You must have left the door open!

Confirmed by my local locksmith this morning, 90% of household locks can be opened with a bump key. There's a basic flaw in the design of locks that means simply by filing down a key
you can open any lock that key fits into by tapping it with something (like a screwdriver).

There are locks available that aren't vulnerable to this attack. They're going to cost you about $200.



blog entry on engadget

Copy from youtube to your ipod

Tubesock grabs YouTube videos from the web and copies them to your video iPod, Mac, or PlayStation Portable. TubeSock knows how to convert the video using the codecs and bitrates best for each device. It can even add the video to iTunes for you.

same spider 01

every night this spider builds a web outside my house for the last week I've been filming her.

kyoto lies

The Federal Govt keeps proudly saying we're not going to sign Kyoto protocol *but* we're going to meet the target anyway. I downloaded Tracking to the Kyoto Target and saw an interesting breakdown. Australia banned land clearing in large areas of Queensland and counts this against increased CO2 emissions from other sources. So our CO2 emissions are about 38% above 1990 levels but through some clever calculations the govt reduces that to 9% because we're not clearing Queensland anymore.

nuclear report notes

Uranium Mining, Processing and Nuclear Energy – Opportunities for Australia?


Terms of reference are key to Howards reports. The Cole report into AWB paying $300 million to Saddam Hussain was framed so that the governments culpability in the affair was not to be investigated.

Appendix A. 1 Economic Issues (c)
Howard: "The extent and circumstances in which
nuclear energy could in the longer term
be economically competitive in Australia
with other existing electricity generation
technologies, including any implications
this would have for the national
electricity market."

Key findings of the Report (page. 2)
Ziggy: Nuclear power is likely to be between 20 and 50 per cent more costly to produce than
power from a new coal-fired plant at current
fossil fuel prices in Australia. This gap may
close in the decades ahead, but nuclear
power, and renewable energy sources,
are only likely to become competitive in
Australia in a system where the costs of
greenhouse gas emissions are explicitly
recognised. Even then, private investment
in the first-built nuclear reactors may
require some form of government support
or directive.

So nuclear power is expensive. So is solar and wind power.
What if Chernobyl had been a wind farm?
What do solar power stations do with their waste?
Why are solar and wind not suggested as preferable options? Because the terms of reference did not include comparing with other options.



Appendix S. Depleted Uranium

Several submissions to the Review argued
that exposure to depleted uranium, including
depleted uranium weapons, is responsible for
severe health effects. The conclusions of these
submissions are not supported by experts in
the health physics community in Australia
and overseas.

This goes against what I've read. Need to investigate.

Depleted uranium sourced from Australian
uranium is covered by Australia’s nuclear
safeguards requirements and cannot be
used for any military application.

I don't trust that this is the case.

nuclear report

On the day the Prime Ministers report on whether Australia should have nuclear power stations was released I read the following:


PRIME Minister John Howard has stepped up the case for nuclear power, telling reporters the Government would be "crazy in the extreme" if it blocked the development of nuclear energy in Australia.

URANIUM stocks are finishing the year with a flourish in response to soaring prices for the radioactive material.

Australian PM asks states to allow more uranium exports

The report is available here. I'll read it so you don't have to.

no ice please

The Melbourne Age reports "A giant ice shelf the size of 11,000 football fields has snapped free from Canada's Arctic, scientists said.

The mass of ice broke clear 16 months ago from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 800 kilometers south of the North Pole, but no one was present to see it in Canada's remote north."

My first thought was, "hey, here come the four horseman of the apocalypse" but then...

Um. It's meant to be a newspaper. Did it really take scientists 16 months to notice this? Or is it being mentioned now for a reason?

alternative ending for braveheart

Stewart Lee and Richard Herring from The Richard Not Judy Show

bad boy bloggy

redirecting my thought stream to the blog so someone can get some work done:


Ovum Consulting - i can't imagine how you would do this

mufti - does any one else find this word funny? This guy doesn't but he's not so sheik these days.

body rollin'

Now I want hand, knee and chest skates!