Daily Photo

The television special that never existed, honest doesn’t actually have a lightsaber battle between Luke and Vader in it. Check the script yourself! You may need to poke your eyes out with a spork afterwards.

Or worse, feel an urge to obtain a bootleg copy. Here, I’ll help you because I love you so much!

Some spinoffs are less worse, such as the 1980 album by Meco, narrated by Anthony Daniels as C3-P0.

Compared to this, Star Wars Christmas ornaments are merely a gentle cuddle to the quality of the epic. After all, there’s still George Lucas officially trashing it with the musical.

Photo: “A very nerdy Christmas” by Ginnerobot, taken December 8, 2008 with a Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT. CC by-sa 2.0.

USB is achieving increasing success … as the universal source of a convenient five-volt power supply. A USB mini-B power plug is now standard for Chinese-made mobile phones. My cheap and crappy cheerful MP3 player recharges through it as well as being a flash disk.

So we get a vast selection of these things, churned out in ridiculous quantities by factories in China. Anything whatsoever that can run off five volts, whack in a bit of flash, profit!

(We have one here, bought for £1 from the high street. My toddler loves it.)

Some of the stuff they make is w0rnger more creative than others

USB 3.0 will give more current, but wants to take it down to four volts. This’ll be fun.

Photo: “USB tree” by Florian Boyd, taken 20 December 2008 on a Panasonic DMC-FX01. CC by 2.0.

mfabbri presents you with an ASCII Christmas greeting, from 2007, screenshotted from what appears to be GNOME Terminal on Ubuntu.

I used this picture because I particularly like the background picture of high clouds on the terminal. It makes it look like a blackboard with lots of leftover chalk. Not ideal for readability (I use black text on a slightly yellow-tinged off-white background in Konsole myself), but really quite pretty.

(As for that brown Ubuntu theme, though …)

Update: He’s also done a 2008 version that’s animated!

Image: “nerxmas” by mfabbri, screenshotted 24 December 2007. Image CC by-sa 2.0, screenshotted software GPL v2 and LGPL v2.1.

So we had this ancient IBM Thinkpad 560X. A lovely device from 1997, tiny screen but full-sized keyboard that’s very nice to type on. Pentium MMX (not Pentium II, but original Pentium) 233MHz and 96MB memory, expandable to 160MB if you could find the ridiculously rare memory modules that actually worked properly (hit-and-miss per machine).

So it was playing up, so we spotted a pallet of five in the eBay wholesale and job lots (an amazing and frightening place) for £250. Going rate for a 96MB 560X was around £80, so this was probably a good deal even if some were DOA. As it was, all worked perfectly — the photo is of all five of them running memtest86. We sold a couple and kept the rest to play with.

They’re all but useless these days, but the keyboard is so nice. I’m tempted to gut one and wire an Eee 701 into the body.

The title comes from my girlfriend calling her Thinkpad A30p Servalan. These would be Servalan’s private guards, a squadron of cybernetically-enhanced Mutoids.

Photo: “cimg1224” by David Gerard, taken 5th October 2004 on a Canon EX-S20. All rights reserved.

This was put up as an ad for people to buy the thing from Lovestruckrobot’s Etsy shop. It’s cool enough that I’m happy to give them a free ad without even being asked.

What would you be communicating with this? Apart from “Hi, I’m a geek, tell my chest about your latest cool project.” Are you collecting feeds from others around you, sucking them directly into your heart? Do other people double-click on your sternum to subscribe to updates on your life? That’d be a good interface for the OpenSocial network, to go with the free shiny colourful Google outfit that enhances your life amazingly and also transmits your cellular structure back to their marketing department. (I think we can forget the polyester Zunewear.)

Photo: “RSS Necklace” by alex lee2001, taken 11 December 2008. CC by 2.0.

maser loves u is a Dublin-based artist with a penchant for stencil graffiti. Quite clever stencil graffiti, as seen here — adopting a deserted shopfront as his own. Now he just needs an exhibition in there.

