Status-Q

Rumours emerged last year that Shell were thinking of installing electric-vehicle charging stations in their forecourts, and they have now confirmed that the first ones will be rolled out in the next few months.

This is great news, though I've complained before that having an electric vehicle means you tend to spend more time in motorway service stations, and, frankly, if there's one place worse than a motorway service station, it's a petrol station forecourt. I'll be much more enthusiastic when, say, the National Trust expands its laudable if rather meagre network of charging points, so I can charge my car while strolling through Capability Brown landscapes.

Still, a more ready availability of charging points anywhere is excellent news, and in-city petrol stations will certainly help those who want to own an EV but don't have their own off-street parking -- currently a significant barrier to electric adoption in cities.

I can't help wondering, though, how petrol stations that still tell you it's dangerous to use your phone in the vicinity of petrol fumes will cope with the 50-kilowatt 400-volt circuitry of rapid chargers... :-)

At a dinner at a friend's house tonight, we finally worked it out.

Donald Trump is Zaphod Beeblebrox.

For those well-versed in late-20th-century literature, a lot of things then suddenly make sense.

Technology doesn't only help humans move around in new ways: This project at CMU allows a goldfish to drive its tank around the room.

Now they've done the difficult bit, all they need to do is work out how to explain to the goldfish what exactly is going on. I fear that may still take a few million years...

Holme Fen

A photo taken last weekend in Monks Wood, with a little processing.
(To hide the fairies. They're very camera-shy and wouldn't sign a model release.)

We had a rather chilly but very pretty walk on the Wimpole Hall estate this morning.

Here's the view from near the folly:

If you really want to see the whole picture from here, though, there's another of my scrolly-panorama things here.

Then we walked back through the woods.

I've always liked this particular link. I can pretty much guarantee that there will be at least something on the other end of it that you don't know.

How do I know that?

Well, that link takes you to a random page on Wikipedia. Since the English version of Wikipedia has over 5 million pages, the chance of you hitting one on a subject about which you have any reasonably complete knowledge is really quite small. (At least, it would be for me!)

So, go ahead, click it and learn something new!

(If, by any chance, you hit a page where you find the subject matter somewhat uninteresting, then you can instead marvel at the fact that somebody found it interesting enough to create a page about it!)

I got a new tripod yesterday, and took it out to play today (just very briefly while I was ostensibly walking the dog).

One thing I've been enjoying recently is stitching together multiple images to create a panorama, and a tripod makes this work very much better. But how to display the very wide images that can result?

Well, here's one way.

And here's another image from a slightly different viewpoint.

I quite like this effect, but even in this form, I'm using images that are 1/5th of the original size in each dimension. Here's the smaller one as a 60 Mpixel image, for example, albeit not at full quality.

Now, interestingly, I have a printer which can take rolls of photo paper, meaning that I could actually print out something like this at a decent size. Anybody got a spare corridor in which to hang it, though?