One less stupid person to breed stupid people later. 

A photo essay about a young boy and his mother dealing with his cancer treatments, emotional upheavals and death. Quite moving. 

I suppose I think about the waste of disposable cups a lot, at least compared to the average person. My office at work has the upstairs water cooler in it, and some people come by to drink water and use the clear plastic cups once, then toss the cup. Personally, I hate that. It's just completely wasteful.

I use one of a couple of insulated plastic mugs or a plastic pint glass to drink water out of, plus I have a tea mug that I use for hot drinks. I really have become British, in the sense that when it's chilly or cold a hot drink really does the trick for me!

Anyway, this scientist did an interesting study comparing the various ecological effects of using disposable or reusable cups for drinking, taking into effect not only the manufacture of the cup but the washing of the reusable cups, which I had never considered. Making the soap and supplying the heat (electric or gas), etc., take energy, just as making the cups in the first place.

Here's the results.

Well I haven't updated all week so far so I thought I'd give it a go today.

Been busy getting stuff off of Freecyclers (check out www.freecycle.org, it's great) where I've been getting free computer parts like cases, motherboards, power supplies, DVD drives, RAM, etc., basically collecting parts to make a couple of 'new' computers.

=But Frank, you've already got an uber-powerful 64-bit system with a window in the side, silver cables, blue lighting, etc., what the hell do you want two more computers for?

Well basically I'm on this Linux kick now and now that I've gotten used to using it on a daily basis (been using Ubuntu Linux for a month) I want to make what amounts to a media PC. Basically a computer that will work as file storage for recorded TV shows, pictures, music files and other stuff, that will sit in a room somewhere and record TV shows and movies and 'serve' the recorded shows to other rooms of the house.

With this software setup called MythTV (www.mythtv.org), it's possible to have one media server (central computer) act as the 'hub' of an entertainment network that allows you to:

    play back recorded TV shows (the main reason to have it),
    use as a picture viewer on the TV, and
    play back music & movie files through the entertainment system or TV

These are the most common reasons people might have a media PC, but there are also these really cool things you can do with MythTV:

    read news feeds (RSS) over the internet
    play emulated games (basically, any old Nintendo, Sega, arcade and other games)
    and there's more you can do, I just can't remember what exactly :)


=Wow, that sounds like it'll be able to do loads of things!

Well...yeah :) The only trouble is, it will take some patience to set up because even the most user-friendly of Linux installs (Ubuntu, by all accounts) can require some finagling to get working just the way you want it, and with MythTV you have to install and set up various software and hardware components and get them all working properly. You can get support online through mailing lists and forums, but you have to have a decent knowledge of what you're doing in the first place, plus the confidence to add, rearrange and customize your computer system - and I'm not just talking about adding some RAM or a hard drive either!

OK so I've gotten enough computer parts off Freecycle to set up a couple of computers, plus bit the bullet and bought a couple of bits off eBay to complete the media box - an AMD CPU to fit a motherboard I was given, plus the critical component of a Hauppage dual tuner TV card. Two tuners means I can record two shows at once, or watch one show and record another, or watch AND record a show while I record another. The beauty of the MythTV setup is that I could add more tuner cards so I could record several shows at the same time, but I don't see having 'just' two tuners being a problem yet. I have been in a situation where I couldn't watch a show I wanted to watch because my housemate's digital TV recorder was recording two other shows, but I reckon this will be rare - and besides, a second card with a single tuner is about £25 on eBay so it wouldn't be a big deal to upgrade I think.

The final part I need to complete the media box is a big hard drive, and I have two big (120GB) drives in my main computer, but of course they have stuff on them! What I'll probably do is buy a big (320GB) SATA hard drive (these are about £50 online), put that in my main computer, partition it accordingly, install Windows XP and Ubuntu on that, and use the two 120GB drives in the media PC. That will give me loads and loads of room to record stuff, store music files and everything. Eventually I'll want to get two SATA drives of the same size and use them in a RAID array so I have total backup and everything, but that will mean getting a new motherboard that has SATA capability, which will mean I'll want to upgrade the CPU and RAM as well, and that will be about £300, so it'll be a while before I can do that.


So with the third computer, I'm planning to use that as a generic 'test mule' machine, basically installing various types of Linux operating systems on it and giving them a try to see how I like them. It probably won't be used very much, as my main computer will be probably four or five times faster than this one and used daily.

