Ontario electric rates 2011: Some interesting revelations

Do you understand your hydro bill?

RSS feeds by topic in Drupal- far easier than it looked

I'm slowly learning more about the underpinnings of the Drupal system that drives this site, and reconfiguring things as I learn how to get the site closer to what I want it to be. The latest change is in the RSS feeds- readers can now subscribe only to the sections that interest them, rather than getting the whole convoluted mess of my writing all at once. It turns out this capability is built in to the Taxonomy module, and it's just a matter of building a custom block with the correct strings of taxonomy URLs to offer up the feeds separately. For example:

Death of the landline? Not yet.

This must be the fifth or sixth year running that various tech gurus have been pronouncing the landline well and truly dead [cleanlink.com] as part of their new-year predictions [infoworld.com].

The great AIS debate, and a bit of applied mariner's sense

There's quite a flurry of debate going on right now about automatic identification system (AIS) equipment. The question of the month is about who sees what: if you fit your boat with a class B AIS transponder, will big ships carrying class A equipment set their display filters to hide your much smaller vessel from their radar displays?

Why so few proas?

Proas- the original multihulls- are rather rare these days. Which is really quite a shame.

A proa, for the uninitiated, is a laterally asymmetrical multihull: one hull is smaller than the other. Proas, at least in the strict definition, are also double-ended, switching bow for stern in a manoeuvre called a "shunt" when ordinary sailboats would tack. There are, of course, proas that tack in the conventional manner, although these are more commonly called tacking outriggers.

Matthew's blog