How To Spot A Psychopath

Most people have seen stupid “copy protection” on Web pages, where some message about copyright or something pops up when you click the right mouse button. This is supposed to stop you from wickedly making another copy of some portion of the data that has already been stored on your own hard drive when your Web browser asked the server for the page, and the server cheerfully sent it.

(See also, people who make Web sites and then demand that you not link to them.)

Via The Daily WTF’s most recent instalment of Error’d, though, comes what may be the Greatest BS Right-Click Warning Ever:

Every listing from this seller has this. Just scroll down to the main product description and click your wicked pirate terrorist right mouse button somewhere on it, and you will immediately receive your very own copy of this fascinating alert box.

Right-click over and over! Send dozens of “reports”! Wheeee!

In case you’re new to all this, and wondering: No, nothing’s actually being “recorded” or “reported”. The alert is created by a little snippet of JavaScript that tells the browser to do something when you release the second mouse button. In this case, the code pops up the alert with the stupid message.

It works in the same way as this, which also pops up an alert when you click on it. (It’s also not unlike the system used for “security” by the subjects of another Daily WTF story.)

Unless you’ve got JavaScript disabled, that is, in which case it won’t do anything at all.

If you throw caution to the wind and view the source of any of this eBay seller’s item pages - using that advanced hacker tool, your browser’s “View” menu, or perhaps just by right-clicking somewhere else on the page but the main product description - you’ll see that the high-powered enterprise-computing code that creates this very serious warning is part of a rather long single line.

As entertained DailyWTF commenters have observed, that line is, in the case of the listing I looked at anyway, a magnificent 40,076 characters in length.

Some text editors will choke on lines longer than 32,768 characters, you know.

So that’s even more security, right there!

When I finally got around to making myself some thermite, which like all right-thinking people I’ve been meaning to do since about the age of 10, the thing that surprised me was how bright it is. The combustion temperature of standard aluminium/iron-oxide thermite is about the same as the operating temperature of a light-bulb filament, and that’s how bright the whole burning mass shines.

Here’s a nice video of the process of thermite welding, which has for more than a hundred years been used to join train tracks together.

There are lots of other thermite welding videos on GooTube, though not all of them let you see the aftermath, when they remove the crucible, knock the mould sectors away and shape the still-glowing weld.

People who do this trick frequently clearly get rather blasé about it after a while, and hang around close to the crucible, or even do stuff like lighting cigarettes off the top of it. I don’t think that is actually a very good idea, unless you are absolutely 100% bet-your-eyes-on-it certain that there’s nothing on, or even under, the crucible that may unexpectedly flash to vapour when heated to these extreme temperatures.

Classically it’s water, or even damp stone, that causes thermite to “explode”, but many other substances will too. As I’ve mentioned before, many metals will boil at thermite temperatures, and there are all sorts of other usually-considered-inert substances that also don’t play well with thermite.

Like, for instance, asbestos. The molten iron from a thermite reaction may have cooled enough to not even melt an asbestos mat, but if you put a chunk of asbestos in with the thermite, it will definitely melt and quite possibly boil.

(This ought, at least, to render the asbestos harmless. Asbestos is basically just silica in an unusual shape, so if you melt it and then allow it to cool, you get a lump of non-toxic glass.)

A guy who glories in the name “Spaz” has been producing neat Supreme Commander videos for some time now. He did one for each faction in the game - prominently featuring the nifty extra units of the BlackOps Unleashed Unit Pack mod - and then promised a great big battle at the end, to be released in January this year.

That didn’t happen, so I assumed he’d given up on the project. But whaddayaknow, here’s the last one!

If you’ve liked my previous SupCom Eye Candy posts, you’ll know to not even sully your brain with the YouTube versions, but go directly to the full AVI downloads. Here’s one for the last instalment, and this forum post has umpteen links.

The HD downloads total 294Mb for the first four videos, and 356Mb for the last one all by itself.

Oh, Sky Cake Windows. You really are a new toy every day, aren’t you?

Readers with unusually long memories may remember that I shamelessly begged for money to buy a new computer. Against all reason, you actually gave me enough to make that possible, just before the end of the last financial year. Said new computer, replete with overclocked Core i7 920 CPU and 6Gb of RAM, has been happily buzzing away next to my desk ever since.

I’m not actually using the new computer yet, though, because I will not permit myself to start screwing around playing Fallout and GTA and such on it until I have actually finished writing big review about it, like unto the piece I wrote about the Athlon X2 box in 2006, and the other piece I wrote about the Pentium 4 box that preceded it in 2003.

