Steve's Blog

The Producers

I went to the movies on Friday with a girlie I met not that long ago. We went to see The Producers by Mel Brooks. I have to say, it’s one of the best movies that I have seen in a long, long time.

I haven’t seen the original version (before the movie became a play that became a movie), but I’m keeping an eye out for it at the DVD store! This was the first movie in a long time that made me laugh out loud (literally!) while watching. A great watch - if you can, go see it!

Weird ice cubes?!

This is a tad weird which has made me wonder how the hell this happened. I got some ice cubes out of the freezer that I made a few days ago, and theres these inch long spikes of ice coming out of the cube. Pics of the ice tray. Now this is interesting, as there was nothing on top of the ice trays and they were placed on the top shelf of the freezer. If someone has any ideas on how these were created, I’d love to hear it :)

Update: I found a really good article on this here.

DAPS/SID/STAR chart for Australia

I’ve been getting into Xplane and VATSIM pretty heavily lately - and I’ve been working of the real procedures from Airservices Australia. These are great, however there are a lot of waypoints missing from Xplanes database. Airservices also have 1606 PDF files (one page per file) of all the DAPS information for Australia.

After talking this through with Airservices, I have been given permission to alter these and redistribute to people using VATSIM. What I have been working on is to gather all DAPS related to one airport, then combine them into a single PDF file. This takes the number of PDFs for the average sim pilot to hunt through from 1606 to around 370 - and you only need one for the airports you use.

More news on this to come as I complete this work (already taken the best part of 3 days!). I have also submitted the missing procedure waypoints to Austin to see if he can add them into an update to Xplane.

Apple SuperDrive tests by Apple

If you haven’t been following the SuperDrive Petition then you might have missed that Apple have taken in my 12” Powerbook for testing. Apple Sydney sent 2 DVD discs down to my AppleStore that I’ve been dealing with on this to test if the drive is indeed faulty. I thought I’d expand this test and also provided 4 blank DVDs to test. The results are very interesting:

  • Ritek 8x DVD-R. Available Speeds: 1x, 2x. 26 mins to burn 4Gb.
  • Princo 4x DVD-R. Available Speeds: 1x, 2x. 29 mins to burn 4Gb
  • Yoshi 8x DVD+R. Available Speeds: 2x. 25 mins to burn 4Gb
  • Datacell 4x DVD-R. Available Speeds: 1x, 2x. 29 mins to burn 4Gb
  • Apple 8x DVD-R. Available Speeds: 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x. 12 mins to burn 4Gb
  • TDK 16x DVD-R. Available SPeeds: 1x, 2x. 29 mins to burn 4Gb

In summary, only ONE of the discs worked as expected (Apple supplied the last two). These results have been sent to Apple, and I’m awaiting their reply with great interest.