How To Spot A Psychopath

Australians will be unable to opt-out of the government’s pending Internet content filtering scheme, and will instead be placed on a watered-down blacklist, experts say.

Under the government’s $125.8 million Plan for Cyber-Safety, users can switch between two blacklists which block content inappropriate for children, and a separate list which blocks illegal material.

If this actually happens, then it’ll be a considerable pain. I’d just switch to using Tor or something to avoid being unable to see “illegal” content (it should be for the courts to decide if a page is “illegal”, of course…), but that’s pretty bleeding slow.

(On account, of course, of the vast numbers of office workers downloading BlackBackdoorBimbosAndTheirBarnyardBeaus27.avi.)

But I’m pretty sure it’s not going to happen.

Similar threats have been made here in the past, and they’ve always petered out into nothing. There are no votes to be won in actually filtering the Internet, after all. The people who vote based on Net filtering promises are unable to tell whether it’s actually happening or not. And there are plenty of votes to be lost when everyone who doesn’t call their browser “the Internet” discovers that they can’t get to YouPorn or Mininova any more.

There’s not even much money to be made in making filtering software that actually works. The big bucks in content filtering were and are based on arse-covering and plausible deniability, not actually stopping anybody from seeing anything in particular.

I confidently predict that this will just end up being another easily-circumvented waste of taxpayers’ money.

There are rats under our floor.

I don’t care about that, per se. I think it’s cute when I put the mouldy end of a bread-loaf in the compost bin and the next day the inside of it’s all been eaten out into a cosy little cave-of-food.

(Anne does not think this is cute in any way at all.)

I think rats are cute too, even ordinary brown ones that want to bite you.

(Anne believes I may need to adjust my medication.)

Unfortunately, though, the rats keep weeing conductively on important parts of the heating system, and chewing other important parts of it.

There are four cats in this house.

So a solution suggests itself.

But that would (a) mean, at best, slow death by torture for little fuzzy creatures which I do not want to eat and (b) expose our own precious furry child-substitutes not only to the risk of loss of self-esteem, should they find themselves unable to catch even the doziest rats, but also to the dangers of the outdoors. Never mind being hit by cars; for all we know, there’s some toxic something-or-other growing somewhere around the house that killed poor Mickey.

So from now on, no cat of ours goes outdoors unless escorted by at least six Secret Service agents.

But the rats have got to go.

So I purchased no-kill traps (from this guy; the traps are cheap and work fine, but they come flat-packed and must be cable-tied into shape). A bit of peanut butter on bread for bait, and bang, one rat was caught in almost no time.

Into the car (on some newspaper…) the trapped rat went, and he or she and I enjoyed a brief but stimulating drive to Kingsford Smith Memorial Park, from the verges of which the rat has by now almost certainly darted into somebody else’s house.

When I got back, re-baited the trap and set it up again, I found a rat in the other trap.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

When I took that second trap back down, the first one was still empty. So I presume we have now caught the two stupidest rats, and will never catch another.

Perhaps we should get a goanna, or something.

I know you were all perched on the edge of your seats about that Moletech, or possibly MTECH, Fuel Saver thing.

Well, The Western Australian Department of Consumer and Employment Protection, or NAMBLA DOCEP, has reached an “undertaking” with the two companies responsible for The MoleWhatever Fuel Saver, in which those companies agree to stop selling their useless gadget in Western Australia and DOCEP agree to not kick their miserable scamming arses into the Indian Ocean.

(I paraphrase lightly. Here’s the DOCEP page about this. I’ve also got a copy of the official PDF press release here.)

I don’t know whether the Federal Government has reached an opinion about Moletech, but it didn’t look good for them in January.

The Western Australian developments were brought to my attention by the proprietor of the Thinkingisreal blog, who saw a story about the “undertaking” on the WA edition of of the sterling tabloid-TV current affairs program Today Tonight.

Today Tonight and their cousins at A Current Affair appear to decide whether to run an approving or a scathing story about nonsense diets, umpteen useless fuel savers, and psychics, by flipping a coin. Actually, I think dice may be involved, with a roll of 24 or higher needed to get a critical story.