But every time I get back to working on that big review, the PC bang-per-buck goalposts have shifted again. There is, for example, not really much reason for most people to get an LGA 1366 Core i7 machine any more, now that functionally-no-slower, yet cheaper, LGA 1156 CPUs are available. And don’t even start me on the graphics-card scene.

So this has turned into the longest PC-to-PC migration project in history, with the new machine being languidly updated with data and applications. It’s on all day, but only actually running a BitTorrent and distributed.net client. (I think you can spot the moment in my stats when the new box came on line. Feel free to mess up the numbers by ascribing your own distributed.net work to dan@dansdata.com, too.)

So anyway, the new computer’s running Windows Vista SP2 (the 64-bit version, so I’ll be able to use all of the 6Gb of memory), and it behaved itself perfectly for weeks on end. As you’d expect it to, of course; Vista was something of an adventure in frustration when it was freshly birthed, all shiny and glistening, but the two service packs have burned away the more impudent of its tentacles.

But then, just the other day, the Vista box decided to stop moving data over its gigabit-Ethernet link to my old computer, the one I’m still using, at the tens of megabytes per second to which I’d become accustomed.

Instead, it’s decided to send data at, oh, maybe half a megabyte per second. 1.5Mb/s, tops. Often quite a lot less.

That screen grab is of a transfer from the Vista machine to the XP machine, initiated and screenshotted at the Vista end. But speeds are the same if I start a transfer from the XP end.

It sped up to about 200 kilobytes per second after a few minutes. Sometimes, at random moments, it actually managed to sustain a whole couple of megabytes per second for a while. Whoopee.

Copying between all the other devices on the network works exactly as fast as it always did. The Vista box copies files between its own drives very quickly. The laptops get full bandwidth from their wireless adapters, the Vista box copies to the little Thecus N299 at its usual roughly 8Mb/s, and copying from the XP box to anything else on the network is also fine. And, get this, copying from the XP box to the Vista box is fine, too. Full gigabit speed. So this is a one-way problem.

And it’s specific to the (Realtek) network adapter on the Vista box’s Asus P6T motherboard. When I unplugged the Ethernet cable and plugged a USB wireless adapter into the Vista machine, I got full wireless bandwidth from Vista, via the access point and its own Ethernet hookup, to my XP PC. I presume a PCI Ethernet card or USB Ethernet adapter would work fine, too - though I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the slow-transfer disease spread to the new adapter in due course.

I’ve plugged the Ethernet cable back into the Vista machine’s built-in adapter for simplicity, now. Since the BitTorrent client is on the Vista box, this means that if I download something big on the Vista machine and want to move it to the XP one, I can either start it copying long before I want it, or plug a thumb drive into the Vista box, copy the file (at a perfectly normal speed) onto that, then plug the thumb drive into the XP machine.

This problem - or something very like it - was all the rage among Vista’s early adopters back in 2007. I think the 2007 version of the problem usually had to with a well-meaning feature in Vista which is supposed to reserve network bandwidth for streaming multimedia content, so if you’re watching an HD movie or something over a (suitably speedy) network from a Vista computer, you’ll never have any frame-dropping or glitches when seeking, because any other file transfers from that computer will be heavily throttled even when they don’t need to be.

This feature apparently often went haywire, especially in the original version of Vista. It either decided to operate all the time whether you were playing video or not, or it operated when the local user of the Vista computer was just playing music, or something, while someone else tried to get a file from his computer over the network. I think there was some kind of Copy Control Crap involvement here, too, but don’t quote me.

This was meant to be fixed in SP1, and by all accounts a lot of it was. Vista Service Pack 2 has been out for some time now, and that’s what my new computer is running. And as I said, for weeks on end, everything worked fine. I could play even HD movies from the Vista box over the network, A-OK.

Because this problem has such a long history, it’s somewhat challenging to dig up information about fixing it on Vista SP2, as opposed to SP1 or the original extra-special Oh Dear God Why Did I Buy Vista v1.0 Edition. An inexpertly-crafted search string will thus turn up tons of people complaining about it back in 2007. The water is further muddied by different versions of the problem, in which copies from Vista to, say, Windows Server 2003 work OK, but copying stuff the other way is very slow and may even time out and die entirely. I don’t think my problem is related to those ones, but who frickin’ knows.

I have tried many things to fix this problem.

