It is in the nature of geeks to develop strange (often fleeting) obsessions – my shiny new one is in life in space. As such I came across ‘Packing for Mars’, written by Mary Roach and subtitled ‘The Curious Science of Life in Space’. I had not heard of Roach before, but she has some interesting titles in her back catalogue, including ‘Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers’ and ‘Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex’. Both of those topics make an appearance in ‘Packing for Mars’.

The main title is somewhat misleading – although what we would need for a manned mission to Mars is a theme that runs through the book, most of what is discussed is the history of space flight. But this is not a standard, run-of-the-mill look at the huge achievements that have been made and the bravery and sacrifice of the astronauts (and animals) who made that possible.

This is a book about the human side of space travel, and that and Roach’s chatty (but detail-oriented) style make this a fascinating read. If you grew up with Horrible Histories and love the nitty gritty of things then this is a story you’ll love.

Chapter 1 starts out fairly sedately, with a look at the way the Japanese select their astronauts – which is disturbingly like an episode of Big Brother. Chapter 2 builds on the personality traits that are selected and walks us through the problems that are likely to arise when you coop several adults up together in a confined space. Again, nothing much surprising there for reality tv fans.

Chapters 3 & 4 take us back into history and show us the weird things people used to worry about before space flight became a reality. Would merely breaking free of Earth’s atmosphere be enough to send you bonkers? Can we breathe in zero gravity? Do our day-to-day bodily functions require gravity to work?

A lot of the experiments into what works in zero G and what doesn’t are done in short bursts on parabolic flights – the Vomit Comet, although NASA would prefer people didn’t call it that. Chapter 5 explores some of those trips, and chapter 6 deals with the inevitable consequence – what does happen when you throw up in space?

Chapter 7 discusses the valuable way in which the dead contribute to the space race, while chapter 8 is devoted to the astroanimals who paved the way for human travellers.

Chapter 8 is all about the mind-boggling detail that’s needed to plan a space mission.

None of these topics pull any punches – the science is nicely explained and the language is friendly, but there are taboo topics here that aren’t normally talked about, let alone written down in books intended for mass consumption. Even so, they’re quite tame in comparison to the final few, which are all about what it means to be a human in space.

Chapter 10 looks at personal hygiene and what happens when you deprive people of the ability to change their clothes or wash themselves. It ain’t pretty, as numerous unfortunate volunteers have discovered. It’s possible, of course, to have a similar experience with your feet on the ground, when cornered by a stinky co-worker, but do bear in mind that – according to the book – there are people who are genetically incapable of detecting BO. So they smell, they just don’t know it.

More volunteers are needed to find out what happens to your physiology when you’re weightless for long periods of time – and they spend months lying in bed, not allowed even to sit up and eat. If you’re female then reading chapter 11 will send you out to get some load-bearing exercise; unless you stand up to read then it will make you feel horribly uncomfortable at allowing your body to become so relaxed.

Spending months in bed leads naturally on to the next topic and chapter 12 spares no blushes by talking about sex in space – about which we know almost nothing. The only thing we know less about is reproduction in space; a successful pregnancy may rely on gravity in so many minute ways that it becomes impossible without it.

One thing astronauts don’t do is bail out of a spaceship that has gone wrong. Chapter 13 explains why it’s an issue. Even the genius pathologists in tv crime dramas might have trouble explaining some of the things that happen to the human body up there.

A popular topic is covered in chapter 14 – how astronauts ‘go’ in space, although generally responses are limited to how such a thing is achieved in a space suit during an EVA. No one really thinks about how it happens in the space ship itself, but take gravity out of the equation and … it’s an issue.

Moving from what comes out to what goes in, chapter 15 looks at what astronauts eat – and what earth-bound scientists have tried to make them eat. I saw no mention of dehydrated ice cream. Not one. But I did find out that carbonated drinks are problematic in more ways than one.

As well as the science, and the personal experience of the author, ‘Packing for Mars’ is peppered with snippets of transcripts from conversations held in space, anecdotes from astronauts and others involved in the space program and odd and fascinating asides. It was whilst reading chapter 14 that I discovered that only half of the human population produces farts that contain methane. Apparently it’s all down to differences in intestinal bacteria. There’s no indication that it’s the male half of the population that does, as I think most women would suspect.

