How To Spot A Psychopath

The 85-watt compact fluorescent lamp I wrote about almost two years ago now still works fine. (Though the eBay seller I bought it from has vanished.)

But that lamp now looks a little… weedy.

This monster has a power rating - the actual power it draws, not the “equivalent” power that an incandesent bulb would have to draw to output the same amount of light - of two hundred and fifty watts.

(I found it in the eBay store of “DigiMate3“. As sometimes happens on eBay, this store has a twin with all the same products, called CNW International.)

This lamp’s output, in incandescent-equivalent terms, has to be something like 1200 watts. Since it’s got the simple out-and-back design that doesn’t get in its own way as much as a more compact (but in this case baroquely complex) spiral, I wouldn’t be surprised if it actually shines as bright as three 500-watt halogen floodlights.

My 85W lamp lights the room it’s in to about 205 lux, measuring on top of the spare bed that I use for most of my product photography. That’s about half the brightness of outdoor light at sunrise or sunset on a clear day. This thing’d probably manage an easy 600 lux all by itself.

A few of these lamps would probably make fantastic workroom or warehouse lights. You could probably even power them from a normal domestic lighting circuit - many normal light sockets can deliver 250 watts safely, especially if they don’t also have to cope with a 250-watt incandescent filament blasting away six inches away from the socket’s plastic parts.

(You couldn’t directly install these lamps in a normal light-bulb socket, because they use the big E39/E40 “Mogul” version of the Edison-screw fitting, rather than the bayonet fitting that’s normal here in Australia or the “medium” Edison screw that most US light bulbs use. They’re also obviously too heavy to dangle from a poor innocent domestic bulb socket, even if they’d otherwise fit; you can get simple screw-in medium-to-mogul adapters, but they don’t magically make the bulb weightless. It wouldn’t be a big deal to whip up a home-made luminaire to fit these lamps, though. You might even not electrocute yourself.)

You could even use these things as photo lights, though their colour rendering probably isn’t all that great. The seller claims a Colour Rendering Index of 80, which ain’t that bad, but might not be accurate.

I think most people who buy this things intend to use them hydroponic grow-lights, though. I’ve written about this area of human endeavour before.

(Just think how much electricity would be saved if marijuana were legal, so people could grow it in their garden, instead of in their garage…)

Here’s a hydroponic company being a bit sniffy about these “unbranded” lamps, which do indeed seem to be inferior to their similar…

…but even bigger product.

If you’ve found a CFL that’s bigger still, do tell us in the comments.

I’d completely forgotten about this.

Anne (un-updated blog here; note the post from when we got Joey) shot this video less than two months before Mickey died, with the intention that I could put it on a loop on my second monitor, as a sort of relaxing furry mental wallpaper.

I didn’t, at the time, think it entirely necessary to subject my blog readers to five straight minutes of Mickey and Joey sitting in a box licking each other, even if it was in their usual could-turn-into-a-wrestling-match-at-any-moment way.

But now that Mickey’s gone, I feel the self-indulgence is justified.

(Joey appears to be quite ready to bond with the new cats in exactly this way, but they’re still growling at him. They’re becoming more mellow every day, though.)

Update:

The aftermath.

Clearly, this box was not large enough to effectively measure the volume of two cats.

(See also.)

As I mentioned in my old piece about rare-earth magnets, there’s a little cocktail-party physics demo I like to do.

(The deal is, I drink some cocktails, and then I do the demos.)

This demo shows magnetic eddy-current braking down the inside of a conductive tube. I take a length of aluminium tube, roll a plastic ball down it to demonstrate that it contains no gimmicks, and then drop a little rare-earth magnet down the tube.

You can hear the magnet going ting-ting-ting down the tube, but it takes a surprisingly long time to come out the other end. When I do this trick with a magnet that fits the tube quite closely, it takes about 30 seconds before it comes out. The plastic pellet takes only about 0.6 seconds.

You can also demonstrate magnetic braking with a chunk of copper and a decent-sized rare-earth magnet. If you slide the magnet up and down the copper, there’s an oily feeling of resistance that gets stronger the faster you move the magnet. It fades away to nothing as the movement speed drops, though, which is why magnetic braking is such a great way to get precision balance scales to settle.

A more dramatic demonstration is to use a horizontal spinning disk of non-ferromagnetic, highly-conductive metal, preferably copper. It’ll grab and throw a strong magnet that you bring close to it.

(More boringly, you can just use the magnet to slow down a less ferocious disk.)