[UPDATE: In the original version of this post I forgot to mention that yes, I’m using a full-permissions administrator account, and yes, Vista’s firewall is turned off.]

First up, I tried using a different copying program (like the aforementioned TeraCopy, or Vista’s own Robocopy). No good.

I tried opening a DOS prompt (with admin permissions) and typing the voodoo chant "netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disable". No good.

I tried Microsoft’s automatic “Fix It” doodad for changing this same setting. No good.

I noticed that the Vista PC’s hard-drive light is locked on for a couple of solid minutes after startup, even if I close all apps that could be expected to hit the drive. I don’t remember whether it did this before the transfer problem. Perhaps it’s SuperFetch-related. While I was fiddling with this, I completely disabled Windows Search. No good. Didn’t even prevent the drive-flogging on startup.

(Good old lsass.exe was totting up I/O reads and writes at a great rate. I’m unconvinced that it had much to do with the startup disk-flogging, though, since it kept on reading and writing after the drive light had returned to normal occasional flashing.)

I’ve got Nero installed on the Vista machine; that installs some pointless services that can also hit the disk, so I killed them along with indexing. I also disabled Nero’s system-startup tasks using MSConfig. No good.

I power-cycled the cheap and cheerful gigabit switch. No good.

I usually have a VNC view of the new computer’s desktop open. I closed that. No good.

(VNC itself is subject to the slow-transfer problem; it updates very noticeably slower now, and of course becomes even more painful if I ignore the new limited bandwidth and force it to a high-bandwidth connection mode, like the “LAN” setting in the UltraVNC viewer.)

I ventured into the registry, and tried setting NetworkThrottlingIndex to FFFFFFFF. Then rebooted. No good.

In a moment of mad optimism, I tried telling Vista to “diagnose and repair” the network connection. It told me I needed to “turn on TCP performance improving settings”, so I did. No good.

I turned off Quality of Service for the XP machine’s network adapter. No good.

I turned off the same QoS Packet Scheduler and a couple of Link-Layer Topology Discovery doodads on the Vista box’s network-adapter properties. No good.

I tried mapping a drive. No good.

I went on a rampage through Task Manager, killing every task that wasn’t obviously necessary for Vista’s continued operation. AnyDVD, audiodg, Daemon Tools, GoogleCrashHandler, jusched, nTuneService, PunkBuster, UpdateCenterService, Real Temp, PresentationFontCache, nvSCPAPISvr, MSASCui, two copies of nvvsvc.exe, Vuze and the VNC server all bit the dust.

No good.

But then there was SLsvc.exe, a Copy Control Crap process if ever I saw one. I killed it, and… No good.

I fiddled with “Remote Differential Compression“. Windows said “Please wait while the features are configured. This might take several minutes”, and for once it was not joking. It sat there for quite a while. But then it finished! No good!

I read through this page looking for things I hadn’t yet tried. The only new one I found was disabling “Windows Meeting Space”. So I did that. No good.

I said, “hang on a minute - why not just connect the XP and Vista boxes with a FireWire cable? That’s fast!”

So I did. And although the XP machine was perfectly willing, it didn’t work at all, because Microsoft has removed FireWire networking from Windows, as of Vista.

I noticed that Windows Update had a new driver for the motherboard’s network adapter, which I hadn’t installed with the other updates. So I installed that. No good.

I tried disabling “Large Send Offload” in the Vista machine’s network-adapter properties. I even disabled the IPv6 one as well as the two IPv4 ones. No good.

While I was there, I tried disabling the IPv4 and IPv6 versions of TCP and UDP Checksum Offload, and an IPv4 Checksum Offload too. Each of them can be enabled for receiving, transmitting, both, or neither; I fully disabled all of ‘em. No good.

I went to Device Manager and uninstalled the network adapter - and selected the “Delete driver software” option - then rebooted so it’d be redetected. No good.

Then I smote my forehead mightily, and tried a new Ethernet cable. I would actually have been slightly irritated if that had worked. It didn’t. Actually, it made XP-box-to-Vista-box copies slow, just like Vista-box-to-XP-box ones. Both cables have all four pairs connected - well, unless there’s a break in the middle somewhere. I cannot escape the feeling that this is trying to tell me something, but I’m too tired to figure out what it is.

I haven’t yet tried starting the Vista box in Safe Mode with Networking, as this page suggests. I haven’t tried connecting the two computers with a crossover cable, either. I also haven’t yet tried just officially declaring the migration to be complete and starting to use the new box as my main computer.

