A week ago, Jem and I took the kids on a semi-planned day trip out to the Black Country Living Museum in Dudley.
I’d not been before, but the name made it sound like it would be right up my street, being a little bit like Blists Hill Victorian Town in Coalport, which is just down the road from us and (from what I remember) is a cracking museum for kids and adults alike.
On arrival, we met up with a couple of friends and made our way into the entrance.
WARNING: Contains spoilers.
The first Guardians Of The Galaxy movie (from hereon referred to as GotG) was a smash hit for Marvel Studios when it came out in 2014, raking in over $750 million at the box office. It was considered a refreshing change from previous Marvel movies, with more humour and, crucially, a setting that did not involve Earth.
Hey there, readers! It’s been almost a year since my last post on here, because I’m a complete and utter prat who keeps forgetting that this domain name even exists. Still, never mind, I’m here now, eh?
What’s brought me back into the fold, you may ask? Well, it’s the hotly anticipated release of Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 on the PC (and various other platforms, but I do 99% of my gaming on a PC, so the PC version is what we’re talking about here.)
Courtesy of my new Nikon Coolpix P900 superzoom…
It’s the last day of Septemblog, and I’ve failed to blog on three days out of the thirty. That’s a 10% failure rate, which is higher than I would have liked, but on the other hand it does mean that – this entry included – I have blogged for 27 days out of the last 30, which is a far higher rate of posting than I’ve ever achieved before.
I doubt I’ll keep it up, but if I can do two posts a month minimum that would be good.
On to the actual topic of this post – flying machines, and in particular, passenger airliners.
I’ve been interested in aviation right from the age of about 5 or 6 when I vividly remember congregating in the back garden of my house with my Mum, Dad, two of my brothers, my next door neighbours, and my visiting Aunt and Uncle (and their two children) to watch Concorde fly overhead.
The reason I vividly remember that event so well was because I was completely unprepared for the sound that Concorde would make when it broke the sound barrier directly over our house, and I literally wet my pants with fear. Not proud of it, but there you go.
It was a few years later at the age of 10 that I took a flight for the first time, and the intense feeling of acceleration when the plane started the take-off procedure was amazing – although somewhat muted by my adulthood and having been lucky enough to drive some ludicrously fast cars.
It amazes me that the human race has been able to develop powered flight, and not only that, but to such a degree that we can take an aircraft like the Boeing 747-400, which (at maximum take-off weight) clocks in at nearly 400,000 kilograms, and not only get that into the air but keep it there long enough to travel to the other side of the world. To put that into some kind of perspective, when Orville and Wilbur Wright developed the world’s first powered, manned flying machine, the Wright Flyer I, it weighed only 274 kilograms and stayed in the air for under a minute for all of it’s first few flights.
It is this amazement that fuels my morbid fascination with aircraft accidents and aviation disasters.
Flying is of course, statistically, the safest form of transport, with by far the lowest number of fatalities per passenger mile. But the flipside to this is that, when something goes wrong, it tends to go wrong big.
Bizarrely I always find myself reading about aviation disasters the night before I have to catch a plane myself, and the "worst" instance of this was shortly before the holiday I took to Tenerife in 2010. Up until that point I’d been blissfully unaware of the 1977 Tenerife airport disaster, which remains the single largest aviation disaster (by number of fatalities, and excluding deliberate action such as the September 11 attacks)
In this particular case, a catalogue of human errors compounded by bad weather conditions resulted in one aircraft attempting to take off while another aircraft was taxiing across the runway. They collided, and 583 people lost their lives. A lasting legacy of this incident is that the language used by air crew and air traffic controllers changed significantly in an attempt to prevent repeat incidents – part of the problem in Tenerife was that the air crew on one plane thought they’d received permission to take off from the tower when in actual fact they’d been told to hold – patchy radio communications meant they essentially just heard the words "take off" and assumed all was clear.
Nowadays, the words "take off" are only said to give clearance. At all other times, "take off" is referred to as "departure."
It’s these little changes that occur that contribute to air travel’s safety record. Sure, things go wrong, and as above they tend to go wrong in a big way, but we learn from our mistakes and push onwards, as humans are so good at doing.