But TT are really solidly committed to this story. Just look at their Consumer Protection page!

In case you’re coming to this post a while after I wrote it and that page now actually has some content, be advised that at the time of writing, and since TT ran the story, the sum total of the non-navigation content on that page - which is presumably meant to provide background information for every consumer-protection story the show has ever run - is:

Fuel Saver Ban
Consumer Protection
1300 30 40 54

Seriously, that’s it.

They don’t even say what Fuel Saver they’re talking about.

Awesome work, guys. Bonuses all round.

(I searched for other pages on the 7perth.com.au site that mentioned this, and found the same “Fuel Saver Ban” snippet on this page, which contains what looks like a nose-to-tail site-content dump. The title of that page is - again, if the page isn’t there by the time you read this, be advised that I am not making this up - “Alzheimers Cure”. And the page-content below the “Fuel Saver Ban” snippet is about a spray-on cure for arthritis pain that uses “Herbal Synergism”. Two pages-worth up from the Fuel Saver snippet is… a miracle diet, this time based around milk protein. Magnificent.)

Thinkingisreal had a blog post up about this, but pulled it because there wasn’t yet any solid info about the ban on the Today Tonight or DOCEP sites (the press release was mentioned on this DOCEP page, but the link to it was broken. Now the official statement is up. Here’s DOCEPs list of current media statements).

Anyway, apparently Today Tonight did a previous story on the Moletech gadget, in which they found “promising results” in their entirely science-free investigation. That story is still proudly mentioned on the home page of moletech.us.

(I originally thought TT had, being at least slightly honest, mentioned this previous story in the most recent one. Thinkingisreal says he doesn’t actually remember them doing so.)

But now, wouldn’t you know it, TT have changed their minds, and decided that this zillionth example of a fuel conditioner that’s supposed to work by some sort of molecular balderdash (”nano negative ions!”) is just as useless as all the rest.

That quote from Band of Brothers springs to mind, yet again.

Picture credit: Conlawprof

A reader asks:

Simple, maybe stupid question. We had an Olympus OM-10 which broke down, and some good lenses and stuff which didn’t. Please, do OM-10 lenses fit on modern Olympus digital cameras? I asked Olympus but they didn’t answer.

Patrick

In brief: Yes, they do. Just buy an OM-System-to-Four-Thirds adapter ring and away you go. Olympus make their own adapter, and there are cheap Chinese ones that’re probably just as good, since there’s no glass in there.

EBay’s full of adapters for popular camera and lens types, but there are far fewer Four Thirds cameras out there than Canons or Nikons, so there only seem to be a couple of OM-to-Four-Thirds adapters on eBay at the moment. I wouldn’t be worried at all about buying one on eBay for $40 delivered rather than from Olympus for $100, though; when there’s no glass in the adapter, it’s hard to get it wrong.

Olympus have a list of recommended lenses for use with the adapter. Other lenses should also work, but may lose a little quality.

The reason for this is that film responds in pretty much exactly the same way regardless of the angle from which light hits it - well, as far as SLR-camera applications go, anyway. Digital sensors, on the other hand, have their own array of tiny “microlenses” over the actual sensor pixels, not to mention protective glass and anti-aliasing filters on top of the microlenses. This stuff does not respond the same to light coming at an angle as it does to light coming straight at it - think of looking at an LCD monitor from an angle, versus looking at a CRT.

So for best results on digital cameras, you need lenses that’re as close as possible to being “telecentric“, which means the light coming out of the back of the lens is lined up, as much as possible, with the axis of the optical components.

All of the standard Four Thirds lenses are pretty telecentric. OM System lenses aren’t so much, because they didn’t need to be to work fine with film.

Olympus have a page about this issue, too.

(Telecentricity may be less of a problem as digital sensors evolve - see this page for some speculation.)

Worrying about telecentricity is a bit nit-picky, particularly because the part of the image circle where the rays from any lens are likely to be least perpendicular to the sensor are around the edge, which consumer digital cameras with their “APS“-sized sensors can’t even see.