You need to look through his entire photo stream. His web site is here and he has blogs here and here.

In today’s news, a water maser has been detected in the far-off quasar galaxy of MG J0414+0534, 11.5 billion light years away. The most distant and earliest known water in the universe. Smile, maser loves you!

Photo: “Smile, Maser Loves U” by Jaqian. Taken with a Fujifilm FinePix S5500 on July 25, 2007. CC by 2.0.

5unny d@y — 5t@y1ng 1n5ide 2 p1@y
0n my w@y 2 wh3r th@ byt3s r 5w33t
C@n j00 t311 m3 h0w 2 g3t, h0w 2 g3t 2 133t 5tr33t?

This Leet Street is in Invercargill, on the southern tip of New Zealand. Leet St is not actually overwhelmingly ’l33t. Oh well.

Other Leet Streets are in Allen Park MI, Lena IL, Washington PA, Sewickley PA and, of course, Leetsdale PA. Does anyone have any idea who the Leet or Leets the streets and town are named after would be? (The Leetsdale Borough Past Pictures page is no help.)

Clouds in the background can dress up any photo.

Photo: “Leet St” by Glutnix, taken 3 January 2006 on a Nikon E3700. CC by 2.0.

“For my god son. Gotta nerdisize him before he learns to speak.” — Nicolás Sanguinetti. As far as I can tell, the one he got him is this one from ToyVault. ThinkGeek, of course have some for your rear view mirror.

My own daughter (nineteen months old) got into her mother’s box of dice this morning. Lots of shiny gemlike d20s that look like sweets and that we had to keep out of her mouth. Lots of d10s and d100s from Wh*te W*lf games. There were even a few of the really weird ones that only have six sides.

Photo: “Plush d20!” by Nicolás Sanguinetti. Taken in Centro, Montevideo on 28 May 2008 with a Sony DSC-W120. CC by-sa 2.0.

Valerie Everett took this in Zionsville, a small town of 9,000 people in Boone County, Indiana. (No relation to Old Zionsville in Pennsylvania.) A quiet, clean suburban Midwest town. Abraham Lincoln stopped by on a whistlestop tour in 1861 and nothing has happened since.

This is from a fountain and statue business that has since gone out of business. Looks like brass. You can see Valerie’s other Zionsville photos, including many statues, in the Flickr set.

Watch it when taking your camera out in the cold. Batteries cool down and badly lose capacity, condensation can foul up the mechanisms if you bring it back inside and it reheats too quickly. Just like glasses fogging. If you temperature-cycle it a lot, most compact cameras have a waterproof case available that doesn’t get in the way of the lens.

Photo: “I’m too sexy for the snow” by Valerie Everett, taken 22 December 2007 with a Sony DSLR-A100. CC by-sa 2.0.

So. What’s happened in Zionsville lately?

If anything can go wrong, it will. Sometimes, that will be at an air show with sixty thousand spectators that you’d rather not plough a jet into. This is USAF Captain Christopher Stricklin, of the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds demonstration team, ejecting less than a second before his $20 million F-16C Falcon fighter jet hit the ground at an air show at Mountain Home Air Force Base, Idaho on 14 September 2003. He’d miscalculated a half reverse Cuban eight manoeuvre.

At least the ACES II ejection seat performed flawlessly, and Stricklin was uninjured.

Photo: “Split-second shot” by U.S. Staff Sgt. Bennie J. Davis III, taken on a Nikon D1X at 1/1000 second on 14 September 2003. US Government public domain.

Disgraced ex-Senator Ted Stevens will be remembered forever on the Series of Tubes for having described teh Intarweb as “a series of tubes.”

This device illustrates the concept. “How the Internet works using mechanical routers, balls representing bits and rails connecting terminals that allow input and display of characters based on the order of the bits.”

If you’re running Google Chrome, don’t forget to try the special page about:internets.

Photo “Mechanical router” by Joi Ito (who just happens to be the CEO of Creative Commons) on 1st September 2007 on, so he claims, a Phase One P 45+, which is a 39 megapixel medium-format camera back. I thought it was a rather detailed image. CC by 2.0.

