diary

Japanese robot 'wired to monkey's brain'

ABC News article

The Superest:

The Superest is a continually running game of My Team, Your Team. The rules are simple: Player 1 draws a character with a power. Player 2 then draws a character whose power cancels the power of that previous character. Repeat.

For maximum fun, start at the first hero and work your way from there.

power meter, with qualified operator

With blackle being all the rage these days, we've been wondering if it makes a difference on an LCD monitor.

A CRT monitor has to illuminate each white pixel, so the brighter a pixel is, the more power required. LCDs are different though, as they have a single backlight, and an array of crystals which either block the light from the backlight or let it pass through (or something in between).

The theory here is that the backlight of the LCD is what uses most of the montior's current draw, and that the state of the pixels has negligible effect on this. Because the backlight is always on regardless of the image displayed, I'd expect the blackle website to be roughly equivalent (in terms of power usage) to google.

To test this, I used an AC current meter to measure the power consumption of a monitor while viewing the blackle and google websites. But to start with, I measured the current draw with the monitor displaying an all-white or all-black solid screen.

The instantaneous power consumption figures (in Watts) for the solid-colour tests look like this:

It looks like the pixel colour has a non-negligible effect on the current draw of the monitor. I thought that the "resting" state of a LCD pixel was white, but this doesn't seem to be the case.

Watching a solid black screen isn't much fun though, so to repeat the test with the search engine pages:

So, on my monitor (an IBM L20p, 20" at 1600 x 1200), using blackle instead of google saves around 3.4W.

As part of her new business, Formulate Information Design, the ever-talented Jessica is doing some research into the formatting of data tables, and how to best present data for ease of use.

Because more participants means more accuracy, she'd love your help by completing the online survey. It's 7 questions, and should take less than 5 minutes to complete. The survey will be open until the 13^th of August.

The results will be publicly available when the study is complete; I'll keep you posted!

I'm not sure that I've ever eaten anything that warranted pixellation.

Tony is now blogging.

That is all.

Watch out Mavis Beacon.

The infinite cat project :

It all began innocently enough when a user on an Apple help web site posted a picture of his cat, Frankie, contemplating the beauty of a flower. Shortly afterwards another user posted a picture of his cat bristling at the image of Frankie on the monitor. I decided this was too much fun and advanced the concept as The Infinite Cat Project which is, simply, cats regarding cats regarding cats in an electronic melieu.

Answer:

• Stevens, Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment
• "There are two caveats with respect to line buffering"

• http://svana.org/sjh/diary/2005/02/21#2005-02-21_02

Today Leon bought me a box of Krispy Kreme from Sydney (apparently they've opened up a store in the airport now). A couple of doughnuts later, I noticed this on the box:

Seriously, what the hell? Since when can people start telling me what I can and can't do with my own freakin' doughnuts? Has the 'all your base are belong to us' style of software licensing been extended to foodstuffs now? He didn't say anything about having to sign some sort of doughnut-exclusivity contract.

Or, more correctly, "Leon's own freakin' doughnuts".

Grr.