Silicon wafer with three PC88 radio valves

Focusing the camera was really hard, it’s bad enough getting a manual lens to focus but when the thing being photographed is so small it can’t be seen with the naked eye it requires a lot of trial and error. I also bought some old radio valves for a few quid off eBay too and decided to compare the two. It’s fun holding an entire wafer of ICs in one hand and having a single valve in the other.

Here is one of the wafers with some circuitry laid down in a regular pattern. The eBay bid says it was Intel memory of some description, but the wafer contains no visible writing to identify it. If I had a microscope I’d probably find something to read that’d identify it. The chips are arranged into small squares varying between half a centimetre and less than two millimetres across. I really like the edges of the wafers where there are half complete circuits due to the shape of the wafer. If these were processors, each one would be worth a hundred pounds or so, and the edge contains about 100 defective half made ones. A lot of the middle ones probably didn’t work properly either.

It’s hard to appreciate just how small the traces are on the surface, fortunately one of my hairs fell out while trying to get my camera to behave and I took a photo of it on the surface of the silicon wafer.

A billion pixel image (scaled considerably, obviously)

Following on from yesterday’s post about how silly the number 1,000,000,000 is I had a play in Photoshop. A few minutes of thinking and a reply on my Livejournal mirror of this blog made me decide that an image containing a billion pixels might be something semi interesting to create. Could Photoshop handle it, or would my PC crash, and just how large is the resulting image?

Photoshop settings

From some basic maths I worked out I’d need an image 31,622.8 pixels square, but since you can’t get 0.8 of a pixel I rounded it up to 31,623 which has the bonus of an extra 14,129 pixels. I also found Windows Calculator has no square root button in scientific mode (and even though squaring a number by a half makes sense, it’d be nice if they’d left the button to do it for you).

An image 31,623 pixels square consumes just under a gig of memory when the image is turned into a greyscale image. When left as 8bit colour it generates a seven gigabyte scratch file and Photoshop becomes very unresponsive. You definitely don’t want layers or to attempt typing text in. Turning the image into greyscale and repeatedly flattening it keeps things working.

So how big is a square image containing a billion pixels? At 72dpi (28.346 pixels per cm) the image is just over 11m square. That’s bigger than the floor plan of my house. If it was somehow printed, it’d be about as wide as a double decker bus and just taller than two. Or a few metres short of half a swimming pool.

Here are some images to show relative sizes of things, with Photoshop’s ruler dimensions being in centimetres.

Screenshot of Photoshop CS3 showing comparisons of sizes

(one thing to bear in mind with the images above… the file in Photoshop is a 72dpi image, but my screen resolution is 96dpi so don’t try and measure the screenshot images using a ruler, it won’t work; use the real image and a large printer instead.)

If you want the actual real image I used for this, you can have it as an LZW compressed TIF image by clicking this link but be warned it’s around 3.5 meg in file size and uncompresses to 970 megabytes when your image viewer attempts to view it.

If you’re feeling daring, here is a link to the Photoshop psb file which is 16 megabytes and will eat your PC alive if you actually try and manipulate the image. You’ll notice that this image is at 2% of the original size… The text “Dimensions of a London Double Decker Bus…” was done at 900 point size.

A billion is a big number, you can’t comprehend its size. There are 61 million people in the UK, and you probably know about ten of them properly, and there is an estimated six billion people in the world. A billion is not just “a thousand million” because that’s like saying infinity is just a really big number. Here’s a graph to prove it…

Your profile has been viewed 13 times since you last visited, make sure your profile’s up-to-date so your friends and family know what you’re up to.

Thirteen times! Thirteen whole times… since err sometime in 2003 when I first joined then thought “this is crap” and never logged in since. I have no idea what my password or login details are and don’t really care. I once got an email asking if they’d guessed my primary school correctly with every primary school in my local area listed. Not much of a guess, more a dumb search algorithm. Supposedly I also have messages from friends which I find dubious since all my friends are on other social networks.

I think their main failing was trying to charge money for people using their site. Sometimes being first isn’t always the best idea.

This could be you...

