I noticed that automated emails from Steam weren’t doing alt-text very well. Some image links had no or inadequate alt-text. (Note that Steam don’t support opting for plain text rather
than HTML emails.)
I’m fortunate enough to depend upon alt-text never-to-rarely. But I prefer not to load remote images, so I still benefit from alt-text.
I filled out a support request to Steam layout out the specific examples I’d found of where they weren’t doing very well, and stressing why it’s (morally, legally, etc.) important to do
better.
And you know what: they quietly fixed it. When I received an email today telling me that something on my wishlist is on sale, it had reasonably-good alt-text throughout. Neat.
You’re probably familiar with the story of George and Robert Stephenson’s Rocket, a pioneering steam locomotive built in 1829.
If you know anything, it’s that Rocket won a competition and set the stage for a revolution in railways lasting for a century and a half that followed. It’s a cool story, but
there’s so much more to it that I only learned this week, including the bonkers story of 19th-century horse-powered locomotives.
The Rainhill Trials
Ten teams submitted applications to enter the Rainhill Trials, but only five actually took part. Four of these were the steam locomotives illustrated above.
Over the course of the 1820s, the world’s first inter-city railway line – the Liverpool & Manchester Railway – was constructed. It wasn’t initially anticipated that the new railway
would use steam locomotives at all: the technology was in its infancy, and the experience of the Stockton & Darlington railway, over on the other side of the Pennines, shows
why.
The Stockton & Darlington railway was opened five years before the new Liverpool & Manchester Railway, and pulled its trains using a mixture of steam locomotives and horses1.
The early steam locomotives they used turned out to be pretty disastrous. Early ones frequently broke their cast-iron wheels so frequently; some were too heavy for the lines and needed
reconstruction to spread their weight; others had their boilers explode (probably after safety valves failed to relieve the steam pressure that builds up after bringing the vehicle to a
halt); all got tied-up in arguments about their cost-efficiency relative to horses.
Nowadays, a train can be cancelled and a paying customer might barely get a half-hearted apology and a spot on a crowded rail replacement bus. But back in 1826 even the crew
of a broken-down train might be offered a copious allowance of beer to keep them motivated. Scan from page 119 of The North Eastern Railway; its rise
and development, by William Weaver Tomlinson.
Nearby, at Hetton colliery – the first railway ever to be designed to never require animal power – the Hetton Coal Company had become so-dissatisfied with the reliability and
performance of their steam locomotives – especially on the inclines – that they’d had the entire motive system. They’d installed a cable railway – a static steam engine pulled the mine
carts up the hill, rather than locomotives.
This kind of thing was happening all over the place, and the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Company were understandably cautious about hitching their wagon to the promise of steam
locomotives on their new railway. Furthermore, they were concerned about the negative publicity associated with introducing to populated areas these unpopular smoke-belching engines.
But they were willing to be proven wrong, especially after George Stephenson pointed out that this new, long, railway could find itself completely crippled by a single breakdown were it
to adopt a cable system. So: they organised a competition, the Rainhill Trials, to allow locomotive engineers the chance to prove their engines were up to the challenge.
When the Stockton & Darlington line began serving passengers in 1826, their advertisements only ever showed passenger coaches being pulled by horses, never steam locomotives.
The challenge was this: from a cold start, each locomotive had to haul three times its own weight (including their supply of fuel and water), a mile and three-quarters (the first and
last eighth of a mile of which were for acceleration and deceleration, but the rest of which must maintain a speed of at least 10mph), ten times, then stop for a break before doing it
all again.
Four steam locomotives took part in the competition that week. Perseverance was damaged in-transit on the way to the competition and was only able to take part on the
last day (and then only achieving a top speed of 6mph), but apparently its use of roller bearing axles was
pioneering. The very traditionally-designed Sans Pareil was over the competition’s weight limit, burned-inefficiently (thanks perhaps to an overenthusiastic
blastpipe that vented unburned coke right out of the funnel!), and broke down when one of its cylinders cracked2.
Lightweight Novelty – built in a hurry probably out of a fire engine’s parts – was a crowd favourite with its integrated tender and high top speed, but kept breaking
down in ways that could not be repaired on-site. And finally, of course, there was Rocket, which showcased a combination of clever innovations already used in steam
engines and locomotives elsewhere to wow the judges and take home the prize.
