News from the UK of an interesting experiment involving people who reckon they're sensitive to transmissions from cellphone towers.

"Dozens of people who believed the masts triggered symptoms such as anxiety, nausea and tiredness could not detect if signals were on or off in trials."

In a classic double-blind experiment, "when tests were carried out in which neither the experimenter or participant knew if the mast was on or off, the number of symptoms reported was not related to whether a signal was being emitted or not."

But that's not to say the affected didn't experience real symptoms. 'Sensitives' reported feeling unwell and had sweatier skin and higher blood pressure -- both measures of a physiological response. A sort of placebo effect in reverse.

The mind is a powerful thing. If you really believe something's having a deleterious effect on your health -- it actually can!

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 8:57 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 2 )

"After running Vista for only a few days - with a complete love for the new platform - the first sign of trouble erupted. I began noticing latency on my home network connection - so I booted my port sniffing software and networking tools to see what was happening. What I found was foundation shaking..."

So reads a post on Abandonia forums. (This version contains the missing images.)

It seems that various US entities have been and are trying to connect to the poster's computer, amongst them the US Department of Defense Network Information Center, the United Nations Development Program Informatics Division, Halliburton and the US Department of Homeland Security.

"I ran traceroutes on the IP's, and sure enough they came back legit and government owned. I thought this might be exclusive to my system, so I ran over to a friend of mine who upgraded to Vista when it first became available... After installing monitoring software on his system, the hits it caught on his network were immediate and almost identical in source. Attempts on both TCP and UDP by suspicious government owned addresses. Again, even when idle and running only a bare minimum of system processes."

I don't run Vista so I can't confirm this. Any local users care to comment...?

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 8:02 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 3 )

Imagine you get unique footage of an alien craft landing, film a miraculous escape or capture images of Bill Gates frolicking naked on a Northland beach. What should you do? (Apart -- in the latter case -- from seeking immediate treatment?) The one thing you shouldn't do is send them to TV One or TV3.

"Have you ever witnessed an event you thought others should see, but there wasn't any time to call reporters and camera crews to the scene?" TVNZ's Your Cam page breathlessly intones. "When there's no time to wait, you can record news footage on your digital video camera or phone to send it straight to our reporters at ONE News. Like the footage of the Bali and London bombings and 9/11, pictures you capture may be the only ones taken as the event unfolds, and YOUR CAM is about capturing news as it happens."

And, it also happens, about capturing your rights.

Item 4 of Your Cam's Terms and Conditions states it plainly;

TV3's Terms and Conditions employ more legalese, and much smaller type;

That means if the BBC pick up your clip, or CNN or any of the other news networks around the world, the rights holder might charge them for it but you won't get a bean.

This point was highlighted in the 22 July edition of Mediawatch on National Radio (the piece concerned starts about 8.5 minutes in).

It may seem trivial, but consider the value of a single celebrity photograph. It's what the paparazzi business is built on. There are whole agencies specialising in nothing else, with in-demand shots going for thousands of dollars.

Don't throw your rights away!

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 3:37 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 3 )

I've just discovered a fantastic tool for dual-booters everywhere. The problem, as Linux users know, is that while Linux can happily read and write to Windows partitions, the reverse isn't the case. Windows is wilfully blind to the existence Linux, which means that if you've left a file on Linux that you now need under Windows, you have to reboot, copy it to a Windows-readable partition, reboot again... Well not any more!

The Ext2 Installable File System is a free download that adds a Linux-aware kernel mode to Windows. What does that mean? In short, this...


[click to enlarge]

... Linux partitions as accessible as any Windows ones!

This brilliant little tool:

• Provides read and write access to Linux Ext2 and Ext3 volumes from Windows.
• Allows Windows to handle floppy disks formatted with an Ext2 file system.
• Installs a pure kernel mode file system driver which extends Windows to include the Ext2/Ext3 in the same way that it currently handles NTFS, FASTFAT, CDFS for Joliet/ISO CD-ROMs, etc. That means direct access to data via drive letters. No need to copy files from or to Ext2/3 volumes in order to work with them.
• Handles files larger than 4 GBytes.
• It’s comparable to Windows NT's native file system drivers.
• Uses a setup wizard to installs and configure the Ext2 file system driver.
• Is configurable through "IFS Drives" in Control Panel.
• Removable via "Add/remove Software" in Control Panel.

The on-site documentation says it works with Windows NT4.0, 2000, XP, and SBS 2003. There's no word about Vista. I don't use it so I can't comment, but I can't see any reason why it won't work there too.



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Posted by Geoff Palmer at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 2 )

Throw away the highlighter, this Gizmodo link has an interesting clip on how to make glow-in-the-dark printer ink. The inter-titles could do with a spell-check ("seringes"???) but it looks like a fun idea.

This link also carries the clip but has more details on the glow-in-the-dark powder as well as an ingenious covert printing idea for the spy-minded. The powder's made by Glow Inc., who also make glow-in-the-dark paints -- at up to US$500 a gallon!

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 9:23 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

According to an analysis of High Definition (HD) DVD releases, Blu-Ray is trouncing the opposition HD-DVD format.

Ken Pierce at Pixel Perfect Productions took the top 100 grossing films from 2005, 2006 and 2007 year-to-date, as well as the top 100 films of all time and the top 100 films of all time adjusted for inflation, then mapped the studios that own them back to the format(s) they support. The result is an interesting series of pie charts showing one clear winner in the format wars

Pierce concludes:

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 8:34 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 11 )

The BBC are reporting a nasty new classroom hazard: whiteboard projectors.

Documents from the Health and Safety Executive, obtained by the BBC under the Freedom of Information Act, say users "should make sure that direct beam viewing of the optical output from this equipment is both controlled and restricted to no more than a few tens of seconds at a time".

You don't even have to stare at the beam. Peripheral viewing can be dodgy too:

"In such instances, no protective aversion response is evoked in viewers and so they won't know that they could be overexposing their eyes."

No news yet on how hazardous your home projector might be.

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 6:57 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

[Updated: 18/07/2007]

RecordMyDesktop is a great little utility to... record your desktop. It's command-line driven but don't let that frighten you. All you have to do is type recor <Tab> (to let auto-complete do it's magic) and hit <Enter> to start recording.

Recordings are made in the open standard .ogg format and can also include sound. By default, your entire screen's recorded, but you can change that by specifying a particular screen area to record.

Download this simple example, made to show the effects of wobbly windows -- one of the cool effects from installing Beryl:


Right-click & choose Save to download (933KB)

I only recorded a small area of my screen with the command;

recordmydesktop -x 400 -y 150 -width 600 -height 350 -o wobbly.ogg

-x and -y specify the starting screen coordinates, -width and -height should be obvious, and -o is the name of the output file.

So how did I determine my start coordinates? With the wonderfully useful krule, the on-screen ruler...


Krule: right-click it to change orientation

Then I imported wobbly.ogg into video editor Kino...



...edited it as necessary and exported it to the more common .flv format. (I could have made it an .mpg but I didn't think you'd appreciate a 3.5MB download!)



Updated: 18/07/2007
As commenters Garret and heri point out, I've overlooked RMD's GUI. GTK-recordmydesktop which makes it all blindingly easy. Both utilities are typically part of regular Linux installations, so just pick 'em up through your regular package manager.





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Posted by Geoff Palmer at 8:04 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 5 )