Spontaneous Monotony

It seems that self-styled ‘anti-fascist’ protestors have delayed the exercise of the right to freedom of speech by forcing their way into a building, and threatening members of the audience.  Nick Griffin and David Irving hold contemptible, even illogical, views. Stopping them from speaking, however, is much closer to the definition of fascism than anything the BNP have done. The right to freedom of speech is one of the most fundamental principles of democracy - it is easy to support freedom of speech for those you agree with, but EVERYONE has the right to freedom of speech, including those who hold hugely unpopular views. I would greatly appreciate if those who are intent on trampling democratic rights would sod off to a country that is more in step with their view of freedom of speech - perhaps Pakistan, China, or Iran?

You might remember my positive assessment of the Asus EeePC. Well thanks to eBuyer and CityLink my Eee has now arrived. The default OS looks great - my only mistake so far has been clicking ‘documents’ expecting my home folder to appear and instead getting OOo Writer. Learning a new interface is fun though (if you’re a geek like me) and it was my own dumb fault (given that the icon was a pen and paper :P).

The Eee is, so far, everything I’ve expected - it connected to the WPA wireless router upstairs (getting, I might add, a better signal than my Buffalo USB stick-equipped desktop which is on the same floor as the router. Writing this blog entry on it, in fact.

Apparently the Asus EeePC launches in the UK on the 13th of November (Tuesday). For those of you who are getting one - and I suspect there are a fair few, given that it is still my most popular post - here is a link to a UK site taking preorders. NB: As with all links, I’m not responsible for anything that happens to you/your computer/your bank details/your cat when you go to someone else’s site. Don’t feel cheesed off at the £200-ish price - we are not being charged double the $200 that was quoted in the original publicity material. The version that the UK is getting is the midrange model - with 4Gb of storage, a webcam, and a larger battery compared to the 2Gb version selling for $200 in the US.

Bear in mind that for that money you’re getting an ultraportable laptop (7″ screen) capable of running full-capability software for taking lecture notes, browsing the web, etc. on the go, and lasting for 3.5 hours of real world usage. The relatively small amount of storage (4Gb) isn’t really a big deal - you’ll have about half of that left (I remember reading 2.3Gb somewhere) after the Xandros-based operating system has taken its share. Since it has multiple USB ports, you could always add another 4Gb of storage via a flash drive - those sizes are going for less than £20 nowadays.

Now that we have the full details of the Eee PC allow me to repeat my balanced, objective and utterly academic evaluation of its capabilities: me want

EDIT: Me have, or at least I will on Monday when the Citylink guy shows up. Got one of what seems to be (from the fact that they’ve now removed the product listing) eBuyer’s only stock of them for the forseeable future.

It turns out that Tesla Coils aren’t just useful for defending your base from enemy tanks, they can also be used as musical instruments. Those of you old enough to remember dialup (*shudders*) will know what a Midi file is. Who would have thought that the playing of a Midi file would end up being a hugely popular video on
YouTube linked by the likes of Gizmodo? Well that’s exactly how these things work:

The music that you hear is coming from the sparks that these two identical high power solid state Tesla coils are generating. There are no speakers involved. The Tesla coils stand 7 feet tall and are each capable of putting out over 12 foot of spark. They are spaced about 18 feet apart. The coils are controlled over a fiber optic link by a single laptop computer. Each coil is assigned to a midi channel which it responds to by playing notes that are programed into the computer software.