12 Aug 2005
It didn’t have the SMS voting, vision mixing and live replays output to multiple displays, or driving around in the small hours of the morning that followed, but it was fun nonetheless. Yeah, just another talent quest thing ;)
And yes, the name is a typo, again one that stuck. That kind of thing seems to happen a lot. *Josh glances at domain name, then at Katy*
I took some video with my little digital Pentax Optio that I quickly cut together tonight and then uploaded it to Ourmedia (hey, it worked once, why not again?). Vaguely amusing stuff, even if the quality isn’t technically great: hey, I shot it on a still camera and edited it in Windows Movie Maker because it’s quick and easy and free(-as-in-beer), so purists and professionals can shut up already!
For obvious reasons, that means it’s only available in Windows media format for the minute. You can download the short clip (all of 1 minute 41 seconds) from Ourmedia. (roughly 4.6MB)
11 Aug 2005
Well, it took me a while, but I finally got around to a camera-toting expedition to lower campus as suggested. Comprehensiveish photo evidence follows.
Just like the original photo only crunchy focused better. Because my camera is not a phone. *nods* ;)
It’s really a glorified 7-11 or a vending machine that does notes and credit cards, and has cereal in stock. Yes, cereal.
I presume you put your card in the slot labelled “Notes”… I didn’t actually check. You can’t quite see it when the photo is scaled down that far, but there’s actually someone’s mobile number listed next to “Info” at the bottom of the screen… would you put your phone number on a vending machine? Ah well, at least it’s not selling prepaid credit (yet).
10 Aug 2005
Category: Geek. Decidedly geek. Yeah, I’m talking about cables.
So we were patching an extension to the phone system here today (no, no more phones, don’t worry… just an extension for an existing handset), and for some reason were using some seriously weird STP cable. The S stands for solid. This stuff is very solid.
The second photograph is probably better (though the first is far prettier — which was actually the only reason I shared it, sorry low-bandwidth visitors!)… you can clearly see that the STP cable (shielding and core) is nearly one and a half times the diameter of the standard (boring) ivory cable that we mere mortals generally use for telephony hookups. Which creates problems.
The back of this standard RJ11 connector allows the STP monster cores to insert up until the final section that guides individual cores to position under the pins — at which point it is simply too thick to continue. On the other hand, the normal (boring) ivory cable (that mere mortals use) moves unimpeded to the end of the lug without difficulties.
I haven’t got photo evidence to back up this claim, but the same is true of standard RJ45 connectors/lugs. This cable is truely… odd. Because it’s an STP cable with solid orange/white orange solid blue/white blue pairings, and seems in nearly all other respects like a network cable (albeit lacking two pairs)… but its cores are bloody enormous!
Trivially, it seems like the actual conductor in this souped-up cable is smaller than its standard counterpart. And it’s made out of tin. So it’s probably a worse cable, though my multimeter’s battery died (and I haven’t got any spares) so I couldn’t actually test impedence.
So. Does anyone know what this thing is? Got me stumped. And vaguely frustrated.
In the end I terminated it to a wall plate (because the odd stuff was of course what we used to do the long run in a cavity) and made a short RJ45 to RJ11 patch (because I didn’t have any RJ11 wall plates), thus avoiding all kinds of complications, but it’s more curiosity at this stage than anything else.
09 Aug 2005
Click on the images above to access a high resolution version of the same image, suitable for non-commercial usage stock or desktop wallpapers. For additional rights, feel free to get in touch.
09 Aug 2005
Due to an alarming rash of elevator-related accidents, the United States Congress recently declared the month of October to be National Elevator Safety Month. In the interest of promoting elevator safety awareness and educating the public about proper elevator riding techniques, I’ve created this page of elevator safety tips.
– http://www.monzy.com/elevator/
