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I've been meaning to write this post for a little while now, just wanted to say something about James Alden's heroic tackling of an armed robber at Somerfield on Wednesday Dec 19.
Apparantly the chap had raided a number of locations in Withington and Didsbury and struck again at the Somerfield store in West Didsbury; poking a gun in James' back while grabbing cash from the till.
James waited for the guy to get distracted and then spun round; tackling him - though he quickly escaped and as far as I know hasn't yet been caught. And the gun was a non-functioning replica as far as we know.
I guess the key thing is that the way I look at it, it should be normal practice for people to respond to situations like that, as did the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 and part of the reason we don't is because our secular culture causes us to act as individuals: we see that a small minority of people are putting us in danger and that acting together they would be overcome, but the fact that 'I' am in danger means we don't act.
So why did James respond? My guess is that it's two things: firstly his eco-activism means he's used to doing what others don't have the guts to do - stand up to those in power when what they're doing isn't right. Secondly, his Christian faith gives him a different perspective on life, one where risking your life is sometimes reasonable, and which affects his psychology at a deep level.
As James said when he met us up at the pub a day later: "I almost met my maker yesterday" before casually starting on his pint.
I've done a Video project using a DVD Camcorder. It was a nightmare. Read on.
I videoed a showcase production for a friend last Saturday using a Sony DVD91E Camcorder.
Aside from the low quality - which was even worse than normal because I had to use LP mode - you have to bear in mind that the disks will act as gyroscopes when you move the camera - they will be extremely sensitive to camera shake and twist. So, I finished the filming and took the disk home. It was an 8cm disk so it doesn't fit in any slot-loading Mac - I had to use an old iBook. But it thought the disk was blank!
Turns out the DVD needs 'finalising'. so then I asked a teacher friend from Ivy Cottage who's school had a DVD camcorder which I picked up on Wednesday. I finalized the DVD (which meant I ended up holding the cam perfectly steady in my hands for 3mins, because it put up a dialog box saying "Finalizing: Do not subject the camera to ANY vibrations." but only after I selected the option (Grrr!!)) Then the disk was too dirty to read properly on the mac, so it took a bit of cleaning. I finally copied the files from the disk, but of course, I can't import them into iMovie, because it's DVD .VOB files not QT movie, .avi or .dv files. It took lots of faffing about until around 11:30pm until I got FFMpegx to convert the file to .dv format (import to iMac, create disk image, create DVD, fix DVD image and recreate etc, download FFMpegx and libraries...).
Awful. In 7 years I never had any problem like that with a tape-based system. Just plug it in, import video. Off I go.
Well, hot on the heels of the eeePC is the DecTop. 
The specs are a bit lower (366MHz Geode, 128Mb RAM, 10Gb HD, No Ethernet), but DEC will sell you a pack of 4 for $75 each (including keyboard and mouse). This takes the cost of our theoretical platform to around £45 + £85 = £130! ( or £520 for 4).
However, (and this is a big however), the DecTop isn't new. Actually it's an old AMD concept called the PIC, designed for developing countries, which doesn't seem to have been successful in the marketplace. The prices Data Evolution Corporation are offering are in fact sales prices, which kinda implies they'll stop selling them soon!
I'm always on the lookout for OLPC alternatives for Africa. It's actually rather tricky, for the following reasons:
- You really need a low-powered device, something that can be powered by hand or via solar cells. This is because often in Africa the electricity isn't often reliable. Realistically a person could provide up to 466 Watts, so 15 minutes worth of effort can power a 50 Watt computer/display for up to 2.33 hours.
- You need a system which can survive extreme conditions. That's another reason why it needs to be low-powered, because low-power means cool.
- You need a system which uses pretty much off-the-shelf components: standard RAM, pretty much standard HDs.
- You need a system which is low maintenance. This pretty much rules out sending old second-hand PCs. There's 2 reasons for this: replacement parts are hard to find and computing expertise is hard to find.
- You need a system which has conventional interfaces: VGA, USB.
- You need a system which is very cheap. The $100 laptop is currently at roughly $200 which is realistic to donate in 10s of units (£1000).
- You need a system which is based on open source software, e.g Linux.
Not many computers fulfill these kind of criteria. One of them is the Asus eeePC.
Research machines are currently selling them for £169 each for the 2Gb version. However, they are for educational use only.
Another alternative is the FitPC. 
Assuming we have to pay the full whack of $285 (£150) this means we can put together a cheap developing country PC for around £260 (£85 lcd display, £150 machine, £10 keyboard/ mouse, £20 Hand crank PSU).
However we can probably cut this down somewhat. If we sell it through a charity on a non-profit basis we can probably do it for half the price: $143 (£72) and then get the rest of it ex-vat, we get: £72+£98 = £170 for the machines themselves (we'd then have to transport them).
Imperial measurements - what Americans call English measurements - really wind me up. I was born in the UK in the late 1960s and spent my childhood learning metric only to find that decades later most Brits (even ones much younger than me) still use imperial measurements for most normal things and still reuse the same arguments for their continued use.
And it's hard for me to switch over too. I've become used to thinking about liquids in litres (rather than pints or gallons), because petrol is bought in litres and UHT milk cartons / wine / water / fruit juice is too. Temperature is normally metric in the UK (so that's easy). And for a long time I've thought about short distances in metric and it's only in the past decade I've started to metricize the rest of my life.
And I mean, just normal things: I'm 1.7m tall and weigh 68Kg. My church (and my old place of work) is about 2Km away. Nottingham, where my parents live is just over 100km.
The real difficulty has been reading stuff in imperial on the web. Most of the world is metric, but most of the web is US-centric which means a lot of measurements are imperial even when they're technical. I kept finding this on Space.com: it's really wierd reading articles aimed at an international audience; about the latest space developments and seeing it all measured in pounds and feet, miles, farenheit and gallons. It's like - Nasa has been taken over by Torchwood!
So a few months ago I emailed one of the guys there and he wrote back to say:
“This is something you need to take up with the style of the major U.S.
syndicator of news: The Associated Press. We follow their style to be
consistent, and they dictate using only Fahrenheit.”
Yet just this week I noticed they'd changed to including metric measurements! Dave Mosher says they've updated their style guidelines, but it just goes to show that people can change their minds and be really considerate :-) !
Yesterday I got threatened by someone with a big stick about the size and shape of a baseball bat. It's OK, I wasn't attacked, I'm just surprised it's possible to get away with that kind of behaviour in public.
I was cycling home from Stockport*
View Larger Map and as I got to the crossroads at Parrswood road / Fog lane a guy in a parked car opened his door right in front of me. So I shouted "Watch it!" and he swore at me to shut up. So I yelled "You don't have the right to tell me to shut up!" and he grabbed something like a baseball bat from his boot* and started to threaten me with stuff like "Come over here and I'll smash your F***ing face in!"
I declined. I was several metres ahead of him; toying with the idea of jumping the lights (which were still red), but I still held my ground and eventually him and his verbal obscenities went into the nearest house (presumably to show off his fine lump of wood).
So that's it really. I reported the incident to a Community Support* police officer. The thing I'm thinking is that hey, there were lots of witnesses, but would they have got out of their cars to help? I think ultimately most of us are too scared to risk ourselves in the face of intimidation and that's why it works. But really it should work the other way round, there's more of us than there is of them!
[* Stockport is in the UK. The Boot of a car is the 'Trunk'. Community support officers are volunteer police]
