I read a book as a child, probably in the early 1990s, whose story sick with me but which I haven’t been able to find since. The plot goes thusly: a child plays a semi text-based
video game in which he controls a character (represented by an asterisk), but it later becomes apparent that the character he’s controlling is real and self-aware. He’s an alien, or
something similar, and he needs help… and that’s most of what I remember, but I can’t be the only one who read it, right?
Last weekend was an exciting and unusual experience, full of exciting (expected) things interspersed with a handful of exciting (unexpected) things. Let’s go chronologically:
Thursday/Friday – Mario, Magic, Marriage
I left work, picked up a rental car (having unfortunately forgotten to take my counterpart driving license to the rental place, I had the choice of either cycling for an hour to collect
it or else paying a fiver for them to run a DVLA check, and I opted for the latter on the grounds that an hour of my time (especially if I have to spend it cycling back and forth along
the same stretch of road) is worth more to me than a picture of Elizabeth Fry. I drove home, packed a bag, said goodbye to Ruth, JTA, and Annabel, and drove up to Preston.
“I just found this card; is it yours? Maybe it will be, later.”
There, I spent most of Friday playing the new Mario game with my
sister Becky, gave a few small performances of magic (did I mention I’m doing magic nowadays? – guess that’ll have to
wait for another blog post) at various places around Preston, and went out for a curry with my mother, my sisters Becky and Sarah, and Sarah’s boyfriend Richard. So far, so ordinary,
right? Well that’s where things took a turn. Because as Becky, our mother, and I looked at the drinks menu as we waited for Sarah and her boyfriend to turn up… something different
happened instead.
Never before in our family has a marriage been conducted with so little pomp nor pre-planning. Except for our mother’s, of course.
Sarah turned up with her husband.
It turns out that they’d gotten married earlier that afternoon. They’d not told anybody in advance – nobody at all – but had simply gone to the registry office (via a jewellers, to
rustle up some rings, and a Starbucks, to rustle up some witnesses) and tied the knot. Okay; that’s not strictly true: clearly they had at least three weeks planning on account of the
way that marriage banns work in the UK. Any case case, I’ve suddenly got
the temptation to write some software that monitors marriage announcements (assuming there are XML feeds, or something) and compares them to your address book to let you know if anybody
you know is planning to elope, just to save me from the moment of surprise that caught me out in a curry house on Friday evening.
Tie some cans behind that trolley and spray “just married” on it in shaving foam, would you?
So it turns out I’ve acquired a brother-in-law. He’s a lovely chap and everything, but man, that was surprising. There’ll doubtless be more about it in Episode 32 of Becky’s “Family Vlog”, so if there was ever an episode that you ought to watch,
then it’s this one – with its marriage surprise and (probably) moments of magic – that you ought to keep an eye out for.
Next, I made my way up to Edinburgh to meet up with Matt R and his man-buddies for a stag night to
remember. Or, failing that, a stag night to forget in a drunken haze: it’s been a long, long time since I’ve drunk like I did on that particular outing. After warming up with a beer or
two in our hotel room, the five of us made our way to the Glenkinchie Distillery, for a
wonderful exploration into the world of whiskies.
It’s hard to appreciate how large the pair of stills at Glenkinchie are, if you’ve only seen the stills at other Scottish distilleries before. See the people in the background, for
scale.
And then, of course, began the real drinking. Four or five whiskies at the distillery bar, followed by another beer back in the hotel room, followed by a couple more beers
at bars, followed by another four whiskies at the Whiski Rooms (which I’d first visited while in Edinburgh for the fringe, last year), followed by a beer with
dinner… and I was already pretty wiped-out. Another of the ‘stags’ and I – he equally knackered and anticipating a full day of work, in the morning – retired to the hotel room while the
remainder took Matt out “in search of a titty bar” (a mission in which, I gather, they were unsuccessful).
The Glenkinchie Distillery bar carries a full range of Diageo Scotch whiskies, plus a handful of other brands, and expert staff are on hand to help with tasting.
Do you remember being in your early twenties and being able to throw back that kind of level of booze without so much as a shudder? Gosh, it gets harder a decade later. On the other
hand, I was sufficiently pickled that I wasn’t for a moment disturbed by the gents I was sharing a room with, who I should re-name “snore-monster”, “fart-monster”, and
“gets-up-a-half-dozen-times-during-the-night-to-hug-the-toilet-bowl-monster”. I just passed out and stayed that way until the morning came, when I went in search of a sobering
double-helping of fried food to set me right before the long journey back to Oxford.
All in all: hell of a stag night, and a great pre-party in anticipation of next weekend’s pair of weddings… y’know, the ones which I’d stupidly thought would be the only
two couples I knew who’d be getting married this fortnight!
Recently, I’ve reduced my hours working at the Bodleian in order to be able to spend more time working on
Three Rings and engaging in other bits of freelance work… and to increase my
flexibility so that I can be available for childcare and to generally make things more-convenient for the other Greendalians and I. Unfortunately, on my very second day of this new working arrangement Nena (which I built in 2008) had her power supply blow up, which sort-of threw a spanner into the works. This, along with a scary recent
hard drive failure in JTA‘s computer, I took as being a sign from the Universe that it was time to build myself a new
PC to replace Toni, my primary box, and relegate Toni to be the new Nena. It was time to build: Cosmo.