The final chapter deals with the problem of packing enough food to support a manned mission to Mars – and possibly bringing the astronauts home again. Certain novel solutions have been proposed, and it appears that the main personal quality you need to become an astronaut (all of whom are intelligent, educated and fit) is an ability to put up with anything. Space travel sounds too much like extreme camping to me – one indignity piled on top of another. I hope the rich tourists busily signing over their fortunes for a trip into space know what they’re signing up for.

I ran iPhoneTracker against our two iPhones and was quite surprised at where we’ve been in the past.

Firstly, this is my graph:

…and this is Emma’s:

I can’t explain the London blob, especially as neither of us have been there in nearly a year. The only reason I can give for the greater number of places I’ve been to (apart from going to more places, obviously) is that I updated my iPhone sooner and therefore the tracking was going on longer than Emma’s iPhone.

I love this application of scraping data from a file and rendering it on a map — I’m not bothered in the slightest that my phone has been tracking my movements, I actually find it useful and intriguing.

Inspired by jEN and her Feeling a new calm post, I feel compelled to show your my dock and it’s related bits. Embrace the nerdery, my friend — it’ll do you good.

Bear in mind I can be quite easily distracted in the right mood and I like to keep a tight ship on the computer front, you might be surprised to know how little is on my desktop. Please note that you can click on each screenshot below and get a larger, more legible version:

A solid grey background with four folders, each with a fairly self-
explanatory/specific purpose:

• in is my inbox
• out is my outbox
• dropbox is where photos end up before they get filed into the right folders (for completeness I use Image Capture to automatically download things on camera flash memory and the like)
• scratch is where temporary stuff lives and is automatically cleared out when I shut down, but left intact if I restart.

As a Mac user, I have access to a dock, an application launcher and switcher, if you will. It lives on the right hand side of the desktop and it looks like this:

Yes, I have a small dock. The adage is true, though — it’s what you do with it that counts. From the top:

• Finder — the Mac version of My Computer.
• A stack of apps (the green leaf being the top of the stack).
• The trash.

My docks tend to live away from the bottom of the screen as is traditional (and the default setting for a Mac) — the right side of the screen seems to work best for me, and the absence of the silly 3D dock plinth thingy is an added bonus. Clicking on the stack of apps reveals its contents:

• Coda — my text editor/flattener and FTP client
• iCal — my high-level day/week/month planner
• iTunes — my music player
• Mail) — my email app
• Safari — my browser
• Skype — my instant messenger and VoIP app
• Speed Download — my download manager
• Terminal — to do nerdy things with
• Things — my life manager

These are the frequently accessed things I open and close over the day. No app is open all day, when I’m done with an app it gets closed down. From a productivity point of view, closing an app when you’re done with a task works for me, even if it’s opened up again straight away.

This simple process of “I’m done, time to quit” saves the time suck of getting lost in a wormhole on the web or spending an hour just doing something pointless. There’s a related productivity thing that I do: “I’m done, shut down” — again, in many cases my computer would be restarted straight away, but there’s granularity between my tasks and the hours I spend working correlate more accurately with the time my computer is on.

It’s all part of a bunch of tasks that mean I enjoy doing my job and the toxic relationship I had with my computers — the one where I would spend hours on or at my computer without achieving anything of note or important — is effectively history.

One final thing to show you — my hot corners. Not a snack food, as the name suggests, but a neat way to make use of the mouse cursor on your screen. Moving the cursor to either of the lower two corners of the screen triggers an action: the lower left one moves all the app windows out of the way and displays the desktop (or, “hide the porn”, if you prefer), the lower right one puts the display to sleep (or, “hide the porn ‘til later”). This is an invaluable feature to me — the functionality, not the porn hidey part — and can be configured at System Preferences → Desktop and Screen Saver → Screen Saver → Hot Corners…:

Why did I use the lower corners of the screen? Because there’s nothing there. The menu bar sits up at the top of the screen, with the Apple menu top left and Spotlight) top right. The last thing I want to do is trigger a display sleep when I want to access a menu, so this makes use of all the corners without me doing something by mistake.

…now all I need is something on the left hand side of my desktop (the side that’s decidedly empty right now) and I’m sorted.

Yes, it’s finally done: we’ve moved away from BT as our line rental and call plan provider. I hesitate to say ‘call plan’ as we rarely made any calls on our BT landline.