But dammit, I want to fix this. I’ve gone too far to turn back now.

Perhaps there’s something obvious that I’m missing, here. If any of the three people who’ve managed to read to the end of this post have any suggestions, I’m all ears.

The original poster of the MetaFilter Space Lego article I mentioned in passing in the last post didn’t explicitly mention something, so I suppose I’d better:

Lego are making Space sets again!

More or less.

(I originally started writing this as another comment on the MetaFilter page, but it turned into a whole big thing so I fluffed it up into this blog post. Regular readers may find this a bit repetitive, but there’s got to be something on this blog for people who’ve just stumbled in, looking worried and trying not to make eye contact with the regulars.)

For many years now, Lego have had space… ish sets, like the Life On Mars and Mars Mission series, and the older UFO line.

Now, though, they’ve got a new Space Police line, which is very close to being good old-fashioned Space Lego.

The first Space Police sets came out a year or three into my own Lego “Dark Age” (the period of time between when a person gets too old for Lego, and when the same person gets old enough to start playing with it again). They were clearly Space sets, just with a few new pieces and a different colour scheme.

(Lego’s most offensive striking current colour scheme is on display in the interestingly-Technical-under-the-skin Power Miners line. Lime green and Day-Glo orange, baby!)

Lego entered their own Dark Age shortly after the first Space Police sets. In the 1990s, they spent a lot of time making sets that were difficult to love, because they had lots of special-purpose pieces. They even made “juniorised” sets that were, in essence, Lego for kids that didn’t actually want to play with Lego. Those sets contained many complex single pieces that should have been assembled out of several other pieces - see this post for a particularly egregious example.

They’re much better now, though. Lego still have a few licensed lines that us oldies usually don’t much care for. Personally, I think almost all of their Star Wars sets look awful; I think Star Wars ships just don’t look right in Lego, except in the large scale used in the multi-hundred-dollar flagship sets. And then there are the “Bionicle” action-figures-made-from-Lego that also have little appeal to most adult Lego fans - though the skeletons of Bionicle figures are very Technic-y, with many very useful pieces. Technic itself has changed a lot, though not actually for the worse, if you ask me.

But Lego have also gotten back to their roots, and now make plenty of good old-fashioned sets, large and small, full of general-purpose pieces just like in the old days. (Except the packaging is flimsier, with none of the useful old blow-moulded plastic trays; now it’s just a box full of plastic bags of pieces.)

There are now many fantastic midrange sets with only a barely higher percentage of specialised pieces than there were 25 years ago. And there are also sets that could have been sneaked into the 1982 catalogue without looking out of place. Look at the #6192 Pirate Building Set, for instance. Lego has an actual two-piece shark now, which looks hilarious with some frickin’ lasers on its head but isn’t general-purpose at all. There’s nothing it can possibly be except a shark with a few connecting studs. But the Pirate Building Set’s shark is a cheerful-looking blocky creature made from several separate pieces, in the old style. (See also that set’s catalogue-number-adjacent relatives, the Fire Fighter and Castle Building Sets.)

If that’s the kind of Lego you like - or just the kind you want to buy for your kid - then you can ignore the licensed stuff and just get the new-old-style sets. You don’t even have to buy sets you don’t much want just because they contain pieces you need for the model of your dreams: There’s an auction site just for Lego full of enterprising dealers who part out sets and sell the pieces separately. So you can, for instance, buy a few yards of the new chunky track pieces, and the sprockets to drive them, surprisingly cheaply.

I also harbour a great affection for the current “pocket money” sets, that give you just a minifig and a smattering of accessories. A better way to inexpensively start to tease other grown-ups out of their own Dark Ages has not yet been discovered.

There’s this cop and his dog, this street trader, this brand-new Space Police officer, this garbage man, this builder, this fireman, this street cleaner (with one of those uncommon rubbery brushes), this kayaker, this God-bearded (Shark!) wizard, this knight, this mailbox robot, this troll, and this little spaceship. (Note that the pre-2009 sets are no longer likely to be available at your local department-store-with-a-Lego-section.)

My absolute favourite, though, is the pirate with a fish on a stick, and an extremely minimalist campfire.

The pirate’s opposite number is much better armed, but that brave smile cannot conceal the obvious fact that he’s having a lot less fun.

It may say something about me that when I read this Global Post article about Scandinavian countries’ prosecution of people who mutilate the genitals of their daughters, what I found most striking was the grammar.

