Occulomency

Moore's Law

Moore's law states that the quality of any Bond film starring Roger Moore will improve at first peaking at the third one, before taking a sharp decline into shittyness with the forth, then improving very slightly with the next two, and finally being totally crap with the last.

How to build you own computer

I notice that Undeniable is considering building a new computer. So as a true friend, and as someone who is sure that I've missed his birthday, again, 'cos I know it's in April, but I can't remember if it's the 5th or the 21st or some other date. So if you could tell me, that would be good. Definitely. anyway, I digress.

Computers and how to build them. Well it's an arcane science at best, but here's how to do it.

You know, building your own computer is easier than you might think, if you think it's going to be pretty nearly impossible, at least. Then again, if you think it's going to be easy, you may find it more difficult than you might think. It's all about perspective. Even Obi-Wan Kenobi acknowledged that truth is a matter of point of view. Think of Einstein and relativity... Now stop thinking of that and concentrate on this very important post I'm writing whilst waiting for 37 images of breasts to download from our server. Ok, that sounds bad, actually they are mammograms and not nearly as exciting as you might think. But I digress.

All in all, and not beating around the bush, if you think it's going to be reasonably straightforward with some difficult bits, then you'll have got it about right.

Anyway, if you still want to have a punt, here's how you do it.

Ingredients:

One stout box or case to put the works, gubbins and thingamegigs (or Hardware as the layman puts it)

Some 'Hardware' (Transistors, printed circuits, microprocessors, magnetic and optical storage devices, astable multi-vibrators, binary counters, integrated logic circuits, flip-flops, oscillators, capacitors, integrators, comparitors, works, gubbins and thingamegigs.)

Solder, string, wires, glue, nails and stuff like that.

A big hammer.

Instructions:

Well here you are at last, on the threshold of a new computing paradigm - poised to begin construction of your very own computer. Just follow these easy steps and you'll find it all quite simple. Just remember the golden rule : THINK LOGICALLY! If you do, then you'll find about everything quite as easy as if you were easily doing anything at all the same in the easy and even logical things can become if you don't care for, so think LOGICALLY!

Trace the diagram on the left onto tracing paper.

Trace it again on to another piece of tracing paper (this is called 'backing up your data')

Once you have traced it out, carefully redraw it at full scale onto a large piece of tracing paper. It should come out at about 8ft by 15 ft, so you are going to need a big piece of tracing paper. Say a bit bigger than 8ft by 15ft square. That works out at 120 square feet, which is an unrealistic size for a piece of tracing paper really, so you'd be better off settling for two 60 sq ft pieces glued together. Actually 4x30 sq ft pieces will do, just remember that you need 1114.8364 square decimetres precisely. In other words, you should ask for four pieces of tracing paper measuring 1.2162 metres by 2.286 metres. As a matter of fact, eight pieces measuring 60.81 centimetres by 1.143 metres would suffice as indeed would sixteen pieces of tracing paper, 10.16 cm by 12.7 cm square but only if joined up properly. Actually, come to think of it, it doesn't need to be tracing paper.

You should apologise to the man in the shop where you tried to buy the tracing paper, consider sending him flowers or chocolates.

Biscuits are nice, especially Abbey Crunch.

Copy the full sized drawing onto a sheet of mild steel. 1/8th of an inch thick, and again 120 sq ft. Or again you can glue together several smaller sheets. See above. And actually, you should weld it together as glue probably won't be strong enough.

Cut out the shape from your steel, score the dotted lines with scissors, perforate slots, fold according to arrows and insert tabs. Your case is complete.

All you need to do now is hire a welder to cut a big hole in the back to put the 'hardware' inside.

Assembling the Hardware

Remember, when assembling the 'Hardware' or flashylightywhizzyworkybits as we experts call it, we shall be using lots of string.

I like string, it's so useful.

String vests, string pants, string bags, string is great.

One of man's earliest inventions, yet still very much with us today. I like the feel of it against my skin when I've just showered...

I digress.

Printed Circuits!

This is a highly maginfied view of one tiny portion of a printed circuit, the heart of a microprocessor. Rather appealing isn't it. I love them with all my heart. Actually I like to feel them against  my skin when I've just showered....

I digress.

