nick chapman

May the force be ever in your favor…

Shirt Punch.

Coffee & Conservation provides information about the connection between coffee and the environment — especially bird habitat.

One bird that frequents environmental sensitive coffee plantations is the Blue-crowned Motmot (Momotus momota), a “member of a family of New World tropical birds related to kingfishers. Like kingfishers, they nest in burrows which they dig themselves into soil cliffs or road cuts; these burrows are five to up to 14 feet long, and winding. Most motmots are medium-sized (robin size or larger), and are sit-and-wait predators of large insects, small reptiles or mammals and similarly sized prey, along with a little fruit.

The Blue-crowned Motmot is the most widely distributed motmot, and is found from Mexico to Argentina in lowland forests, on up to 1300 meters. It’s fairly tolerant of somewhat disturbed habitats, and thus can be found in open woodlands and second-growth forest such as those found on shade coffee plantations.”

Know your coffee birds: Blue-crowned Motmot — Coffee & Conservation.

Bond In Motion exhibition at National Motor Museum on January 17, 2012 in Beaulieu, England. The display, which marks the 50th anniversary of the James Bond film series, is the largest exhibition of James Bond vehicles ever staged and runs until the end of the year. (Photos by Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

Click to view slideshow.

Doctor Who: Towelling Robe: 4th Doctor @ Forbidden Planet.

Although the single “Beetle in the Box” was released earlier in the year, with an animated lyric video to support it, the video released today for “The Paper Trench” marks the first proper music video to come out of Admiral Fallow’s soon to be released sophomore effort, Tree Bursts in Snow, the much-anticipated (by me at least) follow-up to their debut, Boots Met My Face:

On the first couple of listens, this already seems to me the best thing Admiral Fallow’s done so far – it has everything I liked about my favorite songs of Boots with some extra focus and clarity. There’s the lyrical density and strangeness (which the video of course accentuates), the foot-stomping moments that at times have an anthemic feel (though less so here than in tracks off Boots), combined with passages of sweetness and introspection.

“The Paper Trench” also shows Admiral Fallow inhabiting the same cultural space as in their earlier album, a Scotland more of housing estates than wind-swept moors and icy lochs.  In the video, an Ent-like creature, almost straight out of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, wakes up in the garbage strewn wasteland alongside one of those estates and the proceeds on a sort of tour of this strange new world, no longer Middle Earth in the regions of the Shire, but the United Kingdom and the suburbs of Glasgow.  Even leaving the realm of estates and suburban high streets and heading into downtown the Ent creature still doesn’t find anything to which to connect.  Stopping in a park to rest, weary from the strangeness and lifelessness of it all, a young lad sitting with his sweetheart carves a heart on him.  Finally, the Ent ends up in that other Scotland, looking down on one of those lochs, and it is clearly a kind of homecoming.

The video regularly cuts away from the Ent’s journey to scenes of the band playing in a wood-paneled interior, warmly lit by some old-fashioned floor lamps and sunlight from high windows.  To my mind, to almost looks like they are warming up for a village cèilidh in the rec room of some church or town hall, which I think connects up with the kinds of values and perspectives we’ve seen in the rest of Admiral Fallow’s music: they like to party, and for many of us there are few better parties than a cèilidh, but they also have a sweetness and simplicity, a folksiness and an interest in a more human scale of things – of music, of Scotland, of relationships.  Their’s is a music of storytelling, even in those more anthemic songs. And I always want to hear more.

Here’s the earlier video for “Beetle in the Box”:

For more…

• Admiral Fallow | Beetle In The Box – Limited Edition 7 Inch Vinyl (Out Now).
• Video Premiere: Admiral Fallow – “The Paper Trench” :: Featured Videos :: Paste.
• Admiral Fallow – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
• New band of the day – No 983: Admiral Fallow | Music | guardian.co.uk.
• Fred Perry Subculture / Grapevine / hello /The Buzz / Admiral Fallow – “Tree Bursts In Snow”.

“Imagine a coffee brewer that you don’t have to leave running. A coffee brewer that has no pressurized boilers, requires no yearly inspections and heats up water from cold to hot at the push of a button.”

Imagine having an instant brew coffee machine – espresso, cappuccino, you name it – on your desktop – and controlled by your iPhone!  I think I may have died and gone to heaven.

The compact model is about the size of a computer tower: 22 inches tall, 18 inches deep and 7 inches wide. The Scanomat TopBrewer – an idea whose time came when I got to work this morning.

There’s a board on Pinterest called Fish Fingers and Custard!. If Pinterest is your first major foray into social networks beyond FaceBook, it will look a bit strange.  But if you’ve spent any time on Tumblr, it will look very, very familiar.

And I think that’s a good thing.  To a large extent, Pinterest feels like the product pages and ads from House Beautiful, Martha Stuart Living, Cosmo, Fine Cooking, FHM and… wel,l all those other magazines that are little more than glorified catalogues.

