Merseyside Pollce have a new toy….er…I mean crime-fighting tool. According to this BBC story, they are testing radio-control helicopters with CCTV payloads.

They hope this pseudo UAV will help them mount general surveillance of the population at football matches and suchlike.

They point out that it ‘only’ weighs 1kg “about the same as a bag of sugar”. Remember that when this “bag of sugar” is falling your way, blades spinning.

One final point; why do they always paint these things black?

Oh yes please.

Okay, so it’s only ‘official’ because I say so but mobile internet in the UK hasn’t come very far at all and isn’t really going anwhere fast.

For a start, the costs are frighteningly prohibitive. Orange UK will gladly charge you £4 ($7.77) for one megabyte of data on their arse-numbingly slow GPRS network! The average day’s idling on an IM network can ammount to more than that.

On their payg network, they do offer an ‘unlimited’ day’s GPRS for £1 which you buy up front. The trouble is, as I found out to my cost that the network availability can be pathetic even if you are staying put all day meaning it is all too easy to waste that £1.

Then there are the ‘roaming charges’ (punitive charges made to you when connecting from even your own network operator in the EU) These charges can be in excess of £10 per megabyte. T-Mobile, in an unusual fit of generosity recently announced that it would cap it’s daily roaming GPRS rate at ?12. Wow! That’s just ?360 a month!

I’m starting to wonder if I could get a pre-paid Iridium Sattellite data package cheaper.

Well I’m posting this via my Nokia 770 / Nokia 7650 pair over the Orange GPRS network. I’ll have to hope their network hold up ong enough to***NO CARRIER***

After the hail damage to space shuttle Atlantis’ upper external-tank insulation foam while it sat on the pad, NASA have been patching it up back at the vehicle assembly building.

Now, I’m wondering whether the future crew launch vehicle is going to have similar issues.. While the Aries 1 is an in-line stack with it’s manned modules at the top (safe from falling foam), It still appears to use the same ‘ET’ type insulation on its upper cryogenic stage as the shuttle. I wonder whether hail damage to this area would require a roll back to the VAB?

I’ve also been looking for some information on how the CEV module shroud is protected while on the pad but I haven’t found anything yet.

…and then it doesn’t.

I think I mentioned before that I was fairly sick.of SuSE (hence my wholesale move to Ubuntu) but I was recently presented with a broken machine from a friend that needed fixing.

This box was a SuSE 10.0 install running the rather superb Zoneminder CCTV security monitoring software. Unfortunately, this box had died completely.

Initial inspection found the fault easily; a set of expanded / blown capacitors next to the CPU.

So, without further ado, I aquired a replacement socket A nforce2 motherboard. Of course, the new nforce chipset differed from the VIA chipset on the original board and when the HHD was transferred over, this was to cause problems.

Waiting for device /dev/hda1 to appear

Of course, it never appears as the required module for the new nforce2 controller is not available to the bootloader.

The Fix:

I downloaded and burned to CD the first disk in the SuSE 10.0 install set. (not the mini boot iso!)

I then booted from this CD and selected install.

At the point I was asked if I wanted to do a ‘new installation’ I selected ‘other’ and ‘repair’. I then selected expert repair (my delusions showing again).

From the expert repair menu, I told it to rewrite the bootloader (with the default options).

Then reboot and hey-presto, it’s working again.

Full disclosure: it took me about 4 hours to work this out as the correct fix!

Note: The nforce NIC also had to be confgured in my case using YAST.