This episode of Basic Instructions, which came out disturbingly close to the construction of Cosmo, somewhat parallels my experience. Click for full comic.
Given that I had a little cash to burn, I decided that it must finally be time to fulfil a couple of long-standing dreams I’ve had – things I’ve wanted to do when building my last two
or three computers, but never been able to justify the expense. And so I set out to build my new “dream computer”: a beast of a machine which would present me with some fresh
engineering challenges during construction. Key features that I wanted to include were:
Liquid cooling
Most computers are air-cooled: the “hot” components like the processor and graphics chipset are covered with a heatsink (which works just like the fins on a motorcycle engine: drawing
heat away through contact with cool air) and, generally, a fan (to improve airflow over the heatsink and thus increase cooling). Air cooling, though, is inefficient (the transfer of
heat from components to air isn’t very fast) and noisy (“hot”-running air-cooled computers are annoyingly loud), and so in my last few PC builds I’ve drifted towards using cooler and
quieter components, such as processors that are overpowered for what they’ll actually be asked to do (like Tiffany2, who’s virtually silent) and all-in-one liquid coolers for my CPUs (like these ones, from CoolerMaster – note that these still have a
fan, but the use of a radiator means that the fan can be large, slow, and quiet, unlike conventional CPU fans which spin quickly and make noise).
The “business end” of the cooling system of a typical air-cooled graphics card. That grey sticky bit on the copper square touches the processor, and the entire rest of the system is
about dissipating the heat produced there.
But I’ve always had this dream that I’d one day build a true, complete, custom water-cooled system: taking a pump and a reservoir and a radiator and cutting pipe to fit it all around
the “hot” components in my case. The pumps and fans of water-cooled systems make them marginally louder than the quietest of fan-driven, air-cooled computers… but are far more
efficient, drawing a massive amount of heat away from the components and therefore making it possible to pack more-powerful components closer together and overclock them to speeds
undreamed of by their manufacturers. A liquid cooling solution was clearly going to be on the list.
Multi-GPU
And how to best make use of that massive cooling potential? By putting an extra graphics card in! The demands of modern 3D games mean that if you want to run at the highest resolutions,
quality settings, and frame rates, you need a high-end graphics card. And if you want to go further still (personally: I love to be able to run Bioshock Infinite, Far Cry 3, or Call
Of Duty: Ghosts at a massive “ultra-widescreen”, wrap-around resolution of 5760×1080 – that’s triple the number of pixels found on your 1080p HDTV), well: you’re going to
want several high-end graphics cards.
Even though the capability to run graphics cards in tandem, pooling resources, has existed since the 1990s, it’s only within the last decade that it’s become truly meaningful: and
even now, it’s still almost-exclusively the domain of the enthusiast.
Both ATI/AMD’s Radeon and Nvidia’s GeForce series’ of chipsets are capable of running in tandem, triple, or quadruple
configurations (so long as your motherboard and power supply hold up, and assuming that you’ve got the means to keep them all cool, of course!), and as a result all of my last few PC
builds have deliberately been “ready” for me to add a second graphics card, down the line, if I decided I needed some extra “oomph” (instead, I’ve always ended up with a new computer by
that point, instead), but this would be the first time I’d actually design the computer to be multi-GPU from the outset.
SSD/RAID 1+0 Combo
Toni featured a combination of a solid-state drive (flash
memory, like you get in pendrives, but faster) instead of a conventional hard drive, to boot from, and a pair of 2TB “traditional” hard drives, all connected through the
perfectly-adequate SATA 2
interface. Using an SSD for the operating system meant that the machine booted up ludicrously quickly, and this was something I wanted to maintain, so clearly the next step was a
larger, faster, SATA 3 SSD for Cosmo.
This is your computer. This is your computer on RAID.
Anybody who’s messed about with computer hardware for as long as I have has seen a hard drive break down at least once, and JTA’s recent malfunction of that type reminded me that even
with good backups, the downtime resulting from such a component fault is pretty frustrating. This, plus the desire to squeeze as much speed as possible out of conventional hard drives,
made me opt for a RAID 1+0 (or “RAID
10”). I’d tie together four 2TB hard drives to act as a single 4TB disk, providing a dramatic boost in redundancy (one, or possbily even two drives can be completely destroyed without
any data loss) and speed (reading data that’s duplicated across two disks is faster because the computer can be effectively “reading ahead” with the other disk; and writing data to
multiple disks is no slower because the drives work at the same time).
A few other bits of awesome
Over my last few PC builds, I’ve acquired a taste for a handful of nice-to-have’s which are gradually becoming luxuries I can’t do without. My first screwless case
was Duality, back in the early 2000s, and I’d forgotten how much easier it was to simply clip hard drives to rails until I built Nena years later into a
cheap case that just wasn’t the same thing.
If you were at, for example, Troma Night IV, on 17th May 2003, you’ll have seen Duality: she’s the huge blue thing on the right.
