While looking around the web for construction tips for serpentine solar collectors (flat panel type where the pipe takes an s-route across the collector), I discovered this website with photos from Slovenia.

In Slovenia, they have this quaint little concept called ‘communities’. These ‘communities’ get together and accomplish things that an individual with a credit card might struggle with</sarcasm>

The Slovenian economy ministry and civil engineering institute (ZRMK) appear to offer tools and expertise to enable community construction of flat-panel solar water heaters. The project supplies a pre-formed pipe bending table and an asbestos(!)-topped brazing table. There is also a contraption for holding formed pipes against the collector plates for brazing/welding.

The copper pipe, supplied in rolls, is bent around the track to give it it’s serpentine shape. Brazing paste (a meltable alloy) is then applied to one side of the pipe. The pipe is layed onto the copper collector sheets and held down with the spring-loaded contraption atop the asbestos table. It appears that butane torches are then used to melt the flux/paste and braze the pipe to the copper panels. The panels are then very carefully washed and it appears that another layer of copper (foil?) is attached to the other side to form a plate-copper-foil sandwich.

It’s less clear as to what happens next but it looks like the collectors are given a matt-black coating to finalise the construction. It then seems that rather than add the panels into a individual units, the Slovenians instead set about stripping a large area of tiles from their roof. They build a box into this tile-less section which is then used to directly hold the solar water panels and the glazing is mounted straight over the box (all this is my deduction from the photographs - it may be wrong)

Ford has sold the Land Rover and Jaguar marques to Indian company TATA for what seems like a paltry £1.15bn.
Jag and Land Rover represent 16,000 British jobs in Solihull and Castle Bromwich in the West Midlands and on Merseyside.

While no immediate changes are planned by TATA to the British workforce, no direct assurances are given about the future safety of jobs (at least not publicly).

TATA famously introduced the ‘worlds cheapest production car’ recently. They will now preside over the manufacture of some of the world’s most expensive cars.

I just picked this up from BBC News online.

Apparently, a US merchantman, namely ‘Global Patriot’ has fired upon a small vessel which approached it in the Suez canal. The small vessel was reportedly offering wares and may have failed to respond to a challenge from Global Patriot. Reportedly, one man on the small vessel has been killed while two others have been injured.

Global Patriot seems to be a large Ro-Ro operated by Global Container Lines, a US based shipping company.

To the best of my knowledge, US merchantmen are not armed with any naval guns or weaponry so I would guess that Global Patriot engaged the small vessel with small arms fire.

According to the BBC report, 100 other vessels have arrived at the scene demanding an inquiry. It is unclear at the time of writing whether Global Patriot remains at the scene. It is also not clear although seems likely that the small vessel was Egyptian in origin.

Update 0600: Some news outlets quoting Reuters are misidentifying Global Patriot as a ‘US Warship’.  The BBC report is also extended to add that Global Patriot was carrying US military supplies. The dead man from the small vessel is identified as Mohammed Fouad.

In the early hours of March the 19th 2008, world famous space novelist Arthur C Clarke passed away at his home in Columbo, Sri Lanka.

His aide, Rohan De Silva, said that he died of breathing problems. Clarke had suffered from debilitating post-polio syndrome since the 1960s.

Clarke was alway prescient when predicting the future and he was recorded by TVE Asia Pacific in December 2007 talking of his life, his works and also saying ‘goodbye’ to his fans.

I wholeheartedly recommend his works but advise the avoidance of the Rama sequels (the original Rendevous with Rama, penned solely by Clarke is superb)

Clarke was an inspiration to me and I am thankful for the extent of his works, some of which I am still yet to read.

If you’re a resident of the UK who has adopted (or been forced to adopt) the all-singing, all-dancing and often non-working DVB-T digital television standard, you’ll have probably spent some time cursing your TV aerial or the trees between it and the transmitter. I don’t have any such issues myself, being no great fan of modern television programming but members of my family still insist on vegetating in front of the inane spectacle for hours on end, becoming disconsolate when the ‘entertainment’ carried over the air by UHF radio waves and an MPEG-2 stream is interrupted.

Looking around for an alternative, I saw a revised design of an old antenna design in the web technical digests, namely the Gray-Hoverman antenna. Based on the Hoverman antenna of the 1960s, the now computer modeled design is said to outperform other commercial antennas for limited line of sight applications over long distances.

I’m going to try to evaluate whether the Gray-Hoverman would be useful for UK DVB-T and I’m considering making one myself.

The design is licensed under the GPL v3

The organisers of the London 2012 Olympics (at least I think that’s what the logo says) have apparently decided to scuttle their plans for having an ocean going clipper (painfully named “Friend-ship”) sail around the world to promote the event and extoll the virtues of the UK.

The ship was to have been crewed by young British people with an experienced officer complement to give them a fighting chance of getting out of port.

The London 2012 Olympic bid book stated that the ship would:

… carry a cargo emblematic of the UK’s cultural riches.

 Presumably foreign ports would have already mined their approaches lest any of the UK’s “cultural riches” attempt to make it to shore.

The BBC article revealing the abandoned ship idea does not give a reason for the cancellation but with the ever spiraling cost of the Olympics, it is probably fair to guess that money is involved.