Personal YouTube
I have various video and audio productions that I would like to share on the web, but on my own web site in addition to third-party sites like YouTube, Facebook, etc.
About six years ago, I designed a web application called The Outhouse. This web application was designed to be used for sharing video and audio, and utilized embedded Windows Media players (that worked on about 5% of users' computers...). I upgraded it about a year ago to use Flash Video (FLV) instead of Windows Media, but it has not been public for I have not had any content that I would like to share. Now that I do, I would like to revive this system but considered a more complex software package to make things easier and to provide more features.
I noticed that my web host had a package called Clip Bucket available for installation. Clip Bucket is a PHP/MySQL-based YouTube clone. It provides nearly every (if not every) feature that YouTube has to offer. It looked nice, and I figured that I could just template it to meet the needs of my site and have a wonderful video portal!
Ha. Yeah, that is if I spent the time sifting through the hundreds of template files, PHP scripts, and nearly 60 kiB "main" CSS sheet which attempts to apply a background color to the same element about a dozen times. It seems like every single little element is given its own template file, and there is an utter overabundance of CSS elements and an obvious over-styling of everything.
I think I will just write a bare-bones PHP script to convert my uploaded (via SFTP) videos to FLV using phpMyAdmin and edit the details right in the database. Much easier.
Clip Bucket is a great 800-pound gorilla piece of software if you are looking to build the next YouTube and/or have enough time to style its every pixel and clean up its inefficiencies. If you just want to put some home movies or videos up on your site, I suggest something simpler, like static (or semi-static) HTML pages with flash FLV players playing pre-encoded FLV video files.
I'll put the stuff on Youtube, etc. for distribution, and use the good old Outhouse to keep it available on my own site.
Polishing Turds While Flushing Diamonds
On a daily basis I receive updates from the "Waste-to-Energy" group on the career networking web site LinkedIn with the latest "intellectual property" corporations looking to convert municipal trash, sewage, animal guts, and anything else imaginable into "Clean and Green automobile fuel". They all claim to have the best system and they ALWAYS have "Turnkey Solutions" to offer!
Why do we desire to build multi-million dollar turd polishers while we still burn high-quality gas and oil to produce low-grade space heating in homes and other buildings?
The ideas that many entrepreneurs have regarding energy seem to be backwards, but when the goal is to "make money" rather than to "produce energy" it is what we end up with - expensive turd polishers that take a tiny bit of the energy in the feedstock and convert it into a valuable end product, whether that be a liquid fuel or electricity. The remainder of the energy is tossed overboard as waste heat, all while people flush the energy equivalent of diamonds and gold down the toilet when they burn oil, gas, and electricity (through resistance) to provide 72 degree space heating.
Low grade heat can't be bought and sold on the marketplace like electricity and hydrocarbon fuels. It has to be either used at the point of generation, or dumped. So we just ignore it and dump it into the energy trash bin. The people then complain when they can't afford to heat their house with oil/gas/electric resistance. Political windbags start fighting and supporting the policies which made them the most money during last campaign season and/or the policies which incense the opposing party to the greatest degree rather than actually understanding thermodynamics and the natural tendencies of energy.
You wouldn't buy steaks just to grind them up to make hamburgers, right?
Oscillations of Higgs Boson simulated into "sci-fi" sound bite
"God particle" signal is simulated as sound. from BBC News.
Researchers using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN are attempting to detect the Higgs Boson, the particle which is theorized to be responsible for mass.
They have used a model to produce a sound of what collisions and oscillations of the particle may be like (transposed into the audible spectrum, of course). Not sure how they produced this sound, but it sounds like something from a piece of ambient music or the noise used in sci-fi (er...SyFy) movies when someone or something is traveling in space or crossing some dimensional barrier, for instance.
"If the energy is close to you, you will hear a low pitch and if it's further away you hear a higher pitch," the particle physicist told BBC News.
"If it's lots of energy it will be louder and if it's just a bit of energy it will be quieter."
Surely the combination of frequencies was not chosen arbitrarily, especially since the sound itself is a product of a model (what collisions are expected to sound like).
One more reason to quit smoking
I found one of those ceramic space heaters in the apartment complex dumpster. It did not work, most likely because the power cord was damaged at the point of entry into the heater. I then ripped it apart, and clearly observed that a) this thing had been around the block...several times, and b) it was owned by a prolific cigarette smoker.
Sticky brown deposits lined the inside of heater and the fan blades, and plenty of dust cake had built up as well with a brown color and reeking odor of tobacco.
The most likely scenario is that this heater was purchased, shoved under a desk, plugged in, turned on, and forgotten about for three or four years. Also forgotten about were any and all forms of housekeeping in the apartment. When college was finished and it was time to move out, it had done its duty and was tossed. Just like the air conditioners around here which usually run from March up until mid-December (about when the landlady begins forcing people to remove them or else pay their own heat), the heater probably ran all summer long IN TANDEM with the air conditioner. As Bill Engvall of Blue Collar Comedy says, Here's your sign!
Cooking and the Second Law of Thermodynamics
Let us assume that you are looking to cook instant noodles (ramen). So you've calculated that to bring the one-eighth of a gallon of water in the pot to boiling point and cook the ramen, you will need to apply 120 kJ of energy. However, your electric stove and microwave are both out of commission (Bummer).
You turn on the hot water faucet and allow it to get as hot as possible - 125 degrees Fahrenheit. You then calculate that in order to get 120 kJ of energy from the faucet, you will need about a third of a gallon of water.
So, you have the same amount of energy as you would using the stove. Will the hot tap water cook the ramen as well as if it were heated to boiling point on the stove? NO!
Therein lies the difficulty with renewable energy.
Fossil fuels are like the hot stove burner - ready at a moments notice to provide copious quantities of high-grade energy - boiling, baking, frying, grilling, or just simmering whatever you desire.
Renewables are like cooking your food with the hot water from the sink. Yes, your landlord may provide you with free hot water, but the temperature just isn't there. All the joules in the universe can flow from that sink and it will never boil. And when your neighbor decides to stand in the shower for two hours, all hope is lost.
What we must learn to do as a society, is to do our defrosting, simmering, and reheating using renewable energy while saving fossil fuels for the frying and broiling. In other words, use renewables to meet the need for low-grade energy (e.g. heating water and buildings) while saving fossil fuels to meet the need for high-grade energy (e.g. generating electricity).