I had this crazy idea to start up a new web­site today, spe­cific­ally a wiki.

Jasna’s veget­arian and I’m semi-​​vegetarian (“flex­it­arian”, Wiki­pe­dia informs me), only because I’m a picky eater and the veget­arian options out­side of what we pre­pare at home often aren’t great.

Envir­on­mental reas­ons are cer­tainly the primary reas­ons for both of us. Meat is inher­ently effi­cient: for most anim­als humans eat, it takes some­where around 10 Cal­or­ies of plant mat­ter to make 1 Cal­orie of animal mat­ter and it would make a lot of sense envir­on­ment­ally — and prob­ably eco­nom­ic­ally as well — to cut out the middle man and just eat the 10 Cal­or­ies of plant mat­ter. That inef­fi­ciency leads to increase land usage, water usage, soil erosion, etc. There are other envir­on­mental prob­lems, such as sewage and meth­ane emissions.

Well today I was lament­ing to myself that there really is no resource for find­ing out exactly what the envir­on­mental costs of foods are! To be sure, draw­ing the line at meat is a little arbit­rary. Veget­arian food, espe­cially meat altern­at­ives like TVP, can go through a lot of pro­cessing and, for all I know in my ignor­ance, end up being just as bad as meat. On the other side, for all I know, also in my ignor­ance, there are some meats out there that really aren’t a big prob­lem at all.

So I have a vis­ion: what if there were a wiki that allowed con­sol­id­at­ing inform­a­tion and maybe even ori­ginal research into what the envir­on­mental costs of foods are?

I don’t know if it’s prac­tical at all. To gauge interest I did my best at ask­ing an unbiased sur­vey while keep­ing an eye on the “Envir­on­mental dam­age from hus­bandry” option. My biggest fear is I’d just be cre­at­ing a web­site for myself that no one else will ever read; I already have one of those.

The closest thing I’ve found to what I’m look­ing for is food­ori­gins but it’s not really aim­ing at the same thing.

I don’t know. I’ll mull it over for a while longer. At stake is $10 for a domain regis­tra­tion and how­ever long it takes to set up a wiki these days.

After yesterday’s fail­ure I brought a bit of extra duct tape and super glue and got the car back in work­ing order with the cam­era affixed to it nicely. I took it out again this after­noon to see if I could get the cam­era to sur­vive some small jumps off some staircases.

The good news is my duct tap­ing and super glu­ing worked. The cam­era didn’t move an iota — though sadly I had to tilt it a bit to the left to get it seated prop­erly — and the servo con­trol­ler stayed where it was sup­posed to.

Before I get into the down­sides maybe I’ll just show the video.

So the first down­side is that the video ends about five minutes earlier than it should have. When I rolled the car it rolled onto the shut­ter but­ton, unbe­knownst to me. It’s too bad since the crazier/​more abus­ive stuff came after that.

The second down­side is that both the cam­era and car took more abuse than they have before. The metal cas­ing on the cam­era got scraped off on one corner. One of the front shocks on the car came apart, which is espe­cially bad con­sid­er­ing it’s an oil-​​filled shock absorber. I haven’t decided what I’ll do about that.

The third down­side is that since I had to run the car without a body in order to get the cam­era on, it got more water dam­age than usual. Cur­rently it only goes in reverse. I’ll take another look at it after it dries out.

I think I’m going to put this short-​​lived remote con­trolled car video­graphy pro­ject aside until I fig­ure out a way to get things to sur­vive better.

The last time I attached a cam­era to my remote con­trolled car the major prob­lem, from my per­spect­ive, was that it was too bumpy, to the point of not being able to see any­thing, really. The solu­tion to this is two-​​fold:

1. Do it on pave­ment instead of snow.
2. Attach the cam­era more securely.

Since it’s been crazy nice lately — 4º for the past couple days — we’ve had a lot of dry pave­ment com­ing out, so I took the camera/​car com­bin­a­tion out again today. I attached the cam­era dir­ectly to the chassis with the help of a styro­foam shim, rather than to the body like I did last time.

It star­ted off prom­ising! Up until the last ten seconds I think it counts as a mod­est suc­cess! There’s not so much boun­cing and you can actu­ally see what’s going on.