Some news came out recently that a group of aviation enthusiasts (and Concorde fans) had clubbed together and raised $120 million (or £120 million, can’t remember) in a bid to return Speedbird to the skies – all Concorde airframes were grounded in 2003, after a decidedly rocky start to the 21st Century with the 2000 Air France crash (the only crash Concorde ever had) and the "relaunch" flights taking place on the morning of September 11, 2001.
I personally can’t see it happening (Airbus withdrew support and maintenance agreements for the type around 2003 and I can’t see them being particularly keen to start it up again) but it would be nice to think that it could happen.
I was able to sit on board Concorde in 2008 on a holiday to Barbados – it wasn’t flying, obviously, it was stationed at the air museum at Barbados’ Grantley Adams International Airport.
My overriding impression of the plane was that it was much smaller inside than I’d imagined. There is only room for four-abreast seating (with the gangway down the middle) and headroom is much less than on other airliners, simply because the plane itself is so thin.
A truly incredible piece of engineering, and it’s a shame that we’re unlikely to see further developments in supersonic air travel any time soon – there’s not an awful lot of money in it, there never was (Concorde never really turned a profit for the two operating airlines, although British Airways apparently managed to make it profitable towards the end of it’s operational life) and from an airline’s perspective, there are more money-making opportunities on longer flights with more people than on a supersonic flight that lasts half the time.
"…are a million-to-one," he said.
Yes, it’s my second post this month with a direct quote from Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds in the heading. But, you know what? I don’t care. Today has been an odd day for me, with lots of apparently accidental yet strangely coincidental goings on.
Firstly, on my way into work this morning I realised that I was listening to Jeff Wayne’s 2012 release of War of the Worlds, which I’ve previously derided on this very blog. I started it playing last night on my journey home, the goal being to finally listen to it all the way through and decide once and for all if it can hold a candle to the Richard Burton version.
I had to pick up Kit, my good friend, colleague and extreme BeEx lurker this morning as we often carpool into the office, me picking him up as my journey into work takes me past his house.
With Kit in the car, I told him about NASA’s rumoured (and, it appears, actual) announcement today about them discovering evidence of actual liquid water on Mars, which is some pretty damned big news and presumably leads to all sorts of questions about whether there is actually life on Mars still (even at just a microbial level.)
I then asked Kit what he’d done over the weekend, and he informed me that he’d been to the cinema to watch a Cineworld Unlimited special screening of Matt Damon’s new film, The Martian.
It was only at this point that I realised the connecting thread between all of these things, and it struck me as a little odd that we’d spoken about three things related to Mars without even picking up on it, all within the first 20 minutes of the day.
As if that wasn’t enough, I was hit in the face by a chocolate bar wrapper flying up into the air while I was out walking on my lunch break. Yes, it was a Mars wrapper.
There also seemed to be a frankly ridiculous number of Bruno Mars and Olly Murs songs playing on the Spotify playlist at the office today. OK, so Olly Murs is a bit of a tenuous link, but still.
What can it all mean?
I’ve been mucking about with computers for the best part of 25 years now, and in that time I’ve spent a fair amount of hours playing computer and video games. In fact, as my earlier post about Steam will show, I’ve got quite a lot of games kicking around on my home PC – most of which I’ve never played, mind.
But, in that 25 years, I’ve come across a few games that have made such an impression on me that I can always go back and play them some more. For two of those games, I’d long moaned about how no-one had ever bothered to make a worthy sequel to them, but in recent years those two worthy sequels have materialised and I now have both the old and the new to play with, which spells bad news for my spare time.
Here’s a bit of a write up about some of them, starting with…
I kind of missed the boat with the original Elite. It was released in 1984 when I was just a toddler, and until I took ownership of an Amiga A1200 I didn’t really have any of the machines that it was available for, and by the time I’d got an A1200, it’s sequel was released.
Right from the intro movie, I was hooked:
I loved the sense of freedom that the game provided, and even though strictly speaking there wasn’t any "point" to the game (apart from gaining ELITE status, which could only be done by destroying a ridiculous number of AI ships, so I never bothered trying) I never got bored of just flying around soaking up the universe.