The article contains this sentence:

Last year, at age 19, a Swedish court convicted the mother for those illegal acts, awarding the victim record demages.

Yes, “damages” is misspelled. What actually bothered me, though, was that this sentence contains what’s known as a dangling modifier. And it’s a really impressive example.

Usually, as Clive James points out here, a dangling modifier is just something like “at the age of eight, his father died in an accident”. This stops your reading in its tracks until you figure out that the author meant that it was the father of an eight-year-old that died, not an eight-year-old father.

The Global Post example aims at that mistake, but manages to hit an even worse one. Literally, it says the Swedish court was 19 years old. So you apply your standard Dangling Modifier Corrector and conclude that the mother was the one who was 19 when she was convicted. And then you find you have to run the sentence through the de-dangler one more time, to get the correct interpretation that it was actually the girl who was “circumcised” who was nineteen years of age when her mother was convicted.

So this isn’t just the usual dangling-modifier grammatical pothole. There are bamboo spikes in the bottom of it.

(Oh, and later in the article, there’s “originally from Kenya where circumcision rates affect about 32 percent of the female population”, which is also quite impressively confusing. I presume it meant to say that about 32% of Kenyan women are “circumcised” - that sorta-kinda lines up with this map from the Wikipedia article on the subject. But who knows?)

As I’ve said before, I only get really upset about misuse of language when a departure from Correct Usage damages the meaning of the words.

I find the American enthusiasm for calling Lego “Legos” irksome, but have no argument against it as far as meaning goes. But, to pick another oft-quoted example, the slide of the word “decimate” from meaning “kill one tenth of” to meaning “kill most of” is a damaging change. A modern writer will probably intend the second meaning, but you can’t be certain - and people who read a contemporary account of the life of Napoleon that contains the word will have their comprehension impeded by the change.

Dangling modifiers can damage the meaning of the words, but usually don’t. If someone was 30 years old when his father died in an accident, you could cruise right over a dangling-modifier account of the event and end up thinking the dad died at 30. Usually, though, the error is like one of the examples currently in the Wikipedia article about dangling modifiers: “As president of the kennel club, my poodle must be well groomed.” After a brief double-take, you can see what that means; you don’t have to try to work it out from context.

I think I need a new category for grammar problems like this. Down, I say, with lousy writing that can only sanely be interpreted one way, but which forces the reader to decode seemingly nonsensical statements, like the kennel-club one, before they can figure out what the writer actually meant.

(Since this post is completely off the topic of the actual article that triggered it, I invite you all to get back on that topic and have a big argument in the comments about all the wonderful ways in which people chop bits off of genitals. Look, I’ll start it off: “Men don’t have a clitoris at all, so obviously cutting the clitoris off your little girl is a great step forward in female equality!”)

Herewith, a promo video for the 4th Dimension mod for Supreme Commander:

(I think it’s well worth getting the 214Mb AVI version.)

At first glance, this mod is just a particularly-well-done member of the “this game’s OK, but it needs more humungous mecha” genre, but there’s actually more to it than that. There’s a version of 4th Dimension for the original Supreme Commander, but the current version requires SupCom and the the Forged Alliance expansion pack (which is sort of Supreme Commander v1.2).

If you ask me, SupCom is only becoming more attractive as it ages, for people like me who liked the original Total Annihilation (and, heck, Kingdoms too; Demigod is the SupCom engine’s Kingdoms-equivalent). You can still reduce an arbitrarily powerful computer to one frame per second if you play a big enough game, but your standard four-person weekend LAN game is much more workable on current mass-market hardware than it was when SupCom was new, back in ‘07.

You can get SupCom and Forged Alliance together in the “Gold edition” pack, which is cheap on eBay. (Here’s the same search on ebay.com.au).

Hans Andersson is a fellow who made a Lego Rubik’s Cube solver (which, amazingly enough, is only one among many).

He has now gone one better.

Possibly quite a lot more than one better, actually.

Yes, this is a Mindstorms NXT robot that solves sudoku. It’s got pretty good penmanship, too.

Like the Lego 3D scanner, Andersson’s new creation isn’t what you’d call the fastest of robots. But if you’re not in a hurry, I’d say this robot does its job considerably better than the also-amazing Lego movie projector.

(Via, once again, the excellent TechnicBricks.)

A reader writes:

My CPD-G500 is getting the twitches and I fear it will soon slip out of usable duty. I work in Photoshop and Illustrator and Motion and After Effects, I also edit with Final Cut Pro (where the twitching is getting most noticeable - the image twitches and folds at the bottom of the screen.

