• Stepping out

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    So for a couple of hours this evening I tried to replicate the Dance Dance Revolution experience using my PC. Waiting for me at Cambridge today were two nice new Playstation gamepad USB adaptors that I bought off Ebay; I was intending to hook my two dance mats up to the computer via USB, download…

  • Digital TV

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    1–2 minutes

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    An interesting quotation from this week’s New Scientist confirms what I’ve suspected* for a while: The latest 42 inch widescreen flat plasma panel screens cost around $7000, not counting a $250 wall mount and the digital tuner needed to receive broadcasts. Yet customers appear unconvinced of their quality. It turns out you cannot see the…

  • WMD

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    1–2 minutes

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    In the Sunday Times today is a short opinion article by John Humphries; it’s a relatively pedestrian essay about how we shouldn’t make AK-47s any more, etc etc. Not really worthy of note, other than the fact that its title, ‘AK-47s are weapons of mass destruction too’ is quite obviously ripped off from Michigan’s Lake…

  • Calling you

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    Why is it the case that on Orange, you can call any number in the USA at any time of the day for 15p/minute, while it costs 35p/minute to make calls to anyone in the UK at peak time? This only applies for the popular Everyday 50 tariff, but I suspect it’s still cheaper to…

  • Timeshare

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    Seen on Usenet, about spacecraft yachts for the rich: “Larry Ellison would probably go for it — but even he isn’t rich enough. Here’s an idea, though: An orbital timeshare. Ellison can use it six months of the year; Bill Gates gets it the rest of the time.”

  • Ragging

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    4–6 minutes

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    3 comments on Ragging

    Is ragging – making new initiates/players/students perform pointless tasks – the key to forming a strong community?

  • Benevolent

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    1–2 minutes

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    1 comment on Benevolent

    Take a look at the LambdaMOO constitution (about halfway down the page). It confirms my belief that the most efficient and often best form of governance for an online community is essentially a benevolent dictatorship. LambdaMOO is basically an virtual online world. In their constitution, the LambdaMOO administrators (‘Wizards’) explicitly state that they will sometimes…

  • Milestones

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    2–3 minutes

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    A few days ago, the world (for me) passed another technological milestone – I now had full and unmetered Internet access for 99% of the time*. I’d just bought the Orange SPV Smartphone. This phone is quite a nice piece of kit; it has a decent sized colour screen with a reasonably fast processor. Importantly,…

  • Xylophone

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    Saw four people busking with xylophones and glockenspiels in Cambridge city centre today – I think it’s been the first time for years that I’ve felt compelled to give a street performer some money. Their performance of Blue Danube was pretty damn impressive. On another note, I have two long posts that I have in…

  • How to get rich

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    1–2 minutes

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    How to get rich – an interesting lecture by Jared Diamond, the author of Guns, Germs and Steel (a very good book, on the whole). Fairly woolly, but it has some useful points.