Category Archives: Geek Stuff

Geek Stuff, General, Preparing for the worst

Hybrid Solar House

Dave Pogue, at the NY Times, wrote about an interesting technology. A solar house that heats and cools itself by having an atmosphere.

It seems that it would work well in our region, with 300+ days of sunshine. They are basically kit houses, some assembly required. Unfortunately, they ship the house parts from NC and I am in CO. I think the freight charges will be significant.
I like the look of the Aquarius design with the optional garage (gotta have a garage in CO). My one concern is how sound travels from the basement through the double interior walls.

Maybe if we ever sell our current place and move…

Geek Stuff, General

International standard paper sizes

A4 paper format / International standard paper sizes

I find the whole concept of A series paper to be fascinating. Maintaining proportionality as you keep cutting the paper in half.

Dr Science (AKA Courtney Willis) did a nice demonstration of A Series, very scientifically, at the recent COSine.

Be sure the read the History section. Very interesting.

And the different relationships between envelopes and paper sizes and hole punches and drawing pens. A very integrated package.

Then there are the B and C series.

I think I shall move the to the A4 format at home. Even if the rest of the country can’t get its act in gear, that is no reason not to try. But then, I’m the kind of guy that likes to walk around with dollar coins.

Geek Stuff, General

Things to Remember

Just because you get an error message from flickr saying it can’t upload a picture to your blog doesn’t mean it’s true.  Check your blog first to see if it really happened before retrying, getting the same error message and retrying again and then finding out you have a boatload of photos in your blog all with the same look and comment. Just a different time-stamp. (unless you were really fast on the retry button.)

Do you know how tedious it is to delete a post  in this blog?

Geek Stuff

Another thought on Net Neut

Google, Yahoo, Youtube, and other large content providers don’t push content to the user. The User requests it, through their service providers. The User’s Service Level Agreement is the gating factor on the Quality of Service that affects the transport. If the Content provider isn’t on the user’s ISP network, there’s no real way for the service provider to identify where the content is coming from, other then the numeric IP address. And that address doesn’t need to be associated with the content provider.

So it is rather difficult/complicated for the service provider to bollix up what is being sent if the user is paying for a QoS.

Geek Stuff, Politics

‘Net Neutrality’ Amendment Rejected

‘Net Neutrality’ Amendment Rejected

I am getting a bit confused as to what ‘Net Neutrality’ is all about.

The large content providers, like Google and Yahoo and Microsoft, have very large data pipes connecting themselves to the Internet. They are paying the market rate for the volume they use and for the Quality of Service they expect. The Service Providers use those revenues to maintain and expand the network. If new services and a new Quality of Service is required, the service provider is perfectly entitled to charge more. They are adding new equipment and capabilities to the network.

My one concern with the service providers is that they will use their monopolistic control of network access to charge exorbitant rates for new or old QoS traffic.

I know others are worried that the service providers will start corrupting QoS for content providers that are possible competitors for the Service Provider’s content. (That would be be a contract violation, just like a telco providing your call records to a third party.) This is not a smart thing to do and can be easily detected.

The Content Users are the most likely content throttle, their access bandwidth may not be suitable for some streaming content, and while the ISP may be able to provide more bandwidth (using more network resources) for more money, the user may not want to pay the additional tariff. That’s their decision.

Of course, if the ISP provides more bandwidth to deliver the ISP’s content, at no extra charge, then they are exerting their monopoly and should be so charged.