Opinion Australia

As might have become obvious through the years I’m a bit of a ‘Gadget Man’; I love to buy and try new things whenever possible, tho to give myself a little credit I do at least try to find some reasonable excuse for my purchases, i.e. they have to meet some ‘need’, real or imagined. Unfortunately, after eagerly rushing home with my trophies I often find that they either aren’t quite what I expected them to be, or I’ve missed some crucial part of whatever process I thought I was following such that the device in question is about as useful as a lump of lead.

Over the past weeks I bought a Bluetooth mini-keyboard for a tablet which has no Bluetooth; a wireless network card which us unable to link to the router; a radio that was incapable of tuning into FM; and a few other little things which didn’t quite meet the mark.

My latest acquisition is a digital radio that I found in the local Dick Smith. Before I bought it I checked that I was living within the area for DAB broadcasts, and it seemed that there would be no problem with the signal, so off I went in search of a device to replace the device that replaced the device that wasn’t working properly. Whilst browsing I found an ‘end of line’ radio so asked the salesperson for the cost. He said it was on sale reduced to $98… but as it was floor stock I could have it for $80. Nice thought I so accepted – which was when he told me it had no power supply. I asked if they sold power supplies and he said yes, then went off to check with the manager what sort of discount I could have (bearing in mind the radio was without power). He came back saying it was free. What more could I ask? Well obviously nothing so I paid up and headed home.

Ten minutes later I’m sitting scratching my head and wondering why I’d bothered because the thing was totally incapable of picking up a single station! What’s worse, when I tuned it into FM (that option being one of the reasons I liked this model) the sound was worse than the the device I bought to replace… well you get the drift.

So, even though I was told I could take it back if the thing didn’t work in our area, some of me (ok a large part of me) wants to hang onto it because I don’t think I’d get as good a deal elsewhere for such a nice little machine. What I *will* do however is take it into Sydney and check that it *will* receive and process a signal before I finally decide.

While I wait I might sit and muse on what it is that makes me such a dead loss when it comes to buying things off the shelf?

Interesting post in Yahoo this week discussing the possibility of dragging icebergs halfway around the world to water deprived areas to be used as a source of fresh potable water.

I’m not against the idea… it’s been considered a possibility for a hundred years… but a couple of questions come to mind. Firstly, assuming the iceberg is towed to the area it’s needed, how on earth is the water to be utilised before it mingles with water in its the surroundings? Secondly, you’d have to assume that there would be dramatic environmental effects not just because of the influx of fresh water to a saline environment, but an overall cooling of the immediate surroundings – this would not necessarily be ‘a good thing’!!

One possible solution would be to construct what would amount to a huge ‘dry dock’ into which the ice monster could be towed, and left to melt. The icy water would then be piped off to reservoirs etc until made ready for use.

Seems like an interesting idea, but one whose time might not yet have come. So, right now I’d whilst say towing an iceberg several hundreds if not thousands of miles from point ‘a’ to point ‘b’ may be possible, dealing with ice giants up to 10 millions tons is going to cause major headaches for some considerable time to yet!

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/icebergs-floated-solution-worlds-water-woes-161204632.html

Ok, I ignored the vacuuming for a while, installed a couple of plugins and am reopening the registration page to allow people to join up, post comments etc.

Obviously I’ll monitor the situation and will see if the plugins control who signs up and what effect if any they have. More later if required!

By the way, the two ‘systems’ in use are Project HoneyPot, and StopForumSpam both of which have pretty good reputations in the field!

The US tobacco giants have openly declared they are running scared by the US Government’s “Food and Drug Administration” (FDA) plans to force them to place graphic ads on their cigarette packets that display images of the result of tobacco addiction. The ads are intended to be both graphic *and* hard hitting. Some show rotted teeth, another shows a corpse that shows autopsy scars.

The tobacco companies are clearly scared that showing the results of smoking might actually stop people buying them thus in one stroke reducing the number of people whose lives are ruined by tobacco addiction *and* the profits of the companies that grow fat on the misery of others.

Regardless of their rights to free expression or whatever part of the constitution they are using to try to close the FDA campaign down, you have to wonder why they would think that this would be anything other than a public relations disaster? Surely any smoker who reads the story will start asking themselves serious questions about the damage they are causing themselves if the companies are willing to go to these lengths to protect what everyone knows to be a potentially lethal substance?

Source: US tobacco firms sue over new graphic war

I’ve been trying to find some easy way of linking our ‘static’ media devices to the internet without much success. I have an Android TV Portal, a BluRay player etc and no means of easily connecting them to the outside world. That was I *didn’t* have any way of connecting them until I found the “Netgear WNCE2001 Universal WiFi Internet Adapter“.

In theory the simplest way would be to connect both to a media PC, but in practice this turned out to be impossible because the Plasma simply refused to display picture and I was forced eventually to concede defeat. However, after watching the videos on YouTube I think a couple of  Netgear Adapters will be the answer to my problem allowing me to connect the things independent of wiring, or additional switches etc.

They’ll be here in a day or two so I’ll be able to play with them soon enough to find out!