Live from Austin!

$99 for a leather iPod case? And he wasn’t laughed off the stage?

That iPod Hi-Fi looks like it was stolen from the set of Space: 1999, doesn’t it? Come to think of it, a G5 would fit the decor of John Koenig’s desk perfectly. Perhaps the Apple iPhone will look like a commlock?

Then there’s the Intel Mac Mini. We all knew that was coming. However, while the MacBook Pro comes with a Mobility Radeon X1600, the Mini comes with a craptastic Intel GMA950 integrated graphics chip. The old Mini had a slothful Radeon 9200, but at least it had dedicated RAM, whereas the Intel shares its video RAM with the main CPU.

In addition, the CPU speed has dropped from the MacBook’s 1.83GHz dual cores, to 1.5GHz single core. If that wasn’t bad enough, the entry level price has quietly risen by 20%–the $500 PC is now a $600 PC, $800 if you want dual cores or a DVD burner. Price up comparable Dell machines, and that price looks pretty hard to defend.

There are a couple of problems leading to the high price and hardware nobbling. The first is that Intel are charging over $250 for a Core Duo processor, whereas a G4 was well under $200. The second issue is that Apple have to be careful not to make their new cheap Intel boxes embarassingly faster than the PowerPC systems they’re still selling. The Intel iMac was almost as fast as the top end quad G5 workstation, so making sure the Mini wouldn’t be too fast was probably a requirement. Hopefully by the end of the year the G5 will be history and we can have an improved Intel Mini.

We got some things called “Squirrel Logs“. They’re supposed to last as long as 12-24 ears of corn. Given the rate at which our half dozen fluffy friends go through corn, that seemed like a convenient idea.

I tried hanging one from the bungee. No deal, it seemed that they would definitely last 12x as long as corn, because the squirrels wouldn’t touch ‘em. They went straight for the corn on the squirrel-a-whirl instead, and even after eating it they continued to climb out on the whirl and sniff the corn husks rather than eat the log.

I wondered if it might just be too much work for them to knaw at the log while bouncing up and down on a spring, so I decided I needed to rig up a makeshift holder for the log—something that would stop Blacktip from trying to drag the entire thing away. I also realized they’d be more likely to sit around and chow if the log was above ground level, out of the reach of the neighbor’s cat.

I picked a sturdy chunk of wood out of the trash near a local building site, and drilled two holes in it about 1cm apart. I threaded some steel cable through one hole, through the squirrel log, through a metal hex nut, back down through the log, and then through the other hole in the wood. I twist-tied the cable underneath the wood and duct taped it out of harm’s way. Then, I positioned the wood platform over the metal fence, and attached one end to a post of the wooden fence behind the metal fence, with a small right-angle bracket. (I’m not sure why we have two fences.)

The result allows the squirrels to climb on via the fences, and sit and gnaw at the log in comfort. They can grab it and move it around, but can’t actually drag it away.

We haven’t seen Blacktip in a couple of weeks. I’m wondering if something has happened to him. I’ll put corn out all weekend, and if he doesn’t show, I think it’ll be time to put the feed box back. Frida is still a regular visitor, and we’ve also seen a new smallish squirrel with a thick tail, who had trouble working out the whole bungee thing.

So anyhow, if you know me and have a Yahoo or Flickr ID and want to get in on the friends-only photo action, drop me an e-mail saying what your ID is. Or, add me as a friend in flickr; Yahoo ID is metavariable.

One of the defining features of mammals is the four chambered heart. A curiosity of biology is that all mammals have more or less the same lifespan, if you measure it in heartbeats: one billion beats, give or take a billion.

If you’re a large mammal, like an elephant, your heart beats slowly, and you live many years. If you’re a mouse, your tiny heart beats far faster, and you’re lucky to live more than a handful of years. If you’re a human, your heart usually beats around 70 times a minute. Mine is a little different. It likes to throw in an extra beat here and there.

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The Observer:

A shocking 37 million Americans live in poverty. That is 12.7 per cent of the population — the highest percentage in the developed world. They are found from the hills of Kentucky to Detroit’s streets, from the Deep South of Louisiana to the heartland of Oklahoma. Each year since 2001 their number has grown.