I would like you to tell me what you finally decided was the best CRT monitor. I’m not sure how you feel about LCD screens but I can’t work on them, they feel slippery, tricky, I don’t believe what I see and don’t trust it at all.

I’ve been checking CRT monitors for sale on the Web, and of course end up at eBay. There are 19- and 21-inch monitors that I’ve looked at, only one Sony G500, no G520, and there is a 19-inch G400 but it’s in Melbourne and I’m in Sydney; a long way off for a drive to pick it up.

What do you think I might do?

Philip

Your twitching-and-folding image is probably fixable, but you’d need to find a good old-fashioned CRT TV repair guy - they’re a dying breed - to get it done without delving into the realm of high tension with your own uneducated hands. Working with one hand behind your back helps, but CRT repair really, really isn’t the right place to start applying what you’ve just learned from repairfaq.org.

Occasional image “twitching” is a classic dry-solder-joint or failing-insulation problem; a little re-soldering and the slathering of some neutral-cure RTV silicone sealant over the old, cracking insulation on the high-tension cable to the side of the picture tube is likely to cure it. The “folded” image sounds like it’s just an image positioning problem, which is another thing that can be down to components wearing out (electrolytic capacitors changing value, for instance), and which may be fixable with trim-pots on the board or something similarly simple.

All CRTs will die eventually, though; they naturally get darker and darker as the years go by, and eventually the brightness control can’t compensate. A standard old-TV-repair-guy trick is to wind up the electron-gun voltage on old CRTs; that’ll make them die even faster, but will at least give you a decently bright picture again.

If you’re determined to get yourself a new CRT, I think you’re going to find your choices constrained by what you can get (without paying $1000 for shipping from overseas…), rather than what actually is the very best CRT for your purposes. So what-to-buy recommendations from me would be of limited practical value - and I never really used enough different kinds of CRT to have very strong preferences. But, for what it’s worth:

1: Aperture-grille tubes (Sony Trinitron, Mitsubishi Diamondtron, ViewSonic Sonictron…) are brighter than shadow-mask, and many people prefer them. But aperture-grille computer monitors always have horizontal vibration-damper wires for the grille that cast a noticeable shadow…

…across the screen. One wire for small-to-medium tubes, two for 21-inchers, possibly even more for aperture-grille TVs. This is one of those things that many people aren’t annoyed by until they’re told that it exists, then can never stop seeing. You need not thank me if I’ve just ruined aperture grille for you.

(People seldom notice this problem in aperture-grille televisions, because unless you’re sitting ridiculously close to the screen, you won’t be able to see them.)

2: Samsung’s mainstream CRT monitors were always good quality (not the best possible quality, but good enough for almost any purpose), reliable, and excellent value. I don’t know whether they ever made a flat-screen 21-incher, though.

3: The gripping hand is that the big names just don’t make many CRT monitors any more. As you say, you can find second-hand CRTs here and there, but they’re unlikely to be a whole lot younger than the one you’ve already got.

I’ve poked around on the monitor-manufacturer sites - Sony, NEC, Philips, Samsung and so on - and it’s surprisingly difficult to even find product pages for CRT monitors these days, much less CRTs that’re still on sale. Every now and then there’s a couple of old 17-inchers still being sold in South Africa, Bangladesh, Montenegro or India, but if you’re in the USA, Australia or most of Europe, you’re out of luck.

ViewSonic still have a few CRTs, but I think they top out at a 19-inch unit. Lenovo have a relatively cheap 19-incher, too, currently on special… in Canada.

And these are all plain old consumer monitors - higher-spec ones for graphics work are ever rarer. Eizo, for instance, used to have a lineup of hooded CRTs that came with a calibrator, but they seem to only have LCDs now.

And just finding a company that still makes CRTs is only half of the battle. Let’s presume you’ve decided that, say, this 20-inch-viewable-diagonal LG looks good. Now you have to find a dealer that still sells them. Which, so far as I can tell, nobody does.

Any decent computer store will be able to order in pretty much any product from a company that has a distributor in your country, but the demand for CRTs is so minuscule now that there could easily be zero stock of whatever you’re asking for in Australia, so you’d have to take the absurdly-expensive corporate-procurement route to lay your hands on one, or buy some dedicated video-preview screen with more sockets on the back than you ever thought possible; such units have list prices that range from the merely alarming to the downright hilarious.

