Michael Saunby

I took the uniselector clock with me and it was quite a hit, much photographed and now featured on several blogs, here are some -

The Wireless World - August 28th, 1936

Stereoscopic Projection by Polarlised Light

Experiments in Manfred von Ardenne's Laboratory

AT this year's Conference of the German Society for Photographic Research, in Berlin, a paper was read by Dr. Haase, of Jena, on new polarising filters and their applications. During the subsequent discussion it emerged that more exhaustive tests and measurements on stereoscopic projection, with the help of the new filters, had been carried on in the 'Manfred von Ardenne Laboratory. At a demonstration at the Lichterfelde laboratory an opportunity was given of seeing the almost startling results given by this solution of the "plastic film " problem. The optical quality of the pictures shown was so good that one felt oneself to be actually standing in the midst of the scene portrayed on the screen.

The idea of obtaining stereoscopic pro-jection by the use of polarised light was, as von Ardenne mentioned at the demonstration, suggested by Anderton a good many years ago. Practical application of the principle, however, failed because at that time there were no suitable polarisers available.

Polarisation Filters

It was not until the appearance of the new " polarisation filters " which have only been on the market a few months that it was possible to produce polarisers in the form of apparently ordinary spectacles, which, however, thanks to the correct orientation of the two "filters " forming the glasses, enable each of the two eyes to pick out only the appropriate image from a composite picture of two images thrown on the screen, each with its light polarised at right angles to the light of the other. Since the image visible to one eye vas photographed by a camera situated a little to the right or left of the camera photographing the image visible to the other eye, the effect on the observer is to give a stereoscopic picture. With the old-fashioned stereoscope, where the two pictures were side by side, the eves were inclined to strain themselves in bringing the two images together. With the present system there is no tiring effect on the eyes, because the two images are merged together on the screen by the projecting apparatus. On removal of the "spectacles," the naked eye sees only one picture (as the photograph shows). This is "flat," with its outlines double.

Completely satisfactory stereoscopic projection, such as was here seen, demands that the state of polarisation of the light should not be changed at the screen. Demonstrations and measurements have shown that this difficulty has been eliminated to such a degree that from all seats of an ordinary cinema the stereoscopic picture can be seen faultlessly.

All very well, but this is 2010 and I seem to listen to music on Spotify more than any other source and radio programmes on iPlayer.

This week I added a Bluetooth A2DP stereo receiver to the amplifier, and I am very impressed by how well it works. Given that these things are almost being given away (mine cost £15) I cannot recommend it enough.

Not sure what this 1940s telephone was originally used for, some sort of radio telephone link I guess. Anyway it seemed ideal for conversion to a bluetooth phone. With the handset down the original loudspeaker fitted in the dial aperture is loud enough to be heard clearly in a quiet room. I though some extra amplification might be needed, but I got lucky.

The clear glass bezel was in my junk box and works beautifully to allow the bluetooth earpiece blue/amber LED to be seen.

A simple project, but very pleasing.

Update - 9th March. Since posting this Okehampton Castle and Okehampton Primary School have been given their correct locations on Google Maps. Well done Google! Oh and it's now easier to make corrections; see new-way-to-edit-places-on-google-maps.

Which looks so very plausible. There's no castle there though! Switch to satellite view and there's nothing to be seen.

Where is it hiding you ask?

Here it is (or yertiz as the locals say) -

This time from a BBC Radio 4 program. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/8495946.stm

Presumably it's vital to the proper conduct of war and only true soldiers have it.

What I found with organised open plan desks where teams are in tight clusters is that people can become quite tribal, defending nearby resources and establishing their own laws! Examples I saw were almost enforced silence except for agreed meeting times. Something that annoyed me was reduced interest in work in progress by some managers. They could now see who was at their desks working, so progress was assumed. Presumably these geniuses assumed that when progress hadn't been achieved in the past it was because staff were slacking off!

Anyway, the above hardly matters now because over time the need to adapt to new staff arriving, others leaving and projects ending, starting, etc. etc. means that many staff are sitting in spaces that became available rather than shoulder to shoulder with team mates. So 3, or maybe 4 moves on, I now find myself sitting by the entrance door. Not a popular spot, which was why I was able to secure it through a small number of swaps, but it suits me. One of the advantages being that it gives me some of the best notice board space in the building.

