Craig Mayhew’s Blog

This one is a bit of a heavy thought experiment I’ve been thinking about for some time now. I’ve used the Lorentz factor to work out the time dilation difference in seconds for certain speeds. I first started out asking what effect time dilation has when we travel by airplane or if we live on the equator, but it quickly grew from there …

Time Dilation at the Earth’s equator:
Living on the equator means that due to the Earths spin you get an additional 465.1 m/s of velocity vs sitting on the pole (This does not take into account any wobble on the Earth’s axis). Compared to anyone sitting at the poles you would be 0.00004 seconds younger for each year that passes.

Over a 100 year life time: 4 milliseconds

Passenger Aircraft:
Flying in a plane can get you speeds of up to 917 m/s when in one of the latest Boeing 747s. Unfortunately that speed is not constant as it takes time to take off and get to the cruising speed. At 917 m/s if you cruise for 10 hours, you would be 0.168 microseconds younger than if you stayed on the ground. If you somehow managed to get a plane to fly non stop (refuel in the air?) then over a 1 year period you would be 0.0001475 seconds younger compared to if you were left on the ground.

Over a 100 year life time: 14.75 milliseconds

If we also take into account that you are flying east around the equator then we get 917 m/s from the plane and 465.1 m/s of velocity from the rotating Earth. At 1382.1 m/s you would gain 0.000335133072 seconds vs you sitting at one of the poles.

Over a 100 year life time: 33.51 milliseconds

Live on The International Space Station:
The ISS orbits the earth at 7706.6 m/s relative to the Earth’s center. If you had the money (or some serious negotiating skills) and managed to live on board the ISS each year you would be 0.0104198349888 seconds younger than if you had stayed on the north pole.

Over a 100 year life time: 1.04 seconds

Live on Mercury:
The planet Mercury orbits the sun at a fast paced 47.87 km/s. After subtracting Earth’s velocity of 29.78km per second we have a speed difference of 18.09km per second. Although it would not be possible to live anywhere except on the poles due to high temperatures. At this speed you would be 0.057 seconds younger per year than if you stayed back on Earth.

Over a 100 year life time: 5.74 seconds

If you were then able to get a satellite such as the ISS to be built around Mercury (obviously with some very effective heat/radiation shielding) You could gain an additional 6km/s in orbital speed giving you a total of 53.87km/s and a difference of 24.09km per second compared to Earth.

Over a 100 year life time: 10.18 seconds

Please see Harnessing Time Dilation part 2 for improvements to this article and taking my thought experiment even further.

Workings, Assumptions, Limitations:
Seconds in a year: 60*60*24*365 = 31536000
Seconds in 100 years: 60*60*24*365*100 = 3153600000
Velocity may be more complicated for objects orbiting planets. (Any input from someone in the field would be much appreciated)

If you have Ubuntu 8.04 LTS installed but have decided that the speed improvements and nicer interface for 9.04 are just too good to wait for the next LTS, you will need to do the following:

“System” -> “Adminstration” -> “Software Sources”

Click the Updates Tab. Set “Release Upgrade” drop down to “Normal releases”, click “Close”. This will allow you to upgrade to versions of Ubuntu which do not come with long term support (LTS).

Run the Update Manager. Click “Distribution Upgrade”. This will begin the upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10.

During the upgrade process it may ask you to replace a few files that it detects you have customised. For me it asked to overwrite my cutomised printer setup and also undo modification I had made to the way ubuntu uses virtual memory. Don’t forget to make a note of these as you will need to add this customisations again manually later if you still require them. When prompted, restart.

After rebooting, my copy of ubuntu crashed during the boot process due to a problem with the latest kernel it had installed. It crashed on boot due to issues with not being able to mount the root file system. This was easily solved by pressing escape to view the grub menu during the boot process. I then selected the older kernel version from the list of available kernels. It then booted happily into Ubuntu 8.10!

At this stage I took the time to notice the better network interface GUI, better support for wireless and VPN connections. It wasn’t too long before a message popped up telling me that Nvidia had some new drivers for my graphics card! This is excellent news for me because previously I had a script to recompile my graphics drivers each time a new kernel was installed due to the graphics card being so new. However we don’t want to stop here, we’re going for Ubuntu 9.04!

