Sleepypete's Pillow

There’s a few interesting developments in the space world at the moment.

Waitaminute – are those two words (space and world) that should be used together seeing as one is ground and the other is void ?

I’ve been watching the news reports on the Indian space probe lately. There’s two probes going to Mars at the moment, one from India, one from the USA. The Indian one made its people nervous because one of its several “Trans-Mars Injection” burns didn’t go to plan.

I’ve written things about Kerbal Space program before (and I feel I have unfinished business with that game but it’s far more amusing to watch the Scott Manley videos). It’s simplified at the moment but it’s still an incredibly good rocketry and orbital physics simulator. Definitely one where you have to think a bit with the navigation.

Anyway – it teaches you all sorts of things, me being one of those people who learns best by doing. It teaches things like :

Why the Indian probe needed several burns to get to Mars
Why it would split up the burns
Why they send probes to other planets at certain times/dates
Why it didn’t really matter if it missed one

Firstly – the certain times and dates … Everything in space has a path that it goes through. Everything around it influences that path, which makes everything go in slightly wonky ellipses. It’s why we have tides, because the gravity of the moon pulls the water towards the moon. It takes time too for the planets to go around their orbits. You wouldn’t want to launch your probe when Mars is on the opposite side of the sun. Or maybe you would …

Things up there happen slowly. If you pointed a rocket towards Mars and hit the Go button, it would miss because in the time taken for it to get there, Mars will have moved around the sky quite significantly. Instead, you aim it towards where Mars will be when you think it’ll get there and you factor in how much its path will be curved by the gravity of everything else up there.

There’s a phenomenon called the Oberth Effect, which says that if you fire the rocket in orbit, it’ll most affect the opposite side of the orbit. Hold up. 2 important terms : Periapse – closest approach, Apoapsis – furthest approach. Oberth means that to escape orbit, it’s best to fire the rocket at Periapse because that’s the best way of increasing that Apoapsis. And once the rocket is going fast enough, it achieves “Escape Velocity” and will be on its way to Mars.

So why split up the burns, why not go American Style and just do one ? Well – the American one had what all American transport has (lol – I’d love a V8 monster), a whopping big engine, while the Indian one was a bit more modest.

So the Indian one couldn’t get all of the acceleration it needed out of the way in the short times it had at Periapse. It doesn’t matter that it splits them up, as long as it can do it enough times to get to Mars while it still had fuel to get there.

I think that’s enough orbital mechanics for now don’t you ?

Yep. Brain. Fizzing. Cooking. Exploding.

Especially when you think of the insane calculations that go on to get the most efficient course to go. They’ll factor in every bit of gravity they can to get their rocket in the right place at the right time, without bumping into any planets. If they’re really clever, they’ll make it fly by lots of different planets. Probes like Cassini-Huygens visited 3 planets (Earth, Venus, Jupiter) before reaching its final destination (Saturn) and when it got to Saturn, it checked out 9 moons. Most of that is set up by the rockets that fling it out there and the math to do it is absolutely insane. Kerbal Space Program is much simpler and orbital maneouvres in that tend to be rather more brute force.

One last bit – why do they bother being so efficient ? Cos it lets them squeeze as many instruments on to the probe as possible. More instruments means more weight, means more fuel needed to get them to the destination.

Ok – that’s definitely enough for the nerdy stuff for tonight.

I was going to say something about gaming too. I have that unfinished business with Kerbal Space Programme, where I’d like to make rockets that check out the other planets. My main gaming time at the moment is with that old staple (9 years old … cor) World of Warcraft. I’m playing on Silvermoon with ally characters. I’m missing the guys and the Hot Swedish Girls of the awesome Draenor guild but I’m enjoying playing through the story as an ally for the first time.

I have to say, since I started playing WoW it’s got considerably easier. I thought I’d check this out by sending my character into Outland (where the first expansion is set) completely naked. Ok. Not completely, I let her keep the tabard for modesty. Did I have a problem ? Only with the pet battle. I don’t think it’ll be as easy when I get to the second expansion but a lot of the challenge has been removed from the game. And that’s a big shame. Challenge makes it fun and the challenge as the game used to be was never too much.

I’ve been very tired lately though. I started playing on Monday evening and lasted a couple of quests before giving up due to tiredness. At the moment, I’m enjoying watching (actually listening) the Yogscast annual Xmas livestreams. I won’t be watching all of those (their output varies, they have awesome people and annoying people) but I thought last night’s with Hannah, Simon and Kim-Mandrew was hilarious. The videos by Hannah and Kim tend to be pretty special.