Sadly, those last ten seconds…yeah, I turned left when I should have turned right. It not only knocked the cam­era off, but it knocked the con­trol­ler off the chassis. The design of the car is rather stu­pid in this regard: the con­trol­ler is just can­ti­levered, held in by adhes­ive, in my case super glue. I’ll re – super glue it and see if I can’t try again tomorrow.

My ulti­mate plan was to take it off some sweet jumps. Now I’m won­der­ing if the cam­era will sur­vive the trip: it was just held in place by the afore­men­tioned styro­foam shim and some duct tape. I’ll try it with more duct tape and see if I can’t get it to sur­vive a jump tomorrow.

Why use lungs when you can iRespire?

Domain name:           burrell.ca
Domain status:         EXIST
Approval date:         2005/02/02
Renewal date:          2012/02/02
Updated date:          2010/02/02

I’ve been watch­ing it for the past 3 or 4 years. Who­ever owns it doesn’t appear to be using it for a whole lot — prob­ably just email if any­thing — and it def­in­itely doesn’t seem to be a domain squat­ter. I was start­ing to think it was someone who registered the domain and for­got about it. When they for­got to renew the domain last month I figured it was finally going to be released.

Last night — the date the domain expired — I checked it and it was lis­ted by CIRA as SUSPD. I.e., it had entered the 30-​​day “sus­pen­ded” period where the owner has one final chance to renew before it’s released. I think CIRA charges a pen­alty for renew­ing a domain while it’s sus­pen­ded, so who­ever owns this domain appar­ently really wants it for some­thing. I guess I can’t be too upset about it. Oh well.

My novel is still going. I’m still only at about 7000 words — over 10% of the way there! — but I think it’s going pretty well. No mat­ter how stressed I am or how much work piles up I find it pretty relax­ing to go back to the novel, even if it’s only for half an hour a week or some­thing like that.

Also I hit a very major mile­stone today: my novel’s first inter­ro­b­ang. The premise of the novel, again, is that it’s an altern­ate real­ity where another spe­cies of homo has sur­vived, in addi­tion to humans. They’re incap­able of verbal speech, though, which makes oppor­tun­it­ies for inter­ro­b­angs a little less plen­ti­ful than you’d get oth­er­wise. Oh well.

I’ve real­ized I don’t really care for drama that much. I tend to favour non-​​fiction over fic­tion and even the fic­tion I do like I gen­er­ally tend to like for the descrip­tion of the world itself. Any plot hap­pen­ings should be dir­ectly attrib­uted and in enhance­ment of the descrip­tion of the world itself and not just for drama’s sake, or so it seems. Well I threw in a bit of a plot twist today, so we’ll see how it goes.

At this rate I may even fin­ish in time for the next NaNoWriMo!

I’ve always loved remote con­trolled cars. I think at one point in ele­ment­ary school I even lis­ted R/​C car driver as a future pro­fes­sion of mine. While I did have some actu­ally really nice cars as a kid, one dream of mine which never came to fruition was to put a video cam­era on the car. It would be like being trans­por­ted to a mini­ature world where everything is huge and cars go orders of mag­nitude faster than they should.

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Over Christ­mas break we stopped by a Win­ners and I picked up an amphi­bi­ous bat­tery con­trolled car. The box had some dra­matic pic­tures of it going from water to land, so I decided to try it out in my own kit­chen sink. Not great, but well worth the $2.25, I’d say!

Here’s the video.

Someone recently asked about Freenet, so I decided to try it out again. If you’re curi­ous about Freenet, the about page gives a good descrip­tion of it. It’s a WWW-​​like net­work — minus the dynamic con­tent and search engines — with the added bene­fit that it’s totally anonym­ous and uncensor­able. “Anonym­ous” is a bit of a mis­nomer: it’s actu­ally closer to pseud­onym­ous since, through cryp­to­graphic prim­it­ives, it’s designed around the idea of hav­ing iden­tit­ies not linked to real iden­tit­ies. The “WWW-​​like” is also a mis­nomer as it’s actu­ally a more gen­eral key-​​data sort of enorm­ous filesys­tem, but the WWW-​​like part of it is what most users see, espe­cially initially.

