CCTV Installations

More than just a bunch of hot air Our article about the Chinook winds discussed an unusual meteorological phenomenon, but one thing it didn’t touch on was the peculiarity of a wind having a name in the first place. That strikes me as odd, like a temperature or a humidity level or a barometric pressure having a name. I mean, I get it: we give hurricanes and certain other storms names, and that serves a useful purpose, but just calling the movement of air in a certain way at a certain time by a proper noun seems weird. Be that as it may, we were able to find quite a few other examples of winds that have names. Here’s a representative sampling—by no means a complete list: Bora : A cold, north-eastern katabatic wind that blows along the east coast of the the Adriatic Sea (including Greece, Russia, and Turkey). Brickfielder : A hot and dry summer wind in Southern Australia. Cape Doctor : A dry south-easterly wind that blows over part of Western Cape Province in South Africa, so na...

The next big thing in space travel If you wanted to cross the ocean by ship, you’d probably choose an engine-driven vessel over a sail-driven vessel. The engine will get you where you’re going faster; it enables the ship to be much larger than it could be if it were driven by a sail; and it requires much less manual intervention to keep it going. Besides, you won’t be at the mercy of unpredictable winds. In oceangoing vessels, the technological progression from sails to internal-combustion engines solved a great many problems while creating only a few new ones, such as the need to obtain and store significant quantities of fuel and the pollution that results from burning that fuel. Of course, since the planet is conveniently spherical, you’re always a finite distance from the nearest port where you can fill up. If, on the other hand, you wanted to circumnavigate the globe without stopping for fuel, sails would be the way to go. The trip would take longer and the ship would be smalle...

How do you want to be remembered by future generations? You can make a will to handle your physical possessions, but what about your digital life—photos, videos, email, documents, and the like? What about all your passwords, social media accounts, backups, and every other aspect of your digital life? Over the years, I got so many questions about this sort of thing that I decided to write a book about it— Take Control of Your Digital Legacy —and it has turned out to be one of my post popular titles. If you’re not at the stage of life where you can think about this for yourself, consider that you may have to do so for your parents or other relatives. It’s not all about posterity either, since following my advice will also help loved ones access your key accounts and important info if you’re incapacitated, which can happen at any time—or even if you just decide to go on a long vacation. This book, like all Take Control titles, comes as an ebook, and you can download any combination of ...

Old marketing gimmicks never die Hark back with me to the Dark Years (or the Good Old Days, depending on your point of view)—the time before any object a person desired could be delivered to one’s door within days (if not hours), with no more effort than a few taps on a smartphone screen. I’m old enough to remember a time before Amazon.com—indeed, before the internet itself—when discovering, locating, and procuring a variety of any particular type of merchandise actually presented a challenge. Way back in the days when we had to wait for checks to clear and then allow 6–8 weeks for delivery, the notion that a previously unknown specimen of one of our favorite things would arrive automagically on our doorstep once a month was quite compelling. I had experienced, and then long forgotten about, thing-of-the-month clubs when, in the early 2000s, my Christmas gift from my mother was a subscription to the Fruit of the Month Club. Once each month, Airborne Express arrived at our door with ...

Modern-day alchemy Well, I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The good news is that there may be an elegant solution on the horizon to the gigantic problem of garbage—and not just the kind that gets dumped in landfills, but hard-to-recycle plastics, too, along with agricultural wastes, used tires, and just about everything else. More good news: we might get to reduce dependence on foreign oil and pay less for gasoline in the process. The bad news? More cheap oil to burn means more carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere, perpetuating the already dire problem of global warming. The technology that makes it possible to do this is called the thermal depolymerization process , or TDP for short. It was developed for commercial use a couple of decades ago by a company called Changing World Technologies (now owned by Canadian firm Ridgeline Energy Services ), and its first full-scale plant operated for a number of years in Carthage, Missouri. Now various other firms are taking ...

Triassic Park in Argentina I have a special fondness for deserts and other barren landscapes. Partly, I’m sure, it’s because of their rugged natural beauty, but I also find the lack of people and the coinciding lack of noise quite refreshing. I’ve spent plenty of time in desert regions of North America, South America, and the Middle East. One spot I missed during my trip to Argentina back in 2004 would undoubtedly have made it onto my list of favorite desert places. Located in the San Juan province in northwest Argentina, Ischigualasto Provincial Park is remote, hot, amazingly dry, and generally inhospitable, but nevertheless manages to draw over 30,000 tourists each year. Smorgasbord of Fossils The park takes its name from the Ischigualasto Formation , a large basin of sedimentary rock that was once a lush tropical swamp and is now a paleontologist’s playground. It contains a vast number of fossils, but its significance runs much deeper than that. It’s the only known place on the ...

