Month: December 2007

eReader arrives in Australia – at a price

I was surprised recently when I heard the the Australian book chain, Dymocks, was thinking about getting into the digital book world. Today it announced that it would be selling the iliad in it’s stores, for AUS$899, wow! That’s a bit rich!

I had been dying to get my hands on an eReader for years. So 6 months ago, when it didn’t like one was going to be released in Oz I bit the bullet and sourced a the Sony e-reader from the US for AUS$500. Then and now I thought I was getting slammed. I have to admit I like it a lot but I think I would have baulked at paying nearly 900 bucks.

It’s great that eReader are finally in Oz but there is going to have to be a major price drop before they can rope in enough early adopters to make it worth their while.

There is one good thing about the Dymocks choice at least the reader they picked can support open formats like HTML and PDF. Amazons offering, the Kindle, is fairly locked down at the moment and may be the reason it fails.

Uncle Owen! Aunt Beru!

Does any one remember collecting names from Star Wars boxes to send away for the Emperor figure because you couldn’t buy him in the shops. Ahh the memories….

Here are figures they never released. My favourite is the matching smouldering corpses of Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru.

Q&A with Bruce Schneier

There is a very interesting Q&A with security expert and internet meme Bruce Schneier over at the Freakonomics page. While the page is a bit lengthy it is a good read and should be read by all, particularly the less internet savvy as there is a lot to take away.

He describes a very effective way of storing and using passwords. It is a technique I have been using for years and usually recommend to family and friends.

Q: How do you remember all of your passwords?

A: I can’t. No one can; there are simply too many. But I have a few strategies. One, I choose the same password for all low-security applications. There are several Web sites where I pay for access, and I have the same password for all of them. Two, I write my passwords down. There’s this rampant myth that you shouldn’t write your passwords down. My advice is exactly the opposite. We already know how to secure small bits of paper. Write your passwords down on a small bit of paper, and put it with all of your other valuable small bits of paper: in your wallet. And three, I store my passwords in a program I designed called Password Safe. It’s is a small application — Windows only, sorry — that encrypts and secures all your passwords.

Here are two other resources: one concerning how to choose secure passwords (and how quickly passwords can be broken), and one on how lousy most passwords actually are.

After 10 years a joke can become a reality

Sometimes I just don’t know. Comedy writers sit down and try to be ridiculous and then a few years later the thing they were trying to be funny about because it seems so unrealistic becomes a reality. The Simsons in the season 10 episode, Make room for Lisa, have the TV in the background with a stupid reality TV show called “When Animals Attack Magicians” :

Magician: Pick a card, any… (noise of animal attacking) Aaaaaagh!!!

Roll forward 5 years and in the wake of the attack on the Las Vegas magician, Roy Horn, of Siegfried & Roy, by a tiger they used in the act. NBC couldn’t believe their luck when they were able to secure the rights and produce a show where Roy discusses the attack and his recovery in Siegfried & Roy : The Miracle. The joke has become a reality.

The same thing happened again with Meet the Parents, there is a whole lot of humour behind the fact that Robert DeNiros character trains his cat to use the toilet instead of a kitty litter. Type “toilet trained cat” into google and see what you get (or this link) not only are people doing it, people are making money off it, there are YouTube videos as well. Again the joke is now a reality.

Finally there was the Father Ted episode, Flight into Terror, when they feature the Virgin Mary Tape dispenser, which tells you how much tape to you and “God Bless You!”. Stupid ridiculous, right? Is it much difference than this Virgin Mary USB flash drive, with beating LED heart. I especially like the :

“Oh Maria, Keep my data safe”

which is inscribed into the halo. All it needs now is a button that tells you how much space you have left and “God Bless you!”

Wrecked AT-ATs and Constellations


I came across this wrecked AT-AT model today over on the Official Star Wars blog. It is the winner of the Starship modeller wrecks competition where the goal was :

the entry reflects any synonym of the word ‘wreck’ in any language (for example, derelict, broken, abandonned, war-weary, busted, beat up, junker, hangar queen, crashed, pranged, in disrepair, poorly maintained and held-together-with- baling-wire-and-prayers all meet the eligibility requirements)

The last airfix model I ever made was also the AT-AT, I’ve always liked it, it is one that benefits from going all out and trying to achieve weathered look (I know Airfix is a company name, but in Ireland at least Airfix was used for any model set, a bit like hoover or xerox). However the above winner is so much cooler, I especially like the ruins at it’s feet. Unfortunetly my original model still lives on a shelf in Ireland. It has been replaced in Oz with the Lego Star Wars version. Which, while not the same, is a different type of cool.

There are other entries in the starship wrecks worth checking out. Another favourite of mine is the wrecked U.S.S. Constellation (from the Star Trek episode, The Doomsday Machine), another airfix ship I had a go at with my mom wondering what the strange burning smells were all about. I always like to see if I could achieve the effect of burned out and destroyed corridors inside the faked superstructure elements.