I wrote about unsolicited third-party telesales calls back in February and resolved to switch line rental from BT to someone else. In the end we went with the Be Internet landline service and it’s all good.

It’s not really the sort of thing I can wax lyrical about because it’s a copper wire coming from a big building in town via various boxes and tubes and ending up in our house. It’s the main way we get onto the internet…across old copper cable that’s owned and was installed by BT. Now, however, we pay a bit less money to Be Internet…who in turn rent the wire from BT.

Moving from BT to Be Internet was remarkably easy. To their credit, BT were communicative and sent us a standard letter explaining what we’d be losing when we switched, and gave us a chance to call the whole thing off and stick with them. This is the most communicative BT have been since we signed up with them many years ago (I’m deliberately trying to forget the sorry day they disconnected us without any warning back in August 2009 when they were convinced we were moving house). Be Internet sent text messages over to keep us updated and when the day came to switch over, it all went like clockwork.

The only visible difference with the new landline provider is the lack of caller display. We received far more calls than we made, and on the very rare occasions we were call screening it was handy to know who we were ignoring — though invariably if the number was international or an 0800 number there was a pretty good chance we were being telesales-ed. I don’t object to telesales in principle, but it’s a bit poor when your provider can’t even be bothered to call you directly to try and mooch a new contract from you…passing the job onto an external call centre just smacks of poor customer service. Add to that the fact that we’re registered with the TPS (telephone preference service) it’s cheeky to think that BT of all people are above the code of conduct. Anyway, the caller ID was an option on the Be Internet landline package, but it was a paid extra that made the whole thing cost more than BT…admittedly pricing wasn’t a huge factor in the equation, but saving a couple of quid a month is always appreciated.

I’m writing this post now because we’ve had yet another calling on behalf of BT call from a chirpy lass with a Yorkshire accent. I played along, let her do her as a long-term BT customer spiel and then calmly explained we’re no longer with BT. She apologised profusely and assured me she’d stop calling. Resulto. I’m not under the illusion that this will be the end of the calls, but hopefully over the coming months our number will filter out of the lists of numbers that BT pass to these companies and we’ll be interrupted far less often.

I’m pleased to say that my first Typepad DMCA went very smoothly. Compared to some of the other companies I’ve had to deal with it was a walk in the park and everything is now sorted. You can read more about the background here, but the short version is:

• Emma wrote articles for her gardening website with a copyright notice attached to each one
• The owner of orlaphelan87.typepad.com (currently defunct) copied and republished selected articles verbatim without permission or attribution and attached affiliate links to same articles
• Emma got annoyed
• Pete put the smack down

As I say, it’s all sorted now, and full marks to Jen from Typepad support for her assistance with making it happen, but I wanted to share some interesting things that I found in the time I was waiting for things to happen.

Firstly, the way this person was using affiliate links was a bit different to the usual direct link(s) to a website or page. Normally there are text links to a given site with what’s known as keyword text. At a high level, if there are a shedload of links to a given site with similar keywords, that will have an effect in search engines. In this case it was something like ‘lawn care’ and ‘grass cutting’, both related to gardening…but these links were linking to completely unrelated forum profile pages, and the target website was linked from that forum page. The forum profiles were presumably created with the sole intention of not posting any content, but just existing as a link page to a target website.

So, the Typepad blog linked to a bunch of forum profile pages, and those forum profile pages linked to a single website. Two minutes of work yielded the following information:

• the forums where this person had dumped their links
• the target website
• the Amazon affiliate URL this person was using
• the person’s address, which I could look at on Google Local, and also see when they bought the house, and how much they paid for it
• their name
• a bunch of other websites they run (or ran), all using Amazon affiliate links to sell stuff

…which is a bit scary considering all the tools I had at my disposal were free and required no authentication to use. Had I not been the sane, sensible, mentally-balanced and very reasonable person that I am, I could have been speaking to this person at their house within an hour.

And no, they weren’t called Orla Phelan, and they weren’t born in 1987. They do, however, live in Draycott, in-between Derby and Nottingham. And the house they live in was bought in 2006 for £116,666.

