Ray Hilton’s Blog

Not to be outdone by China, Australia wants its own national filtering system for ALL users of the internet.  The problem, as I see it, is that ‘illegal’ content is, and always will be, hidden from plain view.  Such as system will have one hell of a time trying to inspect every packet going in and out of Australia and attempting to determine whether it is ‘legal’ or not.  It will make all Australia suffer in terms of speed and access to legitimate content for the sake of preventing the casual observer from looking at material deemed ’sensitive’.  Of course, anyone that really wants to look at it (child or otherwise) will be perfectly capable or doing so with relative ease (via anonymisers, open proxies, etc).  Attempting to secure the internet in such a way seems to require such gross misunderstanding of its, and our, nature that I have lost all hope in this Government’s tech credentials.

From what I understand, the blacklisted sites will not be published, so most Australians will not even know what sites they are not allowed to view and why not.  Who decides who gets to see what?  and who prevents those people from abusing this power (using anti-terror laws for political end, just like in the UK).  So much for freedom of speech.

http://nocleanfeed.com/

I want an airship, basically a floating kombi van that can float indefinitely in the air using solar/wind power. There are a couple of companies out there trying to bring back the blimps, but using helium rather than the fatally combustible hydrogen used in the Hindenburg. Some of these craft are not actually lighter than air, but use assistive helicopters to lift the craft off the ground. This means that landing does not require tethering to the ground, and thus a largish ground support staff, allowing landing on land or water pretty much anywhere, cheaply and quickly.

• http://www.worldskycat.com/markets/skyyacht.html
• http://www.aerosml.com/galleryML866.htm

This is a potentially amazing technology, capable of not only supplying fuel, but consuming CO2 in the process. The fuel produced is, of course, a carbon-based fuel, so burning it will generate CO2 again, but the system consumes more CO2 than fuel produced due to a side product of carbon monoxide, which can be used to build other hydrocarbons.

One has to wonder that if this technology catches on, whether we will, in not too distant future, be consuming too much CO2, and an absence of it in the atmosphere causes the earth to go into another ice age.

Those scientists have worked out a mathematical model of bacteria in the fuel-cell, which will allow significant optimisations of the technology:

“Modeling the potential in the biofilm anode, we now have a handle on how the MFC is working and why. We can predict how much voltage we get and how to maximize the power output by tweaking the various factors,” said Marcus. For example, the team has shown that the biofilm produces more current when the biofilm thickness is at a happy medium, not too thick or thin.

“If the biofilm is too thick,” said Marcus, “the electrons have to travel too far to get to the anode. On the other hand, if the biofilm is too thin, it has too few bacteria to extract the electrons rapidly from the fuel.”

One step closer to marrying the backyard compost heap and off-grid power generation?

nsf.gov - News - Microbes Churn Out Hydrogen at Record Rate - US National Science Foundation (NSF)

All I can say is thank god some sense has finally entered the market. Its pretty obvious that all the manufacturers who are part of the Open Handset Alliance are frustrated with the quality of the operating systems available. Even Nokia, who partly own Symbian, are rumoured to be jumping ship. I hope they do; I have always used Nokia phones, but opted this time for a HTC device since I could no longer stand Symbian (its soooo sloooowwwww). While WM6 is a profoundly stupid operating system, with a UI designed by software engineers, not designers, it scores over Symbian devices by being faster and much better supported. When I click call, I want it to call, not hang around for a few seconds working out what it should do.

The other choice is, of course, the iPhone. However, the iPhone is just fluff at the moment; being locked into specific networks and developers being locked out means it is just a toy, not a proper platform. Of course it has been hacked, and there is supposedly a 3rd party SDK being released in January, but who knows what degree of access this will provide. Until then it cannot be considered a serious contender as a smart phone.

So, Android manages to fix a lot of these issues by providing an open, easy to use and java based platform. Downside of course being there is no device that can actually run it yet However, at this rate, the iPhone will come out in Australia about the same time that Android phones start appearing. Given my very high opinion of HTC (very well built, compact and free OS upgrades, yay!), I would much rather carry a device with which I can do what I want on whatever network I want, rather than a locked down, but good looking, piece of pocket fluff.

I’m very impressed by the API of Android, it appears to be designed by sympathetic programmers who just want to make your life that bit easier so you can get on with building Cool Shit. The whole thing revolves around a few basic concepts; Activities, Services and Intents. Activities are interactions with the user via the UI and Services are background processes such as playing music. Intents are things like “call number”; they can be provided by or requested by any application. I think a lot of developers, especially existing Java ones, will be quite excited about finally having a proper mobile platform to build for.
http://code.google.com/android/

My friend Paul got his iPhone in the UK, jailbreaked, activated and unlocked in less than 24hrs thanks to this tutorial.

Now, if they would just see their way to releasing a HSDPA version so I can use it with 3 (Which is by far and away the cheapest and fastest way of accessing mobile data in Australia).

Modec produce electric vans with a 100 mile radius and 2 tonne cargo limit. Tesco are going to be using them to deliver groceries to internet ordering customers. Nice to see that Tesco isn’t all evil.

Good Copy Bad Copy is a documentary about modern copyright and its effect on the progression of culture… or should that be progression of culture’s effect on the future of copyright. Shared by the Pirate Bay, naturally.
Good Copy Bad Copy - XviD - The Pirate Bay

Authorities destroyed a suspected bomb outside a medial centre, strapped to a tree.  Turns out that it was placed there by an employee and was actually a weather monitoring device.
Suspicious box turns out to be weather station - Roanoke.com