Holy Shmoly! » General

What is radiation?

Donncha O Caoimh — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 16:21:26 +0000

Here’s the first part of an excellent talk given by Professor John McInerney, of the UCC Physics Department on what exactly radiation is, the different types, the effects they have on the human body and what creates it. Do you know where most radiation comes from? You might be surprised.

Early in the talk, John dispelled with the idea of non-ionising radiation being responsible for detrimental health effects. ”Microwaves in general are not harmful, including the ones in cell-phones and radars. Unless you cook yourself. If you stood in front of a 10KW radio antenna it would be bad for you. It would serve you right. That’s Darwin’s principle at work”.

The video was filmed at a Cork Skeptics session in Blackrock Castle last May. The second part of the talk goes into nuclear power and you can watch it above.

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Clean ball point pen off your LCD easily

Donncha O Caoimh — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 21:26:13 +0000

Several months ago my son grabbed a ball point pen off my desk and with glee scribbled on my LCD monitor. I was of course upset and researched the best way to remove the offending marks. Various methods and potions were recommended but I didn’t do anything about it. I got used to the scribbles, although looking at a web page with a white background was always annoying.

Eventually I asked again and Alex recommended Isopropyl Alcohol. Today I remembered that advice and asked for “i s o alcohol” in a chemist. I received a funny look in reply but she figured out what it was. She brought over a box of “Alcotip Swabs”. 5c each so I bought 4, just in case.

Did it work? Did it what! The swabs dried out quickly and it took two to clean the ball point pen marks off the monitor but it worked exceptionally well! I hardly had to apply any pressure as the alcohol dissolved the pen marks with ease. Here’s a gallery showing the pen marks (not so well), and the swabs. These things work really well if you have ball point marks on your screen!

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Dubai, world's hottest property

Donncha O Caoimh — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 13:08:59 +0000

I’m an avid fan of the National Geographic and while sorting through my dead tree archive yesterday spotted this issue from 2007 when property in Dubai was described as “the world’s hottest”. It certainly is now. It’s untouchable. A reminder of an age gone by.

I also have an issue of National Georaphic from December 1954 which deserves a post of it’s own at some time in the future.

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Harry Copter

Donncha O Caoimh — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 14:41:44 +0000

And for our next product, we’re bringing out a toy that makes pottery called “Harry The Potter”.

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Edge of Disgrace

Donncha O Caoimh — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 10:59:50 +0000

You know there’s something special waiting for you when all around you people are clambering for the download link of Booze Design‘s new C64 demo, Edge of Disgrace.

The demo won first prize at X-2008 in the Netherlands last weekend. Most entries to the demo competition were uploaded quickly but Booze Design wanted to fix a few last minute bugs and caused no end of hype and hysteria. Just check out some of the comments:

Oxidy: I normally don’t comment on demos anymore, but I can’t help myself this time. Edge of Disgrace tops everything I’ve ever seen on the Commodore 64. It’s absolutely breathtaking and I wet myself numerous times during the bigscreen presentation. So much coder pron, so much fantastic graphics, so well polished. Fantastic work HCL/Dane/Jailbird! 10+

Medicus: All demos available for downloading except for the nr. 1? Is this a cruel joke?

Alias Medron: I would like to know how many people press F5 on this page every 10 seconds ..
cmooooonn!!!! upload that bloody D64!!!!!

Steppe: As Stainless Steel said, there was a clearly noticable dent in the space-time-continuum while this demo was playing. Caused nausea and wild screaming all over the place. Virtually every goddamn screen was accompanied by cheering and applauding of the crowd. Simply amazing having seen this on the big screen live at the party!

Stainless Steel: I felt a disturbance in the force when this was played at the compo.

A few days ago a teaser video was uploaded to Youtube but it doesn’t do the demo justice. It’s only 2 minutes of the 15 minute experience.

So, is it that good? Yes, it most certainly is. If you ever owned a C64, or any other 8 bit or 16 bit computer or console you should grab a C64 emulator, download Edge of Disgrace and be impressed. I’m amazed at what a 25 year old computer system can do, and even more impressed that the C64 demo scene is still alive and kicking in 2008!

Now to download Natural Wonders 2 and the other entries in the demo compo.

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Socialist Party Budget Protest

Donncha O Caoimh — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 21:50:18 +0000

The Socialist Party held a protest gathering against the recent tough budget. It took place in Emmett Place in Cork this afternoon. I took a few photos and this video. Our friend, Kathy Sinnott was in attendance but I didn’t hang around to listen for long. Must have a read of the leaflet I was handed. Maybe it has all the answers to a crumbling economy.

Gallery of images after the jump..

