Please reconfigure your connection to use just “unblue.co.uk” as the server address.

For reference, full mail connection details can be found under the Personal Settings > Server Info tab when you log into Webmail.

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If you experience any difficulties please do let me know.

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Please do let me know if you experience any outages.

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Chris Yiu is now connected to Helen Lewis, Digtal enagement manager at HM Treasury

Doesn’t bode well for Helen Lewis’ digital engagements, huh?

This is automatic on a normal DVD stream, so I imagine it must be possible?

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Given this trend, I’ve decided to take a similar approach to the DVDs, and store the lot of them digitally instead. My experience of this process goes back almost 15 years now and I would normally just use DivX and mp3 audio as my codec-of-choice. However, a few keys things have changed since those heady days of Winamp:

Firstly, I find that between the PS3, the Samsung TV and VLC on various computers, AVI containers with DivX video just aren’t reliable as a storage method. What plays on one won’t on the other; audio synchronization can be as issue; and there are filesize limitations. The new kid on the block appears to be MKV, but that has inconsistent support – so it doesn’t really solve the problem.

Secondly, 15-10 years ago, disk sizes were in the 10-100GB range. I remember having my first RAID disaster with an array of five 120GB disks. These days, 2TB is the norm and (subject to regional floods) can be got for almost nothing. So, whilst my gut instinct is to stick to the ~700MB per film approach I used to, I don’t intend to burn these to disc nor do I care about the capacity I’ll use (within reason!).

Lastly, I used to use stereo MP3, and that was (and is) fine for audio that requires nothing more. I never used to have decent surround sound equipment, nor the desire to sacrifice video quality within the tight constraint of that 700MB target filesize. These days however, I just can’t think why I shouldn’t retain all 5.1 surround sound channels.

With these new requirements in mind then, I’ve elected for MP4 containers with h264/AAC encoding. Some tests I’ve run show 320kbps AAC audio with 1.1Mbps h264 video runs at about 10MB/minute, with quality pretty indistinguishable from the original DVD. It also plays nicely with every piece of equipment I own.

The problem I have is that I have no idea on the optimum way to convert what video I already have. With a couple of thousand existing video files in predominantly AVI(Divx) format, I need something scripted; ffmpeg is likely the correct option, but whilst I can put together conversion parameters that do the job, the resulting quality is abysmal. Answers on a (h264) postcard…

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A phone is produced. A good smartphone, sure, but alas just a phone. It has some features that make for a good choice if one is in the market: buying their first phone in a while, or if one needs to buy a new phone for one reason or another. However, here we have a man who has essentially pretended to be homeless for almost two weeks not because he needed to, nor because it was some absurd condition of being able to purchase said phone; but because for some unbelievable reason he decided he had to be the first to buy it. I realise that with countless other sheeple, not queuing might mean that you wouldn’t manage to buy one on the day of release… but when it’s just a phone I fail to see what the problem is in waiting another two weeks.

I also wonder who it is in society that can afford a £500 consumerist gadget, and yet also afford to spend ten days sat on a pavement. Was this his vacation, in which case I’d argue a serious mental health problem? Or is he one of the countless unemployed on benefits who somehow still have large quantities of free cash to spend on needless nice-to-haves? Either way, I see a problem.

This man is undoubtedly an Apple ‘fanboi’, and the extent to which Apple ‘fandom’ exists is something I can literally not fathom – I am totally and utterly incapable of understanding it. The Onion, famed for piss-take satire, writes stories that have been becoming more and more realistic for a while now, and worryingly it’s the world that getting more ridiculous than The Onion less so. Indeed, following the death of Steve Jobs they hit the nail absolutely perfectly on the head.

What bugs me most about this delusional worship is something shared by many others’ posts that I’ve read: that Steve Jobs did not cure cancer, nor work to reduce poverty or deliver peace. He was an almost textbook-definition capitalist who manufactured need-less western middle-class gadgets that do very little in the support of humanity. To my knowledge, he himself was not a noted philanthropist, and neither is the company he ran (though that’s not to say neither were charitable). The products he manufactured, though shiny and clearly excellently marketed, were not innovative; and they were manufactured in Asia under immense pressure and with very little regard for human rights – all purely because Apple’s desire for wealth is apparently more important than such small matters as the string of worker suicides.

What gets me though more than all that greed, is that it’s based on the manufacture and sale of devices that people do not actually need! The man camping on the pavement no doubt already had an iPhone 4: his ‘need’ – and I mean need as in ‘need to eat’ – for the new model is literally non-existent. In the words of The Onion, these people “reportedly needs to get [their] fucking priorities straight”.

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Along with a slew of bug fixes, the notable new feature seems to be a fully-functional address book.

The particular statistic mentioned was that when a habitat’s size is increased by a factor of ten, the number of species only doubles. I’m not sure of the wider context in which this was stated – and in particular whether it was presented as a problem – but it immediately implies a number of things as far as I can tell:

1. Species density is non-linear. That is to say that the number of species found per unit of land area is not linearly correlated. The following chart based on the quoted statistic shows this more clearly (assuming a starting point of 100 species in 100 units of land area):

2. As land area decreases, the number of species decreases (tending towards zero) but at a much slower rate. This implies that you’ll run out of land leaving some species with no habitat (but still present).

3. As land area increases, the number of species increases (tending towards infinity) but at a much slower rate. This implies (given a finite maximum land area on our planet) that there is a finite maximum number of species the earth can accomodate.

4. The non-linear relationship implies some kind of ‘compression’. That is to say, as land area is reduced by 90%, the species density (note not population density) is reduced by only 50%. This equates to an increase in the number of species per land-area-unit of 500%.

5. This increase of 500% implies an inherent change to inter-species relationships; specifically the food chain (to me at any rate). After all, as you crush competing species together with ever-increased resource shortages – living space, food resources, etc. – it makes sense that competition will increase correspondingly. Dramatic changes to environmental or inter-species relationships are – under Punctuated Equilibrium Darwinism – believed to be a key driver for an increase in the rate of evolution.

6. An increase in the rate of evolution should be measurable, primarily by intra-species variations.

This last one is particularly interesting to me. If punctuated equilibrium were true, and we would see an increased rate of evolution in habitats under threat (and assuming the rate of evolution were fast enough to cope with the rate of habitat destruction), then is habitat destruction implicitly bad? Is it true to say that evolution is inherently positive, given its definition being ‘survival of the fittest’?

And, what of the inverse? The above supposition would suggest that given an abundance of available habitat and resources, the rate of evolution would slow down. Is that inherently bad?

I don’t know the answers, or even whether inferences drawn from theories like PED are necessarily valid. But like I say, I don’t envy Claire the work she has ahead – just the subject matter

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