Nuclear Power

So, the government have finally nailed their colours firmly to the mast and told us that we need nuclear power stations to ensure continuous energy supply in the future. About bloody time. The havering has been going on for far too long. We've lost valuable time in consultations and reports while the rest of Western Europe has been quietly preparing their own nuclear plans. Enough on the debate of renewables, they just do not work and will be woefully inadequate for many decades to come. By all means spend a bit on R&D but personally the time and money would be better spent on cutting energy waste.

The real debate on nuclear power has yet to start. Which technology will be chosen, how will the waste be dealt with and who's going to pay for it all?

Wasting time trying to appease the bearded, sandal wearers of the country will cost us all dearly in the future. If we don't hurry up we may have to warm ourselves by burning the very same hippies who will have plunged us into the cold darkness. Every cloud I suppose.

Rant over, carry on :-)

Category:

• Nuclear
• Energy

Blender 2.44

A pretty low key release for Blender to version 2.44. Lovely splash screen by Andy though, very smart. Aimed really as a bug-fix update for 2.43 and the new Blender book (Essential Blender) this version will carry us through Sigraph 2007 and for the rest of the year. It's now 64 bit safe for future processors and Operating Systems and the welcome addition of Sub-Surface Scattering materials is the most notable new feature. The next scheduled release is believed to be version 2.50 which will see the much anticipated UI refactor.

I've been using Blender a lot recently to import motion capture .bvh files for adding to a human character model for use in a game engine. More on that in later posts.

Category:

• 3D
• Blender

Spring Clean

I can't really put this off any longer and as it's a Bank Holiday Weekend there's no excuses for not diving in. I need to reinstall Windows XP Pro on my workstation as it has slowed to a complete crawl weighed down by three years of installed junk. That shouldn't be much of an issue but the real pain is reinstalling all the essential applications and getting them to work just right.

The biggest headache will be my Freecom DVB USB Stick which is a bit of a pig to get working, closely followed by my extreme Monitor/Graphic Card combination for the triple screen set-up I like to run. Then there's iTunes with over 30Gb of mp3's. Will I lose my purchased music (only 5 or 6 tracks) or is there a way of backing up the licenses?

I also need to backup my email into .pst files from Outlook and check whether I can re-import into Thunderbird which I want to switch to as my main client. Then there's the product keys for software purchased online, and my IE/Firefox bookmarks and the torrent directory, recorded TV shows.... and probably another 101 things I haven't yet thought of.

The XP disk has been located (not where I thought it was) and the original software that came with the machine. The license key is marked on the computer case so I think I'm good to go. Today will be the above mentioned preparation and tomorrow the fun begins with a lovely fresh install. Thankfully most of my actual data is on a secondary hard drive but it could do with a good clear out too. Aren't computers just great?

Update: I've been busy. Backed up any data that I wanted to save from C: drive such as photos etc. Backed up my entire iTunes library (using iTunes own back up to CD or DVD tool, onto 8 DVDs taking nearly 3 hours but it's done now :-) Installed Thunderbird and imported all e-mail and the address book from Outlook. I then backed up the data from Thunderbird and Firefox with a free utility so I won't have to re-install Outlook when I've completed the clean OS install. Good to go except I can't get the computer to boot from the DVD drive which is a bit of a pain. I can get a floopy boot disk from Microsoft but I need to get to the bottom of the problem some time.

Category:

• Computer
• Windows