(Note that there may be a heap of new-old-stock CRTs sitting in some dealer’s warehouse or self-storage unit, which they’d be glad to unload. It can’t hurt to ask. Just don’t get your hopes up.)

If you were in the USA, you could find tons of dealers still selling CRTs of one kind or another. A lot of them are definitely not what you’re after - tiny little screens, monochrome monitors for ancient computers or digital X-ray systems, workstation monitors with funny plugs and/or fixed scan rates, $100 monitors that cost at least $80 to ship, used screens sold as-is, “special order” items that may not actually be available any more, and of course a cavalcade of weird-branded Chinese products that’re probably junk. But there are some real, well-reviewed dealers selling real, new CRTs, and if you were in any major city in the USA it’d probably only take you a few hours of fossicking to get one delivered for a reasonable price.

But you’re not in the USA. So you may find yourself having to join us LCD-monitor pod people.

Fortunately, I really don’t think there’s any objective reason for your mistrust of LCDs, any more.

Many mass-market LCDs are still not as good as mass-market CRTs for really colour-critical work, but almost nobody is actually doing that sort of work. If your CRT needs to have one of those light-blocking hoods over it and you recalibrate it once a month, then you probably do need another CRT. If not, though, then any LCD that doesn’t have a cheap narrow-angle 6-bit twisted-nematic panel in it should, today, be more than good enough for almost any purpose. You’ll need to colour-calibrate it to get accurate colour response, but you need to do that with CRTs anyway.

It helps to have a CRT on hand for video editing, so you can see how your video wizardry looks with classic fuzzy pixels. But unless your target audience for some reason includes a lot of people still using old CRT computer monitors, the preview CRT you’ll want will be a television (probably connected via composite), not a computer monitor. There are still tons of CRT TVs in daily service around the world, but cheap and nasty Dell PCs have been coming with LCD monitors as standard for long enough that I think CRT monitors are probably in the minority now, in affluent countries at least.

A lot of mass-market LCDs have somewhat “cartoonish” default colour reproduction, with weird colour temperature and over-response that gives a “punchy” look, like that from cheap digital cameras. That’s fine for happy-snap photography and playing games, but it can give weird results for graphics work. You can fix it very easily with even a cheap colour-calibrator, though; the Pantone Huey and one or another ColorVision Spyder (like the one I reviewed years ago) can be had for less than $US100 now.

It’s entirely possible that someone reading this is in Sydney and has a 21-inch CRT mouldering in the spare room that Philip might like; if so, drop me a line and I’ll pass your info on to Philip. If you know of a great source of well-priced decent-quality CRTs in Australia or elsewhere, do post a comment about it!

A few times a year, all the gadget blogs get excited about some new lighter-than-air vehicle. Sometimes it’s a little one for the determined hobbyist, a big one for specialised cargo, or a huge one that’s never even going to exist.

And then there are the modern Goodyear-Blimp tiddlers that’re shamelessly described as “Zeppelins”, despite only being a third - often less than a quarter - of the length of the proper ones.

I mean, look at the “Zeppelin NT“. It’s 75 metres long, and can only carry 14 people, or a payload of less than two tonnes. Zeppelin bombers in World War One were already more than twice as long, and carrying 16 tonnes!

This, for example, is the LZ1, the very first of the Zeppelins. It was already 128 metres in length.

I, therefore, officially demand that we bring back the hydrogen-filled zeppelin!

They’d be very safe, especially with modern technology; giant bags full of hydrogen need be no more dangerous than giant fuel tanks full of kerosene, which I remind you are usually mere feet away from the jet engines that’re burning the fuel. Modern control systems could intelligently manage multiply-compartmented cellular gas-bags, to automatically keep the zeppelin in the correct attitude, manage altitude, and keep the thing flying even if someone flies his Learjet straight into the side of the airship.

If people just can’t get past their irrational terror of hydrogen, then you could of course just fill your zeppelin with helium, like the old American ships. But hydrogen gives more lift and can be easily manufactured from water; the world’s helium supply all comes from natural gas. Lots of scientists and engineers are beavering away at finding efficient hydrogen-storage technology, too, because we’ll need such technology for fuel-cell cars to become practical. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some of the same tech came in handy for managing lifting hydrogen in airships. And, heck, some of the hydrogen could also be used as fuel!

The one great advantage of a dirigible airliner is that legroom is not an issue. You don’t get vast lifting power - even the gigantic, 245-metre-long Hindenburg only had a payload capacity around the same as that of a 70.6-metre-long 747-400 freighter - but you can have as much space as you like. You just don’t get to fill that space with heavy stuff. Modern lightweight composite materials would be very helpful, here; we could probably make a 75-kilo grand piano if we wanted to, these days.

