Burst Attention Span

Richard Hammond, star of Top Gear and Brainiac has been seriously hurt when his 280mph Vampire jet-car crashed. He’s reportedly in a ’serious but stable condition’ in the LGI. I hope he’s gong to be OK.

The accident happened at Elvington raceway, close to where I grew up. I remember hearing the distant buzzing of souped-up run-what-ya-brung Minis and Renault 5s blatting down the quarter mile from my grandma’s garden. While at university, I took my friend’s Mini 1300 down the strip at Elvington a few times, making it to the end in about 25 exhilarating seconds – I can only imagine what was going through Richard Hammond’s mind while upside down at 5 times that speed… with a giant firework attached to his car!

More Hammond firework action… Get well soon!

I’m addicted to looking stuff up. If someone asks me a question that I can’t quite answer, I’m straight on Google to find out. When travelling without a network connection, the immediacy of this approach can be lost. I often search using my phone over a GPRS connection, but that can get expensive, and reading the results on a 2 inch screen is a pain. Enter Webaroo, a free website-packager, not unlike a cross between AvantGo and Internet Explorer’s MHT web archives.

The twist with Webaroo is that they are offering pre-packaged slices of the web, including all of Wikipedia in a 6GB download, as well as a promised 40GB ‘all the web’ package later in the year! Not that it hasn’t been thought of before, and I’m doubtful about the usefulness of a 40GB web archive to me, but the value of being able to grab any number of websites and read them in an airport departure lounge without paying their mad wi-fi charges can not be understated.
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It’s all very well having a super PDA/phone/organiser/Teasmade full of contacts and appointments, but why is it always such a pain in the arse to share that information with another computer, let alone between handheld devices? In addition to getting the right connection cable (or in my case bluetooth adapter for the PC) and proprietary transfer software, you almost always need a copy of Outlook to handle the data transfer – which then acts as a hub for syncronisation to other PDAs. Outlook Express came free with my PC. Does it support syncronisation? No! The full version is required…

It used to be so much easier when I had a Mac. Using the free Claris organiser and its XTND translators I could sync and transfer data in any direction to any format you could imagine including my Palm and Newton devices. This was ten years ago, and I still haven’t got back to that level of control on the PC, although SyncML seems to be a good candidate, if only all the device manufacturers would support it.

Although still quite dependent on Outlook, the writer of this Engtech article has a similar setup to me, and explains how to get all your devices on the same page, relatively smoothly.

Sometimes it sucks to have a job. Some of my mates took their bikes on tour this August and, judging by the accounts of those who did show up, it was a blast! Jealous…

Rejoice, people of the Tau’ri! Great scenes from Stargate SG1 are being enacted by screws and hardware items. Starring all your favourites, including the hard-anodised Teal’c, and General Hammond (played by a nut) and even featuring props like a sarcophagus (actually played by a blister pack for 2-Hydroxy-5-aminobenzoic acid… someone in the team isn’t very well).

Health issues notwithstanding, they’ve also managed to turn out a movie. Genius, with the sound off.

My parents just got a new, cool (and ‘doody’ according to my li’l sister) Skype phone, so now they can talk to me through the computer without looking like they’re on Blake’s 7. I want one too, but none of the ones in the shops are at all ‘doody’ enough for me.

Enter Instructables’ step by step DIY USB Phone. Now, all that’s left is to decide on an ordinary household object to build it into. After trying to decide between a power strip and an old Apple mouse (a la Scotty in Star Trek IV) I realised I could just mix it up with another DIY project seen recently… that’s real doody.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal… apart from their race, location of birth and lifetime income, according to a new study on longevity in the USA.

After dividing the country by income, ethnic group and location into eight ‘Americas’, researchers found a 30 year disparity in lifespan between America 1’s Asian population (see wise old Mr Wing, above) and America 8’s high-risk (1% cumulative chance of death by homicide!) urban Blacks. The 214 million ‘middle American’ majority occupies third spot with an average life expectancy of 77.9 years while black middle Americans can expect to draw 5 years less pension in America 6 [Chart (Washington Post)].
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