| Updated at the same time, because it's been a while |
[03 Jul 2008|10:11pm] |
Aww forget it. I haven't posted in forever, and this has just been building up. I haven't bothered editing it and I'm sure there are bits where I just trail off.
Minifest
Minifest was alright. Jen and I got a bit bored by the afternoon and went home. I was a bit disappointed that the café had been downgraded so much from last year. They were clogging up a hallway, and their range consisted of nothing but cupcakes.
The video games were almost entirely smash. Jen wanted to play but it seemed there was some combined Minifest / tournament going on and the gaming was only for serious competitors (who brought their own controllers). Casual play was unapproachable. It was entirely unclear how one was meant to get in any sort of queue for the casual play set ups.
Monkey Island
In a minor bout of contracted nostalgia, I decided to download and play Monkey Island. ScummVM runs the game on modern platforms, and I grabbed the game files from the interweb.
I'd never played the game back in its day, only heard since that it was a great game. Often with these things you really need the context to appreciate it. To some extent this is the case here. The game controls feel clumsy in places, with only a limited selection of verbs that sometimes just don't connect with the action you're trying to perform. I won't fault the graphics - there's nothing wrong with them - but the fonts are pretty ugly and hard to read in some colours.
The story-telling is largely timeless, and is bloody brilliant. There are moments that are laugh-out-loud funny.
There's a game mechanic I really love, but is only used for a small part of the game: the swordfighting. When you face an enemy, you throw insults and comebacks back and forth. You have to learn the insults and comebacks by fighting pirates. When you match a comeback with an insult, you advance. When you insult your opponent they will either fire back the right comeback (allowing you to learn them) or give some poor response and fall back. The insults were written by Orsen Scott Card, and are wonderfully piratey.
I'm slowly working my way through Monkey Island 2, but the game is quite a bit bigger. It's dissolved into a random process of picking everything up and (verb)-ing it against every other thing until something happens. The logic of it just isn't as obvious to me as it was in the first game.
Compact Fluorescent (Energy Saver) Lights and You.
Compact fluorescent light bulbs (the energy saver ones) have been growing steadily more available and more popular. That's great, because they can make a difference (not a huge one, but something) in reducing the energy usage of an average house.
They have a range of advantages over incandescent lights beyond simply their energy efficiency. They are just as easy to install as incandescent lamps and come in a range of colour temperatures. You can get warm yellow ones for the bedroom or lounge, and vivid blue ones for the kitchen. They're physically more robust than incandescents, with thicker glass that is less likely to break when abused.
![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) moya_kordinat posted a complaint about a CF light tripping the house breaker. I realised that a lot of people don't know that while there are good points to these lights, there are also some things you have to be aware of lest you get yourself into a lot of trouble.
Toxicity and recycling
A CF light contains about 2-5mg of mercury. Mercury is a neurotoxin. It can be absorbed through the skin, absorbed by drinking contaminated water or eating contaminated food and it can be inhaled in various vapourous forms. Fish and shellfish has a propensity to accumulate the mercury, which then gets into people when they eat them.
Worksafe Australia specifies a limit of 0.025mg/m^3 mercury in soil for people working with large amounts of earth, meaning one CF light can pollute 200 cubic metres of soil to unsafe levels. The Australian Drinking Water Guidelines specify an exposure limit of 0.001mg/L of water, meaning one CF can pollute 5,000L of drinking water to unsafe levels. The Australian Water Quality Guidelines for Fresh and Marine Waters specify a limit of 0.0001mg/L, meaning one CF light can pollute 50,000L of water to a level it's unsafe to eat the fish from.
So you can't just throw them out. They have to be carefully recycled. This is a problem, because while there do exist a few recycling places in Australia that will take them, they're few and far between, and not very well-known.
Improper use: Light Fittings
There's also the immediate problem of improper usage. You can't just go around replacing every incandescent light in your house with a CF light. Such an act could lead to exploding lights, short circuits and possibly even house fires.
The problem with CF lights is that they're quite complicated devices marketed (and priced) as if they were disposable items. The electronics inside include semiconductors, magnetic elements, high voltage components and control logic. They have more electrical complexity than the average toaster or basic dishwasher. At the same time there's an enormous pressure to make them cheaply. This means that corners are cut and components are usually selected such that they are running at their limits.
