my thoughts

I recently discovered the isleofwightweather.co.uk website which offers a realtime storm tracker. This is a pretty cool service showing live strike types and locations.

The sotonmet, offers the current weather of interest to mariners with data from Southampton dockhead (close to the centre of Southampton). There is a related site just outside of Southampton water, on Bramble Bank: bramblemet. (note: at the time of posting these sites are down, probably due to unprecedented load from the Round the Island race this weekend)

Check out my previous posts on weather

I just bought a Playstation Portable (PSP), and whilst it is an excellent device for viewing various media it is not immediately obvious how to manage file transfer from the PC. This site has a good set of tips on getting the most out of your PSP:
» www.askdavetaylor.com/cat_sony_psp_geek_stuff.html

The PSP supports only a few media formats, so getting video files on to your PSP could be a laborious technical process. Fortunately there is a free utility called PSP Video 9 which will do the work for you.
» www.pspvideo9.com/

I think I may be getting too interested in lightning and extreme weather phenomena, perhaps it is the physics degree. This picture shows a relatively uncommon 'positive cloud-ground' (+CG) lightning bolt taken by a photographer who was incredibly close to where it hit! Amazing!
Teslamania has the details (scroll down to 'huge positive..')

So what is Positive lightning? An image like that is sure to spark interest - here is an accessible article explaining more:
www.srh.weather.gov/srh/jetstream/lightning/positive.htm

If you've ever wondered about how lightning actually connects to the ground, then this page offers a nice introduction:
www.srh.weather.gov/srh/jetstream/lightning/lightning_max.htm

Lightning can actually change polarity too, this is called bipolar lightning, and this review paper (PDF) explains a bit about it:
plaza.ufl.edu/rakov/ICLP2000/positive1.16.pdf

Of course, no explanation would be complete without the wikipedia:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning

Just found this rather nice site which presents a good detailed view of the weather through a series of clear images. They have an interesting lightning activity chart too. Great for 'visual thinkers' 
» www.meteorologica.info/

For all the promotion from the mobile operators you'd think they'd provide some better guides to getting your mobile data connection set up. I just found this page which lists all the settings for all of the operators, so now I can connect to the internet with Orange GPRS on my Pocket PC over bluetooth to my Smartphone. Yay!
» www.taniwha.org.uk/gprs.html

Update: Configuring a Pocket PC to use GPRS for mobile internet access on o2 UK
I have since moved away from Orange to o2, who have different settings. Here's what I've found to work for configuring a Pocket PC to use GPRS for mobile internet access. (Note the different APN & proxy server requirements.)
» Pocket PC : Connecting to the Internet
» UK APN settings (o2 gprs)
» Pocket PC: Using WAP

LEDs present some interesting options for lighting: they are available in a range of colours (from infra-red through the visible spectrum to ultraviolet, and also white), they are small, low-temperature and energy efficient which lends them to practical and 'mood' lighting applications.

I saw this project mentioned on slashdot a couple of days ago - a home made mood lighting thing based on LEDs. The author has now posted a guide on how to make your own LED lighting project although the colour control is a little crude (it uses dimmer switches, a more elegant solution is to use pulse width modulation).

I also found this page of fun things to make and do, many of which use LEDs but there's plenty of other silliness on offer, such as: extreme shampoo, exploding last rolos and a light fitting so bright that it requires sunglasses to view.

There are plenty of really bright LEDs available now, and Inova make a rather impressive flashlight based on them.

This got me thinking about other forms of lighting (I do have a degree in Laser-Science, after all), and what fun might be had customising existing devices. I found the candlepower forums which has a range of topics including LED lighting projects and also the frankly dangerous 'modifying laser pointers'' thread in which a 5mw output is cranked up to 45mw!

While this is not the most comprehensive culinary resource it makes for interesting reading. I particularly like the recipe diagrams.
www.cookingforengineers.com/