Overall, this is how the computers will break down once I'm done getting everything hooked up and running:

main computer - daily use, internet, DVD copying, gaming
AMD 64FX-55
1GB RAM
250GB or 320GB SATA hard drive
ATI x1600 graphics
2 DVD 16x burners

test mule - playing about with different Linux distributions
Intel Celeron 733
256MB RAM (roughly)
10-20GB hard drive
onboard Intel graphics (3D at least)
1 DVD drive (won't be used much for burning)

media Linux box
AMD Sempron 2600+
512MB to 1GB RAM
120GB to 240GB hard drive (frikkin' WEEKS of recording time)
nVidia FX5700 graphics
1 DVD drive (won't be used much for burning though)

Complicated? Yeah...

Overly complicated? Probably, but if it gets working the way I want it to, it'll be absolutely smokin' :) It will certainly take some time and lots of effort but I'm sure it'll work out fine.

...just one word about that: WHY?!

Obviously he's making enough money for the studios to continue releasing the crap he's in, so it's basically the fault of the moviegoers that those of us who appreciate quality are subjected to crap like whateverthehellmoviehe'sin.

Here's more folks that shouldn't be allowed to make any more movies:

• LL Cool J
• Jimmy Fallon
• Queen Latifah
• Chevy Chase
• Steve Martin
• the dork dad from American Pie
• the Wayans brothers (all of them)
• a couple of years ago I would have put Jamie Foxx in there but he redeemed himself with Ray and something else (I haven't seen them anyway)

okay I'm running out of steam on this...but basically any movie that these people release these days will be crap. They know it (it's an easy payday), the studio execs know it (easy profit, somehow), we all know it (those of us who care about quality cinema), but obviously enough people are that brain-dead they still go to see them. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!

Uber-manly!

Don't get my wrong. I'm an environmentalist. I'm not rabid about it, but I consider myself more aware of the environment than most people. I think most people are like that. Most people think they're a better than average driver, when in reality they're probably just an average driver. No one wants to think of themselves as 'average'.

But I digress.

Recently I watched a program called 'The Great Global Warming Swindle'. See the whole thing YouTube, or see it below.





The show provides some really compelling evidence, even refuting the primary claims in Al Gore's 'An Inconvenient Truth'.

The only thing that I didn't like about the program was that it didn't provide any contrary opinions. I know it's not meant to be a debate, but if you're going to say something like 'Global warming and everything related to it is a scam, it's normal for the Earth and is 'caused' by the Sun and clouds!' then there really should be some equally high-level scientists refuting the claims made by the scientists in this program.

I did find a YouTube response here that has many links to sites directly refuting the points put across in the program. This one in particular is good, although like most scientific data it might be over the head of the average person.

But it's an interesting program to watch. I think it will influence people who don't bother to do post-watching research that global warming is nothing to worry about (so that's most people then), but if you're an environmentalist or consider yourself concerned about global warm...errr climate change, you should watch this. I think it's good to occasionally question and challenge your views.

Me? I'll continue to recycle and strive to get better fuel economy out of my car, enjoy the outdoors when I can and 'do my bit' - it makes good sense, no matter which scientists you believe.

The University of Berkeley wants to build something that will require moving a few trees, and some wannabe environmentalists (scruffy people who want to live in trees) and nudist activists get together to 'make something happen'.

Check it out here

I'm all for environmentalism and everything, but when crass publicity stunts and people-who-should-have-a-job-but-decide-to-live-in-trees-and-survive-on-handouts get in the way of the actual issue (which, according the link above, isn't really an issue in the first place!), it all starts becoming white noise and easily ignored.

Annoying. 

Have you ever 'quoted' 'facts' about the McDonald's coffee case from years and years ago? You know the one, it basically made all places that serve coffee put signs up saying 'Warning HOT coffee'. I've joked about it like millions of others, and simply assumed some stupid woman spilled coffee in her lap and sued McDonald's to get loads of money. After a while I found out that the coffee had actually burned her and was about 120 degrees in the cup.

Well actually, it was 140 degrees or so, and she wasn't driving and wasn't trying to get rich off the incident.

Here's the facts of the case - sometimes the US justice system does do a good job.