One component specifically - the electrolytic filter capacitor on the end of the rectifier - is a common failure point. These capacitors don't do well when they get hot or are stressed. They dry out and as they do so, their performance gets worse, causing more heat. When they die they go with a bang. The way they have to be connected means that there's the potential that when they die they will short out the power coming in to the light.
Electrolytic capacitors are available in a wide range. Some are designed to withstand high temperatures, most are not. The high temperature ones are more expensive. For a given capacitance (the primary specification of a capacitor) there are a range of sizes, and the smaller ones are more expensive. Because of the commercial pressures on CF light manufactures, often cheap capacitors only rated to 50º are used. In fact, in every CF light I've pulled apart, a standard electrolytic (not a high temperature, ruggedised one) has been used.
So you can't let these lights get hot. The problem is that you can let an incandescent get hot. They run with filament temperatures at around 2,000º, so the bulb can be basically as hot as the melting point of the glass before it's a problem.
Light fixtures are almost exclusively designed for incandescent lights. Ventilation and keeping the temperature of the light down haven't been concerns for designers, so many light fittings get quite hot inside.
It is true that a CF light is more efficient and as a consequence uses less energy and pumps out less heat. That said, they do still get hot in the wrong type of light fitting.
The wrong type of light fitting includes any light fitting that encloses the light, any light fitting that covers the top of the light without ventilation holes. Most light fittings recessed into the ceiling don't provide adequate ventilation, as don't most desk lamps, if they're pointing down.
Improper use: Dimmers and Soft Switches
Light dimmers work by switching the power going through them on and off really quickly. The more time the switch is on compared to off, the brighter the light shines.
The electrolytic filter capacitor in a CF light exists to smooth over exactly these sort of bumps. So when you're introducing more, it has to work much harder. It's not designed for this sort of work and the results are the same as the above overheating: explosion, potential short and possibility of burnt down house.
This switching usually accomplished with a device known as an SCR (or thyristor). As a result of the hash realities of life even when the dimmer is set to 'full' the power is still off for a tiny fraction of the time.
With a normal incandescent light, you can't notice the difference between this state and fully on so nobody cares. Some CF lights react badly to even this small pause. Starting a fluorescent light (including a compact fluorescent) requires first vaporising the mercury in the tube - this is why fluorescent lights have starters. Vaporising the mercury requires a big current spike. The small gap a dimmer introduces, even at "full" brightness is enough to make some CF lights repeatedly try to vaporise the mercury causing repeated big current spikes. Short term, once-off spikes aren't a big problem, but when it's constantly happening all the bad things happen (overheating, component failure, blown fuses, very low power factor)
That said, there do exist on shelves now "dimmable" CF lights. They're quite a bit more expensive than the regular kind and I've only seen them in places that specialise in lighting (Bunnings, not Coles). I haven't pulled one apart to figure out what is different about them or test how well they perform.
Some timers and PIR sensors (automatic movement sensors oftenused to switch a light on outside) also use SCRs, so you have to be careful with them, too. If it goes click when the light switches on or off it's probably a relay and it's fine, but if it switches on and off silently it's probably not appropriate to use with a CF light.
Other Issues: Power Factor
Every CF light I have or I have seen in stores has a power factor (PF) of between 0.55 and 0.6. On reputable brands it's noted on the packaging or on the plastic base of the light. Power factor is a measure of how "cleanly" a device draws power from the line. a power factor of 1 is perfectly clean. Lower fractions are worse.
In the early history of electric distribution technological limitations meant that power companies could only really measure the power people were using in watts. That was okay, because most people used very simple appliances with power factors close to 1. When a device has a power factor of 1 all the energy it uses can be measured in simple watts. An incandescent light has a power factor about as close to 1 as you can reasonably get.
A device with a power factor of 0 is something like a mirror plugged into the power point. It draws lots of energy but it bounces it back out the line without having done anything useful with it.
So a 10W CF light with PF=0.5 actually needs twice as much energy as a 10W incandescent would. The extra energy doesn't go on your bill but does have to be generated by the power company and gets dissipated as heating in transmission lines, transformers and in PF correction equipment.