The down side of this is that an APS-sensor camera can only see about two-thirds of the image a “full frame” sensor or 35mm film frame would capture with the same lens. This means all of your lenses appear more telephoto, and you need a serious bug-eyed-monster lens to get really wide-angle photos. The up side is that, even if you don’t care about telecentricity, most lenses store their problems around the outside of the image circle. Vignetting, chromatic aberration, softness; all are worst around the edges, which simply aren’t seen at all by an APS-sensor DSLR using 35mm-film lenses.

The Olympus/Kodak Four Thirds system was actually purpose-built around these APS-sized sensors, which is why its lenses and cameras are smaller and lighter than those for other big-brand DSLRs.

(The OM System cameras and lenses were small and light compared with the competition too, though that was because of ingenious engineering rather than just having smaller film.)

“Mainstream” Canon and Nikon (and Sigma, for that matter) DSLRs can have full-35mm-frame-sized sensors, but the affordable models only actually have the smaller APS size. So, for those cameras, the lenses and bodies are bigger than they need to be. You can get lenses that only work (well, only work properly, at least) with APS sensors (Canon’s EF-S line, for instance). But most mainstream DSLR lenses, and all of the really high-quality Canon and Nikon ones, still throw a 35mm-sized circle of light into the camera, even if only the APS-rectangle middle of it is being caught by the sensor.

The critical issue for putting a lens made for one type of camera on another one - no matter what company makes the camera and the lens - is how far from the back of the lens the film, or sensor, is expected to be. This is called the “lens register” or “registration distance”. The adapter you use to attach System X Lens to System Y Body will inescapably add a bit of distance of its own, so you need System Y’s registration distance to equal System X’s distance plus the thickness of the adapter.

If System Y’s register is not big enough - if it’s smaller than System X’s, or so close to it that even a skinny adapter will move the lens too far away from the sensor - then it’s still possible to adapt the foreign lens onto the camera, but only with some serious limitations.

If the lens is just too far away from the sensor then you won’t be able to focus to infinity - but you will be able to focus closer than you’d otherwise be able to. This is what people do on purpose when they add “extension tubes” or bellows to lenses for macro work.

(Note that this may slightly hurt image quality, since aberration-correction expects the sensor or film to be the normal distance behind the lens. A lens that perfectly focusses red, green and blue right on top of each other at the normal registration distance probably won’t do that any more if you move it further away from the sensor. The image-quality loss should be much smaller than what you’d get from a simple screw-on front-of-lens “magnifying glass” macro adapter, though.)

If you want to keep infinity focus with a lens that’s too far from the sensor, you’ll need not a simple ring adapter, but an adapter with optics in it to increase the lens’s registration distance. Unless that adapter is rather expensive, this will hurt image quality so much that you’d be better off getting a cheap and nasty lens with similar specifications that was made to fit your camera in the first place.

Karen Nakamura’s Photoethnography.com has an excellent page about inter-system lens compatibility, with register numbers for many camera types.

Let’s pretend you’ve bought a Canon EOS (EF) digital SLR, and want to put your Olympus lenses on it.

The registration for EOS cameras is 44 millimetres, and for the OM System is 46mm, so it’s possible to put the latter lens on the former camera - but only if your lens adapter is a mere 2mm in thickness, or contains the dreaded optics.

It turns out that it is indeed possible to make adapter rings that’re this thin; you can buy ‘em quite cheaply on eBay. You can even get “AF Confirm” versions, which allow the camera’s autofocus system to beep when it reckons you’ve got the scene in focus, just as it does if you’re using a Canon lens in manual-focus mode. The focus screens in mass-market DSLRs are usually not very helpful for manual focussing, and their viewfinders also commonly aren’t very big and bright, so AF confirm can be more useful than you might think.

(Photo by Andy Crowe, coincidentally taken through the viewfinder of a Four Thirds DSLR with an OM lens. This is an upgraded focus screen, not the one that came with the camera.)

The situation for OM lenses on Four Thirds cameras is rather easier. OM System 46mm, Four Thirds about 38.7mm; the adapter has to be about 7.3mm in thickness, which makes it quite easy to make.

