How To Spot A Psychopath

That’ll learn me.

My current main computer has a couple of gigabytes of fancy Corsair “XMS3200″ memory in it. The really fancy kind, with the almost useless dancing LED bar graphs on top.

It would appear that the useful life of one of those two modules, in almost constant use, running within spec at unremarkable temperatures, is about one year.

Ending… now.

There I was, peacefully composing an e-mail, when I was confronted with a blue screen. But a much worse one than usual. This one was dark blue, in big-scanlines text mode, and there was nothing on it. Not a thing.

Just blue, on both monitors.

Restart computer, get long repeated beeps. Which my kung fu tells me means a memory error.

Remove fancy RAM (taking opportunity to Rocket-Air a chinchilla or three worth of dust out). Leave boring RAM. Computer boots again.

(The boring RAM is the Geil stuff from this old review. It hasn’t been used for nearly as many hours as the Corsair modules were, though.)

I’m down to a gig now. A gig, man. Jeez, man, I’m hurting here.

Actually, the silly LED graphs may actually have a function in this situation. Perhaps it’s the module that has one amber LED flickering on power-up that’s died. I’ll do a bit more module-shuffling to identify the dud one - dual channel mode still works with one 512Mb and one 1Gb module (identical modules are not necessary, just recommended).

[I’ve done that now, and so am back up to 1.5 lopsided gigabytes of dual channel RAM, with one 512Mb Geil module plus the one remaining Corsair. With only one Corsair module at a time, the LEDs didn’t do anything different on the bad module.]

M’verygoodfriends at Aus PC Market have an instant swap lifetime super-warranty for Corsair RAM that’s been purchased from… just about exactly when I purchased this RAM, as it happens… but they don’t stock these exact modules any more, so I may be waiting a bit for a replacement. No donations should be needed, however.

[Regrettably, it turns out that you can’t return just one module from one of these Corsair pair-packs for a warranty replacement - it has to be both. I suppose that makes sense for all of the overclocking kids who at least think they need perfectly matched RAM, but I still think it’s kind of stupid to have to return a perfectly good memory module. I wonder if I’ll get something faster back?]

Incidentally, if you find yourself in a similar situation, it’s important to make sure your new module - whether you’re getting it under warranty or not - is good old “standard density” RAM, not the newer off-brand “high density” stuff that’s sneaked into the 1Gb-and-bigger DDR module market, at a considerably lower price.

High density is cheaper, essentially, because it’s crap. It breaks JEDEC specs to save a few bucks, and it won’t work with a long list of motherboards, including pretty much anything made by Asus or Dell.

(Hey! A Dell-incompatibility problem that isn’t their fault! Call the papers!)

UPDATE: I found another couple of 512Mb modules kicking around the place which gave me a decent-enough 2Gb, and so I took ages to get around to sending the RAM in for a warranty replacement. And, technically, it was a couple of months too old to qualify for the warranty here in Australia. But I still got a replacement (and without any do-you-know-who-I-am review-site customer service enhancement, either).

The replacement RAM took a month to arrive, though, presumably because the Australian distributor bounced the RAM back to the States for replacement. Still, I can’t complain.

My replacement RAM is the same as the old stuff - XMS3200-with-LEDs. So the packaging has lots of “Best RAM of 2003!” awards printed on the back of it.

Way to make me feel old, guys.

So Penny Arcade has been screwed up for, oh, hours now, with no comic to go with the most recent news. No doubt it’ll be fixed soon, but I just wasted a couple of minutes seeing whether I’d ad-blocked the comic image or something.

I did that because the excellent Pennypacker Firefox extension, which allows collaborative tagging of PA strips to replace the descriptive alt tags they all lost when PA “upgraded” its site, was showing me a bunch of tags under the invisible comic.

I automatically assumed those tags had been entered by people who, unlike me, were able to see the comic.

I guess I should have read them, huh.

Astoundingly, “Firepower, the Perth-based fuel technology company, has … admitted it is unable to produce some of the promised independent tests that showed its supposedly miracle products extend fuel efficiency.“

(I’ll venture the bold prediction that they won’t produce any of the other promised tests, either.)

Oh, and the headline of the article is “Firepower link to dead dictator and former spy”, which is pretty neat in itself.

(My first Firepower post is here.)

The other day, when idly browsing eBay, I found a listing for “POW! The Cannon Game For Boys“.

I suddenly remembered it. That very game had been one of the stack we used to play when we went down the coast for the holidays.

(There was also a large pile of dog-eared 1960s comics, all of which I pored over at very great length. They included a colour reprint of the one that inspired a Mythbusters stunt.)

To be honest, we didn’t actually play “POW!” very often, since it was a pretty dud game. It had little stand-up cardboard soldiers and marble-shooting spring cannons, which sound like a recipe for a diverting piece of entertainment. But the cannons had very little power, and the cardboard base was bouncy enough to make the whole exercise pretty random.

Still, y’know, it wasn’t bad for 1964.

(”POW!” certainly beat the heck out of the two-years-older “Squatter: The Australian Wool Game“, which provided an intoxicating mix of incomprehensibility and tedium to hundreds of thousands of Australian children, possibly as a way of preparing them for the task of filling out income tax forms. If you need a lot of little plastic sheep-head tokens for some other game, though, “Squatter” can’t be beat.)

The vintage also explained the “For Boys” thing. Sexism in toys is still very much alive, but I reckon the 60s was the last time it was actually made clear in big words on the box.

Until today, though, I had no idea that “POW!” had a sister game. Which was largely the same, but at the same time completely different.

I give you: “WOW! The Pillow Fight Game For Girls“!