PF is a big issue for power distribution companies. They have to generate all the energy, they have to size all the lines, transformers and switching gear to account for it and they have to put in correction equipment. Buildings that have large installations of low power-factor equipment (including, for example, an office building with fluorescent lighting) are required by electric companies to install power factor correction equipment. The motor on your washing machine most likely has a power factor correction capacitor.
Basic Conclusions
The basic things I want people to take away from this are that while energy saving lights have some great advatages, they also have to be used with more caution than an incandescent light. Most of them should never be put on dimmers. They really shouldn't be used in any fitting that traps heat in. A 10W CF light will use about twice that amount of energy but you'll only be charged for the 10W because of the history of electrical distribution.
Game On
Game on was a little disappointing. Jen and I went on the day everybody went: the day of Yahtzee. I was surprised to see such a huge diversity of familiar faces. There were anime club people, Manifest people, uni people, old friends, new friends, acquaintances and others. Unfortunately, the event organisers clearly had no idea how many people wanted to see the panel. The line of people who couldn't get in but were still holding out in the ridiculously small hope somebody wouldn't turn up and a seat would free up stretched out to about 100 people by my estimate. Most people would have seen that line and walked away.
In terms of organisation, I should note that it wasn't a complete disaster: when you bought your ticket to get into the event you had to ask for a free but additional pass to get into the panel. So it was first in, first served and they did have a strict limit on the number of people they could fit in the room. This wasn't something that I ever saw publicised, though. We only found out about it on the day.
When these tickets were "sold" out at least an hour before the panel I would have hoped that the organisers had the sense to move it to one of the many larger theatres in facility.
The stuff downstairs had a wide range from old games to very new ones. I felt though that the coverage was somewhat patchy. I can't quite pick what it was that was missing - to be fair I'm writing this up a looong time since the event. I think it was computer gaming through the 90s that was missing. There were no examples of those CD-ROM games. I'm not sure Myst was on display, though I may have missed it. I'd have liked to see something like a display of the Game of the Year winners for each year.
There also struck me as a strange impersonal tone to the exhibit. Some of the pieces seemed to have the air of lovingly nerdy possession. To see them out where they could be poked, prodded, used and abused with so little supervision was a bit jarring. I wonder where it lives and whose it it all is. It was like the ACMI people found it in a shed somewhere, trotted it out, whacked up some flyers and took tickets for three months. Next exhibition will be Mexican hats, followed by works of art inspired by the Second Sino-Japanese War, all with the same level of passion.
Still, there were some fantastic pieces. I loved the wire-wrap prototype for the Atari. An original Asteroids machine you could play. A Virtual Boy. Monkey Island, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Infocom Adventure. Awesome stuff.
Indy and the Crystal Skull
I really have to break out of the habit of going to the movies. The experience is sub-par at the best of times. The people talk, the seats are uncomfortable and often don't let you curl up the way you want with your girlfriend, the picture is full of scratches and dirt, the room goes pitch black except for rancid green exit signs shining everywhere and the sound is often waaay too loud.
I knew all this, but Jen and I went to see Indy anyway. We timed our entrance quite well - walking in just as the twenty minutes (I kid you not) of trailers had ended and the movie was starting.
The movie has its moments of fun. The references to the franchise are just the right level of subtle - I felt that that aspect was quite respectful. Ford beings the character back as a man certainly not as young as he once was but with a cheeky boy still somewhere inside.
The physics of the movie, though, are atrocious. This is especially problematic because "magnetism" is a prominent plot element and the movie's treatment of it is mind-bogglingly bad. As if to apologise, it's later implied that it's a special kind of space magnetism. There are terrible crimes against physics peppered right through the movie. Some are also problems with the plot.
5 NAULS
Kung-Fu panda
"Quit, don't quit; noodles, don't noodles."
This movie was quite awesome. Cardboard Tube Samurai awesome. I don't know why I had low expectations for it - maybe I expected Jack Black to be the same character he always is and for that to get tiresome. It turns out he was the same character he always is, but that wasn't bad at all. The animation was great, the voice acting was pretty good (though characters seemed a little isolated from each other, like they were all recorded in isolation). Parts were laugh-out-loud funny. I thought it was a pity Jackie Chan (the monkey) didn't get more than two lines. The moral of the story was thankfully not as saccharine as it could have been.