Another thing I’ve come to love and wonder how I ever did without is modular power supplies. Instead of having a box with a huge bundle of cables sticking out of it, these are just a
box… the cables come separately, and you only use the ones you need, which takes up a lot less space in your case and makes the whole process a lot tidier. How did it take
us so long to invent these things?
Needless to say, the planning about building Cosmo was the easy and stress-free bit. I shall tell you about the exciting time I had actually putting her together
– and the lessons learned! – later. Watch this space, and all that!
Three types of bacteria are used in the production of Emmental: Streptococcus thermophilus, Lactobacillus helveticus, and Propionibacterium freudenreichii. Historically, the holes
were a sign of imperfection, and until modern times, cheese makers would try to avoid them. Emmental cheese is used in a variety of dishes, particularly in gratins, and fondue, where
it is mixed with Gruyère.
To commemorate the second anniversary of the death of my father – a keen hiker and cyclist, who was
killed during a hiking accident while training for a trek to the North Pole – I
thought the best thing to do would be to strike out somewhere random. And where could be more random than a geohash? This was also my first ever geohashing expedition, although I’d been
meaning to do it for a long, long while. And so began the Peter Huntley Memorial Geohashing Expedition!
I cycled from Kidlington, near Oxford (in the next graticule over)
via National Cycle Network Route 51, through Bicester and towards Milton
Keynes. Early on, I had to ford a river which had broken its banks and flooded the cyclepath (and even saw a minnow swimming across the cycle lane – quite surreal!). Later, I had a
minor whoopsie when I stayed on the cycle route too long and ended up in Steeple Claydon, on the wrong side of the Padbury Brook valley, but soon corrected it. I’d anticipated having to
hop a fence to get to the hashpoint, but it turned out that the field – which had been left to fallow – didn’t have a fence, and I only needed to walk about thirty paces into it in
order to reach the hashpoint.
In memory of my dad, I pulled out a drawing of him and drank a bottle of Guinness (his preferred drink after a long day’s cycle), and began to head back. But disaster struck! Somehow,
raptors must have gotten to my bike tyre while I wasn’t paying attention, because it was completely slashed. Being that I was now at the furthest point from home in my planned journey,
I pushed it to the nearby village of Hillesden in the hope of finding a shop that might sell me sufficient supplies to repair the puncture, but was without luck. I was now faced with a
choice: I could continue pushing it home, and try to get to Bicester (a little over three hours walk away) before the bike shop there shut, or I could turn and walk
the wrong way (away from home) towards Buckingham (only about an hour’s walk away), and hope that I’d be able to find supplies there.
I headed for Buckingham, but the students I spoke to when I passed the University campus suggested that there wasn’t a bike shop in town, but suggested a hardware store that might sell
a bike pump (I’d since found a patch kit at a corner shop, although it was of course useless without a pump). But while looking for the hardware store, I discovered quite by
accident Solstice Cycles, a wonderful little bike shop right in the heart of Buckingham (at the
time, Google Maps on my phone had been completely unable to find me a bike shop at all). The man there switched out my inner tube in a jiffy (he agreed that it could well have been a
raptor attack that had damaged it), and set me on my way.
Unwilling to add further to my diversion, I took a more-direct route back to Bicester, straight down the A4421, and I’m sure I must have agitated the motorists who weren’t used to
seeing cyclists on such a major road. In Bicester, I ate the remains of my packed lunch before getting back onto the cyclepath home.
Total distance travelled: 57.75 miles; mostly cycled, but more than I’d have liked on foot. And a spectacular first geohash.
I’ve got a twist on a book test that I’m hoping to work into a performance in a couple of weeks time (cabaret-size), and I was wondering if anybody’s got any thoughts about it.
Specifically: does it sound compelling?
The effect: I’ll be following on from a couple of other mentalist effects and selling this as a “modern” twist on a traditional idea. I’ll ask for a volunteer who has
a familiarity with a certain (popular, contemporary, long-running) series of novels, and hand them a Kindle pre-loaded with the entire series, and ask them to inspect it/read any
parts of the books to ensure they’re genuine. Meanwhile, three other audience members will collectively supply single-digit numbers which are joined together in an order chosen by the
volunteer, to make a page number. The volunteer will then choose their favourite book in the series, turn to that page (you know – the hardest bit so far has been working out how to
make a Kindle show page numbers!), and the first sentence will match a prediction that’s been in an envelope on-show since the start. The ebooks can continue to be inspected (and I’ll
thoroughly be encouraging the volunteer to show pages to the audience, of course!).
The format has advantages e.g. (a) there’s no way I can see which book was chosen, unlike many similar illusions, (b) I can use a larger “library” than most, and (c) it fits into a
patter I have about modernising traditional magic. But I have a few concerns, too.
My concerns: will people assume the Kindle is gimmicked (because it’s hard to see it’s not: people already don’t trust technology!)? What can I do to help
the volunteer/audience see that it’s not?
Thanks for any thoughts!
tl;dr: book test but using a whole series of books on a Kindle, inspected by a fan familiar with the series, book chosen by volunteer, page number chosen by audience, first
sentence matches on-show prediction. Is it compelling?