If you’ve got your font sizes set larger than normal (in this case, because your 17 inch screen has 2304000 pixels), and you accept Microsoft’s strong recommendation that you install IE7 (yes, Firefox is the default browser), the why-you-should-install dialog will not look the way Microsoft intended it to.

It will look like this.

I think the mangulation is in a particularly apposite spot. I don’t know about you, but I’ve always thought IE had a very look.

Janez Jevnikar, possibly the world’s fastest producer of panel van art:

(Via, via…)

Actually, that’s unfair. Jevnikar’s stuff, much more of which you can see on his site, is not nearly that hideous. There’s not a Chick Riding A Reptile to be seen (see also).

He does seem to have a thing for pyramids, ringed planets, force fields and craggy mountains, though. Fair enough; so do the cover artists for the books which I, like Gabe, favour.

You may have seen this.

Thermite is not an explosive, but it can do a very good impression of one if there’s water in the area. Or ice.

(Oh, and do try to ignore the YouTube commenters and their d00d-this-is-what-s4ddam-used-to-bring-down-the-WTC theories.)

The clip’s from a German show called “Clever!“, which has its own video page here.

Any time I see a big-boom TV-show science demonstration these days I can’t help but suspect it was faked, thanks to the scumbags at Brainiac, but this one does seem to be genuine.

I mean, forget water. Thermite will explosively boil zinc.

The bit at the end of that video is quite a bad idea if you’re not wearing eye protection. And I’d keep my mouth shut, too. Violently heating any stone-like material can result in steam pockets inside it firing chips of hot rock at you at considerable speed.

While we’re on a roll, I feel the need for a traditional pyro video, with shaky camerawork and autofocus hunting all over the place while a small thing glows in the middle of the frame.

That’s pretty good. But it doesn’t have a bunch of whooping drunks.

Ah, there you go.

There’s a whole class of thermite reactions. The iron oxide and aluminium one is just cheap and powerful.

Here, for instance, is copper oxide and zinc:

The pros ignite their thermite with super-sparklers made for the purpose, which are easier to light than magnesium ribbon, fatter and hotter than standard sparklers, and very hard to extinguish.

These last two videos are from more Germans, this time netexperimente.de, whose YouTube profile page is here. There’s a decent collection of other whooshes, oozes and bangs there, including a simple demonstration of the classic dust explosion (it’s noisier if you jam the lid on harder…) that Adam and Jamie failed to perform back in ‘04. There are plenty of other classics, too, including a nice version of sugar and sulfuric acid - in which, essentially, the concentrated acid is so thirsty for water that it pulls it right out of the sucrose molecules, leaving a frothy mass of black carbon.

(If you’re wondering what the deal is with the “burning snowball“, it’s a methane hydrate ball.)

And here’s someone melting through a rock with a thermal lance…

…and then burning some pennies. As you do.

Modern US one cent coins are copper plated zinc, and zinc burns quite well if you get it hot enough.

If you inhale much of the zinc oxide smoke, though, you’ll get ill. “Metal fume fever” has influenza-like symptoms, and zinc fumes are the most common cause (welders, who get it when they breathe the smoke while welding galvanised steel, call it “zinc flu”). It probably won’t kill you, but it might.

Regular readers will know that I’m not a big fan of “contextual” link advertising companies. You know - the ones that insert non-standard-looking links into the text of any Web page that’ll have them. The links are meant to be to products relevant to whatever the linked word or phrase says but, actually, would only be deemed relevant by someone suffering a severe aphasic disorder.

(I’m fine with the site owners who decide to run such ads, by the way. You gotta pay the rent, and it’s not as if these ads are delivered by malware or something.)

While reading this review of a new game, I noticed some of the tell-tale funny-coloured links, which it turns out are from the contextual ad company Tribal Fusion, which I mentioned in passing here.

Tribal Fusion “strive to maintain pure, relevant content in each of our channels, and accept only a small percentage of publishers who seek representation“, and they connect advertisers to their “key audience“, on “Hand-picked, Relevant Sites“.

Which apparently results in this.

Thank goodness they’re so selective. It’d be terrible if they let just anybody in.

(And yes, I’m also aware of the shortcomings of the ad text itself.)

If you’ve got a highly questionable investment to sell and are therefore in search of people with a remarkably high ratio of disposable income to intelligence, you really can’t go past sportsmen.

And, in a procedure practically diagnostic of pseudoscience all by itself, Firepower have promised lots of really convincing test results that prove their claims but, so far, failed to deliver.

(In case you’re wondering, “spruik” is a more-Australian-than-English word meaning “advertise”, particularly in the context of making a sales speech to people passing by. Some Australian shops employ “spruikers”, traditionally English (sounding…) people, to stand outside with a microphone and a little amplifier and encourage people to come inside. This is a parody, but it’s a quite accurate depiction of the species. And it’s also aimed at AWB Limited, the previously mentioned scandalously corrupt Australian quasi-governmental organisation that’s loosely connected with Firepower.)

Oh, wait - did I forget to mention that Firepower’s European chief executive was previously the head of Halliburton in Germany?

(First Firepower post here.)

We have three cats, two of which do not care enough about going outside to bother making tiny sad kitten noises about it. The one that does care enough gets to go out for an hour or three a day. The younger two stay in.

Millie (previously), however, does occasionally find the great outdoors interesting.

Specifically, she finds it interesting when there’s another cat out there.

Like the ginger cat that lives next door, for instance.

When she sees another cat, she does a thing.

And this is the thing that she does.

She’ll keep doing it for about as long as the other cat hangs around. Several minutes non-stop, sometimes. Note that the ginger cat is so used to it that he doesn’t even bother looking.

When the other cat goes away, Millie’s walnut-sized brain drops out of Scrabble Mode, and she wanders off peacefully to return to her principal occupation, which is sleeping.