Last night I succumbed and installed Steam on my PC, and after upgrading my graphics card drivers, rebooting a few times and waiting all night for the Orange Box to download I have some fun things to play. The same fun things I bought for my XBox 360, but since that went a bit red-ringy the other week I don’t think I’ll be buying more 360 games any time soon.

After playing Portal for a bit and marvelling at the tearing that happens I fired up Team Fortress 2 for a bit of a go. I’ve never played it before, but it’s good fun with a nice cartoon look to it. And that got me thinking about FPS shooters…

At school I’m constantly pestered by my students asking if I have COD 4, COD 6, MW2 or any other confusing acronym that means “have you got the latest hyper-realistic war simulation”, and they always seem gobsmacked that I say “no”. But I don’t, I don’t like playing them, they’re all too serious; I don’t really want to run around an accurately lit and shaded 3D world picking off the enemy with realistic weapons that get hot, jam or run out of ammo. I’m playing a computer game for fun, not enlisting in the army.

The concept of Nazi Zombies is funny, but it’s also so silly – what next? Nazi Terrorist Paedophile Zombies, just to get all the evils of modern society represented? Got to keep the “zombies” bit in though just so you don’t offend any real people.

I had a think and wonder what COD could be next. Space is out the question because of Halo, so I suppose it’s either the Gulf War, some generic desert combat, “Capture the Binladen” or another trip back into WW2. Always WW2, never WW1… I guess the idea of running around with a rifle and a knife isn’t so interesting. Not many fun weapons existed in 1915 and we still played war by the old rules.

So how about Trench Warfare. Yeah, that sounds good, there’s lots of depth in that. Alongside the ever present danger of gas attacks, you could sit in knee deep mud for three weeks managing your gangrene and writing poetry, before being given the order to go over the top… at which point the enemy opens fire and that’s it. Make it ultra realistic, meaning you have a higher chance of winning the lottery than making it home alive.

Yes, let’s make these war games so realistic the kids playing them end up with real shellshock. It might prevent them from trying it in real life.

Or we could just have fun and blow up cartoon representations of ourselves with oversized weapons and goofy Loony Toons style physics that’s funny. I think I know which I’d rather play.

UK GPO 746 Rotary Dial Telephone

The one my grandma had lived under her stairs on a shelf – a special telephone shelf that was just out my reach. The one my parents had lived in the porch out the way – but not so out the way that conversations couldn’t be listened to. Using the phone was a special and expensive thing, it cost real money to make a call back then – 5p a minute for local calls if you were calling after 6pm. I had to sit in the cold trying to convince my friend to bike the half mile up to my house.

Naturally, as time went on phones became cheaper, the GPO renamed themselves to ‘British Telecom’ (although there are still manhole covers in the streets with ‘GPO’ stamped into them) before being cut up into bits, de-monopolised and communications became cheap, easy and a race to the bottom for pricing and customer loyalty. You’d think in 2010 a phone made in 1980 wouldn’t have a chance of working, they’re wholly mechanical, not a single integrated circuit or even a single transistor is inside that phone above. It has cogs and springs and levers and some resistors. And a giant pair of bells that make a noise – if you are angry and end a call with a traditional slamming of the receiver it makes a satisfying “dinnnggggg”. The telesales idiot who interrupted you won’t notice, but the phone is solid and could withstand being thrown across the room. There’s a wonderful physical feel to dialling a number (yes kids, that’s why it’s called “dialling” – there’s a whacking great dial on the phone) because it takes time for the dial to move. There’s a reason it takes the dial time to move, it’s to pulse out the numbers down the line – it’s not just old, slow technology being irritating. The whole thing is designed with a purpose, there are no flashing neon lights or 26 ring tones to choose from.

The thing is, these phones do still work without any modification apart from a resistor so the ringer still works. Think about that for a moment… Unless you live in the outer parts of the Scottish Highlands, you are wired to a digital phone exchange that spends most of its life shovelling ATM, ISDN, ADSL and IP data around the country. Quite a lot of this shoots down fibre optic cabling, rather than being varying AC voltages that fade over distance. My granddad used to shout into his phone when ringing abroad, it was funny to watch but necessary since back then there was a real electrical connection between your phone in England and your friend’s phone in Spain – actual physically connected pieces of metal rather than abstract packets of data.