Let us take a closer look. You will note that the electrical impulses 'E' enters this portion of the microprocessor at input 'I', and it is supposed to emerge at output 'K'. Can you help E find his way to K without crossing his own tracks - and can you find the three hidden lollipops in the picture?

Look, when you've quite finished fooling around, lets get on with  the job in hand shall we? 24 breasts to go.

Trace the pattern of the printed circuit on to a sheet of gallium doped silicone wafer. Etch the substrate with hydrofluoric acid (you may need an adult to help you with this step).

That was only practice, so when the burns have healed, you can progress to the next step.

We live in an age of miniaturisation. Everything is  getting smaller and there  is not much we can do about it, so there you are. Anyway, your circuit must now be miniaturised, so just copy it onto a silicone wafer using 60nm pathways.

Never mind the excuses, get on with it.

Come off it, you know as well as I do where to get access to a state of the art FAB plant.

No, I'm not telling.

GIYF.

Oh, you've found out how have you?

Right. Tiny isn't it? Well, off you go and get your circuit copied onto it.

Well done, you've made your first micro-integrated circuit! It's all plain sailing from here on in. Of course your microprocessor will need a few more of these. Say about two or three million in total.

Calm down.

That's better. Now you can settle down to making the rest of the circuits and getting  them fully integrated onto your silicone wafer. You know it didn't take you that long to make the first one, and the second one won't be quite as difficult. Tell you what, why not make 3 million marks on a piece of paper and cross one off each time you finish a circuit. Say one every 3 months - or even less!

After a while, pack it in.

About five or six years later, you may find the bits a pieces of your unfinished computer, and think to yourself....

Did I give up too soon?
Should I have persevered?
Should I have soldered on?
Should I try harder to finish what I set out to do?

No.

After a few more months, it's time to listen to that nagging voice in your head (or about 3 feet to the left of your head in most marriages), grit your teeth, take the plunge and gird your loins for final assembly.

Glue the remaining bits together nail the integrated micro processor in place (not forgetting to nail on a heat sink), tie the whole lot into a neat bundle and voila! Your computer will be complete.

Or at least, very nearly complete. Before you attempt to switch it on, you need to locate the case. After all these years you have probably lost the original case we made. But don't worry! You can easily find some sort of metal or plastic container which will to. Just stuff your computer into it and leave it out on the pavement, and with any luck, the dustman will empty it. Mine comes on Wednesdays.

Source material for this post comes from the Goodies Book of Criminal Records. Get a copy from e-bay. Funny.

Finally, download the latest Gareth Jones on Speed. You will laugh, I have a vested interest.

My breasts are here!

Travel Bug

I have created, and am about to unleash my first travel bug into the world.

Now where shall it go?

Track it's progress here!

Deliver us some evil

Winston Smith writes to us from Airstrip One complaining that his speakwrite has become infected with Goldstein inspired spyware.

Well we can't have that can we comrades? That would be doubleplus bad.

So, to rid yourselves of spyware, there are three basic programs (all free) that all need to be resident and running on your speakwrite in order to ensure that it is contributing to INGSOC.

So, here are the links:

Windows Defender (don't be sucked into the one-care shite, it's shite)

Adaware

Spybot search and destroy

So, fellow citizens, download the three above mentioned bits of software, run them one at a time and  Bob is the former host of TV quiz  Blockbusters, but  not if your in  Victoria.

Hope this directive from the Ministry of Truth has helped.

Norwegian wood (with fruit)

Yep, Pseudo-geek can't work his Blackberry. Usually this means I'd have lots of fun at his expense (I already have, actually), but I think we need to be sympathetic.

Blackberry, as we all know, is a character from Watership Down, a seditious tome about blaspheming rabbits.

Talking rabbits are an abomination before God, and we must unite to ensure that our children are not exposed to this spawn of Beelzebub. Burn the books I say BURN THEM!

However, using a talking rabbit to retrieve e-mail is pointless, and one would be better off with a PDA or something similar. The crux of the problem is not the rabbit per se, in fact inter alia, the problem is the organization pushing the content to the rabbit. The rabbit can never work properly, unless it is fed the correct carrots. The carrot pushers can't deal with more than one sort of carrot, and so the rabbit will just starve to death in a draw somewhere, and begin, eventually, to smell.

