Ben's Bits

You can find quite an interesting selection of videos on YouTube. Today we're going to watch electricity in action. No, not doing useful things around the house but lots of electricity going awry. Here is a high voltage power line arcing for a while before it arcs to another phase and blows a fuse. Here is a similar video showing night time arcing at a substation. Finally, here is a substation where the arcing got bad enough to superheat the transformer oil, vaporize it and explode it.

When I used to maintain a large MP3 collection my absolute favorite tool to organize and "tag" the MP3s with artist, album and title information was Magnus Brading's MP3/Tag Studio. Thde reason this worked so well for me is because as I ripped CDs I would put the music into folders by album and artist using track number and title for the filename. MP3/Tag Studio allowed me to capture all of that information from the path and put it into the tags. But some time ago I switched from MP3s to the lossless FLAC format. FLAC also allows tagging but tools are fewer and far between. Luckily I've discovered an open source tagging tool that looks like it will fit the bill. EasyTAG appears to have many of the same features as MP3/Tag Studio but works with many types of files including MP3, MP2, MP4/AAC, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, MusePack, Monkey's Audio and WavPack which is a great advantage in my implementation. It's also a cross platform application available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows which is useful for those of us who regularly work with several different OSs.

Even when I'm generally satisfied with software I'm using I like to keep an eye out for other, potentially better, solutions. In this case I have great hopes that eEye Digital Security has produced a better antivirus/anti-spyware/anti-malware solution than what has been available in the past. From Norton to McAfee to TrendMicro and others the traditional antivirus vendors seem to suck up more and more computing resources even when most of the security threats are coming from spyware, rootkits and other areas for which little or no protection is provided. Luckily, if you're a home user the new kid on the block, eEye, has come out with a product called Blink which purports to be a security center for your PC which works and uses considerably fewer resources than the other options. If the hype is real this could easily become my solution of choice. Thanks to the current free 1-year subscription promotion I've installed it on a few computers and will be watching to see how it performs. It sounds like an interesting product and has some powerful features so I have high hopes.

When you're regularly moving from one network to another it's often useful to be able to store a profile of network settings which can quickly be recalled to set things such as a static IP address, etc. Many newer laptops include software to do just this but for those doing it with desktops or who have replaced the OS on the laptop it's useful to know third party utilities exist which can accomplish the same thing.

Two free utilities are Network Switcher and SwitchNetConfig some of the low cost/shareware ones are SwitchPro, NetSetMan, Mobile Net Switch and NetSwitcher though many others exist as well. If you know of others, especially a free or open source solution I would encourage you to leave a comment and let others know about its existence.

On April 26, 1986 reactor 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Soviet Union near what is now Pripyat, Ukraine. Nearly twenty one years later this remains the worst nuclear power accidents and a reminder of both the awesome and potential destructive nature of nuclear power. In recent years, as radioactivity levels in the area have decreased and time has marched on, there has been much less discussion about the accident and it often receives only a cursory discussion in schools. To those still living in the area who see constant reminders of the destruction and sacrifice which followed the accident the Internet has provided a medium to ensure the accident is never forgotten.

In many ways the Chernobyl accident remains shrouded in mystery. In part thanks to the suppression of news and reporting during the Soveit era and in part due to the deaths of key figures there remains much we do not know about the accident and the aftermath. In much the same way there is controversy surrounding the discussion of the accident as well as modern exploration of the accident site. The goal of this article is to provide some guidance in the exploration of Chernobyl related resources.

A good place to start for an overview is the Wikipedia article on the Chernobyl disaster but remember that Wikipedia can be edited by anyone and may contain bias or inaccuracies. Another good place for background information and papers is the International Atomic Energy Agency's Chernobyl page. If you're specifically interested in the natural implications of the disaster you may want to check out the book Wormwood Forest: A natural history of Chernobyl by Mary Mycio.

Once you have a good understanding of the disaster itself you may want to start looking at some of the modern exploration and notes from the Chernobyl site. One of the most popular sites was created by the so called "Kid of Speed" Filatova Elena Vladimirovna who wrote two photographic stories (Ghost Town and Land of the Wolves) of trips into the exclusion zone and hosts them along with other thoughts on the disaster at her website. It is worth noting that several people have called parts of her stories (particularly early revisions) out as hoaxes but she remains a prominent figure and committed to remembering the disaster and her site contains many interesting photographs from the so-called exclusion area. The Nuclear Flower site, an anti-nuclear power site from Australia, contains some higher resolution photos from the exclusion area. The 26-04-1986 site was setup by seven artists from Moscow, Minsk and Berlin to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster and contains some artistic photos from the area. National Geographic also featured the Chernobyl disaster in their April 2006 issue and this online exhibit. Use the links of the side of that page to see photos, writings, maps, sites and sounds from the area. Looking toward the future you may examine the Chernobyl.info site, setup by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, which bills itself as an "international communications platform on the longterm consequences of the Chernobyl disaster".