The intrusion of a quirkier, less product-placement mentality from the world of Tumblr is a welcome development.

What is still lacking, though, is an intrusion from the world of journalism – with all the stunningly pictorial events happening around the world, from tornadoes and other climate change catastrophes to war and famine (and even the odd nice thing) this is a still a lack of boards and pins reflecting any kind of political or social awareness and interest.

For more…

• Pinterest – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
• fish fingers and custard | Tumblr.
• I go ‘ding’ when there’s stuff..

shirt.woot! Don’t Walk / Silly Walk.

And in case you need clarification…

For more…

•  Dead Parrot Sketch.
• The Complete Monty Python’s Flying Circus 16 Ton Megaset – Amazon.com

Not the film, a bar on Rue Jacob in Paris

Sadly, gone from Shirt.Woot. Thanks to GeekTyrant for the pic.

Beautiful modern design influenced by hip hop, Gorillaz and John Heartfield.

About Flashback malware: Apple is developing software that will detect and remove the Flashback malware.

In addition to the Java vulnerability, the Flashback malware relies on computer servers hosted by the malware authors to perform many of its critical functions. Apple is working with ISPs worldwide to disable this command and control network. (via Apple Support)

Update: Check out What you need to know about the Flashback trojan | Macworld.

And now… Checking for Mac Flashback infestation? There’s an app for that.

Reports are circulating about the first really significant infection of Macintosh computers in a long time.  The Flashback Trojan has reportedly already infected more than half a million Macs and poses a significant threat to Mac users running out of date versions of Java. An earlier version of Flashback required users to enter an administrator password in order to run, but the new version exploits a critical Java vulnerability to run without a password. ArsTechnica has a good quick overview

Fortunately, avoiding infection is easy. Apple released a security update on April 3 which should remove the danger; if you haven’t already done so, you should use Software Update to make sure that all security updates and Java updates are installed.

Finding out if you are already infected is less easy. It requires checking the background activity of Safari, either by sampling the Safari process through Activity Monitor or running some commands in Terminal.  The security firm F-Secure provides detailed instructions on the latter process:

1. Run the following command in Terminal:
   defaults read /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Info LSEnvironment
2.  Take note of the value, DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES
3. Proceed to step 8 if you got the following error message:
   “The domain/default pair of (/Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Info, LSEnvironment) does not exist”
4.  Otherwise, run the following command in Terminal:
   grep -a -o ‘__ldpath__[ -~]*’ %path_obtained_in_step2%
5. Take note of the value after “__ldpath__”
6. Run the following commands in Terminal (first make sure there is only one entry, from step 2):
   sudo defaults delete /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Info LSEnvironment
   sudo chmod 644 /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Info.plist
7. Delete the files obtained in steps 2 and 5
8. Run the following command in Terminal:
   defaults read ~/.MacOSX/environment DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES
9. Take note of the result. Your system is already clean of this variant if you got an error message similar to the following:
   “The domain/default pair of (/Users/joe/.MacOSX/environment, DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES) does not exist”
10.  Otherwise, run the following command in Terminal:
    grep -a -o ‘__ldpath__[ -~]*’ %path_obtained_in_step9%
11. Take note of the value after “__ldpath__”
12. Run the following commands in Terminal:
    defaults delete ~/.MacOSX/environment DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES
    launchctl unsetenv DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES
13. Finally, delete the files obtained in steps 9 and 11.

Obviously, this is fairly technical and not for the faint of heart. There are numerous discussions on the Apple Support Communities site discussing the trojan, how to detect it and what to do about it, and people there will be willing to help you determine if your system is infected.

And I would expect to see an automated removal program or script emerge in the next day or two.

Update: Or sooner:  Find Out if Your Mac Has the Flashback Trojan — the Fast and Easy Way.

For more…

• Mac Flashback trojan exploits unpatched Java vulnerability, no password needed.
• Mac Flashback Trojan: Find Out If You’re One of the 600,000 Infected.
• Fast-growing Flashback Botnet Includes Over 600,000 Macs, Malware Experts Say | PCWorld Business Center.
• Flashback Trojan: Making Sure Your Mac is Safe | TMO Quick Tip | The Mac Observer.

But in fact if you are running Windows, “turning it on and off again” is actually pretty good advice.

Saving power/electricity not only saves you money, but will also help save the planet by reducing your carbon footprint.  So it’s a pretty good idea.  That said…

There are some misleading ideas out there about saving power. For instance, unless your toaster, mixer, or food processor has a remote or a little clock in it or a digital display that’s always… displaying, then it almost certainly isn’t using any power just from being plugged in.  So many coffee makers DO have clock/timers these days that this is more likely to be an issue, but again only if it has a clock/timer.

Belkin advertises its Conserve Power Switch with a picture of the switch being used with a toaster and a coffee maker:

Unless that coffee pot has a timer, which it doesn’t seem to, this isn’t going to save you any money. And it’s really unlikely that toaster has a timer or clock or can be turned on by remote, so this kind of seems like deceptive advertising.

