“Do not use in spaces of volume smaller than 5 cubic metres.”
This is a statement on the side of the Mortein pest control bomb spray cans. I wonder what’s significant about that figure. I know the gas is flammable — if used in smaller spaces does it spontaneously combust? Does it become potent enough to [...]
February 22, 2010 – 21:21
Today I was lucky enough to attend a forum in Hobart run by the Australian Computing Society with the leaders of the three state parties as the panelists. The theme of the forum was the National Broadband Network (NBN), which is a rollout of fibre-to-the-node for most of Tasmania and good wireless access in other [...]
I’ve written before about my thoughts on social networking websites and the data you want to give them. What I basically said is that they can do whatever the hell they like with the data provided that I’m keeping a careful watch on what data I give them. If I consciously approve it, it should [...]
I discovered earlier today that through my trial ipv6 access I am using mostly ipv6 to access Google services. This made me wonder: just how much of my home network’s communication with the outside world is through ipv6 compared with ipv4?
I don’t have any results yet, but this is how I’m measuring it using Debian [...]
December 23, 2009 – 22:20
Currently the protest against Senator Conroy’s Internet filter is happening in a vacuum. This vacuum is occupied by thousands upon thousands of outraged Internet-savvy computer users. Unfortunately these people constitute only a small percentage of the overall voting population of Australia, and not all of them are prepared to vote based only on an Internet [...]
November 19, 2009 – 15:11
After some experimenting I’ve managed to get a semi-permanent 115kb/s SLIP connection between my main Debian server and a 486 running BSD. By semi-permanent, I mean as soon as there’s a power cycle I’m going to have to run out with a laptop with DHCP server, a crossover cable and some patience to make it [...]
November 10, 2009 – 22:59
My ISP has been doing a lot of work in the IPv6 department recently and amongst all their IPv6 offerings they have just started a trial for ADSL customers to run a dual IPv4/IPv6 PPP connection. They also run a broker to provide an IPv6 tunnel over IPv4, but this native solution is much neater.
Here’s [...]
I have a hypothesis regarding the comparison of the ability of punning folk.
Amongst those who pun actively, everybody is able to produce bad puns to a similar level of ability. It becomes instinctive enough to search for puns that you can come up with poor (often self-referential) puns virtually on demand.
This means that if you [...]
September 29, 2009 – 13:11
Today I found myself needing to draw both a sine wave and a triangle wave accurately for a diagram in Inkscape. It turns out that all the required functionality is included, but you have to do a little work yourself. Here are my findings…
The tool is called Function Plotter and can be found under Effects [...]