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An Irishman in Georgia

Donncha O Caoimh — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 19:58:23 +0000

Gavin is in Telavi in Western Georgia. Not the first place in the world I’d go on holiday, but he’s having an interesting time, including almost being arrested.

The naval base at Poti, where Russian soldiers destroyed most of Georgia’s navy

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Guinness, say hi to the Data Protection Commissioner

Donncha O Caoimh — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 11:40:52 +0000

This morning, Diageo Ireland (the company behind Guiness) spammed me again, despite my repeated attempts to remove myself from their mailing list.

Thanks to Damien who pointed me in the direction of the Data Protection Commissioner I filled out the complaint form with the following. The Commissioner’s Guidelines for marketing by electronic mail are quite clear and Diageo obviously ignore them. Hopefully something positive will come of this.

On the 8th of April, 2007 Diageo Ireland sent me an unsolicited email regarding a “poker nights” promotion. It appears that someone signed me up, but Diageo never confirmed the invitation. I did not opt in to receive any mailings from them. I also unsubscribed using their subscription page. More details, including commentary about the unsubscribe process are here: http://ocaoimh.ie/2008/02/07/a-pint-of-guinness-flavoured-spam/

Unfortunately, on June 20th 2008, I was spammed by them again. http://twitter.com/donncha/statuses/839602319
I unsubscribed again.

This afternoon I was sent another email from Diageo with the text:
“CONOR,
BECAUSE WE
DON’T WANT YOU TO BE
LEFT IN THE DARK…
Give us a few minutes and we’ll give you so much more
GIVE US A FEW MINUTES
AND WE’LL GIVE YOU
SO MUCH MORE”

Unfortunately I suspect I’ll always get spam emails from them despite the fact that I never signed up for anything, don’t drink Guinness and unsubscribed twice already.

Regards,
Donncha O Caoimh

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The demoscene comes to the Wii

Donncha O Caoimh — Tue, 20 May 2008 10:55:46 +0000

Woohoo! Someone in the demoscene has cottoned on to the homebrew efforts on the Wii. ExistenzE is probably the first demo to appear on Nintendo’s Wii Console.

It’s all thanks to the Twilight Hack which allows developers to run their own unofficial software on the Wii. Basically, the game “Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess” has a bug in it and developers took advantage of that to load other software without Nintendo’s blessings. So far a lot of the software released has been technical or not very interesting to your average gamer, but Quake has been ported to the Wii, as has SDLMame (updated download) and other emulators.

I was excited at the prospect of playing Mame games on my Wii until I realised how much it relies on the host CPU. The Wii’s brain isn’t that fast a performer. I wonder how it would handle emulating an arcade machine and throwing sprites and stuff around the screen. Anyone tried SDLMame on it? (Apparently it uses Linux as a host OS to run SDLMame. That’s cool!)

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Taking Woopra for a test drive

Donncha O Caoimh — Mon, 05 May 2008 15:28:22 +0000

John Pozadzides sent me a Woopra invite several weeks ago and I eventually signed up last week so it’s been collecting stats on this website for a while. John did an interview with Cali Lewis of Geekbrief which goes some way into explaining why Woopra is worth checking out. It was after watching that video that I decided to sign up.

Woopra has a neat Java based desktop interface but initially I only used the web interface. That’s not so bad, but it’s static and doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of the desktop app. I have to confess, I was slow to install the desktop client, simply because I have a “Oh no, Java is too much trouble” switch in my brain from long ago when I attempted to install the JRE. This time it was much easier, thanks to Ubuntu’s repositories.

$ sh woopra_unix.sh
No suitable Java Virtual Machine could be found on your system.
The version of the JVM must be at least 1.6.
Please define INSTALL4J_JAVA_HOME to point to a suitable JVM.
You can also try to delete the JVM cache file /home/donncha/.install4j
$ rm -fr .install4j
$ aptitude install sun-java6-jre
$ sh woopra_unix.sh

After installing the Java runtime, installation of Woopra was simple. I’ve been looking at it now for a few hours and it’s nice. The ticker tape stats at the bottom are a neat touch, especially the up and down markers that give an indication of how your traffic compares with the day before.

Unfortunately I don’t obsess about traffic stats any more. If I did, I would absolutely love this application. If I was targeting a particular keyword and honing the SEO aspects of my site then I would find this Woopra invaluable. Like Google Analytics, I’m confident Woopra will become a useful tool I’ll come back to when it’s needed. It doesn’t even use that many resources. I barely see it ping home for new data and the Java app is reasonably light.

Oh yeah, I haven’t obscured any of the stats in the screenshots. This blog gets several thousand hits a day if you’re interested, although none from Turkmenistan apparently. I guess if I had Woopra running when Turkmenbashi died it may have showed a blip or two of traffic from that region!

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