Fnord.

In the realm of handwaving-generalization-health-advice, the ‘walk at least 10,000 steps per day’ nostrum has been about for a while. Digital pedometers provide a rough measure of steps via a tilt switch, and thus a metric of one’s personal distance covered towards said goal. Mind you, pedometers are pretty inaccurate if you try to use them for distance measurement, since your stride varies quite a bit, but are more accurate when measuring steps.

It’s nice and light, arrives precharged with batteries, and has but one button: Reset. Physically compact, clips onto your waistband. (Or is that wasteband?)

And hey! It’s free! Mine arrived a couple of days ago. Nicely unobtrusive, though there’s a quiet clicking sound every time the switch trips. According to mine, a semi-quiet day yesterday of house cleaning, puttering and errands equals… 2626 steps.

Recommended: useful and free.

(The image is actually from the oyster page.)

in a haul of three tons of oysters, only around three or four oysters produce perfect pearls.

These oysters produce pearls by covering an invading piece of grit with nacre. Over the years, the grit is covered with enough nacre to form what we know as a pearl. There are many different types and colours and shapes of pearl, but this depends on the pigment of the nacre and the shape of the piece of grit being covered over.

Pearls can also be cultivated by pearl farmers placing a single piece of grit, usually a piece of polished mussel shell, inside the oyster. In three to six years, the oyster will produce a perfect pearl. These pearls are not as valuable as natural pearls, but look exactly the same.

For Terri, who didn’t like the last Pearl posting…

Via EETimes, a teardown of the RIM Blackberry 8100 ‘Pearl.’ For those of us that find this interesting:

The analog subsystems are spread between two primary devices, with the audio subsystem based on the Maxim MAX9853 codec and with system power management derived from Texas Instruments’ TPS65820. Other ICs are part of the power management equation, but the TI part handles most activity there. CSR’s BC41B143A BlueCore4 single-chip device serves for the Pearl’s Bluetooth v2.0 link.

From the journal of allergy and clinical immunology:

Background

Farmers’ children have a reduced prevalence of allergic disorders. The specific protective environmental factors responsible are not yet identified.
Objective

We sought to determine whether farmers’ children in the rural county of Shropshire, England, have a reduced risk of atopy and, if so, to identify the factors responsible.
Methods

The Study of Asthma and Allergy in Shropshire was a 2-stage cross-sectional study. In stage 1 a questionnaire to elicit allergic status, diet, and farming exposure was completed by the parents of 4767 children. In stage 2 a stratified subsample of 879 children underwent skin prick testing and measurement of domestic endotoxin.
Results

Compared with rural nonfarming children, farmers’ children had significantly less current asthma symptoms (adjusted odds ratio (OR), 0.67; 95% CI, 0.49-0.91; P = .01) and current seasonal allergic rhinitis (adjusted OR, 0.50; 95% CI, 0.33-0.77; P = .002) but not current eczema symptoms (adjusted OR, 0.91; 95% CI, 0.68-1.21; P = .53) or atopy (adjusted OR, 0.68; 95% CI, 0.40-1.16; P = .15). In contrast, current unpasteurized milk consumption was associated with significantly less current eczema symptoms (adjusted OR, 0.59; 95% CI, 0.40-0.87; P = .008) and a greater reduction in atopy (adjusted OR, 0.24; 95% CI, 0.10-0.53; P = .001). The effect was seen in all children, independent of farming status. Unpasteurized milk consumption was associated with a 59% reduction in total IgE levels (P < .001) and higher production of whole blood stimulated IFN-γ (P = .02).
Conclusion

Unpasteurized milk consumption was the exposure mediating the protective effect on skin prick test positivity. The effect was independent of farming status and present with consumption of infrequent amounts of unpasteurized milk.
Clinical implications

Unpasteurized milk might be a modifiable influence on allergic sensitization in children.

Found via this article on Salon. Both are behind paywalls, unfortunately. The abstract is free, at least.

The bottom line is that raw milk (unpasteurized) seems to have significant positive effects on your immune system. Just being a farm kid doesn’t, which is mildly surprising. Personally, we had a lot of raw milk when I was school-aged, and I wonder how that affected me. I was quite healthy and had no allergies at all growing up, though my older sister did have hayfever.

Interesting reading, and thought-provoking. It does seem that you have to be pretty careful if you want to try it, as your suppliers need more care in handling, feed, pastures and so forth.

If you’ve not seen it yet, an astounding infographic in the latest IEEE Spectrum magazine that really manages to communicate the scales inherent in our energy consumption. Specifically, just what it’d take to replace our current oil usage.

I hadn’t found it online, so the above came to me via The Oil Drum, another excellent site. Best place I’ve found to learn the science behind oil - exploration, drilling, reserves, alternatives, the works. Highly recommended.

“One cubic mile per year.”

As Neo would say, whoa.

Image links to the Spectrum article, or follow the Oil Drum link for the full graphic and story link.

Several of the other images in the album don’t feature my watch.

Torrey Pines State Park, just north of San Diego.

The culprit:

Based on this page, a quick command-line method for permanently removing the Acrobat toolbar from Microsoft Office 2004 on Mac:

cd /Applications/Microsoft\ Office\ 2004/Office/Startup/Excel
rm PDFMaker.xla; touch PDFMaker.xla; chmod 444 PDFMaker.xla
cd ../Word
rm PDFMaker.dot; touch PDFMaker.dot; chmod 444 PDFMaker.dot

God, I hate that sort of unwanted visual crud.