In theory, you could even use this principle to achieve magnetic levitation. All you’d need would be two copper cylinders in the oh-so-safe “mangle” configuration, spinning like crazy around their long axes. Then a strong enough magnet could be suspended by the Lenz’s Law eddy-current effect between and above the cylinders.

You’d have to be out of your freakin’ mind to make such a thing, of course.

I give you: The one, the only, Bill Beaty. (More videos here.)

(Via. I should have noticed this when it was new, more than a year ago, but I didn’t. I presume that in the intervening time at least one crank has decided that this, at last, must be the secret of antigravity/perpetual motion/free beer.)

Oh, and before someone asks me what a ball-bearing motor is: It’s this.

And herewith, a more recent BillB video, partly just to get him a few MetaCafe hits (the older vids, like the one above, are on YouTube), and partly for “it’s like cryogenic napalm”:

Regular readers will know that Unique Hardware are the makers of the hilariously-named but great-looking and, more importantly, surprisingly-good-sounding “HUMP” series of USB computer speakers.

A while ago, I reviewed their NF01 and NF02 speakers, which differ only in the USB amplifier module. The NF02s…

…have an amp with buttons and an auxiliary input.

In brief, these tiny (but surprisingly heavy) speakers sound quite remarkably good for their size. Which really is astonishingly small.

When I reviewed them, though, they cost about 75 US dollars delivered, and you could only buy them on eBay.

You still can buy Unique Hardware speakers on eBay; the US ebay.com store is here, and the Australian-dollar version is here. The price is now down to about $65 delivered, which would be too much to pay for ordinary crappy plastic USB speakers, but is quite a good deal for the Unique Hardware products. They’re unquestionably the finest “pocket sized” speakers in existence. If you ask me, their only weakness is that if you treat them roughly and fracture the cables - which you could easily do in less than a year, if you’re chucking them into your laptop bag twice a day - you’re going to have a dickens of a time repairing them.

I’ve recently updated the review to mention that ThinkGeek have started selling “Crystal USB Desktop Speakers” that’re obviously actually NF01s, for only $US39.99 plus delivery. That’s a great price, if you’re in the USA and don’t have to pay much for delivery.

Oddly, however, Unique Hardware tell me that they aren’t actually wholesaling any speakers to ThinkGeek. In truth, they’ve been having some trouble making money on the product.

It’s not likely that the ThinkGeek speakers are inferior copies, though. The rock-solid machined-acrylic cabinets that make the Unique Hardware speakers special also make them rather difficult to clone. Unique Hardware believe that ThinkGeek have actually bought a crate or three of NF01s from some other outfit that earlier bought them from Unique, then found the speakers hard to sell.

(If you’re a ThinkGeek insider with more info, do feel free to fill me in.)

It’s not surprising that people - including the manufacturers - have had trouble shifting these speakers. As I point out at the beginning of the review, little tiny computer speakers, as a general rule, suck. Sucky speakers that cost ten bucks are one thing; sucky speakers that cost more than $50 are quite another. When Engadget mentioned the “new” ThinkGeek product, they therefore quite reasonably assumed the Crystal USB Desktop Speakers sounded lousy.

But they really, really don’t.

No, these little speakers don’t have much bass, and no, they don’t go up to party volume. But they really are a very great deal better than you’d think.

I invite US readers to buy up ThinkGeek’s entire stock, which Unique Hardware figure isn’t more than about 500 units. Then they may have to start buying direct from Unique, who deserve more business.

Found among my referrer tags, thanks to a comment:

The picture’s from the guy who runs Fleebnork; oddly enough, his other photos have something of a Lego slant to them, too.

The custom spaceman itself came from the guy who runs the bespoke-minifig-accessory emporium BrickForge.

See also:

What a Fleebnork is.

(Collectively, they’re arguably the most frightening things in Lego Space. The winner is, of course, the unstoppable Explorovore.)

The terrifying Fleebnork Queen.

Fleebnork stat card for Brikwars (”Sort Of Like Warhammer, Except You May Already Have A Huge Army And Not Even Know It”).

Herewith, a duplicate of the bit I just put on the front page of Dan’s Data, in accordance with my ancient tradition of slightly padding my PayPal account by pimping Photon sales:

Again with the Photon Light special offers. But there’s something different about the current sale:

Shipping to the US or Canada is, until the end of this month, free. And shipping to anywhere else is only four bucks, this month only.

No matter how much stuff you buy.

And yes, this includes Photon’s larger lights, batteries, chargers, and so on. Anything you like.