The moral of the story, don't try to do a blog post about technology using rabbits and carrots as metaphors for PDAs and Information Services. It just won't quite work.

I prefer rabbits to koalas...

Domains

I've purchased www.occulomency.co.uk and the domain points to this site. So you can update your bookmarks or not as you see fit as I'm not moving from typepad any time soon.

The reason for the domain name was so I could get some email addresses that were not tied to an ISP, as I'm going to change from Bigpond quite soon. So I'll send out a few emails to tell you of my new email address and the Prof's one too!

Good curry with Kirsty and Dave last night, downloaded 'Never mind the buzzcocks' and thought teh funnay...

Simon Amstell is an evil genius.

Get Firefox

Get it here.

Bit Torrents for Psuedo Geeks

So, bit torrents eh? Well, sometimes it's best just to read things and follow links. So, to get Top Gear, this is what you need to do.

First, get a video player and codecs that actually work. I like VLC media player get it here.

Next you are going to need codecs. Get the xVid codecs here and the DIVX ones here (I know it's tortology, but hey, sometimes it's best to be a completist).

Right, now you can play stuff. Now you need to get a software client that will manage the downloads  for  you.  Enter  stage left utorrent (well mutorrent but I don't do Greek in HTML so....) Get utorrent here and install it.

Right, now to find a torrent file. Use either one of these three, preferably in this order....

http://www.isohunt.com/

http://www.mininova.org/

http://thepiratebay.org/

So, just go to say isohunt, search for top gear. Click on the file you want (hint, more seeds = more speed) and open up the resultant download in utorrent, and Bobs a close relative of your Mother.

It's so simple, you don't even need a degree to work it out.

Ten years transportation

Back in 1895, a German physicist of the University of Würzburg, who, on November 8, 1895, produced and detected electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength range today known as x-rays or Röntgen Rays, an achievement that earned him the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901. Basically, Wilhelm Roentgen invented Radiology.

Thus. without him, I would never have had the honour of meeting the esteemed Jacques. I will forever be in Wilhelm's debt.

Actually, today marks the tenth anniversary of my landing in this great brown land we call New Holland. This fact has caused me to pause and consider the many and varied ups and downs of my time here, and I have come to the conclusion that the ups so far outweigh the downs, that I can really count myself bloody lucky. Mind you, this was after Juliet gave us a clear 4 and a half hours uninterrupted kip last night so I'm feeling pretty bloody good about everything right now!

Anyhoo, high definition for radiologists.

Go out and get yourself a nice 50 inch Samsung or LG plasma panel. Make sure it's at least 720p (1280 x 720 resolution), and that it supports the HDMI interface.

A plasma panel has far better contrast, a 60,000 (working) half-life and are big and (relatively) cheap. Don't bother with 1080i or 1080p, there is very little content available, no-one is going to broadcast it and most mortals can't tell the difference in side by side comparisons.

LCD is just too damn expensive for the panel size, and size matters. Oh yes. Don't bother with a protector either, poor life span and fecking expensive consumables.

I know this is an about face on my old position on big screen TVs, but technology has moved on and plasma is the way to go right now.

PS. I've just learned  whilst writing this entry that the old principle of my  school of  radiography died  last year  after a  protracted  struggle  with  ill health.  Richard Swallow  looked after me well and talked me into staying on after I had health issues in my first 18 months of studying.

I liked him, he was one of the few people who smoked more than I did, and a friendly ash tray was always to be found in his office.
 

Macs

Don Quixote and I spent the day at in a tent full of ROMPs up at Noosa on Monday. Now none of you are in the least bit interested in what went on there, but we did get to talking about eary computers that we had owned.

Don Quixote came out of the closet (sucessfully, for a change) and admitted that he was a Mac owner in a previous life. Now I like Macs, I don't own one, but I believe that they are the ideal computer for non-geeks (or gentiles as we shall call them). There are lots of reasons for this, but given that my notoriously technophobic mother loves her Mac, I'd say that proves my point.

So, Don's Mac. Introduced in January 1984, The 128Kb RAM was not expandable. Although 128 Kb was large compared to the 32 or 64 Kb typically installed in other home computers. It had ports only for the mouse, a printer (ImageWriter), a modem, an external floppy drive, and a monophonic speaker — all of which used new, proprietary connectors, different for each device. This was an advantage over previous device connections, which were often the same type for different devices; with the new connectors, an newbie user could connect a device only to the correct port.