There was a Plan B I had up my sleeve if there was a problem with Typepad and their takedown request. Thankfully I didn’t have to use it, but it went something like this:

• get in touch with Amazon, get the person’s affiliate account shut down (copyright infringement, a violation of the Amazon Associates agreement)
• get in touch with Bosch and explain this person is using their trademarks in a domain name (also dodgy ground if you don’t have permission)
• send a stern letter to the person, explaining that they have 7 days to remove each of 20+ articles copied without permission, otherwise they’d get an itemised contract with a non-exclusive republishing licence permitting them to use said article once only at an already existing website address…with a £495 + VAT fee for each article

Clearly this was a last resort option, save for the door-knocking and friendly warning (softball bat optional), but it was there nonetheless.

The other thing that cropped up in the research was the software used to scrape the website pages and republish: Readability (safe for work).This cropped up because an article on the offending Typepad site had an error message specific to Readability — having checked on Google for the origins, it turned up in one place: the Readability support forums. I’m not suggesting for one second that Readability were complicit, condoning or even aware of what was happening, but it does help me to understand the mindset of this person.

As a result of this whole incident, I am one more DMCA better off and it’s made me rethink content delivery for Emma’s new website, which I’m building at the moment. RSS feeds will have copyright statements in, articles will have copyright statements in. It’s a bit sad, really, as the majority of content we make for the internet, including what I’m writing now, is licensed with generous Creative Commons terms.

Maybe it’s just the non-licensed stuff that’s worth ripping off.

During our recent garage-to-kitchen conversion we were in the rather lucky position of being able to choose new appliances, namely a new cooker and — since we were feeling a bit posh — a dishwasher. The old kitchen had a standard 600mm wide gas cooker. Apart from being a bit scummy around the edges and battle-weary, it did the job nicely. There were a few instances in the past where the grill pan had caught fire and nearly engulfed the house in grease-fuelled flames, but we caught it just in time.

The choice of appliances in this case came down to budget and space, as these things invariably do. We were looking for a mid-range oven from a reputable brand and the same of a dishwasher. The dishwasher needed to be integrated rather than free-standing, but beyond that there were pretty open on the choice of white goods.

What really surprised me was the range of prices on ovens and dishwashers. Clearly there’s the quality of workmanship to bear in mind, and the brand name, and the size of the unit, and a bunch of other factors, but you get an oven for under 200 pounds if you’re strapped for cash. If you’re wealthy beyond all boundaries you can spend nearly fifteen grand – same with dishwashers, you can go cheap-and-cheery with a 200 quid option or go nuts with a very shiny 1200 notes option.

Anther factor in this decision was the fact that we would leave the appliances with the new occupants when we sell the house, whenever that may be. So, we wanted to make sure we had quality gear that wasn’t going to break down two weeks out of warranty, but at the same time wasn’t prohibitively expensive that it wouldn’t recoup its worth when we sell the place (for example, far from being able to afford a super-pricey oven, an estate agent isn’t going to bump the value of the house ‘cos it has a nice cooker, even with any protestations I make).

In the end we plumped for a Rangemaster 90cm dual-fuel range cooker with cooker hood and a Whirlpool integrated dishwasher, all from Currys with free delivery.

The cooker is absolutely amazing. We got a discount deal on buying the cooker and hood together from Currys equating to about a hundred quid off. On top of that, there was a rebate offer from Rangemaster (part of the Aga group) which gave us a free saucepan set and frying pan set. And these are great, heavyweight pans — not the cheap ones we’re used to. I love using these pans, so much so that I’m now lusting after a Le Creuset 30cm cast iron casserole dish/pan — it’ll be mine, one day. When I’m Oprah-rich, I suspect. Have you seen the price? Gadzooks.

Having a split oven is very good. Previously we had to fire up a big oven and I always felt there was wasted space/heating power as there was rarely anything more than one tray of stuff in it. Now we have a half-size oven which just about all our existing cookware fits into. It heats up faster, it’s more efficient, and there’s no need to fire up the full-size oven next door. We do, of course, have the option of running two ovens at the same time if we have folks round, but as hermit types this doesn’t happen often. And there’s a griddle plate for the hob, which is just marvellous. Indoor barbecuing all year round. I’m developing a fondness for griddled onions (fresh ones, ideally red but I’m not fussy). With just about everything the griddle cooks. Om nom.

The dishwasher has fundamentally changed our life. The amount of water it uses compared to the equivalent handwashing is less. Yes, it uses less water than if we do the washing up manually. The water heating is done with electricity rather than a combi boiler for handwashing, so there is a lower carbon footprint (factor in us getting our electricity from Good Energy and there’s a much lower carbon footprint). We use Ecover rinse aid and tablets so we’re not dumping scary amounts of crud in the water stream.