Engineering marvel of the Canal Age Before I knew much about aqueducts (whether ancient or modern), I imagined they would be constructed to bring water to areas that had none. While they can serve that purpose, I’ve since learned that aqueducts have been built in places with plenty of water—such as a river valley. One example of this is a first-century aqueduct system constructed by the Romans in Southern France to carry water from the Eure spring in Uzès to a water tower in Nîmes, about thirty miles (fifty kilometers) away. In this case, it was the spring water in particular that the Romans coveted, using it to supply the fountains, sewage systems, and spas of the flourishing town. As part of the aqueduct system, the Romans built the now-famous Pont du Gard , a bridge that enabled the channel of water to cross over the Gard river and to continue on its way to Nîmes. In a way, it was like they built a river (or stream, if you will) above another river; rather remarkable to a non-eng...

Fairy castles in the air When people accuse you of building castles in the air, they are not usually congratulating you on an incredible engineering feat, but more likely trying to bring you back down to earth with a thud. Synonymous with daydreams, pipe dreams, and all other dreams unlikely to come to fruition, castles in the air are at best a hopeful vision, and at worst, a hopeless illusion. Although the phrase “castles in the air” (the original phrase was “castles in Spain”) is most often used to describe imaginary constructions, it can also be used to describe a very real optical phenomenon—the fata morgana effect—in which different levels of hot and cold air distort the appearance of objects on the horizon to make them look like, well, castles in the air. Tempting Fata Fata Morgana is the Italian name for Morgan le Fay, the half-sister of King Arthur in Arthurian legend. Reputedly a sorceress and able to change shape at will, Morgan le Fay was sometimes said to live below th...

This week, another book just for Mac users! As the amount of data we store continues to grow, figuring out where to put it and how to access it becomes more complicated. Every Mac includes internal storage in the form of a hard drive, SSD, or Fusion drive. But you may also have one or more external devices (such as hard drives, flash drives, SD cards, or RAID devices), not to mention network-attached storage (NAS) devices or cloud storage (like Dropbox or iCloud Drive). Making sense of all your options, managing your stored data, choosing new devices or services when you’re running out of space, or even just figuring out what’s where can drive anyone to distraction. Jeff Carlson covers all this and much, much more in his book Take Control of Your Digital Storage . For example, the book helps you choose a new (internal or external) hard drive, SSD, or hybrid drive; determine how much storage space you need; understand APFS, Apple’s new filesystem; format, partition, and repair disks u...

The controversial theory of Peak Oil Whatever your feelings about the cost of oil, the means of obtaining it, or the effect that burning it has on the environment, one thing’s for sure: there’s a finite amount of it, so sooner or later it has to run out. At least, I hope so, because once all the oil’s gone, perhaps the planet will finally have a fighting chance against global warming. Many people, however, would take a decidedly negative view of the impending disappearance of the world’s oil reserves for all the obvious reasons. Either way, just how long will the oil last? In 1956, a geophysicist named Marion King Hubbert developed a theory to predict future oil production. He assumed that for any given oil field, production follows a bell curve. After the well’s discovery, production quickly ramps up as new wells are added. But eventually, as the oil is drained from the underground reservoirs, the production rate hits a peak after which it begins to decline, eventually returning to...

A little piece of Spain in France As an American, I’ve always felt a bit embarrassed at my limited grasp of foreign languages. I have friends in Europe who speak four or five languages fairly fluently, and they rightly boggle when they hear that most Americans are monolingual. But for complicated historical, cultural, and political reasons, that’s just the way things turned out. However, I did take French classes in high school (and picked up quite a bit more during the years I lived in France), studied linguistics as a grad student, and picked up a handful of phrases in half a dozen other languages here and there, all of which probably makes me slightly less clueless as a tourist than many of my compatriots. I usually know at least enough to recognize which language I’m listening to. Years ago while driving through Europe, we stopped at a gas station in Austria near the Italian border, and when we asked for directions to a certain castle, the clerk’s response included French, German...