I still think that it was an incredible achievement – David Braben squeezed an entire universe into under 500 kilobytes of disk space. True, much of it was procedurally generated, but the core systems were all hand-built and there was of course graphics and audio to be included in that size as well. I imagine this web page probably doesn’t fit into 500 kilobytes of disk space!
I always chose the "recommended start position" at Sirocco Station, on the surface of Merlin in the Ross 154 system. My first action would be to buy some hydrogen fuel and some animal meat, and then jet off into the big black (or rather, the big blue in Frontier’s case) and hyperjump to Barnard’s Star, where I would dock at Boston Base (an Orbis starport that orbited Birminghamworld, if I remember rightly) and sell the animal meat. I can never remember what I took back to Ross 154 – I want to say Robots or Computers, but I think they may have been too expensive to buy at this stage, so it might have been Farm Machinery.
Either way, I went back and forth between the two stations until I’d raised enough to move over to Sol (where Earth is, non-spacey people!) and do more trading around there before getting in with the Federal Military.
Eventually I’d get cash rich enough to upgrade my Eagle Long Range Fighter to a Viper Defence Craft and then I’d go and kick some space pirate arse. Although usually what happened was that I would get my non-pirate arse handed to me on a plate and I’d have to start over.
Over the years I’ve most likely spent thousands of hours playing this game, and it’s one of the ones I always wanted a worthy sequel to. Frontier: First Encounters came out in 1996 but I never had it as I wasn’t a PC owner at the time, and it was a buggy mess anyway.
Over time, rumours started that David Braben and his company Frontier Developments were working on a new sequel, the much vaunted Elite 4. Nothing ever came to fruition though, until a few years ago when Elite: Dangerous appeared on Kickstarter and made an absolute fortune. I put quite a bit of money into it myself, and the game came out last year to a mixed reception. I enjoy playing it, and still do occasionally, but at the moment it lacks some of the features that made Frontier so special – namely planetary landings and passenger transport missions, but the former is coming to the game very soon.
And it looks so, so pretty…
The spiritual successor to Laser Squad by the Gollop Brothers, UFO: Enemy Unknown (or X-COM: UFO Defense as it was known in the States) was a turn-based strategy game centred around the story of an alien invasion of Earth.
I’d played turn based strategy games before (including Laser Squad, and the good-but-not-quite-as-good-as-UFO Sabre Team) but none of them really "gripped" me in the way that UFO did.
I think it was the combination of base and resource management and the actual turn based battles themselves, it made it feel like a deeper game (and it was only really in the mid 2000s, when I got involved with the UFOpaedia, that I became aware of just how deep the game actually was)
Here’s the intro:
The best part about UFO was that it was completely and utterly unrelenting. In most games back then, and even more so today, you were punished for failure – but the difficulty level in UFO (even on the easiest setting) was such that you could expect to lose your soldiers constantly, and for the most part it didn’t matter – in fact, in many cases you found yourself recruiting soldiers specifically to be used as cannon fodder.
In most games, the difficulty curve starts off very easy and, as you learn the ropes, the difficulty increases until you get to the Big Bad Boss. This was basically reversed in UFO – at the start of the game, you were outnumbered, outarmoured, outgunned and outclassed in pretty much every way. You are facing off against an unknown enemy force and you know literally nothing about them or their capabilities. As the game progresses, your research scientists discover more about the aliens and their weapons and you develop effective methods for fighting them.
At this point, the game normally throws harder aliens at you with new capabilities, but as time goes on and your scientists produce more and more kit, your job gets easier as you can fight back with alien weaponry. By the time you reach the "endgame", you should have almost no trouble at all taking on the aliens.
This is another game that I’ve logged a stupid number of hours on. Sure, it has a dated user interface and graphics (although I love the "manga" style, personally) but in terms of gameplay, atmosphere and sheer outright difficulty, nothing has ever come close for me.
And, as with Frontier, this game has been crying out for a decent sequel for a long time. Many, many game developers have tried and most have failed. It was only in 2012 when Firaxis Games announced that they were working on a new game – XCOM: Enemy Unknown – that I sat up and took notice.
The 2012 game (which has recently had a sequel announced, creatively titled XCOM 2) changed some elements of the original, which I remember being quite aggrieved about at the time, but those negative thoughts faded away as soon as I played the demo. It was near perfect, and a bang-on reimagining of the original game. I seem to remember writing a review of XCOM back when it was released, too.
