Haje’s Brain

I don’t think anyone but myself has ever seen me with a moustache - and there’s an excellent reason for that: I look like a 1980’s throw-back child molester. But this year, I’m participating in Movember, which means that for the whole month of November, I’ll be growing a mo.

At the beginning of the challenge, I gallantly said that I was going to try for a Clark Gable, but frankly, that’s probably just wishful thinking. My moustache is ginger, for one thing.

So anyway, if walking around with one of these abominations on my face makes me look ridiculous, then why do I bother? Because it’s all for an excellent cause, of course… (more…)

Over lunch today, I was talking to Gwyn and Laurie, two of the Ruby coders from New Bamboo - I work with them on a Top Secret Web Project for work.

We started talking about geeky things, and somehow ended up discussing a compression algorithm, where you would alphabetise each character of a message, and then replacing the number of instances of a character with a number, thereby drastically compressing how much space it takes up. (more…)

Having bought an iPhone is kind of like being in an abusive relationship with an extremely attractive martial artist. You just know you should get the hell out while you’re ahead, but you always get lured back for another beating. Except in this case, you’ll be tied in to an 18-month contract, with no chance for reduced time for good behaviour. (more…)

If you’re active in today’s society, you can’t have missed the word ‘gadget’. The word itself is confusing, and means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

How come an item can be a gadget one week, and not the next? What makes one mobile phone a gadget, while another isn’t? Does something have to be high-tech to be a gadget? What draws people to gadgets? (more…)

This morning, I stumbled across a news story about how:

1) Last year, the top 10 NHS litigation claims are responsible for £68m of its budget.
2) all 10 of these claims were related to problems with complications in birth or pregnancy.

This bothers me on a whole series of levels. The average annual brutto salary in the UK is just over £20K. This means that the top litigants, who were on average granted £6.8m of compensation, were given 323 annual wages as a lump sum.

Now, I don’t necessarily have a problem with that civil litigation suits can be a way to keep businesses in check, but the NHS is a government organisation which currently is running at a £512m overspend. The past year, the NHS spent £593m on litigation cases. For a government agency run on taxpayer’s money, this is completely ridiculous. The UK only has about 60 million inhabitants, which means that each and every individual pays £10 every year, just to cover the litigation suits. (more…)

Anti Lag is a system used in highly tuned turbocharged vehicles, to reduce the effect of turbo lag.

How a turbocharger works

A turbocharger works by exploiting the pressure of the exhaust gasses moving out of an internal combustion engine. It consists of a turbine - driven by the exhaust gasses - which is connected to a compressor.

The air pump forces air into the inlet manifold. The higher density of the compressed air means that more fuel can be injected into the engine, which leads to much higher power output compared to a non-forced-induction car (also known as a ‘naturally aspirated’ engine) (more…)

The sport of Drifting has been around for quite a while, but with movies such as Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift, and a recent increase in popularity in the D1 and Formula Drift championship, the newest motorsport on the block (or, more likely, around the block) is gathering speed.

Back in the day, you could drift with just about any car that’s got rear wheel drive - Sierras and Cavaliers were tremendously popular in the early years of UK drifting - but as competition levels went up, more is needed from the cars. (more…)

Jesus, we’ve come a long way since the 1960s. Surely, they can make a taxi that doesn’t look completely ridiculous? With the launch of TX4, I guess the answer is ‘no’.

For some reason, we get tons of press releases about how great black cabs are, and how hard all other hackney carriages suck. Of course, it’s a bit tiresome, but we could live with that, if it hadn’t been for the fact that the LTI taxis themselves are complete dinousaurs, with ancient engines and ridiculous performance. (more…)

VTEC is a technology invented and developed by Honda, for used in internal combustion engines. It can in theory be used in all engines that use camshafts, but has in practice only been used in cars, motorcycles, and 4×4 vehicles.

VTEC stands for Variable Timing Electronic Control, and is short for Variable valve Timing and lift Electronic Control. It is a technology which allows cars to behave differently at different engine speeds, by actuating different cam lobes at different speeds. (more…)

Lonely Planet recently published a Guide to Experimental Travel. The idea is to travel somewhere, and take a surreal approach to exploring a new place, by taking an alternative idea to route selection. In theory, this means that you might stumble across some typical touristy-type things, but you will also experience sides of the city / place / country that you wouldn’t discover otherwise. (more…)