So with all this digital data whizzing around, these clunky obsolete bits of technology still work. My line has ADSL on it, there is a filter to cut that off so the phones don’t mess it up. My phone is wired to the exchange using just two wires, and down those two wires goes everything… the ADSL, the power to run the phones, the power to ring the physical bell in my phone, the voice signal, the digital ADSL signal and a thing to tell the exchange when I take my phone off the hook. All that sent down two wires meaning I can watch YouTube and the phone system can shovel 90 volts of electricity up the line to ring my phone.

Isn’t that just a bit magic?

My gas usage

As an added incentive you get a little energy meter which after five minutes I duly took apart to see what was in it. They also have a section on their website to see your energy usage during the year, and a comparison to last year. It seems from my graphs I’m using less gas than last year, probably because I don’t use the timer any more and just switch it on manually, but I use more electricity. I probably use more electricity because I have a few electric heaters in my bedroom to keep the mould away.

My electricity usage

So, from these graphs you can see several things – Compared to summer, it’s bloody cold since all I use gas for is heating and cooking, and I certainly don’t eat more food in winter. And compared to last year I have used double the electricity somehow, probably also due to it being so damn cold I had to buy electric heaters. Really, it was -4.5c outside when I woke up this morning and a crisp 13c in my bedroom. It’s a good job I was underneath four duvets with a pair of thermals and thick socks on, curled around a hot water bottle.

Not to worry, come summer I’ll be sweating to death with all the windows open.

The World of Science ISBN 0723543208

While wandering around a local car boot sale this book caught my eye. I quite like the old science and computing books from the 80s and 90s. There’s a certain style to them that doesn’t exist any more. They’re books I used to read from the library or have bought for me at Christmas. Books aimed at children, but books that assume the children reading them aren’t stupid and can cope with complicated words.

I also like the hand drawn images. No computer rendered images in these books. The World of Science is the usual affair telling us all about atoms, space, magnets and gravity. None of it goes into any particular depth, but it’s enough to make an enquiring mind think “that magnetism stuff… what’s it do, where can I get a magnet from? Dad, buy me that science book on magnets please it can be an early birthday present”. Don’t forget, in 1990 there was no Wikipedia so information wasn’t instantly available, it had to be paid for in books. Yes teenagers… books… you didn’t just fire up Google and type “what is magnetism” into the PC; a time when libraries actually contained more books than computers.

The best part of this book is the Tomorrow’s World section at the back where the book’s authors attempt to predict the future. Yes, there’s the assumption we’ll all be in space in little 2001 style pods, flying cars and the like. And like all books of the era, it totally and utterly fails to predict the popularity of computers or mobile phones. I wonder what blindingly obvious things we’re missing right now…

Here’s a two page scan of that section to read. Click it for a bigger image.

The World of Science - Tomorrow's World

[3704510.037506] uhci_hcd 0000:01:0b.1: host system error, PCI problems?
[3704510.037564] uhci_hcd 0000:01:0b.1: host system error, PCI problems?
[3704510.037611] uhci_hcd 0000:01:0b.1: host controller process error, something bad happened!
[3704510.037660] uhci_hcd 0000:01:0b.1: host controller halted, very bad!
[3704510.037716] uhci_hcd 0000:01:0b.1: HCRESET not completed yet!
[3704510.037723] uhci_hcd 0000:01:0b.1: HC died; cleaning up

I think I’ll just be rebooting my computer now then. Yes, reboot time.

And I’d just got CUPS working properly too, and was trying the ambitious thing of printing from an RDP connection via my desktop PC to the printer plugged into my server. The printjob made it out the remote machine and into the server’s print queue so I think it’ll work.

Since the bike is electric, it’s just a bike – no road tax or MOT etc needed.

But what’d happen if we strapped a petrol generator to it to charge the battery while it’s moving? Would it still be an electric vehicle, or would it be a petrol powered one?

Since if it remains an electric vehicle, I’m going to remove the engine from my car, replace it with electric motors, fill my boot with batteries and use the petrol engine to charge the batteries while the car is running.

… it’s how a lot of trains work, so it’s not as daft as it sounds.