AlexH

A new Nokia phone, the N90 has been released. It can play and record MPEG4 videos :D. I think Flickr is going to need a video clip section soon.

Over the weekend I got my 2 WRT54G routers flashed with the Freifunk Firmware, which is an enhanced version of OpenWRT. It is very cool. Basically it turns your WRT54G or GS into a fully customizable Linux box, with a mesh networking protocol called OLSR.

My nodes are registered on the BC Wireless project as KerrisMesh and anyone can connect to them if they are running OLSR 0.4.8 with the ‘LinkQualityLevel’ set to 2 (sometimes called ETX).

I’d really like to see big chunks of Vancouver covered by mesh networks. It’s slowly starting to happen.

While I was sick, I had an interesting entanglement of nuclear and quantum mechanics related topics.

First was Fat Man and Little Boy, a movie starring Paul Newman, about the Manhattan Project, the creation of the United States atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This was a really interesting movie, although not a Hollywood blockbuster. Science geeks would definitely enjoy it, as it dramatizes Robert Oppenheimer and the other scientists’ roles in building the bomb. John Cusack plays Michael Merriman, who is a ficticious character. SPOILER WARNING: He dies as a result of an experiment where two plutonium cores accidentally touch, going critical, and he knocks them apart using his bare hands. I knew that an accident like this had occurred, and I had always assumed that it was before the bombs were dropped in Japan, but apparently it happened in 1946, and was declassified in 1985. Although the movie’s writers changed the timeline, it is still a sad story.

The next piece of the puzzle is Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, made in 1964, directed by Stanley Kubrick. This is a spoof movie, but when it came out in the 60’s, it must have caused quite a stir. It makes the US President, the Russian premier, and the entire US military look like fools. And Peter Sellers does an amazing job in his many roles. I need to watch more Pink Panther.
The final entangled thread is Entanglement: The Greatest Mystery in Physics which is a summary of quantum mechanics for the layman. It was very interesting, and I was surprised to read about the same people that were involved in the Manhattan Project on the same day that I watched them in a movie. The part that I found most interesting was that even though Einstein contributed so much to the field of relativity and quantum mechanics, he was completely wrong about entanglement!

Not many posts on my blog lately, first I got sick with the flu (which I’m sure I picked up from someone at the gym), then a week later I caught a cold. Missed 4 days of work over a 2 week period. Ouch. Good thing I had a lot of sick days saved up.

I’ve found an interesting occurence with my MythTV box. When I first put it together, shows were coming in fast and furious and I struggled to keep up with all of them. I felt bad when they expired without me watching them. Especially the movies/special. I was particularly mad when the A&E special on Eisenhower/D-Day got deleted.

Since I was sick, I got caught up on a lot of the shows. I watched Fat Man and Little Boy, Dr. Strangelove, a ton of CSI episodes, and some Law and Order.

And of course I was able to keep up with Conan, Leno, and the Daily Show.

So now I’ve reached an equilibrium with my shows, and the drive space is steady at about 100GB free/133gb total. It seems like the shows being recorded are coming in at a slower rate as well, to I’ll feel less pressure to keep up with the shows.

I would still like to expand the disk space in this machine, probably with a quad bay firewire enclosure, and starting with a single 200GB drive inside. Ideally I’d be able to store every single CSI, Simpsons, Futurama, and Family Guy episode, just in case.