The price you pay for this is that the prices of the actual products aren’t any cheaper than normal for the duration of this “sale”. But you can still get Photon’s standard volume discounts, which start from only five units and are obviously interesting when shipping’s this cheap.

If you’re in Australia like me, or in Europe, or in some other place that isn’t North America, and have gotten as far as the shipping prices on previous Photon sales before deciding that you perhaps did not need a collection of funny-coloured key-ring lights quite that much: This is the sale for you.

And, as always, if you follow this link and then buy something, I’ll get a cut!

Quote from front page ends.

My reviews of the mainstream Photon products are all a bit elderly now; I’ve had some newer Photons sitting on the to-review pile for lo, these many moons. It’s not as if Photon have suddenly started making laser pointers or nose-hair trimmers, though; their key-ring lights remain rock solid and highly reliable, and just get newer, brighter models of LED from time to time.

(Although they have recently released a freaky rechargeable four-LED key-ring light; you charge it by clicking magnetic contacts onto the ends of any standard 1.5-volt cell!)

I continue to highly recommend the odd colours of Photon light, although I don’t think they’ve actually got a lot of brightness advantage any more, since lots more development money has been poured into white LEDs than coloured ones. But you can still get a “turquoise” Photon II or Freedom Micro, and it’ll still be surprisingly bright (from fresh batteries, at least), and make the world look like a cheap sci-fi movie.

Apropos previous mentions of lazy spam-scammers, here’s one who’s working harder.

I got three copies of his “order”, sent to my domain-registration e-mail address, my private iiNet address, and dan@dansdata.com. The man’s thorough!

From: “Bill Jackson” <rev.billjackson@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2008 16:11:41 -0700
To: sushilmehta0072000@yahoo.com
Subject: order

Hello good day my name is Rev.Bill Jackson i will like to order some Fuel
Savers from you and will like to nop the cost for each plus tax and dont
include shipping cost

Thorough, but dumb.

Perhaps there’s a little symbiont circle out there, of scam artists making worthless fuel-savers and other scam artists buying said fuel-savers with fake bank cheques.

(See also.)

Oh, and the New South Wales Office of Fair Trading has announced an investigation into fuel-saving devices. They somehow managed to not mention the word “firepower” anywhere in the press release.

Nothing helps you get over the death of a pet like getting a new one. So right after we buried Mickey, we found ourselves a new cat in need of a home.

I know this looks like two cats, but they’re so closely connected that they probably actually qualify as one. Tentative names: Charley and Susie.

The little soft house technically belongs to Joey, but he doesn’t seem to be missing it. He’s engaged in some perfunctory dominance behaviours in the direction of the new ginger twins, but I imagine he’ll be using them as a heated mattress…

…just as he used Mickey, soon enough.

When I read about the 11,000-lumen, 200-watt, two-kilometre-naked-eye-range, waterproof, $US7400 FoxFury Sunbolt 6 Mega Spotlight, I naturally assumed its specs were pretty much 100% claptrap.

It’s very hard to make a super-powered LED light. Durable, efficient, bright-for-its-size, not-terribly-expensive; all that, LEDs can do. But they’re not quite there for spotlights yet.

It is, however, very easy to throw around some weasel words concerning the capabilities of a non-super-powered LED light, so that’s what I assumed FoxFury had done.

But I was wrong. They’re actually only fibbing a little bit.

Their first bit of close-to-the-wind sailing is their claim - which I presume came from a press release, since it doesn’t seem to be mentioned on the Sunbolt’s product page - that the spotlight has the power of “7 car headlamps”. 11,000 lumens is indeed about seven times the output of the 1962-vintage basic “H1″ halogen headlamp bulb, but many more powerful and more efficient automotive lamps exist today.

The “naked eye distance vision” part is questionable, too. The Sunbolt is claimed to have an eighteen-degree beam, which at the stated maximum throw range of two kilometres will light a circle about 634 metres in diameter, with an area of 315,696 square metres. Distribute 11,000 lumens over that circle and you get 0.035 lumens per square meter, or lux.

The average dark-adapted human naked eye can see - in grainy monochrome - in light levels down to 0.1 lux; 0.035 is just barely possible, but practically speaking it’s completely useless for spotlight applications. That’s because dust in the beam will glow much brighter than the beam can light such a distant target.

It’s possible that the FoxFury beam is sufficiently centre-weighted that there’s a smaller spot in the middle that makes it to 0.1 lux at 2km, but it’s disingenuous to pretend that this gives it a real, useful, two-kilometre throw. Much better to specify maximum throw as the range at which it averages one lux over its whole beam circle; going by the quoted output and beam-width numbers, that’d be a range of only about 375 metres, if I haven’t flubbed my inverse-square-law calculation.

