Author Archives: Andrew
There’s a famous quote "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes bowling down a highway". Musing on this I decided to try and estimate the bandwidth of a carrier pigeon, given modern storage technology. According to Wikipedia, a racing pigeon can maintain about 50 miles an hour over moderate distances. So let’s feed our pigeon, strap a 64GB micro SD card to each leg, and send him from Bristol to London,which should take about 2 hours.
128GB in 2 hours is roughly 1GB/minute, or say 160 Mbps (megabits per second). That’s about the effective transfer rate for USB 2, and is getting on for Gigabit LAN speed. It’s about 50 times faster than the best I get from BT Broadband, and probably over 100 times faster than the sustained broadband bandwidth over a week, which is about how long 128GB would take to transfer. Plus remember that that’s the download speed, and upload is another factor of ten slower…
Now I would be the first to admit that there are some limitations to the "pigeon post" architecture, especially in terms of range. The latency also precludes chatty protocols. But in terms of sheer transfer bandwidth Yankee Doodle Pigeon has "broadband" beaten hands down!
After talking about it for over a year, I decided that my transport needed to be “greener”, and finally bit the bullet on the respray. This is “Vivianite Green”, actually an official Mercedes colour in the late 90s, but for Continue reading →
Wednesday, May 4, 2016 in
Thoughts on the World
Like it’s predecessor, Man Up!, this is a knock-about farce based around the capable but somewhat cursed sports agent, Patrick Flynn. This time the key protegé is a nymphomaniac Russian tennis player, but otherwise the cast of gangsters, hit-men (& Continue reading →
Monday, April 25, 2016 in
Reviews,
Thoughts on the World
This book is a review, at the 50 year point, of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), and a consideration of how it may evolve in the future, by the scientist who heads several of its key committees. It’s a Continue reading →
Saturday, April 23, 2016 in
Reviews
There’s a significant dearth of information on the internet regarding how to create high-resolution 3D images for display on a suitable TV. While many of us regularly enjoy watching visually stunning 3D movies both in cinemas and also on television, Continue reading →
Monday, April 18, 2016 in
Photography
Daniel Suarez is billed as the new Michael Crichton. While a few of his novels have come onto my radar, this is the first I have read. Based on this showing there’s a great deal of promise, but the fairly Continue reading →
Friday, April 15, 2016 in
Reviews
The 1988 Winter Olympics brought us not only one, but two heart-warming stories of sporting heroism by unconventional outsiders. The story of the Jamaican Bobsleigh Team was told promptly in the wonderful 1993 Disney picture Cool Runnings, but we’ve had Continue reading →
Mike Johnston (no relation) over at The Online Photographer has recently run a number of articles discussing the extent to which the photographer adjusts the “look” of a photograph (see What Should a Photo Look Like?) His primary examples were Continue reading →
Some things don’t scale. You start off doing something, but before you know it it’s outgrown its usefulness and needs to change. So it is with website design… I started off with lists in a couple of places on this Continue reading →
Thursday, March 10, 2016 in
Photography,
Travel,
Website & Blog
As part of a general tidy-up, I’ve updated my camera history page, with a new photo of the "fleet". It may amuse you, especially as the count has crept back up again! "Photography" is a combination of many separate hobbies, Continue reading →
Tuesday, February 16, 2016 in
Photography
Coming up with a reliable backup policy is a challenge as data volumes grow. My approach is as follows. On a weekly basis I do a full backup of the system disk of the more "volatile" PCs in our collection, Continue reading →
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