It contained a 400 kB, single-sided floppy disk drive and had no internal hard drive or other internal storage. At the time, one floppy disk was sufficient to store the System Software, the application you wanted to use at the time and the data files created with the applications. Indeed, the 400 kB drive capacity seemed large compared to the basic 160-180 kB floppy drives common in other computers at the time. However, most users write-protected their System/Application disks and found themselves swapping the system and data diskettes interminably.

The 128K had a  one-bit monochrome, 9-inch display with a resolution of 512x342 pixels, establishing the desktop publishing standard of 72 PPI. The keyboard had no arrow keys or numeric keypad — although later you could purchase a numeric keypad separately — and the mouse had only a single button, a signature of Apple's mice that would continue until the introduction of the Apple Mighty Mouse in 2005.

The unit did not include a fan, making it extremely quiet while in operation. Steve Jobs insisted that the Macintosh ship without a fan, a marketing (not engineering) decision that persisted until the introduction of the Macintosh SE in 1987, after Jobs was forced out of Apple. This was the source of many common — and very expensive — component failures in the first four Macintosh models. The persistent overheating, and the design of the floppy disk drive, led to the nickname "The beige toaster".

The applications MacPaint and MacWrite were bundled with the Mac, other programs including MacProject, MacTerminal and Microsoft's Word and Microsoft Multiplan, eventually turning into Microsoft Excel.

Following the release of the Macintosh 512K which expanded the memory from 128 kB to 512 kB, the original Macintosh was nicknamed the 'thin Mac' and the new model the 'fat Mac'.

 

Apple official specs

System

• Introduced: 1/24/84
• Discontinued: 10/1/85
• Floppy Size: 400K
• Internal HD: none none
• Upgrade From: none
• Upgrade To: 512Ke, Plus
• Form Factor: 128
• Weight: 16.5 lbs.

Logic Board

• Main Processor: 8 MHz 68000
• PMMU: none
• FPU: none
• Data Path: 8 MHz 16-bit
• Secondary Processor: none
• Slots: none
• MIPS Rating: .7

Memory

• Memory on Logic Board: 0.125MB
• RAM Range: 0.125MB to 0.125MB
• RAM Slots: 0 n/a
• RAM Type: ns n/a SIMMs in groups of n/a
• Notes: This system has no built-in memory expansion, however third-party upgrades could take this system to 512K.

Video

• Built-in Display: 9" monochrome CRT
• VRAM Configuration: built-in CRT
• VRAM Speed: n/a
• VRAM Expansion: built in
• Color Bit Depth by Screen Resolution:
  • 512x384: 1-bit
    (1-bit = Black & White, 2-bit = 4 colors, 4-bit = 16 colors, 8-bit = 256 colors, 16-bit = thousands, 24-bit = millions)

    The maximum color depth listed for 640x870 is 8-bit, reflecting the capabilities of the Apple 15 inch Portrait Display

• Notes: Screen size is 512x342.

Sound

• Sound In: none
• Sound Out: mono, 8-bit
• Microphone Port: none

Ports

• ADB: none
• Video: none
• Floppy: DB-19 - Disk Drive Port: 500K baud
• SCSI: none
• GeoPorts:
• Ethernet: none
• Microphone Port Type: none
• Ports: Printer Modem Speaker
• Notes: The serial ports in this system do not support handshaking or synchronous modems.

Serial Port specs

• AppleTalk: 230.4K baud
• Asynchronous: 57.6K baud (maximum rate)
• Synchronous: 920K baud (maximum rate with external clock)

Power

• Source: .5A 105-125V 50-60 Hz
• Consumption: 60 W or 205.2 BTU
• Battery Type: 4.5V alkaline, #523

Software

• Addressing Modes: 24-bit
• Original System Software: 0.0
• Original Enabler: none
• ROM ID: $0000
• ROM Version: n/a
• ROM Size: 64K
• AppleTalk Version: n/a

(Wiki tells you so much!)

Now at this point, I must add that Don Quixote has the bare faced cheek and audacity to refer to himself as a pseudo geek.