Hey cool! I got a photo put on Insect Picture of the Day. Check it out.
Well OF COURSE it’s from Australia. What IS IT about freaky animals and Australia? I mean, is there some weird genetic scrambling force down there? Or is there maybe some migration gene crosslinked with excessive mutation that says “Hey, we just grew tentacles; time to migrate down under.”
Be sure to add insect picture of the day to your rss reader if you think of yourself as someone who thinks bugs are neat.
Edit: A commenter found a page that has more info on this caterpillar
[tags]australia, caterpillar, insect, photo[/tags]
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As I mentioned previously, I recently came into possession of a bunch of scratched Wiggles and Dora DVDs care of a toddler engaging in imaginative play. The first attempt to repair the DVDs using toothpaste was unsuccessful. I went down the shops and came across a DVD scratch repair kit and decided to give it a go.
The kit consisted of a polishing cloth, some paste and then a solvent based cleaner. It also had a disclaimer that it couldn’t do much with ‘deep’ scratches. It was pretty simple process, apply the paste, wait five minutes, polish it off (gently) and then apply the cleaner and polish again.
The results were pretty good for most of the DVDs. Only one DVD could not be repaired with this kit and that was the one that I had scuffed with the toothpaste. I tried polishing this one extra hard but only succeeded in scuffing it more.
At this point I decided to go heavy duty on the last DVD and bought some car cut and polish. I bought a pretty cheap brand that claimed to be very gentle. The first run through with this polish made no difference to the DVD. Subsequent run throughs with greater force only succeeded in scuffing the DVD even more! The DVD is really really positively unreadable now.
In hindsight, I wonder if the toothpaste method used on the other lightly scratched DVDs would have worked just as well as the scratch repair kit. Hopefully I won’t need to find out but I think DVD scratch repair is a handy skill to have as a parent of a toddler.
[tags]dvd, polish, scratch repair, scratch repair kit[/tags]
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When I left UQ Library, I promised I would blog a bit about what I was doing on various projects. The problem with blogging about work related stuff now that I work for a private company is that I’m restricted in what I can say. My contract says I can’t divulge company secrets and the borderline of what is secret and what is just common knowledge is a bit grey. I think the intent of it all is to hamper the attempts of competitors to replicate our products.
I had intended to just not reveal the name of the company I work for so that nothing I say here could be confused as anything to do with my employer but it goes a little deeper than that. It’s not just about using the employers name, my employer actively doesn’t want me helping anyone to do anything that might be similar to what they do. So when I think about it and apply the strictest interpretation of my contract, it means that I can’t blog about anything I’m doing at work.
But I’ve decided I can probably blur the boundaries a little bit by just sticking to fairly broad topics that are common to my industry without divulging how the company I work for actually implements any of it. I think that will be a safe approach.
All this secret squirrel stuff is bad for the industry in general anyway, especially when I think about how much I (and by extension the company I work for) benefit from the generosity of others who share their expertise on blogs. I guess the problem that is trying to be addressed is that of freeloaders or lazy competitors who come in and rip off your product. I think that actually having more openness would be a better solution to this problem as you can just expose the rip-offs for what they are and market your company as the one with the realexpertise. I suppose it get’s hairier when we’re talking consumer products but when it’s a relatively small market with a smallish customer base – i.e. you have a relationship with all of your customers, then it makes sense to be more open.
[tags]contract, intellectual property, nda, secrecy, work[/tags]
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The other day, my son thought it would be really fun to get a hold of his DVDs (Wiggles, Dora, etc…) and jump on them. As our floors have tiles, you can imagine the condition of some of the surfaces of the DVDs after this little exercise. Once I’d finished beating him within inches of his life (just kidding, I think I calmly explained to him why it was a bad idea and then made sure he never gets to touch them again. Ok, I might have swore a little) I started looking for ways to repair these DVDs.
A few google searches gave me some suggestions: very fine car polish, toothpaste and specialised DVD repair kits. I decided to start with the toothpaste method as I had some in the house. I’ll just say up front that this method did NOT work for me.
I used Colgate Gel toothpaste with a fresh mint stripe and applied it to the DVD with my finger. I then just polished it with my finger for a few minutes using a radial pattern (rubbing from the centre of the disk to the edge and then back again). Apparently you don’t want to create any micro grooves that run parallel with the tracks on the DVD so you shouldn’t do circular motions.
I tried about four times to polish the disk, washing the toothpaste off under the tap and then inspecting the surface each time. While the scratches don’t look that deep to me, I didn’t see any improvement in the DVD and the DVD drive confirmed that the disk still had read errors. I then attempted using the toothpaste and a tissue which left scuff marks on the surface of the DVD so I definitely don’t recomend that!
I guess my next attempt will be using car polish or a repair kit and if none of those things work, I suppose I’ll resort to bittorrent (though I notice the pickings are pretty slim).
The idea at the moment is to back up our DVDs. I’m thinking I’ll just make XVids of Sol’s stuff as I don’t think he worries too much about the quality.
[tags]dvd, polish, scratch, repair, toothpaste[/tags]
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