Author: Terren

Wondering why nobody’s ever written to you about a comunique? Pondering why there’s no mention of dispinsation in your inbox? Gmail now suggests correct spelling searches, kind of like its bigger search brother. In fact, Gmail has a little ways to go in catching up to Google in search capability, as Google Operating System points out—just an option for relevancy sorting would be nice. What search powers do you wish you had in Gmail that you're currently making due without? [Google Operating System] More »

The 1394 Trade Association has announced that over two billion FireWire ports have shipped worldwide, which is most impressive for a largely forgotten interface. Going forward, the Association expects to see “steady, stable growth” in 2011 as more products with FireWire S1600 go to market, though a dearth of such devices at CES makes us think you can add the word ‘slow’ to that projection. Given that the standard’s promised 1.6 Gb/s bandwidth is less than a third of the 5 Gb/s offered by USB 3.0 (even with USB’s larger overhead, 3.0 still provides a bigger pipe), and the fact that Intel may finally get on board with Superspeed, it may be awhile before FireWire celebrates another such milestone.

[Image source: ScratchWorx]

Continue reading FireWire ships its two billionth port, still not as fast as USB 3.0

FireWire ships its two billionth port, still not as fast as USB 3.0 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 Jan 2011 02:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Paul Pape created a custom action figure and packaging for the Conan O’Brien DC super hero The Flaming C (created by Bruce Timm). You can buy your own custom toy by Paul here.

*Buy Justice League Unlimited toys at eBay.

The Canadian loonie will hover at parity with the U.S. dollar for some time to come, thanks to Canada’s economic strength, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said Wednesday.

What’s this? News from an airport that doesn’t make you want to vomit blood in outrage? Finally. A man stuck in airport security gridlock could say goodbye to his dead grandson when his flight’s pilot refused to depart without him. More »

Saskatchewan lawyer Tony Merchant is leading a class action lawsuit over $2.7 billion worth of benefits allegedly denied to thousands of First Nations people.

If this personnel write-up is to be believed, the Domino’s in question had been employing a pretty subpar assistant manager. I mean, come on, this guy could only recite pi to 46 places. [via BuzzFeed]

An update to Windows 7 released yesterday has given a strong clue that a final release of the first service pack for the operating system isn’t too far away.

According to a Microsoft support page, the imaginatively-named KB976902 (Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 installation software feature update) makes changes…

The main purpose of this post is to share some photos sent to me taken by my cousin’s brother-in-law in Toowoomba. But first some context.

Paul Norton described the topography of Toowoomba thus:

Just to give people some idea of what seems to have happened in Toowoomba, the city of Toowoomba is located just on the west side of the Great Dividing Range. As you travel from Brisbane to Toowoomba, the road begins climbing slowly after about Grantham and Helidon, then climbs steeply west of Withcott before cresting the range at a bit under 700 metres. The eastern suburbs on Toowoomba are built on the western slope of the range, whilst the CBD is located in something of a hollow at the bottom of this slope, with gentler slopes to north and south. The “cloudburst” (to used Brian’s word on the older thread) on the range looks to have basically been funnelled into the CBD by the topography.

Further to my previous comment, the range forms a neat half-circle around Toowoomba on the east side, centered on the CBD.

That half-circle, according to the Federal member for the area Ian Macfarlane, is the rim of an old volcano, which has eroded away to the west, so the main street forms a virtual gully that drains away to the plains and into the Condamine.

The cause of the floods was a sudden downpour, described on TV as “nothing much” on the radar, but delivered 150 mm (six inches on the old scale) in about half an hour. The result was like a raging gully through the CBD and a vast amount of water down into the Lockyer Valley to the east.

So here are the Toowoomba pics. The first is a long shot of Russell Street:

Russell Street in Toowoomba

Here are the flood waters at the railway crossing:

Flood waters at the railway crossing

Followed by another street scene:

Street scene

The next is a close-up of a building in the background of the second photo. We get a view inside someone’s home:

Home of resident with wall ripped away

I saw the occupant interviewed on TV. The torrent ripped away the side wall of his home exposing the inside with sagging floor.

Next we see the contents of a furniture store floating down the street:

Floating furniture

Here’s a car wrapped around a post:

Car wrapped around a post

And another one somewhat the worse for wear:

Car mauled by Toowoomba flood

That’s it folks. What we see is a raging torrent that came and went fairly quickly in a place where no-one expected to see running water.

The Toowoomba Chronicle has some photo galleries, including this one. Here’s a sample:

Cars piled up in Toowoomba

The Courier Mail has quite an interesting home video of the incident here.

if you are discomforted by laughter towards the end, remember people laugh for reasons other than that they think something is funny. In fact I heard an extended interview once on someone who had done research on why people laugh. “Because it’s funny” from memory amounted to some 14% or one in seven of the instances.

ABC Southern Queensland has further information. I’ll leave you with a photo from this article which illustrates how angry the water was:

Angry flood water in Toowoomba

I’m stunned. Doctors are flabbergasted. The world is square. What. The. Hell. An Italian man was hit by a stray bullet. In the head. But it didn’t kill him! How? Well, he somehow sneezed out the very bullet that shot him.
More »

Yesterday we saw the junk in the trunk, now here’s what’s powering it. It’s the motor that makes the Ford Focus Electric go, and while we still don’t know many details (we couldn’t get anyone to quote us a weight) it is a reasonably compact little thing. We did, however, get confirmation that it will not be run through either a standard transmission, like the dry-clutch automatic that the regular Focus comes with, nor something like the two-speed transmission that Tesla uses in its Roadster. It’ll be “like a CVT” we’re told, keeping the motor at its most efficient RPM, and while we’re not sure what that looks like on the inside we’re sure that there’ll be no shifting involved, neither manual nor automatic.

Ford Focus Electric motor extracted, split asunder, coppery guts exposed originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 11 Jan 2011 13:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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