I spent Saturday evening fixing my monitor. Yes, it's a strange thing to publish here but I enjoyed doing it. Only a geek can understand the excitment of taking on the inner workings of a 22" CRT with it's thousands of deadly volts and x-ray warnings. Also, this post will be commited to the information superhighway forever and may help other people searching for a fix.

The VM Pro 510 (A201HT) gradually stopped working over the course of a few weeks. The first signs of a fault were when the PC powered up. If in standby mode (orange LED) the monitor would initially sense a video signal and switch on (green LED). However, as the fault became worse, the monitor would fail as it switched on and reverted to standby mode. In the end it would fail to even enter standby mode and stopped responding to the on/off switch.

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Impressive electron microscopy images of new copper(Cu) Nano Tubes.

Yang, D., Meng, G., Zhang, S., Hao, Y., An, X., Wei, Q., Ye, M. and Zhang, L. (2007) Electrochemical synthesis of metal and semimetal nanotube-nanowire heterojunctions and their electronic transport properties. Chemical Communications, 1733-1735.

When the pesky pink monkeys start messing around with their legs, Dachshund's brains tell them that standing still is the best thing to do. This little dog, with tiny boots on it's feet, remains completely still until some food appears. Then she does a crazy walk towards the snack. Wait for the crazy walk, it's fantastic.

For the first time ever, a step by step guide to building, inflating and bursting an Aquaglove. Each step, described in a detailed instructable, will lift the veil of secrecy surrounding the giant glove. Join the 9500+ people viewing and learning about the joys of Aquagloving.

Some excited glove inflators;

• TheMadScientist says: Am I the only one who was brave enough to just go up and punch it as hard as I could? you get this cool ripple effect before the thing pops
• connorcancount! says: whoa, that first picture of the water is really cool!
• oinkoinkzoopals says: i did this with a bike tube and it was crazy it got like 7-8 inches across and like 6 feet long before it popped

Bloody pogga.co.uk, yeah, that's www.pogga.co.uk. Three years buying hosting from them, and not so much as a goodbye email. They just stopped communicating (but left the hosting servers on). Word is, that they disapeared around April time.

Rather than wait for someone to pull the plug, I moved host. Simple solution really. This site is now hosted at www.fuzioned.com. Their basic package provides all the same admin services as pogga, but with more storage and bandwidth. There is an active forum for discussing hosting matters, all the people seem friendly. Very please with the move.

"Orbo produces free, clean and constant energy - that is our claim. By free we mean that the energy produced is done so without recourse to external source. By clean we mean that during operation the technology produces no emissions." http://www.steorn.com/orbo/

5th July 2007. Not happening today. Steorn were due to be demonstrate orob to a live audience at the London Kinetica Museum(?) and across t'internet. Except, the lights were too hot and it had to be delayed until the 6th. Suspect he forgot to attach it to his shoe (see previous post). Update to follow.

6th July 2007. Still broken. Sean McCarthy CEO has stated "These problems were primarily due to excessive heat from the lighting in the main display area. Attempts to replace those parts affected by the heat led to further failures".
It melted?! Is it made of wax? History tells us that wax is not the best material to use in the construction of incredible new machines. Have Steorn forgotten about the The Daedalus Disaster in Greece.

3rd August 2007. No news is good news? Until the next test day, just pretend that they are able to bypass the laws of Physics.

Back to the Bentwaters Cold War airbase for another year. Aldeburgh and Lumin have put on another fantastic festival. Here are some of the things I've collected;
Linkfest;

• The official website
• The flickr group for Faster Than Sound , 15 members and counting. Currently 363 photos...
• Last.fm's Faster Than Sound event page, listing artists and attendees
• Aldeburgh and Lumin, organisors of the event
• my FTS del.icio.us links