This was a bit of a controversial game at the time. The original box-art featured a red poppy, which led to a hate campaign in various British newspapers, who vilified it as an insult to war veterans and people that had died in service of the country, claiming that it glorified war.
Of course, what every single one of those newspaper editors had failed to realise, and what would have become patently obvious if they’d bothered to play the damn thing, was that Cannon Fodder was very much anti-war. Through satire, the use of visual metaphors (like the "Boot Hill", which would slowly become filled with the headstones of soldiers that had died under your command) and other small touches (like all of your soldiers having names) the game went to pretty big lengths to point out that actually, war’s a bit on the crap side and that we should do all we can to avoid it, it being a senseless waste of life.
Besides all of this controversy, the game was great to play and over the course of the game you became really quite attached to your little green helmeted guys.
I don’t really get much chance to play this (and its sequel from a couple of years later) any more these days as I can only really play it on an Amiga emulator and I often can’t be bothered to boot it up, but it’s still as good today as it was then, and I would give my left nut for a phone/tablet conversion.
A Russian company was licensed to make a sequel in 2011. It was crap. It tried desperately to retain the charm of the previous two games, but the move to 3D really didn’t work, and nor did the poor attempts at keeping the same atmosphere.
It also didn’t help that there was clearly a dodgy translation somewhere as lots of parts of the game (right down to its Start Menu shortcut) referred to it as Connon Fodder 3.
Still, at least the first two games are still playable. There is a game in development from someone completely unrelated to the originals that looks promising (Jarheads, by the excellently named Gareth Williams) and, should the worst come to the worst, the first game gave the world possibly the greatest video game music video to have ever existed:
Over the past few months, I’ve begun noticing more and more adverts (or promoted posts, or whatever they want to call them) on Facebook trying to sell me products that the advertisers have deemed that I need, no doubt from analysing my browsing history, the status updates that I post to Facebook, my tweets and every other digital footprint that I leave on my hike through the information superhighway.
The thing that amazes me is how (quite frankly) utterly ridiculous many of these products appear to be. I’ve included a few examples below. In true "don’t sue me" fashion, I feel I should write a disclaimer that states that I’m sure all of the products featured below have a valid use and aren’t just shameless cash grabs for unsuspecting gadgetphiles, but that they’re just not for me and my opinion counts more than anything else. Natch.
Let’s start with this one, shall we?
I used to have a MacBook Air, with a built in webcam. I have a laptop now, again with a built in webcam. I don’t think I’ve ever been particularly bothered by the prospect of someone remotely switching my webcam on – let’s face it, I’m just not that interesting, and out of the billion or so Internet users (probably more than that) why would someone pick little old me?
Clearly I’m something of an odd one out though, as nearly eight thousand people with more money than sense donated a grand total of just over $93,000 (NINETY THREE THOUSAND UNITED STATES DOLLARS) to "bring this project to life."
To be fair to the project creator, the lowest pledge tier was $5 and that at least got you a two-pack of Nopes.
However, as one Nope is basically just a small neodymium rare earth magnet, I can’t work out why someone would buy Nope instead of just forking out a fraction of the price for a pack of 10 from Amazon.
This project is still in the funding stage but is somehow going to be fully funded.
Watches and other timepieces have remained largely unchanged since they were invented, for all intents and purposes. Sure, the invention of the digital watch meant that people didn’t need to look at analogue clock faces any more, and there have always been novelty watches available, but this is something else.
Not only is the watch itself much harder to read "at a glance" than every other timepiece ever made, but it retails for a mere 349 euros. Actually, reading the campaign page, this price doesn’t seem too high as the engineering involved to make this watch work as described must be quite involved, but 349 euros will buy you all manner of watches or smartwatches.
Reading the Kickstarter page, it becomes very apparent that they are targeting hipsters and other fashionistas who would probably buy a watch like this purely to make a statement rather than as an actual functional item.
(I’m hardly one to talk about this, incidentally, in that I own an Apple Watch. But at least I bought mine to use, damnit, and to look vaguely idiotic when paying for something at a supermarket.)
"Watches to travel through time", indeed. Get bent.
