I took this photo in Singapore on our way back from London.
10 Second exposure on a Sony A300. (Flash embedded)

Qantas A380 at Singapore by ~starsky on deviantART

This article is a really good read. If, like me, you are an Arsenal fan,  you have seen the period under Wenger, which has been unusually successful in comparison to our history. In this most recent lean spell without trophies, a large coterie of fans have been calling for blood.  I say, in Arsene we trust.

Read this article if you want more perspective.

The Australian Government is proposing that all ISP’s keep all of your internet browsing history, for possible use in litigation.

I can understand the motivations behind such a proposal, but the end result is that the most serious offendors will remain undetected, as they will already be hiding their activities. Those on the margins, who currently get caught, will be driven into the same behaviour as the serious offendors, and their activities will also become obfuscated.

So my view is that this type of legislation will back fire, and end up reducing the ability of law enforcement to catch offendors.

There is reasonable broad acknowledgement that Global warming is caused, if not at least significantly contributed to, by the burning of fossil fuels resulting in CO2 emissions. In Australia the biggest contributors to our emissions are Hazlewood and Yallourn Coal power stations, representing 40M of our 600M tonnes of CO2 emissions.

The Australian government is talking about introducing an Emission Trading Scheme (ETS), in essence to try and incentivise companies to go green.  Taxes, and then handouts will in theory minimise the family impact of the ETS.

What I don’t get is why people don’t bite off a much simpler solution, and directly tackle the carbon emissions. Raise revenue from all Carbon production, and then to reduce the corporate impact, invest the proceeds from the tax in identifying the biggest CO2 emitters, and then fixing them.

So let’s look back at our Yallourn example from earlier. The owners of the Yallourn Power Plant are saying they can convert the Brown Coal power plant to Natural Gas, for a total cost of $2.5 Billion, and result in a 75% reduction in emissions. Let’s for the sake of simplicity assume Hazlewood is the same. For $5Billion dollars we can eliminate 4.5% of Australia’s CO2 emissions.

Why wouldn’t the goverment just subsidies that conversion, and bring it forward? Or why not just pay for it outright? Sure the price of electricity is going to rise, and probably by 20%. It will probably do the same under an ETS also, but with this solution we would actually make a big dent in the problem.

It seems to me that all the politicians are looking for elegant solutions, when it may well just be easier to throw money at fixing the biggest emitters.

I really wonder what the movie industry is thinking when they expect people to pay $30 to $40 for a Blu-Ray disc. Let’s for a second weigh up the alternatives.

• Movie Theatre – new release film $12
• QuickFlix or Bigpond – 2 DVD’s per month for $10
• Itunes – Buy $25, Rent $6
• Local Video Store – Rent $7-$9

I would contend that people are downloading movies illeglaly because the legitimate pricing is unacceptable.  What I don’t get is why $12 at the cinema is not the baseline? Sure you can watch it multiple times, and share it with your mates, but is it really worth $30? I wonder what  would happen to piracy rates if you could buy digital content to keep (without DRM) for $10 and rent them for $3 (with DRM obviously)?

Would people be more comfortable renting something for $3, and getting fast, safe, and legal access to a movie? Or what about an “all you can eat” plan? $50 a year for as many rentals as you want, and $200 a year for download to own? In Australia people will be limited by their download caps anyway. Maybe the movie companies could host their films, and earn payment from the internet companies for content serving? 

The Movie industry is now where the music industry was 10 years ago. They need to get the digital model right now, one that is consumer friendly, and profitable. If they don’t, they only stand to lose, as rampant piracy becomes endemic.

If you get an error after downloading a ps3 minis game, in my case 80010006 then don’t fret. Some forums have mentioned formatting and the like, but the solution is much simpler. Go ahead and check for the latest system update. Firmware 3.15 is avaialble, and after downloading and installing it, your minis will work just fine.

I am not sure why Sony didn’t make it a pre-requisite to attempt playing the minis, but there you go. A confusing error solved.

Go to the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Media Player NSS\3.0\Devices\

Find the MAC address for your PS3.

Create a new String value called FriendlyName

In the vlaue give it a name.

Simple

You would think that having done all the hard work of making a backup of your Hard Drive (Just in case), and having used the Vista tools to do a Complete HD backup, that dealing wit ha HDD failure would be a relatively simple affair. But if things are not perfect you might be surprised… Continue reading this post…

I just saw this brilliant wine advertisement on one of the news sites I frequent.

The campaign by fifth leg is called “Operation Kerplonk” .

The most original wine marketing campaign for 2009 so far.

I recently bought a new Hard Drive and cloned it using Diskcopy 2.3. Everything appeared to work normally for a few days, and then the new HDD just stopped working. So I put the old one back in, and lost a few emails. No harm done.

So I am going to try it again, but with different software.

People have recommended XXCLONE, but this doesn’t work with Vista
People have recommended ACRONIS true image, but this costs money

So I kept searching, and I found the new Seagate DiscWizardedfa which is based on Acronis, but is free. So if you need to copy your entire HDD ot a new one, you should consider giving this a try.  The new HDD is up and running again. Fingers crossed it stays working.