Under President George W Bush an extra 5.4 million have slipped below the poverty line. Yet they are not a story of the unemployed or the destitute. Most have jobs. Many have two. Amos Lumpkins has work and his children go to school. But the economy, stripped of worker benefits like healthcare, is having trouble providing good wages.

Even families with two working parents are often one slice of bad luck - a medical bill or factory closure - away from disaster. The minimum wage of $5.15 (£2.95) an hour has not risen since 1997 and, adjusted for inflation, is at its lowest since 1956. The gap between the haves and the have-nots looms wider than ever. Faced with rising poverty rates, Bush’s trillion-dollar federal budget recently raised massive amounts of defence spending for the war in Iraq and slashed billions from welfare programmes.

[...]

Dealing with poverty is not a viable political issue in America. It jars with a cultural sense that the poor bring things upon themselves and that every American is born with the same chances in life. It also runs counter to the strong anti-government current in modern American politics.

c.f. The Onion, which makes the same point rather more briefly.

Apparently the FCC have taken a closer look at the figures they were offered to prove that à la carte programming would increase prices. Turns out the figures were flawed, and prices would actually drop according to the FCC’s own analysis.

Predictably, the media giants are howling with dire warnings of even bigger price hikes, mass censorship, outbreaks of bird flu, and anything else they can think of.

I’m getting tired of seeing the same old crappy arguments wheeled out time and time again, so I’ve put together a page on à la carte TV myths, based on thoughts I originally wrote up in a letter to the FCC. (Hey, they asked for comments.)

The prize for worst response has to go to Comcast, who announced yet another 4-7% price hike a few days after the FCC turnaround.

The controversy over à la carte cable and satellite programming keeps resurfacing. The basic problem is that cable prices keep rising, to the point where the basic level of digital cable is over $50 a month in many places. Prices have risen 40% in the last decade.

(As an aside, I’m amazed at the whiners in the UK who complain about paying £126.50 a year for a TV license that gets them the best premium programming from the US, as well as UK TV. I pay $588 a year to get a similar selection.)

Viewers find it galling to pay for a hundred channels when there are only a handful they watch on a regular basis. Hence there has been a campaign to get the FCC to rule that cable and satellite providers must offer the option of à la carte programming, where you can choose to subscribe to only the channels you actually want.

The cable and satellite companies don’t want to see that happen, as it would eat into their fat profits. Since the same companies own a lot of the mainstream media outlets, I’m constantly seeing astroturf coverage explaining why à la carte programming is impossible, would make your cable bills skyrocket, is tantamount to Communism, and so on.

This is my attempt to cut through a lot of the common bullshit spouted on the subject.

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On May 13 last year, we got a fairly hefty packet of junk mail inviting us to apply for Discover cards. Inside was a plastic replica card.

We got another one on May 18. And two more on May 25. And another on May 27, followed by one more on May 28.

After that, things settled down a bit. Another offer on June 15, then a final one on August 8.

So, 8 copies of the junk mail, all to the same address. It’s worse than AOL CDs. I wonder how much money Discover must be wasting?

If James Brown is the hardest working man in showbiz, Richard H. Kirk must surely be the hardest working man in electronica. He seems to be able to effortlessly drop an album or two every year without the quality suffering. I noticed the other day that most of his back catalog is now available from the iTunes music store, generally priced way below what you can find the limited release CDs for.

Meanwhile, Leningrad Cowboys Go America is finally available on DVD…in Finland. Or from an online store in Denmark, which wants $32 plus shipping. Ouch.

TELEX have a new album out later this month, How Do You Dance? (answer: badly). No sign of it appearing in the US. There’s also a single and a video, can’t find any trace of those either. $19 for the CD, plus shipping from France, equals ouch again.

I suppose I should be grateful that Kraftwerk’s complete remastered box set hasn’t appeared yet.

Which contains more bacteria: the ice in your soda at a fast food restaurant, or the water in the toilet at the same restaurant?

A schoolgirl in Florida decided to investigate. You can probably guess the outcome: on average, you’d be safer to drink from the toilet.