Thoroughly enjoyed that. It’s gamers enjoying games and bringing you with them when they do. Quite restful too, except when they’re playing horror games and unexpected sounds happen.

Right – over to the livestream 🙂 But … random piccy !

Definitely.

Yeah – it didn't really feel that long after they got the prologue out of the way.

Thought the 2 1/2 hours flew by. To be honest I never really noticed the time passing.

I had a feeling it would be as well produced as the first movie. It was long but it didn't actually feel overlong this time …

Well worth picking up early. Must read the book.

I enjoyed HG2 more than I thought I would. It was a little samey in places but different enough to keep me interested. Much darker than the first film and full of menace. It'll be interesting to see how much of the off-screen stuff is actually in the book.

There’s a blockbuster out there at the moment … you may have heard of it.

Yep – Hunger Games 2 – it’s being hyped mercilessly (although not with the arrogance that is the intro to the Hobbit 2 trailer).

While I’m on Hobbit … Pronunciation is weird here. English has a lot of inconsistencies in its language but it has its consistencies. Things like :
Caught, taught, haughty, naughty – pronounced with that “au” coming out like “or”

I can’t think of any “au” sounds that come out differently. Until now. In their lacking wisdom, the Hobbit 2 people have decided that Smaug sounds like Smowg. I’d hesitate to even consider finding an alternate saying of Smaug that doesn’t sound like smorgasbord. The way the Hobbit 2 people have done is it just plain Wrong.

I’ll go see Hobbit 2 anyway, although it’s tarnished by :
Arrogance of the producers (you will like our film, you will see it in 3d – no I won’t)
Being overlong (that’s a Peter Jackson thing)
And that pronunciation which will be annoying for eternity.

Oh – Hunger Games 2 – if you saw the first one and appreciated it in any way, this one is better in almost every way. The first was produced extremely well and made for one hell of a movie. It’s very faithful to the book, although it removes some of the brutality that makes up the backstory. Be warned with HG2, that brutality is all there this time around and it’s heavy stuff. Executions, torture, whippings, implied torture. Lots of stuff, some of which is shown. Be warned.

Hunger Games is set in a relatively distant future earth where a calamity has occurred that’s redrawn the map and concentrated the population into a capital and districts. The rich/poor divide has extended to the point where the capital denizens are ridiculously pampered while the district populations are severely downtrodden. The districts are kept in line by the Hunger Games, which happens annually. Each district contributes 2 tributes, 1 girl, 1 boy, who join a fight to the death with the other tributes. The tributes are picked at random (mostly), with the odds being dependent on how much food the candidate requisitions. More food, more likely to be picked.

That’s the basics at least, there’s more in the books and the film. The upshot is that the capital is expressing their power by enforcing these games upon the populace.

There’s a lot going on here too. The first introduces two characters, Hamitch and Effie. Hamitch is a veteran of a Hunger Games, Effie is the flowery fluffy person who picks the names. Their characters are very much drawn up by their experience. Effie is distant, Hamitch is a drunk suffering PTSD. They’ve both seen years upon years of kids being picked, trained and condemned to die. The first movie sees their first time where their kids have survived.

And you can see how it all affects them through the movie.

I’ve probably said too much already and given too many spoilers !

Go see it, it’s worth it. Although it’s highly recommended that you see the first one or read the book.

There’s been some pretty good films out there, although if it’s a choice between HG2, Ender’s Game and Iron Man 3 (all big highlights of this year), I’d actually choose Pacific Rim. It’s very silly but it’s a lot of fun.

How have I been doing ?

Tired and sore pretty much sums it up. I’m drawing on reserves at the moment, as is usual for this time of year. I’m sore on the inside as well as resisting the urge to tear at the bits of skin that are still bad. However !

The skin is in the best shape it’s been for over a year. It’s mending. I just have to give it the chance to repair itself. I’m still not free of the need to occasionally hit the bad bits with gunk though. My insides have got better too – tummy bug – gone.

So – things are looking up, although I’d like that skin condition all gone instead of just doing the steps forward, steps back as always.

Not long left until Xmas and then the best time of the year comes around again. Yep. Mini Eggs will be back on sale soon. Hurrah !

PS This was supposed to have a little about gaming in. Doh ! I forgot and the post grew too long anyway. I shall save the Naked Outland story for another day …

Ok, that title’s a bit dramatic.

I was just thinking that I’ve not posted anything since saying I’d picked up a tummy bug. Bugs down there are rare for me. If I do get them, they only last a day or so until the Nasties are out of my system.