But there was a fifth competitor in the Rainhill Trials, and it was very different from the other four.
Cycloped
When you hear the words horse-powered locomotive, you probably think of a horse-drawn train. But that’s not a locomotive: a locomotive is a vehicle that, by definition, propels
itself3.
Which means that a horse-powered locomotive needs to carry the horse that provides its power…
If this isn’t the most-zany railway vehicle you’ve ever seen, please share what beats it.
…which is exactly what Cycloped did. A horse runs on a treadmill, which turns the wheels of a vehicle. The vehicle (with the horse on it) move. Tada!4
You might look at that design and, not-unreasonably, decide that it must be less-efficient than just having the horse pull the damn vehicle in the first place. But that isn’t
necessarily the case. Consider the bicycle which can transport itself and a human both faster and using less-energy than the human would achieve by walking. Or look at wind
turbine powered vehicles like Blackbird, which was capable of driving under wind
power alone at three times the speed of a tailwind and twice the speed of a headwind. It is mechanically-possible to improve the speed and efficiency of a
machine despite adding mass, so long as your force multipliers (e.g. gearing) is done right.
I’ve long loved this 2010 photo of Blackbird, simultaneously showing a flag (blowing left, with the wind) and a streamer (blowing right, as a result of the wind-powered
vehicle’s speed) demonstrating that it is travelling against the wind, but significantly faster than the wind.
Cycloped didn’t work very well. It was slower than the steam locomotives and at some point the horse fell through the floor of the treadmill. But as I’ve argued above, the
principle was sound, and – in this early era of the steam locomotive, with all their faults – a handful of other horse-powered locomotives would be built over the coming
decades.
Over in the USA, the South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company successfully operated a passenger service using the Flying Dutchman, a horse-powered locomotive with twelve seats
for passengers. Capable of travelling at 12mph, this demonstrated efficiency multiplication over having the same horse pull the vehicle (which would either require fewer
passengers or a dramatically reduced speed).
This strange contraption was eventually replaced with a steam train, under the understanding that improvements in steam locomotive technology would continue to develop faster than
advancements in techniques for the selective breeding of horses.
As late as the early 1850s, people were still considering this strange approach. The 1851 Great Exhibition at the then brand-new Crystal Palace featured Impulsoria, which
represents probably the pinnacle of this particular technological dead-end.
Capable of speeds up to 20mph, it could go toe-to-toe with many contemporary steam locomotives, and it featured a gearbox to allow the speed and even direction of travel to be
controlled by the driver without having to adjust the walking speed of the two to four horses that provided the motive force.
The reins now arriving on platform one is the Mane Line service to Carlisle. Mind the gallop. Stand clear of the hackamore.
Personally, I’d love to have a go on something like the Flying Dutchman: riding a horse-powered vehicle with the horse is just such a crazy idea, and a road-capable
variant could make for a much better city tour vehicle than those 10-person bike things, especially if you’re touring a city with a particularly equestrian history.
Footnotes
1 From 1828 the Stockton & Darlington railway used horse power only to pull their
empty coal trucks back uphill to the mines, letting gravity do the work of bringing the full carts back down again. But how to get the horses back down
again? The solution was the dandy wagon, a special carriage that a horse rides in at the back of a train of coal
trucks. It’s worth looking at a picture of one, they’re brilliant!
2 Sans Pareil’s cylinder breakdown was a bit of a spicy issue at the time because its
cylinders had been manufactured at the workshop of their rival George Stephenson, and turned out to have defects.
3 You can argue in the comments whether a horse itself is a kind of locomotive. Also – and
this is the really important question – whether or not Fred Flintstone’s car, which is propelled by his feed, is a kind locomotive or not.
4 Entering Cycloped into a locomotive competition that expected, but didn’t
explicitly state, that entrants had to be a steam-powered locomotive, sounds like exactly the kind of creative circumventing of the rules that we all loved Babe (1995) for. Somebody should make a film about Cycloped.