The raw power and output numbers, though, are usually where the claptrap lies in LED-lamp publicity. But getting twelve LEDs to draw (very slightly) less than 200 watts and output 11,000 lumens actually is a plausible specification, today - provided you use multi-die fifteen-watt LEDs. Those are technically each six LEDs in one package, so this is really more of a 72-LED spotlight. But who’s counting.

The basic luminous efficacy number - 11,000 lumens from 200 watts gives 55 lumens per watt - is nothing special these days. If the LEDs are reasonably well-cooled then they ought to last a long time, too. They’ll slowly lose brightness, which could cause problems for scientific or movie applications, but won’t be perceptible to most users for a long time.

So yes, this really is a pretty serious spotlight. Don’t expect it to actually create a circle of daylight at two kilometres, but the rest of the specs seem pretty much kosher to me.

Mickey the cat - the subject of the famous kitten review - is dead. He was about five and a half.

I found him like this. He looks as if he’s just asleep - only the little bit of purple tongue sticking out gives it away.

He was stone cold and stiff as a board, though. So I dug a hole in the garden and put him in it. Then we sprinkled some flower seeds on top and watered them in.

This isn’t the way it’s meant to happen. Mickey was a big strong healthy boy. Really big; he was quite lean, but very long and tall, for a cat. He weighed seven and a half kilos just a couple of weeks ago.

Perhaps that was it; perhaps he didn’t have a strong enough heart for a body that size. I’m at a loss as to what else it could have been. Cats that know they’re sick hide themselves away somewhere, but Mickey just curled up on the spare bed as normal. And there was no vomit, no signs of distress; I don’t think he’d even been off his food, though I might not have noticed.

Perhaps the last time he went out, for only about ten minutes before he decided it was too cold and came back in, he ate a poisonous mushroom along with some grass. Those are famous for killing people half a day after they eat them. Or perhaps he picked up a tick, though it’s freezing cold here in Katoomba right now, so there shouldn’t be any ticks around. I don’t think it was rat poison or slug bait or something like that. But who knows.

When you own a pet, you expect - or should expect - that at some point you’ll have to pay quite a lot of money to buy that pet several, or at least a few, more years of happy life. Look at Tom, with his arthritis and diabetes and a bout of hyperthyrodism, too. It cost a bloody fortune to get him repaired, and he still needs injecting twice a day. But Tom’s happy as a clam, settling peacefully into the prolonged geriatric period that’s normal for elderly housecats.

Mickey, on the other hand, was the picture of health, as far as I could see. But he was there last night, and gone this morning.

He was a very good boy.

A couple of irretrievably soft-hearted readers have asked if there’s any particular animal charity to which I’d like donations to be made in memory of Mickey.

Mickey came from one of the Cat Protection Society “aquariums” full of kittens that you can see in the window in some Australian vets.

(Yes, they do let the kittens out regularly to run about. But it’s amazing how many of them will be perfectly happy in a thousand-litre Perspex box for hours on end - though at least one bright spark does always seem to end up sleeping in the litter tray.)

The Cat Protection Society would, of course, be very pleased to receive your tax-deductible donation or volunteer time. And then there’s the RSPCA in Australia, the UK and elsewhere in the Commonwealth, and their equivalents the ASPCA in the States.

These sorts of organisations always run shops. The “op shop” type with low-priced used stuff can be fun but, given the prices, can’t actually add much money to the bottom line of the charity. I highly recommend you patronise the other kind of shop, like the RSPCA Shops here in Australia. Those shops sell the usual sorts of “pet shop” animal supplies - toys, food, tennis ball chuckers, noisome dried pieces of pig or bull (not, for very good reason, cow…) of which dogs cannot get enough - at the usual rip-off pet-shop prices. You can get all of these things much cheaper if you shop more carefully - but the profit from the charity-shop rip-off pricing all goes to the charity, so when I’m there, I specifically seek out products which seem to be the worst value.

If you can’t afford to donate, buy overpriced catnip mousies or spend a lot of time having your heart rended by the predicament of abandoned animals, but you live near an animal shelter or veterinarian that has a Room Full O’ Kittens, be advised that they may be very happy to have you just visit and play with the kittens for an hour, provided you don’t seem too likely to eat any of them.

Kittens need to get used to being picked up and patted and played with, and veterinary and animal-shelter staff are likely to be pretty busy. So the terrible responsibility of being covered with kittens for an hour a week may, I fear, fall to you.