There are, however, some downsides to the new dishwasher. Firstly it’s the collection of pans on the counters and around the sink. The everyday utensils (cutlery, bowls, plates, etc) get washed regularly, and we do a special (hotter) wash to get the pans clean, albeit less frequently. The second downside relates to the size of utensils. Smaller is better. For example, it’s far easier to get a bunch of small glasses in the dishwasher than larger glases. We use IKEA POKAL which are virtually bomb-proof and very dishwasher friendly. Conversely, the larger glasses (origin unclear, but they’re 750ml capacity beer glasses) we have are still good for every day use, but too large to comfortably fit in the dishwasher drawer. The integrated-ness of the dishwasher means you lose height inside — and that also causes problems for plates. To that end, the next set of plates we buy will have to be about 10mm narrower than the existing ones to be absolutely sure they’re not impeding the internal workings of the dishwasher.

I never thought I’d be a plate nerd, but clearly I’m mistaken. I’m OK with that.

I’m a bit paranoid about losing data on my computers. It happens infrequently, thankfully, but I like to take steps to make sure I don’t get caught out by stupid mistakes and limit the damage when there are factors outside my control.

One of these factors is power cuts (blackouts, brownouts, whatever you like to call them). To get around most power cuts, I use uninterruptible power supply (UPS) units as big batteries. When the power drops out, the battery kicks in seamlessly and any UPSes that have lost power scream like banshees. Which is fun, for about a minute. The shrill beeping is an indication that it’s time to start powering things off pronto, lest you be in the rather sad predicament that your computer will run out of juice and switch off in a very ungraceful fashion.

The small servers I use (Netgear ReadyNAS RND4000 – 4 of ‘em) share two UPSes, one of them being an old-but-trustworthy APC Back-UPS 300 that I liberated from…let’s say ‘an office’…and a newer-but-twitchier APC Back-UPS RS 500. The RS 500 has been ill lately — unexplained server shutdowns were causing me grief — and wacky indicator light combinations that weren’t listed in the troubleshooting section of the manual were the icing on the cake. I assumed that it needed a new, replacement battery. It goes without saying that the warranty period had recently expired. Purchasing time, then. Goody goody.

By the by, it wasn’t until about 4 years ago that I realised it was possible to change a UPS battery when it ran out of puff, I just assumed they were sealed units. Turns out there’s a thriving market in new UPS batteries to replace worn-out APC duffers.

Having completed a fairly major house renovation project, money is tight right now. With that in mind, there were a few options to my problem:

i) get a brand-new, replacement UPS — after all, it might not be the battery that’s shot (least risky but most expensive option – 80-90GBP)
ii) get a replacement RBC2 battery direct from APC (higher risk but cheaper than a brand new UPS)
iii) get a replacement APC battery direct from a third party (same risk, same product, cheaper than getting one from APC direct)
iv) get a replacement unbranded equivalent from eBay (higher risk, cheaper still)
v) suck it, make do without a UPS, just run a server off the mains, move on (nightmare-inducing risk, cheapest option)

Weighing up the pros and cons, and very aware that eating and shelter have a higher priority than UPS batteries in the money queue I went for iv). As is normal with eBay, you need to be aware of the postage and packing costs, especially for heavy stuff. UPS batteries are heavy — the one I need is 2.5kg — it’s never going to be a cheap process. An unbranded ‘value’ battery was ordered and arrived quick-style, within 24 hours of the order being placed it was in my UPS and charging up.

And it worked really well. For about two weeks. Then it died.

Which brings us to about two days ago. It wouldn’t hold charge, wouldn’t take any power, and the UPS wouldn’t switch on. My trusty multimeter proved it was dead. Contacting the eBay seller about the 12 month warranty and getting an RMA number to send the thing back, I get a stock answer indicating I should first contact APC Technical, who will “talk you through some tests including resetting the unit with a Hyper-terminal session”. Yeah. That’s right, HyperTerminal — it’s like 1999 all over again.

