If saw wi-tricity in Howth in the mid 1980’s. a Hobbyist radio engineer Frank Decker from Grace O’Malley showed me and my twin brother how to use incandescent light bulb as a dummy load for a FM radio transmitter. [for the non geek readers why dummy load? its like taking full output and soaking it up immediately ] so this wasn’t wireless. a PL259 connector with coaxial cable patch would be soldered on to a 15W light bulb or a 40W light bulb. Too much power and the bulb blows.

So the real interesting stuff happens in the earlier stages of the transmitter. A fairy light bulb (think Christmas tree lights) has a screened cable loop of 1 centimeter diameter connected to the two points of the little bulb (which are hard to find in June) the the loop on the bulb is placed on the coils of the early stages and the transmitter is tuned up by light. These little fairy lights when placed in the air near the output stages would light up! then modulate the transmitter with “California Über Alles” by the Dead Kennedy’s and blow the whole Christmas tree set of lights.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers made a 60-watt light bulb glow by sending it energy wirelessly — from a device 7 feet away — potentially heralding a future in which cell phones and other gadgets get juice without having to be plugged in.

The breakthrough, disclosed Thursday in Science Express, the online publication of the journal Science, is being called “WiTricity” by the scientists.

this method of radiation to light is now deployed in childrens toys.!

these memories of mine help me form opinions about technology and its advance in the name of mankind making money. When UMTS towers are placed beside homes and schools i think of holding these fire cracker fairy lights. I also recalled RF burn and RF blindness to a rep from H3G doing some after care community relations having sited a tower beside a school, that the locals forced them to remove through civil militancy.

This must read as very worrying news for 1-2% of the population that are electro sensitive. more EMF smog. If my neighbours get this inside their walls, i can kiss goodbye to shortwave listening.

Hardly Normal but.

conn at edgecast.ie wrote

After a heroic editing marathon, Brian has just published the entire suite of podcasts from Thursday’s conference. If you weren’t there (or if you spent the day networking in the corridors), you can now take in the presentations and discussions at your leisure. Well done Brian - and well done Microsoft Ireland for recognising the sponsorship value of these podcasts. They’ll continue to resonate on the internet for months to come.

IIA newsletter wrote

If you missed the event do not fret as all of the speaker presentations are available as podcasts - simply go to the relevant post on the IIA Blog and listen! Thanks to Brian Greene for his work on this and Microsoft for kindly sponsoring the podcast.

now i’m blushing/ thanks to Microsoft who realise that long after the 300 people have left the Killiney Castle Hotel their sponsorship is working on demand along side the content! who said “no one got sacked for choosing Microsoft” perhaps they are just clever.

conor pope blogs over on the Irish Times ‘cassette death’ & I comment

long live the compact cassette (CC). while curry’s may not stock it. the glut of journalist interviews recorded via CC over the decades are still on those treasured tapes in bank vaults. think of the student (Jim Duffy) that taped Brian Lenihan Snr. that led to his fall from grace over calls to the Áras on the night a Govt. fell. Bugging scandals, radio airchecks, family sing songs, or taping Top of the Pops in a not so quite living room, all on CC somewhere. I have boxes & bag of tapes.

Alternatively I have struggled to hold archive MP3 files from hard disk to CD to website from job to job. Just because its digital does not make it all so easy. And while I do have early 1997 MP3s I can still say what is contained on a knackerd C60 AGFA from ‘83 by looking at the defacement of the cover of side B with total recall.

Its sad to see them go out of general use. But they will live on far longer than the 5.25 inch floppy disk.

from mastRIP.com

3G got Planning for the mast on Advance Tyres, Glasnevin Avenue. But our appeal to An Bord Plenanla, has just overturned the planning decision.
Congratulations to everyone… Goes to show what we can do when we stick together. further information will be posted in the next few days

back when we sought the sensible siting of a mast in Baldoyle in 2005 the Glasnevin group began their campaign. Their fight and story is a lesson to us all to fight the good fight and to stay the course. well done. phone companies your customers are citizens with rights! wake up, engage and meet prior to planning to discuss where these masts are to go. a quadrupling of network in the name of competition is a joke nobody is laughing at.

This appeal win seems to be another case where ABP overturned an inspectors report, and it seems to be restricted to the revisions to a previous successful planning application. I am seeking extra info on this.

rte is to stream many of its news & current affairs programmes live to the world and to Ireland from tomorrow (St. Patrick’s Day 17/03/2007). see rte.ie/live

press release

Múirne Laffan, Executive Director of RTÉ Publishing, said of the new service:

“This is a very exciting development for RTÉ. We built a system in-house, using the most innovative technology to give the best service possible to our existing users. Our aim is also to reach new audiences. RTÉ.ie now has the highest user base of any Irish website. We believe that delivering RTÉ News live throughout the world will grow this even further”.

adverts are blacked out, and house ads could be put in here unless thats not allowed. I think the service could be complimented with 24/7 rolling news, 24 hrs a day and 7 minute loop like Sky News & BBC24. to fill the gaps between the live news slots. With RTÉ International due this year its a big year for the Irish broadcaster, earlier today we reported the the LW 252 was to get DRM enabled in the next 10 days.