My neighbor has a Fortis ‘Flieger’, or pilot’s watch. In his case, he used to be a flight surgeon, so it’s been up in a F18, unlike most of the Walter Mitty-types. Although I used to fly, my poor Christopher Ward has only flown passenger-class.

But I digress. This watch, which seems to be ref 595.11.46, is an ETA 2824-2 based design, using the undecorated base grade movement with Etachron fine regulator. It was running slow, so I volunteered to tweak it.

Unlike the the CW, Fortis uses a screwed caseback, so I got to use my new tool:

Man, I love having an excuse to buy new tools. This one is Indian, and cost about 20 bucks. Works pretty well, didn’t leave any marks on the case.

Here’s what you see:

Plastic movement spacer, basic colimaconnage on the rotor, looks like a gilt finish on the movement, very serviceable. This one was running slow, about -17s/day. Since I don’t yet have a timing machine, I loaned my CW to him and wore this for a couple of days, where I’d adjust, wear, measure and repeat.

After three tweaks, I had it down to under 2s/day, slightly fast. That required about 2 marks on the Etachron, which indicates that he really should get it serviced sometime soon. I’ll probably recommend Asim Gunalpt here in San Diego, as I’ve had good luck with him in the past.

Watch review

If I’m reading the caseback correctly, this is a reference 595.11.46, which has zero hits in google. So maybe that’s the wrong model number. It seems to resemble ref 595.10.41 (vendor link):

The watch differs quite a bit from my CW:



Much less bezel, much less detail on the face, bigger numbers and hands, a bold orange second hand, slightly larger crown, flat black painted face. I really like the screwdown caseback, which helps it attain its 200m rating. (The CW is 50m, meaning that I shouldn’t lap-swim with it. I did once, but it’s a bad idea.) 200M is nice, and makes the watch more versatile and durable.On the negative side, the face’s visual details were less well executed. Here’s a close-up of the face:



If you look at the ends of the hour markers, you’ll see white paint where the Luminova fill wasn’t applied. It goes all the way around the dial, and is quite annoying in person.Compare and contrast with the CW dial, which has applied and filled markers:



(Photo copied from this page on the CW forum.)The Fortis definitely presents a more workmanlike appearance, it makes the CW look very dressy. Which it really is. The CW is an aviator-styled dress watch, and the Fortis is just a tool watch.

I have to say that CW wins hugely on value. The Fortis retails for around 600, though discounts are available to around 400 or so.

Either one is a nice watch, but I’m quite happy to stick with my CW. I do wish the CW had the better water resistance, but that’s not a big deal. The higher-grade movement in CW is a huge advantage, and the better dial is much nicer in my opinion.

In terms of the hands, I really like the graceful shape of the Spitfire-inspired CW hands. The shape of the Fortis hands, modeled after instruments, is sharply angular and less to my liking. The orange second hand is really cool, though its not lumed so its invisible at night. Both watches really could use a timing bezel and lume on the second hand, dang it.

(The CW forums claim that he’ll introduce a diving watch at Basel 2007, so maybe that’ll address both. Hmm. I can’t afford this.)

One more thing - the Fortis has anti-reflective coatings on both sides of its crystal, which is flat. CW has a cambered crystal with AR only on the inside. I like the CW approach better. On this Fortis, there were places where the external coating had been scratched or worn off, which was quite noticeable. The internal coating is not prey to that, and was equally effective when paired with a cambered crystal.

 


 

Damned clever and very funny. I want one!

Update 5/22/08: Oh yeah, URL fixed/added. Sorry.

The old (Hitachi WirelessIP 5000):

The new (Sipura/Linksys 3102):

I had a fair bit of grief with my Hitachi phone and finally eBay’d it off. In its place is the Sipura 3102, a 3-interface device of considerable sophistication. It has FXS, FXO, WAN and LAN ports, meaning that it is:

 

1. A router and firewall
2. An analog phone interface (FXO)
3. A telephone network (PSTN/POTS) interface (FXS)
4. An ethernet bridge
5. A SIP client/server

There are several things I really appreciate about it:

1. Small, low power, no fans or moving parts
2. If power fails or VoIP drops, it has a relay to reconnect the analog phone to the wall. Failsafe!
3. Plays well with Asterisk, the VoIP server software of choice.

You connect your existing analog phone to the Sipura, wire it into your network, and voila! Our existing (cordless) phone works a lot better than the Hitachi, so this is an enormous win. Once in place, it all seems easy - VoIP in and out, analog in and out, software phones, quite cool…

The outgoing connection is via the commercial service Broadvoice, which for 25/month has more-or-less unlimited to most countries we care about. Seems to work pretty well, and we’ll really be giving it a workout now.

Getting it working

…took some doing. This page on InfoWorld was by far the most useful, and once I fixed my dialplan I was good to go. The VoIP wiki page is also somewhat useful.

Big note: The VoIP has to go via the WAN port; the LAN port will not work. The Infoworld doc covers this, but I’ll also note that you can just configure the Sipura to ‘bridge mode’ from the Web interface, and don’t have to use the PSTN dialing hack.

I also setup QoS (quality of service) on my router, so hopefully other traffic won’t screw up the voice connections. I also plugged the Sipura (and analog phone base station) into the UPS, so we’ll still have phone if the power goes out.

So far, so good: Recommended!

Update 10/11/07: We’re now using Telasip with better results than Broadvoice. Been six months or so now.

Update 4/16/08: We had a persistent problem with too-quiet audio; this page explains that gain setting are buried on the ‘Regional/Advanced/Miscellaneous’ page. Yeesh.