I have two theories right now :

It’s something I ate (definitely !) – chief subject is a flapjack
It’s something I cook with (it fits cos I tend to cook with the same implements)

The Nasties should have been out of my system by now – they’re not. Oh well. It’s not too bad – you can probably guess the symptoms so I won’t describe them here. (Someone at work today asked and he was definitely getting that “Too Much Information !!” look). They’re not getting in the way of what I want to do.

I’m testing that second theory by having take out as much as I can this week and seeing what happens. If I recover, I’ll bin the cooking implements and get some new ones.

Lesson – work the problem to get your answer. The plan will actually work out a little – chippie tonight. Chinese tomorrow (they have a day off on Monday’s). KFC possibly Wednesday – I’m expecting to have to go to that Post Office pick up place again which will put me in the vicinity of the Mall. Something Different on Thursday (thinking about watching Hunger Games 2 – anyone join me ?)

We’ll see how that goes.

Skin’s giving mixed signals. I think the infection has pretty much gone but my arms haven’t recovered as much as my legs have. The legs are doing pretty well actually but the arms are a bit too much in range when my guard’s down when trying to get to sleep. But … it’s coming …

Ok. Change of subject.

Watched the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special on Saturday. They’ve been hyping this mercilessly, so much that it was a relief when the show actually came around. Hype is a strange thing. It can give all sorts of expectations. The fans get all sorts of expectations. Star Wars had this in spades with the prequel sequels and a lot of the fans think they were failed by those prequel sequels. (I think they’re decent action movies but crippled by Lucas’s hamfisted treatment of his own universe)

Doctor Who ? Awesome. After just 5 minutes I’d navigated to the Amazon page to check out the bluray and I almost preordered it.

It was a pretty special show. It had everything, humour, drama, emotion, mystery, silliness. I thoroughly enjoyed it and the only reason I haven’t preordered it is because BBC have a habit of not giving you bluray quality on blurays (Sherlock didn’t have bluray quality sound, so I can’t watch it without risking the sound skip problem). I’ll get it when I can be assured of no frustration with the sound (picture doesn’t mean much to me but sound ? crucial).

Matt Smith has been a very worthy Doctor. I’ve been watching Doctor Who since a babe and he’s one of the best. That’s always going to be the utterly mad Tom Baker but Matt Smith is right up there too. He can snap from one aspect of the Doctor’s personality to another in a split second in a way that instantly grabs the attention.

He was supported by a couple of the better companions too in Rory Pond and Clara. Amy Pond started well but just ran out of good writing.

You’re probably guessing that I’m a huge Doctor Who fan. You’d be right. It’s consistently been good quality scifi (ok, the Sylvester McCoy times were cursed by awful writing) and it’s always been entertaining. That’s the key for me, stories on telly have to be entertaining. Things like Stargate Universe forgot that. The new Battlestar Galactica got lost in thinking it had a clever plan (it didn’t, they started making it up as they went along).

I hope I keep things entertaining here. That’s enough for tonight ! I’m going to watch the first episode of Britain By The Sea (oh look ! Pendennis Castle, home of Mr Cuddles !) and then it’s back to Azeroth for my latest mage. She’s searing the Searing Gorge tonight.

PS If there’s any rumours that the 50th special almost did a Bolt on me and drew tears near the end, I’ll utterly deny them. However, I will confirm there was an Oh My God during the epilogue.

Think I need to change one of my habits.

I don’t suffer from the effects of bad food too often (the extra acid I make beats up the bugs I think) but it still happens sometimes …

Before you start thinking “Too Much Information!”, it’s not been messy type food reaction. Phew ! But I have been feeling :

Fuzzy
Bloated
Extremely wiped out

Last night was pretty much a right off. I just watched videos (after watching Jack Reacher off the box – good but I ain’t gonna buy it). Not feeling like I could raise the concentration to do gameplaying at the moment. It’s different at work. I’ve been reserving my energy for work time and trying to chill out at home.

I’m a bit improved tonight, although that appetite is rather missing. I usually find my hunger demanding that I have a teacake in the morning, a lunch and something munchable in the afternoon. To be honest, the afternoon munchie is really just an excuse to get away from my desk for 5 minutes or so. There’s a limit to how long people can concentrate and that 5 minutes away lets me reset my brain.

Anyway – no teacake, no afternoon munchie and the packet of cookies on my desk staring at me at the moment is unopened.