Im watching it on 2048/256 ADSL in Dublin and both windows media & real media formats had some issues on the eve of live watching eircom soccer. But in the main its nice to see 16:9 as i live in bunny’s ears land of FTA where RTE digital has yet to provide a service, but my freeview box has just become FREE and will be in Dublin on Tuesday (thanks liz). While I watch this i think a tight RSS feed to a youtube like service would be a decent service in this day and age. Perhaps if the iPlayer from Auntie BBC is EBU usable then RTE eyes would really be smiling online.

messing around with the xda mini; a great wifi hunter. makes twittering more fun in landscape; and I can SSH and make phone calls too! or yes and Skype over wifi…. keep the bills down! (making the business case to my partners! who all got k800i SE phones)

19 outa 20 blogs I own are WP, the other is blogger. I hold a blogger to stay in touch with the past

many a client has one too. and some of these clients like to have side bar links in their websites to their blogger blog posts, on every other page of their website.

to this end a simple atom2html script by Stephen K. Anthony was used.

When blogger users choose New blogger over old they do not realise that the atom is shifting also. A quick fix to the atom2html.pl by me is here to share with you,,,, I have kept the old method for you old blogger heads who wont upgrade.

To blogger heads that did upgrade, welcome to 2002, from the WP users in 2007.

the perl script is here no warrant(y) blah blah blah.. but if you improve on it pass it on and pass it back. hope this saves someone half an hour… example of use http://www.doop.ie/podcasting/index.html

IRISH DOCTORS’ ENVIRONMENTAL ASSOCIATION

Open Meeting
Date;Fri. 23rd Feb. 07
Venue Tailors Hall, Back Lane,Dublin 8
(Near Christ Church).

HEALTH AND THE ENVIRONMENT

11.30 - 13.00
Dr. Elizabeth Cullen - Health Implications
of ClimateChange.

Michael McKeon - Mercury in the
Environment

Ms.Juliet Duff and Dr Ohnesorge
Ecohealth Education.

14.15 - 16.00
Dr. Vyvyan Howard - Health implications of
nano-Technology.

Dr.Gerd Oberfield - EMR and Public Health.

Dr George Carlo - Mobile Phones and
Health.

16.00 Break
16.15 - 17.00 - Open Forum and Close

17.00 - 18.00 AGM.

for the record. I got wind of the balcony TV take down from Inga in Boston who is on a different time zone to me. I did my usual 5 hours sleep but started at 11pm so was up at 4:30am. saw the issue. blogged it, and while I blogged it I was so pissed, and answering Inga’s request for a fix/take down from a myspace & web site for the broken video’s I decided NO feck that I wont. I will re upload the videos. Now here is the science bit. You can and should take copies of stuff on youtube if you ever feel it may be removed by whomever! details on how to archive it will be at the bottom of this post.

So i went to my virgin youtube account, and uploaded the very FLVs I supplied to enterprise ireland a month ago for the midem bash in france. youtube took the FLVs that it once gave me and the two eleanor mcevoy videos are restored. o happy days (for me not balcony TV).

What the hell is youtube up to? i suspect Balcony TV was a director account? and had 223 vidz up there? and the cut off was ever so clinical? when 2-tone.info migrated from majordomo to google groups (gg), GG had an oops, you can’t message 900 people an invite, who are you? kinda response. 2-tone.info said who they were etc. and all was well. DMCA viacom is the tip of the iceberg, if WIPO gets podcasting inside the broadcast treaty, we are all doomed. Thankfully PodRepBod and its international partners including EFF & the international podcast group are keeping an eye to that area.

so mystery over, thats how at least two Balcony TV vidz of old survived..

there is a way to grab the feed of a youtube video.

using the firefox browser get a plugin (add on) called videodownloader
from http://javimoya.com/blog/youtube_en.php

follow its instruction and change the file extension to .flv
and you have your own copy of the video without the youtube ‘dog’

you may play these files with a .flv player like FLV player
http://www.martijndevisser.com/blog/article/flv-player-updated

you are then able to one click convert it to things like a video iPod
with a tool like http://www.videora.com/en-us/Converter/iPod/

all software discussed is Free/shareware/or Open source