Once again run the “Update Manager” found under “System”->”Administration”. Click “Upgrade”. It will prompt you with a few messages. Click Start and Upgrade where necersary.

If the process appears to get stuck downloading a particular package when it’s at the stage “Getting New Packages” then click cancel. Go back to the update manager and start the upgrade process again. It will start from where it left off and won’t redownload the packages it has already downloaded.

Once it has finished upgrading, remove obsolete packages and restart when prompted.

There you have it! You should now be running ubuntu 9.04!

This in my opinion, is very cool. As it’s got pretty silly recently that people are being given fines for not putting their bin in the exact right place or at the required angle as this makes it more difficult for the dustmen. So forget all that, let a robot do it! Reading their official site they are planning on creating a large network across towns to not only collect rubbish but do litter picking and general hygiene management. Very cool, when can we all get some?

A link to the BBC article can be found here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/8072619.stm

And the official website is:
http://www.dustbot.org/

If you want to get the STABLE RELEASE of the ubuntu second life viewer, eg the same as the lindens official release then add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list (you will need to do this as root e.g. sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list):

# Second Life (Open Metaverse viewer)
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/openmetaverse/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/openmetaverse/ubuntu hardy main

Note: If you are not running hardy heron but instead are running a later version of ubuntu then you can change the “hardy” bit to e.g. “intrepid” or “jaunty” and it should work just fine.

Update lists:

sudo apt-get update

Install Second Life:

sudo apt-get install omvviewer

You should then find in the Applications menu, under games is the “Open Metaverse viewer” aka second life!

I decided I needed to change my desktop background this morning as they can get boring quickly when you see the same one for months on end. I actually found it difficult to find many images at 2560×1600 as alot of the sites I would normally use didn’t allow searching by resolution or just made it difficult to do. In my quest for high resolution desktop backgrounds I have saved these various places that will take you directly to search results pages chock full of wallpapers at 2560×1600 pixels.

http://interfacelift.com/wallpaper_beta/downloads/date/widescreen/2560×1600/
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=2560×1600&m=tags&ct=5&mt=photos
http://www.pulsarmedia.ro/search.html?search_fields=all&search_keywords=2560×1600&search_terms=any
http://myhdwallpaper.com/v/2560×1600Wallpapers/
http://wallpaperstock.net/wallpapers_2560×1600r.html
http://images.google.co.uk/images?q=2560×1600+wallpapers&hl=en&imgsz=huge
http://www.wallcoo.net/2560×1600/index.htm

I decided to go with this New York cityscape in the end :)

Edit on 10/05/2009:
I’ve found the exact place where the new york photo was taken. It’s at 40″45′36.41 N 73″59′27.36 W Elevation 57m. Great if you want to have a look on Google Earth.

If you get a corrupt mailbox with Microsoft Outlook, when you open outlook it will kindly tell you which mailbox is corrupted and tell you to use Scanpst.exe to fix it. Unfortunately it doesn’t tell you where Scanpst.exe is!

Windows 2000:
In Windows 2000, you can locate Scanpst.exe on the CD:
<CD drive>:\Program Files\Common Files\System\Mapi\1033\NT\Scanpst.exe
Alternatively:
C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\Scanpst.exe

Windows XP
If you have Microsoft Office installed:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\Scanpst.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\Scanpst.exe
If you don’t have Microsoft Office installed, try here:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\1033\Scanpst.exe
Alternatively:
C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\Scanpst.exe

Windows Vista
C;:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\Scanpst.exe
Alternatively, if you have Microsoft Office:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\Scanpst.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\Scanpst.exe
Alternatively:
C:\Programme\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\1031\Scanpst.exe

Internet Download
If you still can’t find the Inbox Repair Tool, you can download it from here (http://www.emailaddressmanager.com/outlook/Scanpst.exe) then copy it to one of the above folders so it can easily be found again.

Felix has been uploaded to youtube!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXajA5MBFOM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTCOkdyeW1k