I didn’t call. I won’t be calling. I won’t be sending it back to get a replacement. Not for any inherent stubborn-ness, it’s more fundamental than that: cost. You see, I’ll be on the phone with APC for an hour while they walk me through their tests…that is if they even decide to help me. Why would they — the UPS unit is out of warranty, I’m using a 3rd party battery, something which they specifically advise not to do. I’m not going to lie to a tech support dude, I’ve been on the receiving end of technical fibs when I worked in tech support at…let’s say ‘an office’…and it’s not cool. And then there’s the postage costs of sending 2.5kg back to the seller…and do I get it recorded/registered so I know it’s arrived? More expense. Oh, and a trip to the post office as it’s too large for a post box. More time and money. And if I do decide to go through with the whole process, I’ll likely get a battery from the same batch which may die in weeks.

I don’t think for one minute that the eBay seller did this on purpose, but it’s a wily system — there will inevitably be duffers from a batch of new batteries, especially when they’re sold as value batteries. I can’t imagine that many people will go through the ball-ache of calling APC, a “Hyper-terminal” session and then post the darned thing back. It’s the recycling bank for this poor battery.

The lesson learned here is that, actually, a branded battery would’ve suited me better…and choosing option iii) would’ve been the smartest move. Also, if you have a UPS, factor in replacement batteries or new units. By their nature, they will get ill and die, and if you know ahead of time what you need and what your options are, it makes for a smoother transition.

As a final footnote, while I save the pennies to get a proper APC RBC2, I’ve jacked the NASes into my main APC Back-UPS 1500, which is now a single point of failure for my computer, monitor and two servers. I’m not comfortable with this as a long-term strategy, but needs must. And it’s a better option than v).

Oh, and the old-but-trustworthy UPS has been totally fine for years and runs happily off a cheap non-branded battery, so this could all be really bad luck.

I’m having some fun with a Nigerian 419 scammer at the moment. It all kicked off with this email from about a week ago:

Dear Beneficiary,

Re: Payment of your withhold/Outstanding contract/inheritance Fund of USD$2.4 Million.

Regards to our earlier correspondence in respect of the above subject matter,kindly be informed that we have here in our bank
and file record the above mentioned sum on your name that has been approved for immediate payment to you.

In view of this and considering the number of applications and request we have received regarding this same amount,we are
requesting for the re-confirmation of the following information so as to enable us ensure that this fund is paid to the rightful and original beneficiary.

1)Your full name and address.
2) Your telephone number(s) and fax No.(if any)
3)Your age and occupation.

The above information are required to enable us cross-check with the information in our record and to ensure that you receive
your fund directly.We have had people here submitting several application claiming that you gave them power of attorney to
receive the fund on your behalf.This is why we needed this re-confirmation of information from you.

We are anticipating your most urgent response.

Thank you.

Respectfully,

Ms Kemi Martins
For:SKYE BANK PLC

Fairly standard stuff, and the type of thing I’d usually just delete and think nothing more of. Occasionally I report the sender to their email provider in the vain hope that something might be done and they get disconnected, but that’s getting less and less effective. If time and mood allows, I now prefer to pick a spammer a week and just screw around with them for a while. I justify this to myself in a few ways: a) scammers have too easy a ride on the internets, b) them dealing with me and my perceived stupidity takes up their time for ultimately no reward, c) it’s fun and d) an actual, proper, confirmed Nigerian scammer is just too good an opportunity to pass up. I’ve been replying back-and-forth to the email address in question (skyebkgroupplc@live.com) from one of my disposable webmail accounts for a few days now and I’m acting a bit…startled. I mean, come on, I thought my bank account was doing OK and now I hear I’m in line for some free money — how could I miss an opportunity like this!

The guy on the Nigerian end of things (82.128.116.64) has sent me a file today, asking for my bank details so I can have my new VISA card sent directly to me. He sent skye_bank_form.doc (31kb), and I must open it, fill it out, and return it. What he’s actually going to get in return is skye_bank_form-completed.doc.zip — I’ll explain in my best naïve voice that I had to include some bank statement scans and the file is a bit larger than I expected. Mmm, juicy bank statements – an excellent reason to open the attachment at his end.