Yes ! Cookies ! Unopened ! I must be ill. Lol.

I think I’m coming to the end of this little phase of malingering though. I’m feeling a little better than yesterday evening although I still won’t open the games up. I think it’s come from a flapjack from yesterday. I have my doubts about those flapjacks. They may have more than flapjack in, the kind of stuff that’s beaten you to it and is eating away at the flapjack already. Yep. Furries.

My condition’s steadily improving in general actually. The signs of skin damage are steadily fading away, although I’m having to keep that discipline together because it’s really easy to set the healing back. That’s on the outside at least, on the inside the pain levels have been going up as my muscles declare their dislike of the cold.

Talking of the cold … I need a scarf. That’ll seal up my neck and hopefully keep my neck and back warmer while I’m waiting for the bus. My ears have been getting cold too. But … no longer.

Mall trip tonight. I actually bought stuff too :

Laptop bag – actually a rucksack but it’s a good idea to have bags that don’t scream “Expensive Stuff Inside – Steal Me”
Umbrella
And … The See Me From Space Hat

Yep. It is mine. And it’ll keep my ears warm as well as being a beacon for traffic.

And there’s a picture on Facebook too (it’s staying there, no pictures of me here ! Too many nutters in internet to expose that to – they’d get ideas). Let’s just say, it was dark yet the picture did not need the flash turned on …

Yep. Feeling better tonight but still not feeling especially brilliant. Appetite is still a bit lacking but to be honest, that’s not a bad thing. My weight has crept up to the point where I’m suffering from acid again. That’s usually a sign that I need to lose weight. That’ll help my bones and muscles too, they don’t like it when I weigh too much.

Oh what I really shouldn’t do tonight …

It’s the Ashes again ! It begins tonight with England playing Australia with the start time being 00.00 midnight GMT. There’s a 2 hour session until the lunch break which, in a healthier condition, would have me tempted to watch until that lunch break.

I’ll try to get to bed at a reasonable time. Honest … Looking forward to showing the hat off at work tomorrow 🙂

Last weekend saw me taking a run up to the parents place for the birthdays.

It wasn’t just my birthday last week, it’s the sister’s too. Our birthdays are 2 days apart (and a classified* number of years)

*(If I told you, you’d be ok but she’d hunt me down and kill me. Slowly.)

They’re ok up there. The Family is full of people with active brains. We have to be doing Stuff all the time. Mum and Dad have been struggling a bit there since they retired but they’re still finding things to keep them busy. (It’s a big house with a bigger veggie garden than most people’s allotments). Mum’s doing better recently too, she’s injured her arm quite badly and it’s a difficult fix (bad muscles, bad tendons and both ganging up on the other).

Enter the Puppy.

The Family’s always had dogs. We had a cat for a while too. Not sure what happened to Patch, it’s been a few decades. The latest family pooch is Ben, who’s been with us for a few years now. He’s a Staffy with as good a temperament as you’d ever want in a dog. Possibly too chill because he won’t do what Scruff did once – bark so loudly (think there was some foaming in there too) at the doorstoppers that “Go away or my dog will eat you” would have been very believable. Ben is a lot more placid than that.

I don’t have a dog, there’s not enough room here and I’d need to dog proof the back yard. Besides, the poor fella would be on his own all day and that’s no way for a muttley to live.

New Puppy ? He’s called Murph (short for Murphy 2) and he’ll be a massive labrador when he grows up. He’s only 21 weeks at the moment. Here he is :

That’s a really sweet face isn’t it ? There happened to be meat scraps involved …

He’s got massive paws, you can see how long that tail is and the legs are pretty long too. His body hasn’t caught up yet, so he seems scrawny. When he gets his adult size, he’ll be able to pull carts. Fast too. I’m wondering if his nickname should be Little Monster (for the size he’ll grow to) or Missile.

Lovely dog, although Ben was having issues. Didn’t know how to deal with the puppy. Hopefully when Murph comes next time, Ben will assert himself a bit more as Alpha Dog. Pooches need to do that, they need to establish their pecking order or the younger dogs will take too many liberties with the older dogs.

But yeah, I reckon he’ll turn into a very sweet affectionate dog who keeps an eye on his people.

Weekends like that wipe me out though. I’m just about regaining enough energy to count as “Very Tired”, so I’m looking forward to Xmas when I’ll get a good chance to have a rest. Not just that, I’ve twisted my knee and I’m also nursing a minor ankle sprain. Add to that the usual stuff where my body dislikes the cold (fine when I’m moving, warming up is the issue !) and I’m looking for quiet time.