Picture credit: David Reeves

Simple adapters are inadequate if the lens you’re adapting needs to be controlled by the camera to work properly. Modern autofocus lenses, for instance, may still have a manual focus mode (possibly without even a distance scale), but they usually don’t have a control on the lens to set aperture. To set the aperture to anything other than wide open, therefore, you need to attach the lens to a camera of its native type, select the aperture you want, press the depth-of-field-preview button to make the lens stop down, then remove the lens while still holding the button, so it stays at that setting. This is not very practical.

If you’re just putting old all-manual lenses on new cameras, though, these sorts of problems don’t arise. The lens controls are all on the lens, so it’ll work as it did before.

Vendors of “haunted” objects have apparently diversified from merely selling spooky dolls. Now there are about a billion other “haunted” things for sale on eBay.

(Actually, as I write this, there are only about ten thousand hits for non-Halloween “haunted” things in ebay.com’s ever-entertaining “Everything Else” category. There’s similar nonsense scattered around various other categories, but Everything Else, especially the wall-to-wall-BS “Metaphysical” subcategory, is where the real winners are to be found.)

You name it, someone’s selling it. Ordinary glass marbles that’ve allegedly “captured the energy at the moment of all sunspot explosions that have ever happened on the surface of the sun”. Dime-store rings that allegedly come with an “astral plane incubus”, guaranteed to “bring you pleasure during dreams”. A “Powerful Amulet” enchanted by a “psychic witch” to bring in “MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF MONEY & CASH FAST”.

Some of this stuff costs less than ten dollars all told - the money-amulet is fifteen bucks delivered, but just think how fast you’ll make it back. And the “HAUNTED MOST POWERFUL ASTRAL TRAVEL ORB IN THE WORLD!” costs thirty bucks delivered. But c’mon, it’s “SUPERCHARGED WITH ASTRAL TRAVEL ENERGY!”

It’s possible to spend a fair bit more, though.

“HAUNTED 7 DEVATA PENDANT MOST AMAZING ITEM ON EBAY”? Yours for $149.99.

“Haunted Demon Ring and much more! Money, Power, Love”? $160 delivered.

“HAUNTED WICCAN MARID GENIE DJINN MASSIVE BINDING RITUAL”? $369.99.

“DJINN SON OF OSIRIS HAUNTED RING MARID/EFRIT JINN GENIE”? Fifteen hundred bucks.

“Haunted Ghostly Hand Asylum Window Black & White Photo” or “HAUNTED- THE RING OF UMBRA - THE SEAL OF THE SUMMONER”? Each $2500.

(But the photo doesn’t apparently do anything, while the Ring of Umbra is just dripping with “ISHAB MalFatah & Muhamad-Dal-Jafi Magic”. This will apparently pretty much turn you into Mister Mxyzptlk.)

“FORTUNATE MISS CLEMENTINE HAUNTED AND LUCKY JEWELRY”? Seventeen thousand dollars.

“AUSTRALIAN BLACK OPAL GEMSTONE 14K GOLD PENDANT HAUNTED”?

Twenty-seven thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine dollars. And thirty cents.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you:

The voting public.

Herewith, another duplicate of an update I just put on the Dan’s Data front page:

The Photon Light people are doing the free/flat-rate shipping thing again. All orders ship free in the USA, or for a flat rate of only $US4 for international deliveries. No matter how much stuff you buy.

(And you still get volume discounts, which start at quite small "volumes".)

Their "Knives and Tools" department also now has a selection of Leatherman tools, including the nifty new Skeletool and Skeletool CX and the classic Leatherman Wave. If you want something key-ring sized, they’ve also got the not-at-all-new but still-very-good Leatherman Micra, and three models of the more recent "Squirt" - the P4, S4 and E4.

The full-sized tools are all as cheap as I’ve seen them anywhere; the Micras and Squirts cost a buck or three more than the usual online-store price. But the free-or-cheap shipping deal more than makes up for that.