Greenhouse gas disposal techniques By now, everyone is well aware of the atmosphere’s rising level of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), as well as the fact that this is increasing the average global temperature and causing climate change. While nations and corporations debate about whether or to what extent CO 2 emissions can be reduced, it’s clear that at least a portion of that unwanted CO 2 can be captured and liquefied (for example, as it’s produced by power plants and factories), preventing it from going into the atmosphere. Great, but then what? There’s way too much of it to just store it in giant tanks for eternity. The process of storing carbon dioxide permanently in such a way that it cannot escape back into the atmosphere is known as carbon sequestration (or, sometimes, carbon dioxide sequestration ). You may have heard the term in the news, but what does it really mean? Broadly speaking, there are two places one might put large quantities of unwanted carbon dioxide—in the oceans...

Museum in a time capsule On July 4, 1976, bicentennial celebrations took place all over the United States. I was nine years old at the time, and along with my five-year-old sister, I went to a special gathering just a few doors down from our house near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A local funeral parlor , in a highly publicized event, was going to bury a time capsule (instead of a coffin) in a corner of its parking lot. Memorabilia from the community would be kept there until the capsule was unearthed, as I recall, 50 years later. Children were particularly urged to come, in order to sign a replica of the Declaration of Independence that would be included in the capsule. By the time my sister and I had made our way to the front of the crowd, the page was completely full, so someone brought out extra sheets of paper to hold the rest of the signatures. I remember being both excited to have my signature in a time capsule and annoyed that I had to sign a stupid blank piece of paper. The ca...

Setting the world’s problems to music My cat likes to walk on the dining room table. I have too many work deadlines. My favorite TV show was cancelled. Motorcycles make too much noise driving down my street. It’s not hard to come up with things to complain about, but who wants to listen to someone else complain? The surprising answer: just about everyone, as long as the complaints are set to music and delivered in four-part harmony by a choral ensemble. Musical groups called complaints choirs have sprung up all over the world, drawing sell-out crowds (and internet fans by the hundreds of thousands). Let’s Give ‘Em Something to Complain About The idea was the brainchild of a Finnish couple, performance artists Tellervo Kelleinen and Oliver Kochta Kalleinen. They were discussing the Finnish term Valituskuoro , which literally means “complaints choir” but refers to a situation in which numerous people are complaining about something at the same time. Tellervo and Oliver thought it w...

“Smart home” devices are everywhere these days—you can buy internet-connected light bulbs, thermostats, door locks, sensors, and dozens of other products. But these devices aren’t very smart on their own. Apple’s HomeKit platform offers a way to integrate, monitor, control, and automate smart home devices from a wide variety of manufacturers. Using the built-in Home app on a Mac or iOS device (perhaps along with third-party apps), you can connect to your various smart devices, see what they’re up to, control them, and even get them to operate on a schedule or respond to changing conditions in your home automatically. Even with HomeKit, however, home automation can be a daunting prospect. That’s why TidBITS Managing Editor Josh Centers wrote Take Control of Apple Home Automation . The book walks you carefully through every step of the process, showing you how you can start with a basic system that costs less than $50 and work your way up to as much complexity as you want or need. And...

Artificial noses and beyond While out for a walk in my neighborhood, I caught a whiff of something that instantly made me think of my grandmother’s house. I haven’t experienced that smell—either from its original source or elsewhere—in maybe 25 years, but the memory of being back at my grandmother’s house was immediate and striking. On the other hand, I can’t really remember or recreate that smell in my mind; either it’s there or it isn’t. I have convenient analog and digital methods of recording images and sounds so that I can see and hear them later, but no way to capture the scent of a dish at a restaurant, a favorite vacation spot, or any other smell that moves me in some way. I don’t normally think of smelling as being something within the province of machines. I understand, of course, that devices like smoke detectors and breathalyzers perform what amounts to mechanical olfaction of sorts, but I was still sort of surprised to learn that increasingly sophisticated artificial no...

Reinventing the two-wheeler When I first learned to drive, I learned on a car with a manual transmission. It never seemed especially difficult because that was what I got used to. In fact, the first time I had to drive an automatic, I remember being very confused. What was I supposed to do with my left foot? Do I not have to shift at all ? And if it’s automatic, then what’s with all these different choices on the gearshift lever? I quickly got the idea, of course, but still preferred the increased control and responsiveness I got from making my own decisions about when to shift. It would therefore seem that I should have the same attitude about bicycles, which not only require manual shifting but typically have many more than four or five gears. But manual bicycle transmissions have always given me trouble, and I’ve frequently wished I could have the convenience of an automatic transmission on a multi-speed bike. Yanking My Chain For the record, I am not what you’d call an avid cyc...