Even on a device that does have “vampire” usage, sucking power even when not in use – like an iPod charger, anything with a clock or with one of those big transformer blocks – the energy usage can be quite low.  It might take you anywhere from 6 months to a couple of years of energy savings – assuming you remembered to use the switch every time – to save the cost of that Belkin switch ($6.99 plus tax).

But what about the planet, I hear you ask.  Good question.  But not so easy to answer.  How much energy – and other resources – were used to produce (and market and ship) that Belkin switch?  Without knowing that, there’s no way of calculating how much it would do to really reduce your carbon footprint.  But for anything small like an iPod charger, I’m willing to bet it’s a false economy, money-wise and planet-wise.

However, when it comes to your home entertainment equipment and your computer, it’s a different matter.  These use a lot of power when in standby mode, and most of them are always in standby mode when not in use.  Lawrence Berkeley Labs has produced a handy chart of the energy usage of various products. Some quick calculations based on the cost per kWh from your energy bill can help you figure out how much money you are wasting. Figures drawn from carbon footprint sites can help you estimate how much planet you are wasting.

For instance, if you leave your cable modem on all the time – which you do, right? – you’d be using about 4.3 kWh/month, which at PG&E’s current rates would cost you close to a dollar. So if you turned it off for the 2/3rds of the day (probably) when you are not using it, you might save around 60 cents a month. You’d also save about 2600 grams of carbon emissions – if all your electricity comes from coal-fired generators.  That’s not a huge amount, but it’s not insignificant either.

And that’s just your cable modem.  Add in your printer and monitor and USB charger and speakers and computer and… it starts to add up. Then there’s the entertainment centre, with the TV, xBox, set-top box, Blu-ray, Roku, etc.  That’s really going to add up, especially if you have a cable TV box, as those tend to be notorious energy suckers.

So the short answer:  don’t worry about your toaster. DO WORRY about your computer set-up and your home entertainment set-up.

If you already have all that stuff plugged into power strips or surge protectors, you can use the switch on that to turn everything off at once.  Or you can buy something like Belkin’s Conserve Switch surge protector with remote ($39.99) to do it.

For more…

• Consumer Energy Commission: Choices for the Home – small appliances.
• Ask Mr. Electricity: Myths about Saving Electricity.
• PG&E: Save Energy & Money.
• CoolClimate Carbon Footprint Calculator | CoolClimate Network.
• Individual Emissions – Household Emissions Calculator | Climate Change – Greenhouse Gas Emissions | U.S. EPA.
• Free Carbon Footprint Calculator | The Nature Conservancy.

Researchers Find Flaw in an Online Encryption Method:  A team of European and American mathematicians and cryptographers have discovered an unexpected weakness in the encryption system widely used worldwide for online shopping, banking, e-mail and other Internet services intended to remain private and secure. (via NYTimes.com.)

The crux of it is this: a very small number of PGP keys may not be secure because the random numbers used in the key generation process were not truly random.  It would be possible to replicate the researchers’ process to determine if your key was insecure, but the truth is that there is going to have to be a fix for this, and then everyone will have to create new keys.

Until that happens, take your privacy/encryption with a grain of salt.

Update:  Questions are being raised about the researchers’ findings, and whether they reflect a fundamental problem or some flawed implementations.  Since the research seemed to crack keys generated by different implementations, if their findings are correct then the flaw is widespread, regardless – I think…

Researchers Allege Defect in RSA Public Keys, Findings Questioned.

A free subscription to InformationWeek magazine is available here: http://pass3.informationweek.com

The sign-up process is somewhat cumbersome and requires a fair amount of info on your business, but you can just waffle on and say anything if you don’t want to give real details.

SOPA would have allowed the blocking of domain names associated with pirated content, and the prosecution/persecution of sites and persons who posted links to sites and materials that might infringe on US copyrights… You’ve heard all the arguments about it – probably more than you wanted in the last two weeks – but consider this:

Scrivener 2.2

Scrivener is a project management and writing tool for writers of all kinds that stays with you from that first unformed idea all the way through to the first – or even final – draft. Outline and structure your ideas; take notes; storyboard your masterpiece using a powerful virtual corkboard; view research while you write; track themes using keywords; dynamically combine multiple scenes into a single text. Scrivener has already been enthusiastically adopted by best-selling novelists and novices alike. Outline… Edit… Storyboard… Write. (via AvaxHome.)

That sounds like a good piece of software. One which my clients or friends might find useful. There’s nothing in what I’ve said that suggests any kind of piracy or copyright infringement.  Nor is there anything like that on the page linked to.  But… it’s probably a pirated piece of software.  Presumably under SOPA access to that site would have been shut down. It’s also possible WordPress would have to monitor its blogs – including mine – to see if we posted LINKS to sites that contained links to files that   might be infringing.  How was that ever going to work?