There’s also a closeout deal on the versatile "Fusion" light I reviewed years ago. It’s not cutting-edge technology any more, but it’s also not almost sixty bucks any more. While they last, Fusions - including the funky red- or blue-beam versions - are now only $US31.95.

And, as usual, if you follow my affiliate links and then buy something, I’ll get a cut!

Everybody else gets to sound off about the global financial crisis without actually knowing much about it, so I was pleased when a reader invited me to take my turn:

What’s your take on the global financial crisis? You’ve never indicated you know anything whatsoever about finance, but you’re usually “pretty on the ball” about everything else, so I though maybe you’d feel like blogging on this.

Ryan

Indeed I do not know a lot about economics. My knowledge pretty much stops at how tax brackets work, and that copper is not a precious metal. But since readers of this blog know pretty much everything, I presume there will soon be some +5 Insightful comments at the bottom of this page, correcting the ghastly errors I am surely about to make.

(Or maybe there’ll just be one guy saying that this is what we get for not listening to Lyndon LaRouche.)

I’ve no real opinion about what’s going to happen to the US and/or global economies in the short term. Fortunately for me, I’m in Australia, which doesn’t look like being squashed too hard. Australia has a healthy commodities sector, and major Australian financial institutions don’t seem to have much exposure to the US problems. Yet.

In the long term, though, the USA and countries that depend upon it economically - which means just about all of them - are going to have to feel a lot of economic pain.

Both Presidential candidates know this, on account of how they’re not idiots (so yes, I do suspect that only one of the vice-presidential candidates knows it too). But they wouldn’t say a word about it even if you tortured them, on account of the great American allergy to ever paying more than about half of the tax that people in much nicer countries seem quite happy to pay.

Because the USA is taking on such colossal government debt, for the war(s) and the various bailouts, it seems to me to have only three options.

1: Just keep doing what it’s doing, paying interest on the old debt by taking on new debt.
2: Jack up taxes and/or reduce spending so it doesn’t have to increase its level of indebtedness, or may actually be able to pay the debt down.
3: Say “screw it”, get drunk, and print more money.

The second approach is a sure-fire vote-loser. If it were me then I’d start out by taxing the absolute balls off the owners of any house of worship that seats more than a thousand people, but the USA is a country where 21% of the atheists apparently believe in God, so that probably wouldn’t work too well.

The third option is what people often seem to think the USA is doing now - “creating” new money to bail out the financial sector. It’s an awe-inspiringly dumb thing to do, though, and even the Bush administration isn’t stupid enough to try it. (Robert Mugabe seems just fine with it, though.)

What the USA is actually doing, and what I presume they’ll continue to do, is option 1, steady-as-she-goes. As long as people are reasonably confident that the government isn’t going to fall on its sword by refusing to pay up when bonds mature, and that inflation isn’t going to start running fast enough that a bond with a lousy 4% return will be worth less than you paid for it when it matures, then people will keep buying bonds, and the Treasury can just issue more and more of them and hope there’s enough of a market to get ‘em all sold. China is as addicted to selling stuff to Americans as Americans are addicted to buying it, so I presume it’ll keep that economic perpetual-motion machine rolling, even if inflation does make bonds lose real value over time.

The borrow-more-to-pay-your-loans-off approach is an obvious loser for normal personal finance, but I think whole countries - and businesses, for that matter - can actually make it work, if their increase in national productivity means that their debt is not increasing, proportionally speaking. If you used to owe a million dollars and make 20 million dollars, and now owe two million and make 50 million, then proportionally speaking you’ve reduced your debt. You should find it easier to service, or pay down, the second debt than the first one.

During the terms of Republican presidents since Reagan, though, the USA has been taking on debt much faster than it’s been increasing production, no matter which way you look at it (some people apparently regard this as a good thing).

The exact numbers are squirrelly - like unemployment statistics, they get harder and harder to measure the closer you look - but the cost of the wars and the 2008 bailouts will unquestionably greatly exceed Reagan’s Savings and Loan “jackpot“.