You’ve got 37 unpaid parking tickets. You just got pulled over for speeding. In your defense, you were texting your sister about how drunk you are. Plus there’s all that blood on your
windshield. Obviously you know it’s deer blood, but the police officers walking toward your vehicle don’t. Still, in the time it takes them to figure that out, maybe you’ll sober up.
Or escape on foot! Either way, it’ll probably be fine.
User Tags: Poor Choices / Story Rich / Multiple Endings / Parkour
Collect dead seagulls and build a zoo to house them all. Beautify the zoo with artistic flair and deodorizing sprays. Design creative group promotions to stir up interest! Is that a
customer? You’d better hope it’s not the owner of the live seagull zoo down the street, because he’s probably got some questions.
User Tags: Hard Work / Supply / Demand / Diseases & Parasites
I’ve just tried this and it works; thought I’d share my results with you so that any fellow Europeans can give it a go too.
Pre-order the game in your own country (I’m in the UK and bought my copy months and months ago; paid in £)
Pre-load the game (shocked if you haven’t already done this), so Steam says “Pre-load complete; unreleased”
Get yourself a US-based VPN provider. I’m using VyprVPN because I had an account with them already, but if you’re just after an ultra-short subscription for this one thing then you can probably get a better
deal: here’s a starting
point.
In Steam -> Settings -> Download + Cloud, change your “Download region” to one of the US ones. Save, and shut down Steam.
Connect to your VPN.
Open up Steam again: by the combination of (a) the VPN and (b) the download region, Valve will believe that you’re in the USA and activate your game! Hooray!
Play!
I hope you all appreciate the time I spent typing this when I could have been playing Civ 5! See you online!
…for several of my friends. They all got redeemed, apart from one. I keep reminding the guy, but he never gets around to redeeming it, so I reckon he doesn’t want it.
So: if you want it, it’s yours. Just PM me your Steam username.
Just want to know how to ‘fix’ Steam’s password field? Scroll down to “How to Fix It”
Steam & Security Theatre
You’re a smart guy. You’re not stupid about computer security. And that’s why you always make sure that you use a different password for every service you use, right? You might even use
a different password for every account, even when you have different passwords on the same service. You know that there are really, really good reasons why it’s
simply not good enough to, for example, have “high-security”, “general use” and “low security” passwords, and re-use each of them in several places. And if you don’t know that: well,
take my word for it and I’ll explain it in detail later.
It’s no great hardship to have lots of long, complex, effectively-random passwords, these days. Tools like SuperGenPass, LastPass, and KeePass, among others, mean that nowadays it’s so easy to use a
different password for every service that there’s no excuse not to. So you probably use one of those (or something similar), and everything’s great.
Except for that one application
– Steam. I have Steam save my password on my desktop PC (by the time somebody steals my desktop PC and
breaks into the encrypted partition on which my data files lie, I have bigger problems than somebody stealing my Just Cause 2 achievements), but it forgets
the password every time that Ruth uses her Steam account on my computer. No problem, I think: I can easily
copy-paste it from my password manager… nope: Steam won’t let you paste in to the password field.
What? If you ask Valve (Steam’s creators) about this, they’ll say that it’s a security feature, but that’s bullshit: it’s security theatre, at best. And at worst, it means that people like me are inclined to use less-secure passwords because
it’s harder to memorize and to type out that a more-secure password would be.
How to Fix It
Well, obviously the best way to fix it would be to successfully persuade Valve that they’re being stupid: others are already
trying that. But what would be nice in the meantime would be a workaround. So here is is:
Edit Program FilesSteamPublicSteamLoginDialog.res (Program FilesSteamPublicSteamLoginDialog.res on 64-bit Windows, somewhere else entirely on a Mac) using
your favourite text editor (or Notepad if you don’t have a favourite). Take a backup of the file if you’re worried you’ll break it.
In the "PasswordEdit" section (starting at about line 42), you’ll see name/value pairs. Make sure that the following values are set thusly:
"tabPosition" "1"
"textHidden" "0"
style="TextEntry"
The next time you load Steam, you’ll be able to paste passwords into the password field. The passwords won’t be masked (i.e. you’ll see the actual passwords, rather than asterisks), but
the dialog never loads with a password pre-populated anyway, so as long as you make sure that nobody’s looking over your shoulder while you type, you’re set!