This is another one that continually pops up in my Facebook feed, usually with a suitable clickbaity headline like "You Won’t Believe The Features That This Notebook Has! It’s INSANE!"
They wanted $10,000 to get the manufacturing of this notebook off the ground. They ended up with just over $383,000.
For some bloomin’ paper and faux leather – not even real bloody leather! The cheapskates! $27 for one notebook. $27 for a non-refillable notebook. $27 for a notebook that boasts such incredible (sorry, "INSANE!") features as having a gap at the top for putting a pen in, like people don’t have pockets.
Amazing. Simply amazing.
A portable flask made out of titanium, that ships with it’s own unique insulating coat, and is designed purely for the collection and bottling of snow for the express purpose of retailing to Inuit communities?
This is why I’m not an ideas man.
And, do you know what? On reflection, I take the heading of this post back. I’m glad I’m not.
By "range", I do of course mean "distance", not "shooting range" or "frying range" – although to be fair, I have experienced frying range anxiety from my first job working at a local chippie. That was more to do with the owner though, a large, hairy Greek man called Tony who insisted on calling me Gary no matter how many times I told him I was at best "Gaz" and at the very worst, "Gareth."
Oh yes, sorry – got a bit sidetracked. Which is sort of apt for the topic of this post.
A lot is said about electric vehicles and "range anxiety" – i.e. being worried that you will not have enough battery power left to reach your destination.
Because EVs are (currently, at least) far more limited in terms of their potential range, there’s no denying that not being sure about your state of charge can be something of a concern.
However, the number of public charging points dotted around the place should make this more or less a thing of the past, and I had my first real taste of this today.
The day started with me doing the school run, with Jem. I’ve never done the school run before, so it was nice to get out and do so. However, it did mean using up about 10 miles of precious range before I’d even started my journey to work (18 miles.)
I then had an appointment after work in Newport to see an osteomyologist about my back problem (which is still giving me a ton of pain, annoyingly) so that took off another 16 miles.
Now, ordinarily at this point, I would have just gone home (about 13-15 miles from Newport I think) and all would have been fine, but on this occasion I had to pop back to Shrewsbury to do some shopping for my Mum, so that knocked another 16 miles off (for a total of approx. 60 miles) and still left me 18 miles from home.
In theory, it would have been fine – the range meter was showing 24 miles left, but I’m not that used to the car yet so I didn’t want to risk running out of electrons on the way up Harley Bank near Much Wenlock (steep hills will kill the range of an EV, and Harley Bank has a 12% incline)
I therefore hatched a plan – I would do my Mum’s shopping at ASDA instead of Morrisons, and take advantage of the fast charger they have on their car park to top up while I was shopping (and, to maximise charging time, Jem and I decided to nip further up the road to Nando’s for a bite to eat)
The public charger at ASDA Shrewsbury is operated by Chargemaster, and users can either register to receive an RFID card used to open the sockets, or they can pop in to the store and ask to borrow one of their cards for a £10 refundable deposit.
Unfortunately for me, this took a bit longer than planned as the woman behind the counter at ASDA had no idea what I was talking about and had to call a colleague to come and get the card for me, but all was well in the end and they even waived the £10 deposit as I only had a card on me rather than cash.
There are two charging posts, each with a 3kW and 7kW charger on board – fortunately I specified the 6.6kW charging option for the LEAF when I bought it, so could take advantage of the faster charge. I’d remembered to leave my Type 2 charging cable in the boot so I was able to hook it all up for an hour and a bit while we did the shopping and had our quickie-chickie.
Upon returning to the car (and having returned the RFID card back to the customer services desk in store) I switched the car on and found it had gone from 21% charged to 55% and that I now had an effective range of 52 miles – more than enough to get home!
I can understand why people get anxious about range with their EVs, although I didn’t worry too much – even if the charger at ASDA had been out of service I would have risked it and probably just ended up getting a taxi back the rest of the way if I’d run out of juice.
I had to rearrange my plans for the evening slightly to fit in around using the charger, but it actually all worked out quite well in the end and very probably saved time – had I had the range to spare in the first place, I may have ended up spending ages driving around deciding on a place to eat!
Next time, I think I’ll push the car a bit more and see if I can find out just how far I can push it before it stops.
Privacy Policy & Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén
