Nappi

Fractal Design cases are worth checking out too: http://www.fractal-design.com/?view=product&category=2∏=100 Don't know about the availability in <your country>, though.

How am I sailing?! <Phone Number>

Patent application or social criticism?

Good luck with the interview, Miffy! And nice boat Luftmensch!

I've been using Hola Unblocker for some time now, and it has been great. I assume the two are quite similar?

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' Push the Sky Away is excellent! As is the new Eels album:

Man.. Sim City's always-on DRM looks awesome!

I'm yet to read Jailbird, Deadeye Dick, Hocus Pocus and many of his short stories. Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions were the first Vonnegut novels I read and that was several years ago, so I don't have much to say, except that both felt very "fresh" at the time. I'm planning to revisit both of them one day. As I already mentioned in the other thread, I think you might enjoy Bluebeard.

Definitely not one of his best, but I thought it was still OK. I don't remember much about it anymore, though. Which of his books have you read so far? My favorites are The Sirens of Titan, Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions, and Bluebeard. I have enjoyed his other novels as well, except for Player Piano and Galapagos.

Cool! I just started reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. The beginning was very strong (as were those of the first two Cloud Atlas stories) and I was instantly hooked. I'm glad that I bought the Kindle edition of the book. Turns out that my archaic English navy, trade and colonial vocabulary is really poor. I would never have checked all the (key) words on dictionary if I was forced to type them in manually.

Oh no, I'm not making that mistake again!

Now I'm confused. Wasn't Lolita written in English and later translated into Russian by the author?

But Nabokov wrote most of his best known books in English. And translated at least some of the Russian ones himself.

This topic is such a bizarre read. I will contribute: I woke up one night, many years ago, feeling a bit weird and decided to go to the toilet. When I was walking back to my bed I suddenly just couldn't keep going anymore and collapsed. Next thing I remember I was upright again clinging to a table so tightly that my father had serious difficulties in making me let go. Once I got to my bed, everything was perfectly fine again. The doctor said that what I experienced was some sort of intermediate state between being awake and asleep, which sounds a bit bullshit to be honest. I haven't had a similar episode since.

I finished Bluebeard yesterday and can heartily recommend to you if you liked Mother Night. In fact, it is has got to be one of my favorite Kurt Vonnegut novels ever.

I can totally relate to this, although I quite liked reading The Crying of Lot 49 despite the complicated sentence structure being a major stumbling block for me at first (I read the book in English). There are novels whose world I yearn to go back to once I'm done (the abbey of The Name of the Rose and, incidentally, the Los Angeles of Inherent Vice, for example). Then there are novels that I simply didn't enjoy reading (Günter Grass' The Tin Drum, for instance). Interestingly, some novels fall into both categories. Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano was incredibly hard read for me, because of the multilevel helplessness the alcoholic protagonist, who was completely incapable of not hurting his loved ones, made me feel. Still, every time I see the novel on my bookshelf, I miss that little Mexican town and the Day of the Dead. I like the notion of massive amounts of information being lost once a person perishes. This was also one of the major themes in one of Jorge Luis Borges' short stories, the name of which I can't remember right now. It makes one appreciate how unique and precious each person's experiences are, despite how "ordinary" that person may appear at first glance. Like a move camera filming a scene from completely different perspective.

I have that edition too! Penguin Essentials and Modern Classics stuff is really nice. Having said that I just started reading the free iBook version of The Great Gatsby on my brand new Kindle.

I should probably have stopped at that point too. Instead I let him describe the ending of Dreamfall and decided not to pledge. I quite liked The Longest Journey when I first played it, but couldn't stand the gameplay of Dreamfall. Or the plot for that matter (which probably was not much worse than that of The Longest Journey to be honest). So yeah, I think I'll wait until the game is released before making the decision.

Ahh.. Thanks anyway! The movie looks interesting. I loved Baraka.

Nice setup, Dontwalk! Even nicer wallpaper (the green one). Care to share?

Who is this guy?

Haha, don't worry. I'm as much at fault in here. And thanks for the info! Those lamps look interesting.

That sounds pretty fishy. A white paper looks white in a room illuminated by incandescent lamp. No, the problem is that small changes in the non-smooth spectrum of, for example, LED and fluorescent lamps (e.g. a peak shift of a couple of nanometers) can lead to drastic changes in the CRT even if there is practically no perceivable difference in color rendering. Interesting! What lamp is that? And where/how you got that spectrum? The spectrum of all the CFL lamps I have measured has been more or less like this. In fact, my first thought was that either that was in log scale or that the measurement device is not up to the task (i.e. The spectral bandwidth of the instrument is so high that the peaks are averaged out, and/or the instrument saturates or is non-linear in terms of intensity. At least, the 10 nm steps size seems a bit too large for this type of measurement). I have mainly focused* on warm-white lamps, though, and not with an aim of making a comprehensive market study, so it is more than likely that a spectrum like that can indeed be achieved with a different type of phosphorous coating. Still, I wouldn't call the spectrum any prettier or more natural than that of the LED lamps. For the record, I'm in no hurry in replacing my bulbs with LED lamps, not while the prices are so high. I would perhaps consider them for places where I need the full intensity of the light right away or for outdoor use, as both areas are problematic for fluorescent lamps, but as it is, I'm fairly content with my CFLs. * And at the moment I'm focused on different things entirely. Anyway, back to topic: I can see some sort of hill through my window.

LED replacement lamps are still a fairly new technology and there are sill a lot of issues to be solved (heat transfer being the most urgent one). There are also a lot of companies trying to exploit that "true replacement" buzz by giving false promises. So one should at least do some research before making the purchase. By the way, the color rendering index of most CFL lamps you will find in stores is well below 95, around 80 or so. Most proper* LED lamps can reach similar values, but you should of course always check that before buying. The current definition of CRI has been under heated debate recently anyway, as the values don't always correlate that well with the subjective color rendering quality. The large blue spike in LED spectrum is nothing when you compare it the comb spectrum of the CFL lamps. Also, the ratio between the blue peak and the phosphorus peak is not nearly as high as in the picture you linked for warm white LEDs. * Ones from known companies such as Osram, Philips and GE are a safer bet than those that have no distinguishable company behind them.

These? Interestingly enough, we have been aging those, along with various other LED retrofit lamps, at work for 1.5 to 2 years now, and to my knowledge, none of them have failed yet. The excellent luminous efficacy of low-pressure Sodium-vapor lamps has — of course — everything to do with its monochromatic nature which is also the reason why its color rendering index is pure zero. As far as I know high-pressure sodium lamps are more common in Finland. I haven't paid much attention to street lighting business and I don't know what the trend will be now that Mercury-vapor lamps will be banned.