I won’t actually be sending bank statements, of course – I’m sending him a zip bomb. When he opens skye_bank_form-completed.doc.zip, it’ll extract a file called skye_bank_form.doc, which will look like a Word document in WinZip, and he’ll eagerly open it. The thing is, skye_bank_form.doc is full of zeroes. Lots of zeroes. A hundred gigabytes of zero — or, in old money, 107374182400 zeroes…one hundred and seven billion, three hundred and seventy four million, one hundred and eighty two thousand four hundred zeroes. That 100 gigabyte file zips down to a few megabytes and will extract to full size when he opens it. Which will likely crash his computer. Or kill it completely. Or something worse, I don’t know — and I don’t care.

Here’s how I did it. This assumes you have a UNIX-esque operating system, I’m sure it’s possible for Windows but you’re on your own with that. Make sure you have enough free space on your hard disk, and you’re not doing anything important, then open a terminal prompt and type:

dd if=/dev/zero of=skye_bank_form-completed.doc bs=1m count=100k

That command takes a never-ending zero generator (the /dev/zero part) as its input file, and dumps it to skye_bank_form-completed.doc, with a blocksize of 1 megabyte, and it stops when it has 100000 blocks in a row…a thousand megabytes is a gigabyte, and a hundred of those make a hundred gigabytes. That’s stage one complete. Next: zip it. A billion of the same character in a row will compress exceptionally well. My hundred gigabyte file has been squished into a file that’s of an email-friendly size…and is currently headed along the interweb choobs to a dial-up account in Nigeria.

(Not strictly a Cooper Acres-related post, but there’s some useful information that follows, and it relates to housing in a tenuous fashion, so it’s here.)

We’ve recently had our garage converted into a new kitchen. During the spec-ing process, I was asked what sort of lights I wanted. Rather foolishly, and for reasons I now don’t remember very clearly, I left the decision to the main contractor. I did this because he’d converted a bunch of garages before, and I had confidence in his choices. What I hadn’t factored in, though, was that he’s a traditional tradesman, and he was subcontracting to a traditional electrician. Nothing wrong with that, mind you – I would much rather have people working to good standards with stable wiring and not worry about things spontaneously combusting when I open the fridge door.

Traditional sparkie (electrician) installed 8x recessed halogen downlighters, per the spec. They all worked nicely, job done. What I also hadn’t factored in was the standard issue light bulb for each of these fittings: a 50w GU10 bayonet-fitting MR16 spotlight bulb. Now, there are a bunch of things that don’t sit well with me with these bulbs:

• They can get very hot. So much so that the downlighter case is certified flame-proof for 100 minutes. Yikes. Let’s try and avoid fire where possible, that’s normally a good rule of thumb.

• They use 50w of power per bulb, and there are 8 of them in our kitchen. That’s 400w. Yikes.

• They have a relatively narrow light throw (the clue is in the name: spotlight). Upshot of this is they light the floors really well, but not much else.

• They have a 3000k ‘warm white’ colour, which just looks silly in a kitchen.

• GU10 halogen bulbs are not known for their long lifespan.

Sure, they’re cheap and widely available – trade price for an adjustable CED GU10 chrome downlighter is under 5GBP for the whole thing, including a halogen bulb – and they’re well-built, but flicking a light switch and turning on 400w of spotlight bulb scares me and my electricity bill.

The plan initially was to locate alternative bulbs for the downlighters and swap the halogens out. As well as finding suitable compact fluorescent lamps (CFL) replacements, I was hoping to ramp up the colour temperature to 6500K (closest equivalent to daylight) and have the light more white than yellow.

The first hurdle was finding a suitable CFL bulb to fit inside the existing downlighter case. I was limited by the internal dimensions of the case, and the face fitting. A standard GU10 bayonet MR16 bulb is 55mm tall. Taking into account headroom clearance inside the downlighter case, I was looking at a maximum bulb size of ~63mm long. CFL bulbs are normally larger/longer than their incandescent bulb forbears, primarily down to their requirement for a internal starter to fire things up and the difference in glass arrangement. Long (and dull) story short: an MR16 with a GU10 fitting is ~55mm and a typical 11w CFL equivalent is ~78mm long. Too big.

So, Plan B. How about LED replacement bulbs? No requirement for a starter, so they’re more likely to be an appropriate size and can just be swapped out. The first snag with this plan was the minefield that is LED lighting technology. The old adage of ‘you get what you pay for’ is true, but in the case of top-end LED lamps, you will pay a lot more than standard CFLs. Oh, and I couldn’t find a reputable 50w daylight equivalent LED lamp for under 41GBP. That’s 41GBP for 1 bulb, not 8. Spending 328GBP on LED lamps scared me even more than switching on 400w of halogen in one go.