I played around with it years ago and I have to say it’s improved quite a bit since then. The biggest, and just about the only vis­ible, change is in per­form­ance. I haven’t dug into see­ing what they’ve done to help things, but most frees­ites load within a minute and there are very few “data not found“s. “Within a minute” may not sound very impress­ive com­pared to the WWW, but it’s really impress­ive con­sid­er­ing the nature of Freenet.

From a local resource con­sump­tion stand­point, per­form­ance is still quite ter­rible. I’ve been run­ning it for close to a day now and the load aver­age stays some­where around 0.3 even when not doing any­thing and can jump up above 3.0 when doing cas­ual brows­ing of frees­ites or Frost boards. This is unfor­tu­nate since you have to leave it run­ning 24/​7 for it to work well.

The same prob­lem is with Freenet that has always been there: con­tent. I agree with the gen­eral philo­sophies of Freenet: even “good” cen­sor­ship philo­soph­ic­ally has bad con­sequences and so it is nice to have a place like Freenet free from any sort of cen­sor­ship. Well, in prac­tice, that hasn’t really panned out. Freenet’s been around for close to 10 years now and still doesn’t have any com­pel­ling con­tent. I’ve poked around the major frees­ites (this link will not work if you aren’t on Freenet) and the Frost mes­sage boards and…nothing. There’s piles of con­tent, of course, but little of it of con­sequence, very little of it inter­est­ing, and none of it compelling.

The primary value of some­thing like Freenet in mostly-​​free coun­tries like Canada would be Wikileaks, I would think. Well there is some of that — for instance there’s a frees­ite devoted to the leaked Sarah Palin emails — but the fact of the mat­ter is that Wikileaks exists in the “real” cen­sor­able Inter­net and it hasn’t been cen­sored. Or at least not yet. There’s been pos­tur­ing that maybe it will be some day, we’ll see. But the fact that it hasn’t been yet takes away a niche mar­ket for Freenet.

What I see a lot of on the frees­ites is politically…disagreeable…writings. In this sense Freenet actu­ally does make sense. The Inter­net is becom­ing less and less anonym­ous. It used to be that you could set up a Geo­cit­ies sites and write about your love for Emma Gold­man, but these days ser­vice pro­viders (in the most gen­eral sense) are chomp­ing at the bit jump­ing all over them­selves at the oppor­tun­ity of passing on IP addresses and what­not. The polit­ical writ­ings on Freenet aren’t gen­er­ally illegal (well, maybe there might be one or two in a few coun­tries with severe hate speech laws, but those are the excep­tions), but they’re uncon­ven­tional enough that I can see people want­ing anonym­ity. It’s not so much about Freenet being uncensor­able as it is about Freenet offer­ing this very eleg­ant pseud­onym­ity. I sup­pose it’s nice to have a place where you can write and you know that it’s impossible for future employ­ers to track you down and find out that you secretly agree with Emma Goldman’s politics.

Well, I still agree with the the­ory of Freenet and I still acknow­ledge its prac­tical value in places like China, but…I still can’t see that it applies to me. I’d like to cre­ate a frees­ite to add more con­tent and get more people inter­ested in Freenet, but like most people, I can’t think of any­thing com­pel­ling to put there. I think I’ll just unin­stall it again and wish it well.

P.S. I’ve just learned that Frost has been obsol­esced by a new Freenet mes­sage board sys­tem called FMS. When I’d pre­vi­ously used Freenet many years ago, Frost was the big one, so I installed it out of habit. FMS looks actu­ally rather fant­astic (and it works with your exist­ing news­group reader like Thun­der­bird) and maybe I’ll keep Freenet around another couple hours to play with FMS, but I doubt the con­tent on there is going to be rad­ic­ally dif­fer­ent from the rest of Freenet.

I still have a few minutes before 2010 so I thought I’d write a little some­thing while Jasna and I are sit­ting on the couch watch­ing cel­eb­ra­tions on TV with her parents.

Well, first off I think I need to take more pic­tures, the evid­ence for that being that the above is my favour­ite pic­ture I took this year. It’s our fat­test cat, Pin­cho.
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