28 NAULS
Futurama: Bend's Big Score
Oddly paced, as the movie was designed to be split up into three episodes. Marred slightly by a desire to jam every character and reference to the series in as they could, but brilliant nonetheless.
28 NAULS
Amazing Grace
Starring Hornblower as William Wilberforce, following his push to abolish slavery. Long and not terribly interesting, but thankfully less about the Americans than it could have been.
72 NAULS
Asterix and the Vikings
I don't remember Asterix stories being in any way contemporary. Perhaps it's because I was young when I read them but they didn't ever seem to reference current events. The movie tries to do more of that than I'd like. It introduces a new character, too. Despite these modernisations, the movie is not a horrid rape of a classic and well-loved series. The voice acting is a mixed bag. All up I'd call it "pretty good".
15 NAULS
Alvin and the Chipmunks
Is even worse than I expected. -4NAULS
Atlas Shrugged
An impulse buy ago I bought Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. I got about three pages in before the heavy weight of the tomb and it's somewhat ponderous start had me asleep.
So I downloaded an audiobook version. I tried to get a legal version - EscapePod listeners were offered a free audiobook download, but the company involved required a credit card number (even for a free download). I gave up and downloaded it illegally, which was so very much easier.
Atlas Shrugged is one of the longest books written in English. (The audiobook version is 56 hours long) It's longer than Tolstoy's War and Peace. Like War and Peace, it's a literary classic, once being voted the second most influential book (after the bible) in a survey done by the US Library of Congress.
Describing it isn't easy. It's a bit of a rant pushing the philosophy of objectivism. The story mostly follows railroad tycoon Dagne Taggart, vice-president of a trans-continental railroad. She and other industrialists find themselves set upon by an increasingly socialistic political and social environment, and struggle to maintain their businesses.
If you've played BioShock you'd be a bit familiar with the themes. The story of BioShock is heavily influenced by the book.
The conflict is clearly written to show laizzes-faire capitalism is the One True Path and that a regulated economy is doomed to failure. At times I found the book a bit frustrating: I may not be an economist but I understand the basic difference between the extremes of anarchy and totalitarianism in social and economic policy. Often one of the main characters would be presented with the arguments of a socialist regime and the obvious counter-arguments wouldn't come. Like the conversation was one-sided (that is, only presenting Rand's side) throughout the book.
It's also a little blunt in its push for these ideas. The industrialists are all brilliant men, tall and grand. The "looters" are weasel-y and small. It feels overly manipulative in this sense and this weakens the premise - it's a little like Rand's philosophy can't stand on its own in a realistic world, so she creates a world of larger-than-life heros and strawman enemies expecting us to be impressed. It isn't until the last few chapters that Rand presents a character that can actually articulate the opposing viewpoint (the president) and by then it's far too late to make any difference.
The book is certainly long, but the length of the book isn't really misused. Rand uses multiple industrialists to show slightly different versions of her argument. The audiobook version came in 10minute chuncks and I did skip two - there's a loooong speech at the end of the book by one of the characters that basically just summarises the philosophy, but I had understood it enough through the story that it was just redundant. If it were a paperback I'd have just been flipping through the pages.
There are some really great moments in the book. I loved a speech made about money as the root of all evil that begins:
So you think that money is the root of all evil? Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?
And the book is the source of the famous quote:
There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. When there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
"Reading" it as an audiobook was more pleasant than I expected it to be. I could read while riving or riding, or at night with my eyes closed lying any way I liked (which is much more comfortable than reading a paperback in bed.) It is definitely slower, though. You also have the problem of zoning out. When you relise, while reading a paperback, that for the last three or four paragraphs you haven't been paying attention, you can just flip back and read them again. When you zone out with an audiobook you have to rewind and try to find your place. It's much harder.
On balance, though, I liked the audiobook version, and I think I'm going to try a few more books this way.
20NAULS
Banned Game
Ars has a review up of Dark Sector, yet another game banned in Australia. Ben Kuchera's verdict is "buy", and there's a lot about the game that looks interesting. I really hope Yahtzee gets his hands on it to review.
One Year
Jen and I celebrated our first anniversary a month ago. I love her more than I have the art to express and every day I love her more.
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