Bad car analogy: this is what a Government-funded luxury car programme would come up with. This is a moderately famous stretch Trabant commonly seen in the streets of Prague. Of course, stretch Trabis anywhere can’t be seen without a flock of photographers.

The stretch conversion wouldn’t be that hard — the Trabant’s body is made of phenolic wood-fibre sheets and is quite light and almost completely recyclable. Here are some videos of them being made.

Running it is another matter: “The engine, a tiny two-stroke model similar to a moped engine, made up for its pitiful weakness by spewing such an astounding quantity of foul-smelling exhaust that West Germany forbade ownership of the Trabant, and when Car and Driver magazine imported one into the United States to test it, the Environmental Protection Agency wouldn’t let them operate it on public streets.” (Mark Frauenfelder, World’s Worst.)

Getting a job promoting a tacky strip club is probably a step up in the world.

Photo: “Stretch Trabant” by Jean & Nathalie, taken with a Pentax Optio WPi on 16 November 2008. CC by 2.0.

The quality and intelligence of graffiti is inversely proportional to the difficulty in putting it wherever it is. Dangerous spots on train lines? Misspelt tags. Quiet abandoned swimming pools? Computer scientists with spray cans.

Marshall Astor found these at Angels Gate Pool, an abandoned swimming pool in Los Angeles. It was originally built for the local army base and used as a community pool for a short while after the Army gave the land to the City of Los Angeles, but was closed owing to fears that the crumbling retaining walls holding up the hillside would give way and the pool would slide down the hill! It’s been out of service for over twenty years.

Until about 2005, the pool had been relatively free of graffiti. So it’s nice they’ve got some people of culture and knowledge decorating it.

Angels Gate Pool will probably come back into service before Perl 6 is released.

Photos: “Angels Gate Pool — Perl” and “Angels Gate Pool — Perl 2” by Marshall Astor — Food Pornographer, taken on 31 August 2006. CC by-sa 2.0. Title from, of course, XKCD.

Of course nerds reproduce. This is what happens: kids with better outfits than anyone.

Star Wars is an epic adventure story for kids anyway. I have no doubt these two were having the time of their lives at the San Diego Comic-Con 2008 Nerd Prom.

Putting a little girl in a Darth Vader mask is just asking for trouble. Particularly a hot pink one with a tiara and veil. I think of my own toddler daughter’s determination and wilfulness and occasional tendency to cling lovingly to Dad’s neck around my throat. Miss Vader’s brother appears to be a teenage mutant ninja turtle with a lightsabre. I’ve probably guessed wrong.

Photo: “SDCC08 208″ by Terri Hodges. Taken on a Fujifilm FinePix A400 on July 27, 2008. CC by 2.0.

The Large Hard Hadron Collider was launched in September. In honour of the day, my girlfriend baked some cookies. Of course, I had inspired her earlier in the day. Note the gold ring.

Today the photos came out showing the damage from the liquid helium boiling over when a wire lost superconductivity, pushing magnets weighing tons half a metre. This used to be lined up properly. The damage an ill-considered hadron can do! Not subtle, are they.

Ah, but don’t go home with your hadron
It will only drive you insane
You can’t shake it (or break it) with your Motown
You can’t melt it down in the rain.

Photo “Hardon Collider Cookies!” by Arkady Rose, taken 9th September 2008 on a Canon Ixus 400. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Rockets? You don’t have rockets. Space shuttles, cheap orbiters, SpaceX … all these are mere clockwork toys compared to the might of the Saturn V SI-C first stage and its five F-1 engines. Real astronauts fly to the moon.

That’s an actual test vehicle which was on display at the U.S. Space Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The engines measured 19 feet tall and 12.5 feet at the nozzle exit and burned 15 tons of liquid oxygen and kerosene each second to push the Saturn V off the launchpad. “At 364 feet (111 m), the Saturn V is just one foot shorter than St Paul’s Cathedral in London, and only cleared the doors of the VAB by 6 ft (1.82 m) when rolled out.”