Update: let’s face it, Valve’s security policies suck in other ways, too. Please read the tale of a friend-of-a-friend who’s desperate to change her Steam username.
On this day in 2004, I’d just finished my first marathon session of playing Half-Life 2, a
spectacular new video game that quickly became one of the best-selling computer games ever. Despite New Year celebrations and other
distractions, I managed to sit and play the game for a couple of days and finished
it very soon after.
The launch of the game was delayed – I’d
pre-ordered it 17 months before it eventually got released – after being plagued with development difficulties. One of the many delays to it’s launch was blamed on the theft of part
of the source code: I remember joking, after the thief had been caught, that now that they’d got the code back they’d be able to release the game,
right?
Meanwhile, Paul swore that he
would have nothing to do with the digital distribution platform – Steam – that remains the only way to get a legitimate copy of
Half-Life 2. On his blog – then on LiveJournal – he listed all of the many problems that he saw with Steam, and I countered a few of them in an argument in the comments. For years to
come, he’d go on to refuse to play some of the most fantastic computer games to be released on principle.
Looking Forward
Things change. I can’t remember the last time I saw Paul playing a video game that he didn’t buy on Steam, for one (except for a handful that he bought from Good Old Games – which is well worth visiting, if you haven’t already).
Some things stay the same: Half-Life 2 remains one of the best first-person shooters ever made, and has been followed by two spectacular sequels (Episode 1 and Episode 2) and a number
of spin-offs (including the mind-blowingly awesome Portal, which stole my life for
a while, although not for long enough to make my 2007 list of
life-stealing games). We’re still all waiting on the much-delayed Episode 3, though…
This blog post is part of the On This Day series, in which Dan periodically looks back on years gone
by.
Half-Life 2. The most immersive first-person shooter I’ve ever played. From it’s “throw you in at the deep end” beginning – chased
around the streets of the overpowering City 17 by Combine agents, rushing through apartments as raids go on all around you – to it’s immensely clever, multi-faceted puzzles – how do I
get past that guard? I could creep by him: I wonder if he’s paying attention… or throw that can to make a noise… maybe I could knock him in the back of the head before the security
camera sees me… can he swim? – it’s a thrilling game. In the Half-Life tradition, very little is given away, and the player is left to make many of their own assumptions about the way
the world around them works; I find this a little frustrating (I’d like to hear more back-story), but this is soon taken away when I’m drawn into another firefight. The game is
gorgeously detailed – the characters around you frown, smile, wink, raise an eyebrow… and genuinely look relieved, scared, upset, etc. Meanwhile, explosions outside are rendered
beautifully, water reacts like it should, and the ‘Havok’ physics engine means that if you can imagine it, you really can build it out of the myriad small items around you.
Despite Paul and my complaints about the Steam distribution system, it’s all
seemed very good – owing to it’s modular design, I was able to start playing the game when it was just 69% downloaded (and when I ‘caught up’ with it, I only had to wait a few seconds
for more content to be downloaded). Paul may be relieved to hear that once the game is downloaded (or activated, if it’s
store-bought) it can be played in “offline mode”, and never accesses the internet without permission, it won’t auto-update unless you let it, and there is an option to back up the
version you currently have installed – to CDs, for example – so that you could, if you wished, reformat and reinstall Windows and re-install the
game without having to download it again. In addition, the modular design meant that my download was ready sooner than it might otherwise be, as it took advantage of the files I’d
already downloaded as part of the demo version. I’m still not sure of any way to install to a different drive, which I’d particularly like to be able to do, but nonetheless I’m more
impressed with Steam than I expected to be.
I managed to play Half-Life 2 for four hours… before I began to feel motion sick (I’d recently had a plasma cannon installed on my hovercraft, and driving it [with my left hand] while
aiming and firing the weapon [with my right] left my poor eyes sufficiently confused that I’m now taking a quick break). I’ll probably go in again and blast some more Combine scum
before I go to Sian and Andy‘s New Year’s Party. Yeah!
Update: Fixed link to Paul’s new blog after he moved it, breaking a universe of links. Old content was at
http://www.livejournal.com/users/thepacifist/202607.html