Not that long to go until Xmas.

Nothing’s been mentioned yet but there will be another Crazie meet up where we can chill out in company. I’ll head back to the parents for a few days too (likely to have a few visitors too). Wonder if something extraordinary will happen and I get to treat someone ? No likelihood of that at the moment sadly.

It’s a chill out evening tonight too. Plan A was to head off to the Mall but traffic was bad (there will be other nights and I can pick and choose when I face that traffic).

There’s a Bright Yellow See Me From Space Hat that’s calling me. I need it.

And why we can’t have nice things.

This one’s been triggered by something I spotted on the Register today. It’s partly about some Sonos sound kit but mostly about connectivity.

We have great expectations these days, we like to be able to plug one piece of electronics into another and we expect them to work together. It used to be pretty easy, just plug a SCART lead into the dvd player or the video recorder and send it to the telly. And on things that didn’t have the room for SCART, there was the yellow lead for picture and the red and white leads for audio.

It used to be simpler back then, we didn’t have the expectations for things to work together. Now, we have a wonderful replacement for SCART that takes audio and video in the same lead. But … it doesn’t work that well.

My hifi is connected up along reasonably traditional lines – it has leads that go to the speakers and I hide them behind various Stuff. There’s only one lead that runs across the floor (speaker lead). The rest map up as follows :

TV cable box to Telly (through 5 leads)
Telly to hifi (through 1 lead)
Xbox to hifi (through HDMI)
Bluray player to hifi (by HDMI again)
Hifi to telly (by HDMI)
Littlewhitebox to hifi (by 1 lead)

The reason everything possible hooks up via HDMI is because of Trust Issues – the money people in media made it so that the device sending the picture needs to be able to Trust the devices it’s sending everything to or it will send a degraded picture. I have to use HDMI for the bluray or I don’t get the best sound.

However … it’s not a particularly great connection. It’s prone to bad equipment causing problems :

TV cable box can’t send a stable picture by HDMI
Bluray player can’t send stable sound with dvds

Yep. I have to use my Xbox as a dvd player. I think it’s actually a problem with the hifi rather than the bluray player but it shows that the shiny new connection isn’t as good as it should be. I think it’s those Trust Issues getting in the way. I also have to start things up in a particular order or I get problems.

Where’s this going ? Lol – I’m wondering that myself.

I’d like to be able to connect anything I have to everything else. And I’d like to do that without :

Interference (the audio streaming suffers from this)
Wires on the floor
Reliability issues.

It’s a shame the Trust Issues happen. They’re in there because piracy is so rampant these days that the money people demand protection is built in. That’s why we can’t have nice things. It’s because there’s a tonne of people out there who can afford shiny pcs and internet subscriptions but are too cheap to pay for dvds, cds and blurays. And in doing their pirating, they make things more expensive for the rest of us.

I’ll close by saying what I would like to make in an ideal world. We’ll assume the multimedia house has to be around other people. We’ll have :

Network. I used to think an Ethernet socket with each power connector would be the thing to do. And you’d put the router as close to the phone as possible for a good connection. Then ? Wifi comes along and makes things easier. However … wifi is very susceptible to interference and not just from other wifis. Now ? I’d use Powerline networking to hook everything up.

If … you could send the video and audio around the network. (The Apple TV looks curious here) Apple’s Airplay works pretty well for audio and I understand there’s a few other potential methods out there too.

Airplay ? It’s what the Airport Express does. It takes in wifi and sends out audio from iTunes or other stuff that knows about Airplay. It’s a fantastic little device, easy to move from place to place. You just plug it in and it does its thing. Means I can take it up to my parents’ place and use it like I do here.

Video – I think people overcomplicate this. They expect to squirt video around a network. Nah. Better to have a tame laptop and send the video that way. Or one of those little boxes that looks at the internet to stream things. To have it in the telly ? Madness. It rarely works properly and you have totally inadequate ways of finding what you want. It’s bad enough to find things on my V+ box when you’re navigating the On Demand area.

That’s what I’d like – to have a simple way of hooking everything up that works time and time again. Powerline networking might be a good way but … it would be handy if you could build it into things like laptop power supplies. Hook up the power ? Get network too. That would be great.

We’re a long way off having that multimedia nirvana. Hopefully it won’t be too long away but I think for now we’ll have :

Lots of different boxes doing lots of different things
As many different leads as boxes
And still more conflicts where things don’t play nicely together

And all because the pirates cause us to not be able to have Nice Things !