In 2002, amateur astronomer Bill Yeung found a suspected asteroid orbiting Earth. It had a spectrum matching titanium dioxide white paint. Tracking the orbit back showed it was actually Stage III of Apollo 12, the second rocket to the moon.

“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department,” says Wernher von Braun.

Photo: “Dr. von Braun Standing by Five F-1 Engines”, date unknown (1960s/1970s?). US Government public domain.

This shot shows the Aurora Australis from the Space Shuttle in May 1991, at the last peak of the geomagnetic maximum. This is somehow even cooler than seeing it from the ground.

NASA serves up the best cool space photos ever. Mostly US Government Public Domain as well! That’s why Wikipedia is full of NASA photos and not European Space Agency photos — NASA says “use our stuff! please!”, ESA says “all rights reserved.” ESA later had the gall to complain that Wikipedia used NASA’s images rather than theirs.

See also the NASA Johnson Space Center Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth.

Photo “Aurora Australis” (STS039-342-28) from Earth Observatory Image of the Day. Taken on Kodak Ektapress 5030 ISO1600 negative film with a 35mm Nikon, with great care. Here’s the version without colour correction. US Government public domain.

Melt seven candles together for the Binary Birthday Candle: “The only birthday candle you’ll ever need.” Designed to be suitable for birthdays from ages 1 to 127. Oskay has even posted a walkthrough for making your own.

(Needless to say, the geeks responding to his blog post have gone wild with feature requests.)

There’s also the more obvious approach, clear from across the room. Who hasn’t gotten an “I AM 2″ badge and an “I AM 1″ badge and put them together for someone’s twenty-first? No, just me then? Never mind.

Photos: “Binary Birthday” by Oskay, taken 19 November 2008 with a Canon S3 IS, CC by 2.0; “Geeky Birfdai cake” by Fifikins, taken 24 October 2008 with a Canon Digital Ixus 90 IS, CC by 2.0.

People often need to create network diagrams. Some server rooms are, of course, harder than others. Some software even claims to make it easy. I tend to work more directly with graphics primitives myself.

But all of these use computers — the very tools that got us into this mess. Karin Dalziel decided to take the opposite approach: raise the napkin scribble to new heights of sophistication. It works very nicely in a blog post too. It’ll be quite a while before Visio’s that good.

Painting: “A painting of my home network (in progress)” by Karin Dalziel, CC by 2.0. Medium: uh, water colour, acrylic, sharpie …

The right camera is the one that you want to carry everywhere and that makes you see the world in photos ready to be taken.

I was chatting with x-eyedblonde (of this image) about this. Her Canon PowerShot G9 is not my idea of convenience, but it appears to be hers and has the right effect on her. A friend has a Kodak, and I wouldn’t recommend a Kodak digital camera to anyone (too pricey for too mediocre a camera), but it does this trick for her. So it’s the right camera.

My previous camera, a Canon Ixus 50, had this effect for me. A good camera, small enough to fit in my pocket, I knew its behaviour and it kept getting me to use it. The one before was a Casio Exilim EX-S20, which is so tiny it would have been a spy camera fifteen years ago, but is a pretty mediocre camera so didn’t do that for me. My current camera is a Fujifilm Finepix F20 (a cut-down model of the F30), which I bought for its incredible low-light powers, but it’s a bit big and somehow doesn’t do it for me, even though I still carry it everywhere.

What’s your favourite camera? What camera makes you just want carry it everywhere and take pictures all the time?

Photo by David Gerard, taken 25th October 2007 on a Canon Digital Ixus 50 without a damn flash at the Elsinore in Whitby. All rights reserved. Simon carries a Canon EOS 400D with battery grip and 28-135mm f/3.5-4.6 IS lens. He has a PowerShot A470 in his pocket and an old Ixus 330 (that I sold him) as backup. Jane carries an EOS 350D with Canon EFS 18-55mm lens.