use. Replacing the innards with lithium polymer cells reduced the weight of the whole notebook and gave it more battery life than when it shipped new!

Is the notion outdated anyway?

My last thought is: could the idea of a full day's battery charge be achieved not by carrying around heavier computers, but by using lighter devices like iPads (or equivalent knockoffs that will no doubt be sprouting up everywhere) for some of the time? I wrote this entire post on my iTelephone for example, and the battery is still going great. If we had reliable phone infrastructure, could it be conceivable that some of our data be in the cloud so we're not tied to just one machine [and it's battery] during the course of a day? Just food for thought.

Wouldn't it be fantastic if we could recharge our own energy as easily as we could recharge a computer? Eh, on second thought maybe not, we'd have lots of energy when we were born, but by age three we'd barely be able to leave the house for a few hours before dropping our heads into bowls of soup and making royal arses of ourselves. I already embarrass myself with terrible jokes and a poor fashion sense in public as it is.

Related posts

Curated by hand! I really should install a plugin to do this for me one day.

• 2010.03.30: Batteries own me
• 2010.01.24: OS X telling me to Service Battery? Uh oh

Links shared from del.icio.us today:

Bird Cow Fish

Really great little cafe and restaurant in Surry Hills in Sydney that my dad and I ate at this morning. Friendly people too, and a great name :). Needs a temporary NoScript allowance for the menus to load.

(categories: restaurant sydney australia nsw food coffee cafe breakfast)

mrwho_67.htm: Reality Cracking: Commercial TV

Don't let the Web 1.0-ness fool you, this is a really eye opening site. Teaches you to think critically and differently about advertising.

(categories: advertising mindcontrol thoughts eyeopening thinking)

Some civil liberty groups are championing the news that Senator Conroy's plan to filter Australian internet has been put "on hold", but personally I'm still just as jaded and pessimistic as I was before. Conroy and his cronies haven't said they're scrapping it which is the only sensible thing to do, they've simply pushed it to a time after the federal elections to spare themselves some embarrassment.

While we're also talking about this, David Ramli of ARNNET is reporting that it seems Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce has also put his support behind the mandatory filter which leads us to one very important question: can we all stop calling Barnaby Joyce a maverick, rouge, super elite senator please? Yes he's taken issue with a few things the coalition have proposed in the past, but reading these descriptions at the start of every single story about him starting to get a little long in the tooth.

Goodbye Singapore, you were a pretty, nice, safe, clean bubble to grow up in with great food, friends and experiences; but after 13 years we have to move on. I arrived at you as a nervous little primary school kid who loved pizza and left as a nervous computer professional who loves late night prata and sushi washed down with a teh tarik and green tea, though perhaps not at the same time.

You spoiled me with your public transport, safe streets, ultra fast internet and your friendly, talkative taxi drivers who always guessed I was from the UK. I'll miss The Morning Express; hearing meteorologists predicting 24-33 degree weather with afternoon showers every single day; nights with Brian Richmond; debating with shop keepers at Sim Lim Square over the merits of AMD versus Intel; the best airport and national airline in the world; the three different currency design changes that kept us all on our toes; exclaiming aiyo and wah lah; the street directories that proudly proclaim they come with a free map; the smiles from cute baristas who I never worked up the guts to ask out; the customs officials that repeatedly treated me with more respect than the ones from my native country; the year long warm weather that made it so much easier to wake up in the morning; the proximity to amazingly diverse places like Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia and Viet Nam that made my school excursions and camps that much more amazing; Dr Tan and the tireless nurses and staff at the medical oncology ward at Gleneagles Hospital; and finally the experience of growing up somewhere different.

Huh?

My family moved to Singapore in the mid 1990s, now finally we're being transferred back to Sydney where I was allegedly born, though I have poor memory of such an event ;). My sister and I studied part time in Adelaide but went back to SG for holidays, now we're studying at UTS in Sydney, across the street from a family friend of all people!

I've wondered for ages what sort of person I would have turned out to be had we stayed in Australia. I probably would have been satisfied with Aus and had no qualms with settling down somewhere, probably Sydney where it all started. Now the thought of sitting still and living in the same place for more than a few years terrifies me for more reasons that I could be bothered to talk about, or that you could care to read!

A "base" back in Singapore would be nice for our general stuff we don't want to be lugging around in moves all the time (like photo albums, my late mum's posessions and so on). I've always wanted to live in Hong Kong for a while, seems like the next logical progression from Singapore ;).

Absolutely the best description outside WholeWheatRadio.org I've read of the RIAA, in a comment on a CNET story of all places:

The RIAA as a group of members is a criminal enterprise. It has been found guilty of price-fixing, collusion, market manipulation and likely other RICO (and perhaps criminal) violations. Only their political donations to [Washington] keep them from looking like the mafia as far as the law goes.

The RIAA’s claims of "theft" falls on deaf ears. They have legally unclean hands in their claim to ownership of artist’s music. Many artist’s find they are in dept to the industry through it’s “creative book-keeping” in what amounts to modern indentured servitude. These situations are engineered to keep the artist’s poor and the RIAA in charge of distribution and profit.

Shut-em-down… Don’t feel guilty, stealing from a thief isn’t stealing in a moral sense and perhaps not in the legal sense either. Unclean hands…

I'd also add that their claim of "theft" falls on deaf ears because theft != copyright infringement, as I talked about a year ago.

Optimistic pessimism?

I can't sing (although I've been told I do a mean Louis Armstrong impression), but if I did I sure as heck wouldn't want to be "represented" by such a scummy organisation. Hopefully with The Internets more people will be able to do without signing their souls over to an RIAA member label that'll use the funds to extort customers out of more money in frivolous lawsuits than BP is being asked for in response to the latest environmental catastrophe.

How can one feel cautiously hopeful, yet so pessimistic at the same time?