(One of the indications that the huge design-concept “Strato Cruiser lifestyle zeppelin” I liked to above is not a workable device is its hilarious inclusion of a topside swimming pool. That would weigh at least a hundred tonnes, and maybe a lot more; a standard Olympic pool contains at least 2,500 tonnes of water. It’d get a lot lighter when the airship turned and the water all sloshed out, of course.)

This, for instance, was just the dining room on the Hindenburg. It also had a lounge, a writing room, a smoking room (which contained the single lighter permitted aboard the vessel…), bathrooms, a crew mess hall, and small, but private, cabins for the 50-to-72 passengers.

“Oh, but what if someone tried to hijack the zeppelin, or blow it up?”, I hear, from the people who don’t mind having their shoes examined before they’re allowed onto a plane.

Well, if the hijackers are only armed with box cutters, passengers could just run away from them through the modern zeppelin’s acres of lounges, bars and tennis courts. And if terrorists had, let’s say, a two-part shaped-charge-plus-thermite guaranteed-747-killer of a bomb, you could stand back and let ‘em set it off, straight out into a gas-bag. The venting gas might catch fire, but the straight hydrogen inside the gas cell cannot support combustion by itself, and automated systems could dump the cell’s contents out the side of the airship, or pump it into other cells. The damage would be a reduction of total lift by a few per cent, at worst. The frame of the airship could be a tensegrity structure of light composite beams and pressurised gas cells, so there’d be no single component an attacker could break to bring the whole ship down.

Even if the terrorists were running around with satchels full of bombs setting them off wherever they could, they’d still only be able to damage the gas cells adjacent to the passenger areas. You wouldn’t even need to have gas cells in such locations, if you didn’t mind making the airship somewhat larger.

Let’s see - what other objections might there be?

Oh, yes: “What if a storm catches you? You’d be blown around like a toy balloon! Storms were a big problem for the old hydrogen airships, you know!”

Well, yes, they were. But that was because the old passenger dirigibles - and the early military ones - had a cruising altitude that seldom exceeded 2000 feet, and was often much lower. Like other aircraft of the time, they didn’t have pressurised passenger compartments, so they simply couldn’t fly too high without everyone needing oxygen masks and eight layers of sealskin.

Back in WWI some bomber airships were made as “height climbers”, flimsier in structure to make them able to attain great altitude; doing so was rather dangerous, and horrible for the crew, especially when the engines started freezing up. Even when flying at modest altitude, the old dirigible engines often needed in-flight maintenance, which was a very exciting task. None of these problems would apply to a modern zeppelin, with a pressurised cabin and reliable engines, or even fuel-cell-powered electric motors.

With modern technology to manage the gas bags, modern engines, vectored thrust for much better maneuverability and pressurised gondolas, modern dirigibles would only need to worry about weather during takeoff and landing - and they could probably delay landing a lot longer than a 747 can. The rest of the time, they’d deal with storms in the same way that regular airliners do - by flying over them.

This does creates obvious limits to the routes airships could fly, though, since they couldn’t make much headway against fast high-altitude air currents. We could easily make dirigibles twice as fast as the Zeppelins were, but that still only gets you to 260km/h. If you’re happy to go in the same direction as a jet stream, though, it’ll boost your speed by an easy 50-to-100 knots.

I think the main actual reason why nobody’s brought back the zeppelin is that they wouldn’t be cost-competitive with heavier-than-air craft, in the same way that ocean liners couldn’t compete with planes. Airships might be able to compete for some exotic cargo applications, perhaps, as per the above-linked SkyHook JHL-40, a hybrid zeppelin/rotorcraft, but they certainly couldn’t deliver passengers from A to B anything like as cheaply as an airliner.

In a fantasy world where everybody wasn’t utterly determined to turn every field of human experience into a money-making operation, however (hey, how’s that all working out for you, world?), and assuming that we actually could make 38,000-foot-capable pressurised zeppelins if we wanted to (”…we can put a man on the moon, but we can’t…”), then airships certainly would be competitive, if one’s aim was to travel in a pleasant way.

Ocean liners of the sky, able to cover 5000 kilometres a day and take off and land virtually anywhere, which cause people to actively compete to buy a house near the airport, just to be able to watch them. Sounds like an improvement to me.