All of this has just got to shake through into a serious quality-of-life reduction for the average American some time soon. Either jacked-up taxes or a severely devalued currency, I think. The US national debt is overwhelmingly in US dollars, so if the $US drops to five Euro cents, it’ll be much easier to dig enough stuff out of the ground to pay off the debt. (But a Toyota Camry will cost half a million dollars.)

There are ways in which the USA could spectacularly reduce governmental spending and thus make the situation far easier to handle, but I strongly doubt the most obvious one - giant military cutbacks, including closing many of the USA’s more-than-700 military bases all over the world - has any chance of flying. The USA could cut four 400 billion dollars out of its annual military budget and still be spending twice as much as anyone else, but this sort of thing is so far-out that you won’t even find the option to do it in “budget simulators“.

Sci-fi writer Charles Stross wrote a very interesting essay about the current situation the other day. I agree with him that the USA’s determination to not bend before the economic hurricane means we may see the world situation change far faster than anybody would have predicted only a few years ago.

(This Gawker piece is excellent, too.)

I have just, by idly clicking through from the Wigu/Overcompensating guy’s pictures of his righteously necrotic brown-recluse-spider bite, discovered that there is a Flickr group called “Does this look infected to you?“

That is all.

As I mentioned in this article, as soon as I saw Theodore Gray’s prosthetic hip joint, I had to get one of my own. (Theodore’s is one of the samples for his Periodic Table Table; he’s pretty sure it belongs in the cobalt collection.)

And here mine is. I bought it on eBay; it cost me a total of $AU23.38 including delivery.

I’ve only got the hip part, not the corresponding socket part - which in this case would have been polyethylene, I think. But this is the interesting part, if you ask me. Mine even has a couple of nifty holes in the shaft, instead of the less elegant solid shaft of Theodore’s. As I mentioned in that article, I find it makes a very acceptable ray gun.

I think it’s probably made from a cobalt chrome molybdenum alloy. It’s very slightly magnetic; you can’t tell if you’re just holding even a rare-earth magnet in one hand and the hip in the other, but when I hung a magnet from a string, I could get it to stick to the implant very slightly.

I’m not sure what company made it. There’s a logo on the side like an R with a line around it, like so:

If you recognise that, drop me a line.

After the logo, there’s “52-0346 46mm” (46mm is the diameter of the ball on the end), then “CC” on the next line. Further down the shaft there’s a serial number, T00991004.

I’ll have to buff all that stuff off before I try to pass the implant off as alien technology.

(See also: My bone chisel!)

UPDATE: One or another of my readers can reasonably be expected to know absolutely anything, so I now know exactly what this prosthesis is.

Take it away, Charles the anaesthetist:

Your prosthesis is an Austin Moore Hemiarthroplasty prosthesis [yep; now that I’ve got that string to search for, I instantly found it], used to replace the femoral head in cases of subcapital fracture (fairly high) of the neck of femur where the fracture site is high enough to probably affect the blood supply to the femoral head, leading to necrosis. Because of this you can’t just screw the fracture together (search DHS, CHS, or IMHS).

Neck of Femur fracture (NOF) is an old person’s fracture, as such not a great load is expected on the hip, in terms of use and duration, thus the acetabular side (socket) is left as is (which is why the head is so large: total hip replacment prostheses have a much smaller head diameter).

An Austin Moore is uncemented, too: you ream to size and bang it in. There are cemented hemiarthroplasties that are a sort of half way position (more stable and durable, less loosening) between this and a THR (total hip replacement), but cementing a prosthesis in this patient population has a high intraoperative morbidity and mortality itself.

There is a very high mortality post NOF: not due solely to the fracture, but due to the clinical situation of these patients. If a younger person happened to NOF themselves, you might pin it first if you thought the head had any chance of survival, but if not, a THR is better.

The “R” is Richards, an orthopaedic company since absorbed into Smith and Nephew, along with others.

I used to have a Austin Moore as a gear shifter in my Kingswood wagon: it fit nicely in the hand!

After my post the other day about that nifty Lego excavator, I’ve been hunting for more of those chunky new tread links, as well as the smaller old-style ones that you can drive with normal Technic gears. I posted part of this in a comment on the excavator post, but I’ve spent enough time messing around with this now that I reckoned it deserved its own post.