There are many, many cheap LED bulbs on the market. Technology advances mean that the light/heat output from lamps gets better each year. It’s still, however, a very new domestic technology, and I’m no longer a trailblazer for brand new technologies. The research I did seemed to boil down to this: if you want LED lamps, get them from a reputable manufacturer, and don’t get angry if they don’t last the 4 zillion hours they’re advertised to live for. This is not a guarantee – it’s guidance. A power spike/surge could, in theory, blow your shiny LED bulbs, and if you’ve gone for 50w equivalent pricey ones, that’s a hefty bill to replace them.

Plan B was dead. Plan C was thought-up and activated. Swap the whole bally lot out. Downlighter case, bulb, everything. Perhaps I would find a bigger case so I could get some CFLs installed. Perhaps I’d find something else even more exciting that would make my life (and electricity bill) more bearable. Perhaps I would…oh, you get the idea.

The solution, ultimately, was replacement downlighters and CFL spiral bulbs from Kosnic. I use Kosnic bulbs widely throughout the house, and I usually get them from cheapenergysavinglightbulbs.co.uk/ as their range and prices are good. They even sell the Kosnic downlighter I had decided on – so a plan was hatched: price up 8x replacement downlighters, 8x replacement 11w (50w equivalent) CFL spirals and a handful of spares for good measure.

Rather than buy a boxload in one go, I decided the smart option would be to find one and see if it fit in the hole properly first. I found a chap on eBay selling the downlighter and bulb for ~5GBP all in, including postage. This was already cheaper than cheapenergysavinglightbulbs.co.uk so I was curious how this might work out.

The halogen lights had a cut out of 80mm, and the replacement Kosnic need a cut out of 65mm. A potential problem was that the existing hole might be too large, and I really didn’t want to be farting around patching up holes to make them smaller. As it turns out, the Kosnic replacements fit over a 80mm hole without any issue. There’s plenty of headroom in the ceiling space for the new case, and the bulb supplied by the eBay dude was a Kosnic 11 watt warm white bulb.

I’ve fitted one replacement already, and had it running for a week or two on and off. From a practical point of view, fitting the new downlighter was straightforward. The springs seem to be a bit more fierce, and the build quality seems to be OK. I’ve ordered another 7 to replace the halogen downlighters. The same eBay guy quoted me ~60GBP for 7x additional downlighters with 11w 6400K daylight spiral bulbs on a much-more-sane E27 base, plus a bunch of spares for the E14-fit daylight bulbs we have in the skylight. As with all CFLs, they do contain mercury, which make disposal of dead ones a bit more tricky (not impossible, though), but that sits better with me than spending over 300GBP on specialist LED lamps that haven’t been road-tested for anywhere near their advertised life.

From a power/heat/light point of view, each bulb will use 11w rather than the 50w a halogen does, they’ll have a much more diffused light than the spotlights do, and the light will be whiter than before, so appear brighter. The heat produced is far, far lower and the inherent fire risk from overheating is therefore much lower than with halogens.

It’s November again, which mean it’s time to wheel out NaNoWriMo for public consumption. I’m a terrible reader, I don’t currently have the concentration or staying power to finish books in one sitting, a sign of a distracted/troubled mind, I suspect.

They say everyone has one good book in them, but I don’t. Not at the moment, at least. I need and want to write more, but I don’t have any motivation to bash a novel out in a month. Rather than just let November trundle by without doing anything, I’ve thought of a variant on the NaNoWriMo theme. NaCoWriMo. Also known as National Copy Content Writing Month.

I’ve set myself the last quarter of 2010 to batter this website into shape, and a large part of that is solid, textual content. And lots of it. Whether it’s a blog post here, a Cooper Acres post, some coupon text, it all counts. Regular, useful posts during November 2010.

50,000 words is the NaNoWriMo threshold for a win or completion, so it sounds fair that I use the same target. That’s 100 posts of 500 words, or 250 posts of 200 words, or some other number of so-and-so words. I’ll even keep a running tally of how well I’m doing. Check the sidebar soon for the latest stats, I’ll have a whizzy home-brewed chart (courtesy of the Google Chart API and some confused bodging on my part).

Game on, then. another 249 posts like this and I’ll be home free.