Saturday Link Roundup

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The Spoon Theory by Christine Miserandino
I started to ramble on about pills, and aches and pains, but she kept pursuing, and didn’t seem satisfied with my answers. I was a little surprised as being my roommate in college and friend for years; I thought she already knew the medical definition of Lupus. Then she looked at me with a face every sick person knows well, the face of pure curiosity about something no one healthy can truly understand. She asked what it felt like, not physically, but what it felt like to be me, to be sick.

BenitaPerera.com
Benita developed from childhood, affirmed in the belief that everyone, always has the ability to; self-heal, grow, and always be on a path of constant Spiritual Development. At a very early age, Benita Perera developed a strong and inherent psychic intuition and over her entire lifetime, Benita has continued to develop her gifts, as a psychic healer and intuitive counsellor. Benita now teaches others how to develop spiritually and is sought after throughout Australia and Asia to speak and to inspire.

How to make sure Windows 7 and Windows 8 creates an MBR formatted drive when installing.

Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime?
The defendant was an immense man, well over 300 pounds, but in the gravity of his sorrow and shame he seemed larger still. He hunched forward in the sturdy wooden armchair that barely contained him, sobbing softly into tissue after tissue, a leg bouncing nervously under the table. In the first pew of spectators sat his wife, looking stricken, absently twisting her wedding band. The room was a sepulcher. Witnesses spoke softly of events so painful that many lost their composure. When a hospital emergency room nurse described how the defendant had behaved after the police first brought him in, she wept. He was virtually catatonic, she remembered, his eyes shut tight, rocking back and forth, locked away in some unfathomable private torment.

Forgeries, Fakes and Forensics

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Forgeries Fakes and Forensics Recently went to a talk by Victoria Police Chief Forensic Scientist, Bryan Found PhD, titled “Forgeries, Fakes and Forensics”.

Bryan Found is a very engaging presenter.  Things I found of interest, in no particular order:

  • You can sign your signature with different parts of your body.
    Which is to say the mechanical motions to write your signature can be used by your foot, or your bum.
  • In one security role I held, the mantra was “burn the paper, and then stir the ashes”.
    As burnt paper can be coated to stop it disintegrating, and the burnt writing can then be read.
  • All photocopiers now print a digital watermark, which can be used to identify the photocopier, and the time and date of printing.
    Printer manufacturers will extend this to all printers over time.
  • Think using a black marker to react lines in your diary will make the original text unreadable?  Think again…
  • The devices used to reassemble shredded paper files are called “graduate trainees”. :-)

Light My Fire Spork.

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Light My Fire Spork A couple of these arrived in the post the other day.  One of my co-workers has one, and following the standard protocol in the office I decided to thieve it* decided to buy my own.

At $3.50, it seemed a reasonable price,

Likes:

  • easy to clean, dishwasher friendly.
  • nice sized, good for eating pasta.
    which is to say, the fork and spoon are a good size.

Dislikes:

  • don’t cook with it, it’ll melt.
  • the “knife” blade is useless for cutting most things.

If I was backpacking, I’d invest in a Titanium Spork instead.  The Light My Fire Spork website is here.

 * I had a titanium spork go missing.  It’s probably fallen down the back of the dishwasher with all the other missing items.

And the ATM customer walked away …

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We had a call from Footscray Police Station late one Friday night.

We’ve had a man walk in with $200 claiming that he found it sitting in the ATM cash dispenser cradle.  Can you tell us who the owner of the money is?

This was back in the days when we didn’t have privacy laws, so we duly verified who the customer was, and rang Footscray Police back.  Footscray Police told us later that the customer was very happy to be re-united with their cash.

Nowadays this wouldn’t happen because:

  1. Privacy laws would prevent us passing that information on to the police, and more importantly
  2. Automatic Teller Machines will now retract the money if the customer doesn’t take it.

To elaborate on point 2.  The final part of the cash dispenser path is where the cash is presented to the customer.  On most* ATMs, there is a light sensor which detects whether the customer has grabbed the cash.  After a period of time (30+ seconds generally), the ATM will take the cash back, assuming that the customer has walked away.

Which led to an interesting fraud.

Some clever person realised that if you broke the light sensor, the ATM wouldn’t know that you took the cash, and then the ATM would cancel the transaction.  We had an ATM emptied of cash over a weekend due to this fraud.  Once the fraud was discovered, NCR developed a fix to prevent the problem occurring again.

NCR5080 * the exception being the NCR 5080 ATM, which had a cash cradle.  The ATM would drop the cash into a cradle and then consider the transaction completed.  The Footscray ATM was one of these.

Mobile friendly web sites

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Mobile version of news.com.au screenshotThis collection of (mainly Australian) mobile phone friendly links was something I put together (almost) four years ago.

All the links still work from a mobile phone, which was a surprise to me.

News
ABC Mobile
Google News
News Limited
The Age
Fox Sports

Email
Microsoft Mobile Live
Yahoo mail

Search engines etc.
Google Mobile
Wikipedia – Mobile Edition Yellow Pages / Whereis Map / Trading Post

Other
eBay
Telstra collection of mobile friendly links
m.weatherzone.com.au
agreencow.com

Fire extinguishers in Australian Office Buildings

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NCC 2013 - Cover - Volume 1 Spent the morning looking at the number of fire extinguishers needed in an Australian office building (ie. a Class 5 building).

Here’s the process I followed  as a Health and Safety Representative:

First I grabbed a copy of the Building Code of Australia.  It’s also known as the National Construction Code Series.  From that I find out that:

  1. Part E1.6 – Portable fire extinguishers
    Portable fire extinguishers must be provided as listed in Table E1.6 and must be selected, located and distributed in accordance with Sections 1, 2, 3 and 4 of AS2444
  2. Table E1.6 Requirements for extinguishers talks about the types of extinguishers required, not the number.
  3. So we need to open a copy of Australian Standard 2444 – Portable fire extinguishers and fire blankets – Selection and location.
    Section 4 – Distribution of portable fire extinguishers in buildings is the section I need.

And that’s where things start to get rubbery.

  • Is the fire risk a Class A risk or a Class B risk?
  • What is the fire hazard level?
  • Is the fire extinguisher(s) the primary protection or a complementary protection?
    Complementary protection is “where fire extinguishers are provided to complement a fixed automatic fire suppression system complying with the requirements of AS 2118 (all parts) or AS 4214 (all parts), extinguishers shall be distributed in accordance with Table 4.x”

So we look at the relevant Table to see what we need:
Table 4.1

Yes, I’ve blurred the details out.  Go buy your own copies of the relevant Australian Standards.

References(s)
AS 1851-2012 Routine service of fire protection systems and equipment
AS 2444—2001 Portable fire extinguishers and fire blankets—Selection and location
National Construction Code Series – Building Code of Australia

How to open a WD Elements USB2 External Drive

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You carefully lever the bottom of the case, out of the case.  Here are a couple of photos which demonstrate this:

WD Elements USB2 - Open WD Elements USB2 - Open - 2

After I got the case open, I was impressed by the amount of shock absorption that Western Digital provided.  The blue mounts in the second picture are the shock mounts.

If you are looking for a replacement, you can still buy drive these drives Western Digital WDBAA0010HBK drives on Amazon.