If you want lots of just one kind of Lego piece, the place to go is online Lego marketplace BrickLink. I got no results when I searched BrickLink for “technic link tread new”, but when I searched for the new treads’ part number, 57518, I got tons of hits.

The low price for the new chunky tread pieces on Bricklink is down around 15 US cents plus delivery, which is much cheaper than you’ll get them for in any set. You can get the special wheels to drive the tracks very cheaply, too.

The best-value whole set for people who’re hunting the new tread links is clearly set 7645, the “MT-61 Crystal Reaper” from the “Mars Mission” line. It’s got a list price of $US50, but gives you seventy of the new Link Treads (in black instead of the Technic grey), and six large drive wheels, which can only otherwise be found in the monstrous 8275 Bulldozer (which is $US150, but has motors and 84 grey tread links).

The 8294 Excavator lists for ten US dollars more than the Crystal Reaper, but gives you only sixty tread links and four small drive wheels.

Seventy new tread links on BrickLink will only cost you ten or eleven dollars plus delivery, though. The small drive wheels come in at about 22 cents each, so you can pretty much get enough links and wheels to design an entire FedEx sorting facility for the price of the 8275 Bulldozer. The large drive wheels are rather more expensive.

The Crystal Reaper does have some other Technic pieces, though. Pins, gears, liftarms and even old-style studded beams, plus oddities like the three-axle bush. It’s got a lot of space-y pieces as well, but it’s surprisingly close to being a Mislabeled Technic Parts Pack. If you can get it for 20% off or something, and don’t need nothing but tracks, do not hesitate.

Next, I started hunting through sets and BrickLink for the smaller old-style Technic Link Treads. Lego used to sell parts packs that contained nothing but these links, but the last of those came out in 1999, and is no longer available.

(And then there was the Chain Link Pack, which was even more awesome.)

Anyway, here are the small-tread options in the current set lineup.

The 7664 TIE Crawler lists for $US50 and has 164 links; that’s 30.5 cents per link.

The giant 10144 Sandcrawler has 273 links, but costs $US140. That’s 51 cents per link, but you of course get a ton of other parts too.

The 7787 Bat-Tank has 158 links - wrapped around it, so it looks like a Mark I Tank - but it’s $US50, so you’ll pay slightly more per link than you would for the identically-priced TIE Crawler. The Bat-Tank’s other parts are a bit more Technic-y, though, and you do get a minifig Batman!

If you can find an 8288 Crawler Crane (it’s a 2006 product), you’ll get a lousy 86 old-type links for $US50, but the rest of its parts are almost all Technic. They include two Boat Weights, for people who want to add weight to part of a model but don’t want - or are forbidden by the rules of the Lego Sumo competition - to just build a bunch of coins into it or something. You also get three of the uncommon flexible double axle joiner, one of the giant gear-toothed turntables like the one in the middle of the 8294 Excavator, and two kinds of string with “end studs”. So this set is definitely worth looking for.

And then there’s the 7626 Indiana Jones Jungle Cutter, which only costs $US40 but has a not-too-bad 86 tread links in it, plus a decent complement of other Technic pieces, well-armed minifigs, and little animals. A good one to snap up if it’s on special.

BrickLink is still the easy value winner, though. As I write this, new and used old-type link treads are on BrickLink for around nine cents each, often from sellers with hundreds or thousands of them on sale. This seller in particular has several thousand, for 8.88 cents each, plus what ought to be pretty cheap shipping.

Oh, and if you want the standard 40-tooth big gears to drive your tracks, they start from less than fifty cents. (BrickLink’s default “Best Price” search order seems to sort by colour, then by price; change it to “Lowest Price” to see the genuinely cheapest items first. Weirdly, the URL of the page only sometimes changes when you do a Lowest Price search; it didn’t in this case, so all I can link to is the Best Price version, which starts with a bunch of gears in the probably-not-quite-what-you-want “Bionicle Red“.)

So there you go. You’ll be building your Crawler Transporter, six-metre crane or JCB JS220 in no time!