Category: Uncategorized

Holy PDA, batman! Somebody just failed to sell a Siemens Newton NotePhone on eBay! I’d thought these things were only produced as prototypes, but apparently not. I wonder if the rumoured A4 slate hospital prototypes ever saw the light of day?

The wonderfully crazy folks who strapped a miniature gas turbine to a skateboard for me were, at the time, working on an order for a matched set of eight such engines for a scale B-52 project (scroll down for pics). The result flew earlier this year, and was utterly magnificent. At over 7m, the span is greater than some light aircraft.

Sadly, it crashed, in what from the video (Windows Media Player) looks like a textbook copy of a real B-52 crash from years back. There’s much discussion in the R/C model forums about the cause, but the bottom line seems to be that roll spoilers do not provide adequate control authority when low and slow: B-52s apparently cannot recover from bank angles over about sixty degrees, which I think is how I’ve come to grief in them in X-Plane as well. Also, flying downwind in 25 knots and gusting is tricky. Still, builder/pilot Gordon Nichols was seriously experienced with flying large models, and the poor chap must be devestated.

There’s also ongoing debate about whether such huge models are safe to fly at all – the B-52 weighed more than piloted ultralights. I think it’d be a tragedy to rein these guys in, but by the same token, I wouldn’t want to have been close to the crash site. However, the Large Model Association is already involved in inspecting and certifying these things with the CAA. Hopefully the situation can be managed rather than bluntly legislated against.

From an interview with Sukhoi designer Mikhail Simonov, on attempts to break the F-15’s time-to-altitude records with an Su-27 Flanker:

“The aircraft must be standing still like a sprinter on the start line. But when the engines are working the wheel brakes alone are not enough to hold the aircraft. To keep the fighter still we tried using a tank. A cable was connected to the hook on the lower part of the fuselage, but we weren’t celebrating for long. After just a second of afterburners being engaged we heard a screeching sound and observed how the Su-27 started pulling the tank down the runway. We had to find something else to hold the plane. A nearby runway was under construction and we have noticed a huge “Caterpillar” bulldozer. We attached it to the tank, which was in turn attached to the aircraft. The fighter’s start from dead stop was guaranteed.”

Great toys. Rock on.

And no Richard, Harro: this isn’t here solely for your benefit. Other readers might be amused too. Like… er… Alan. And… no, that’s about it, actually.

My mum, it seems, has been invited to join some sort of West Yorkshire underground art mafia. A breakaway splinter sect of the Menston Art Club, meeting in secret in a church hall in Adel on alternate Thursdays. Presumably to trade illicit gouache, or something.

“Were you followed?”
“No, I lost my tail.”
“Excellent. Do you have your portfolio?”
etc

In comments, Alan wonders whether MT-Blacklist is doing a decent job, given that a junk comment made it through the filters today. In its defense… according to its logs, it’s blocked 163 junk comments since yesterday.

Not ruddy bad, I’d say.

Catching up with Metafilter posts, this. Wow.

It’s a little too early for chicken-counting, but I think we’re back in business. Though I’ve a nasty feeling that orange nonsense is going to return at some stage. First impressions: MT3 and MT-Blacklist are really very good indeed. Next impressions: I need to update the template and stylesheet here, which means picking apart the (minimal) changes I made last year, and then – gasp! – working out what this page should look like. Strangely enough, I’ve never been a fan of the chocolate-brown background. Sends my eyes funny.

So, yes, we’re back in business. Paging John Coombes – are you next up for the giant leap to MT3?

Blah.

I think… perhaps… I’m now running MT3.11 on MySQL.

A relatively smooth process, though there’s a sort of ten-minute communications blackout where it’s not clear if MT is updating stuff, or nuking it. Next challenge: MT-Blacklist, the comment spam system.

Having had basically no sleep last night, thanks to this dratted cold, I declared myself unfit for travel to my niece’s party in Leeds. Which sucks, and about which I feel rubbish.

By way of penance, I’m about to attempt the miraculous conversion of this blog to the MySQL back-end. If it all goes very 404 suddenly, you’ll know why.