Colonel Sponsz's Shared Items

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Road signs for C-Roads are something of a rarity as they shouldn’t really exist. Nothing below a B-road is supposed to be named on signposts.

Generally if they exist its probably an administrative error, and here’s a local example.

Original source judgecorp writes “About 37,000 Sky broadband and phone customers lost their connection, as incompetent copper thieves raided BT’s infrastructure… and took fibre. Some scrap metal dealers will pay £4 per kg for stolen copper cables, but there is no dark market for fibre, so the thieves didn’t make anything — which might be some small consolation to customers, some of whom had to wait for two days for BT to repair the inaccessible cables.”

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Original source Nerval’s Lobster writes “From the annals of Really Important Science comes word that a research assistant who picked up his B.S. just seven months ago has invented a coffee mug designed to keep java at just the right piping-hot temperature for hours. Logan Maxwell, who got his undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from North Carolina State University in May, created the “Temperfect” mug as part of his senior design project for the College of Engineering. Most insulated mugs have two walls separated by a soft vacuum that insulates the temperature of a liquid inside from the temperature of the air outside. Maxwell’s design has a third layer of insulation in a third wall wrapped around the inner basin of the mug. Inside is a chemical insulator that is solid at room temperature but melts into a liquid at 140 degrees Fahrenheit. The insulator – which Maxwell won’t identify but swears is non-toxic – turns to liquid as it absorbs the extra heat of coffee poured into the mug at temperatures higher than 140 F, cooling it to a drinkable temperature quickly. As the heat of the coffee escapes, the insulating material releases heat through the inner wall of the mug to keep it hot as long as possible; a graph mapping the performance of a prototype shows it could keep a cup of coffee at between 128 F and 145 F for as long as 90 minutes. “Phase-change” coffee-mug insulation was patented during the 1960s, but has never been marketed because they are difficult and expensive to manufacture compared to simpler forms of insulation. While working on the Temperfect design, Maxwell met Belgian-born industrial designer Dean Verhoeven, president of consulting form Ancona Research, Inc., who had been working on a similar design and had already worked out how to manufacture a three-walled insulated mug cost effectively. The two co-founded a company called Joevo to manufacture the mugs.” According to the Joevo Kickstarter page, you can get one starting at $40. For that much, I’d like a clever lid like this Contigo has.

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Original source alancronin writes with a quick bite from the Dallas News about everyone’s favorite FPS: “Few video games have had the impact that Doom has on the medium as a whole. While it wasn’t the first first-person shooter out there, it was certainly one of the earliest hits of the genre, due in no small part to its revolutionary multiplayer. Today, that game is 20 years old. Made in Mesquite by a bunch of young developers including legends John Carmack and John Romero, Doom went on to ‘transform pop culture,’ as noted by the sub-title of the book Masters of Doom.” Yesterday, but who’s counting. Fire up your favorite favorite source port and slay some hellspawn to celebrate (or processes). I’m partial to Doomsday (helps that it’s in Debian).

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Achdé, the accomplished French cartoonist who took over drawing Lucky Luke after Morris’ death, pays a loving tribute to Gir by replicating Pilote’s anniversary Blueberry/Lucky Luke switcheroo.

See more of his work at his blog: gribouillachde.blogspot.fr/

Original source sfcrazy writes “Valve Software, creator of Half-Life and Left 4 Dead, has announced that SteamOS will be available for public download on December 13. That’s the day when the company will start shipping Steam Machines and Steam Controllers to the 300 selected beta participants. The company said, ‘SteamOS will be made available when the prototype hardware ships. It will be downloadable by individual users and commercial OEMs. (But unless you’re an intrepid Linux hacker already, we’re going to recommend that you wait until later in 2014 to try it out.)”

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