Most folks don't spend much time by my desk as they'd be blocking an entrance, but nearly all my colleagues will pass at least one each day, so they can't help but read any notice I put up. They're walking and I don't want them to stop to read, so I've established a routine of posting an A4 page with no more than 20 words in large font that I change frequently. Usually it's a quote from someone famous, but it could be anything that made me think, smile, or groan - depending on my mood.

So to get back to the point I was heading towards in my last post. I plan to extract short quotes from What Matters Now and post them on my desk to share with my colleagues.

Today I read Seth Godin's excellent What Matters Now and felt moderately inspired by several of the contributions. (Seth is the editor, the material comes from a host of thinkers). Have a read, it's really very good, and will hopefully encourage many people to do meaningful stuff. As I read it I knew I wanted, as intended, to share the content.

Now for the story that is likely to take me drifting away from the point of this post never to return.

When my employer moved to a shiny new building near Exeter I was one of the first to move in, as I already lived locally and had been commuting to the old site in Bracknell. I was given a temporary desk in the first block to be completed. A couple of months later I moved to my proper desk with the rest of the team, as did all the other hundreds of small teams that make up our organisation. For most people it was the first time they had ever worked in an open plan office. The hope of management was that putting everyone in one building and teams in large open spaces would make us all more productive and better teams.

Did it work? More soon.....

Here's a press release on the keynote speech by Craig Fugate of FEMA.

Here's the Ning social site for Random Hacks created by Patrick Svenburg.

Here's what I believe to be the official RHOK website on Google Sites. Which is where you'll find the problem definitions.

Here's an interesting blog post from Open NASA.

And now back to look for more useful snippets on Twitter with the tag #RHoK.

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Update

The winning hacks http://www.rhok.org/events/rhok-0/winning-hacks

The winning team http://disastercam.blogspot.com/2009/11/random-hacks-of-kindness-first-prize.html

Here's one to start http://www.frontlinesms.com/what/ (from http://www.janchipchase.com/)

Broadband Global Area Network http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BGAN

EUMETCAST (weather data via satellite IP multicast) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eumetcast

Back in the summer I was recorded by the Antiques Roadshow with the Uniselector Clock. Unfortunately this segment won't now be shown on 25th October. The letter I recently received from the production team states "there are always difficult editorial decisions to make during the editing process to maintain the balance and variety of the programme and sadly, we cannot include every item that is recorded."

has me thinking once again about little nudges that could change the world -http://nudges.wordpress.com/

Back when the Wepoco team (anarchists?) were trying to think of ways of getting weather forecasts to people who really could change the world - poor farmers - we deliberately chose to exclude weather warnings from the service. I'm not sure that we ever properly explained why. Well if you work for a government you very soon learn that governments are very protective of their right (responsibility?) to tell citizens when to panic (and how much).

What we hadn't considered is that once the s**t actually hits the f*n, it makes little difference to those affected who is helping them - speed and quality of service is everything.

So perhaps I can make up for not pushing hard enough on the original Wepoco concept by figuring out how best to use technology and weather forecasts to prevent bad situations getting worse.

0xb7fc2410: ????* Heartbeat Failure 2 (Step 3)

The above line and many, many others came out of the very useful Helix DNA server when I restarted it yesterday. Why? Because once again I'd forgotten than when I reboot my Ubuntu server it doesn't bring up the loop-back device. Hence the command in the title of this post.

VNC, Google AppEngine Java SDK are a couple of other things I use that fail to work properly without 'lo' up. In some ways what is more remarkable is that the Ubuntu distribution itself is so content to work without this widely used (essential?) virtual network device.

Vintage technology up for auction. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8275483.stm

This story both pleases and saddens me.

It pleases me that old tech is being taken seriously. After all, this stuff changed the world way more than (almost) any book, painting, or tune ever did.

It pleases me that in future people might think twice before throwing old electronics into a skip and not consider if someone, somewhere, might like it.

It saddens me that as with so much collecting it is seen as ticking off items on a list - the first TV, computer, pocket calculator...

Then again, perhaps it is made up -

Really? So insects aren't animals any more? When did that happen? Perhaps the reason rodents don't hunt "proper" animals is that mostly rodents are the smallest mammals (proper animals?) about.

Hell - what do I know? I just read stuff and observe things around me. I'm not a "proper" scientist.

Thankfully the web has a plentiful supply of "dead squirrel" pictures to maintain balance.

I'm thinking of using a 1940s pentode, e.g. KT61 rather than a 1930s type.