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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER 01 - 06 MAY 2023
Hello and Welcome,
Important Notice about Windows and DVDs
This is part of a note from PowerDVD. There may be other ways around Windows' actions.
Using discs to watch stuff is less popular than it used to be, so Windows has phased out its disc capabilities. This means you can't just pop in a Blu-ray disc and expect it to play in Windows Media Centre, which has been discontinued.
WHAT? — Ed.
But don't worry; you can still get your movie fix without dusting off your old DVD player.
With a few simple steps, you can convert your Blu-ray disc to digital format (new from PowerDVD version 22) or play it directly on your PC with software like PowerDVD.
Speaking of PowerDVD, it's a digital Blu-ray and multi-media player that you can use on your PC. It lets you enjoy all your DVDs and Blu-rays in top-notch quality and takes your viewing experience to a whole new level right from your computer.
So, keep reading to learn more about PowerDVD, how to play Blu-ray on PCs, and everything you need to know about watching Blu-ray movies:
Go to cyberlink for how to Play Blu-ray discs on PCs on Windows 7, 8, 10 & 11.
— Steve South
The Coronation
Don't forget to watch the Coronation of King Charles III on Saturday, May 6th.
The procession from Buckingham Palace begins at 11 am GMT; Aust broadcasts may begin about 5 pm AEST.
Meetings This Week
2023/05/02 — 18:00-20:00 — May, Tue — Main Meeting
2023/05/06 — 13:00-14:00 — May, Sat — Penrith Group (MEETING)
Meeting Next Week
2023/05/09 — 18:00-20:00 — May, Tue — Programming
Schedule of Current & Upcoming Meetings
First Tuesday 18:00-20:00 — Main Meeting
First Saturday 13:00-14:00 — Penrith Group
Second Tuesday 18:00-20:00 — Programming
Third Tuesday 10:00-12:00 — Tuesday Group
Third Saturday 14:00-16:00 — Web Design
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Go to the official SydneyPC Calendar for this month's meeting details.
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Penrith meetings are held every 2nd month on the 1st Saturday from 1-2 pm. Next meetings: May, July and September 2023.
ASCCA News:Tech News:
Dirt Batteries to Help Bridge Gap in Wind, Solar
See the InfoPackets article by Dennis Faas on April 24, 2023 at 12:04 pm EDT.
A startup company called Energy Vault is developing a system that uses gravity to store renewable energy generated by wind and solar panels.
The system works by hoisting hundreds of large 24-ton bricks made of compressed dirt up the side of a building. It hoists the gigantic brick batteries using energy previously generated by solar panels or wind turbines, then stores them inside the structure. (Source: cnet.com)
When power is needed, the bricks are lowered, spinning electrical power generators in the process. The bricks are abundant and cheap to make, and replace the need to purchase expensive batteries (such as lithium-ion) that require mining of special metals.
Gravity Batteries to Complement Coal, Hydro Power
The push towards green energy has led to significant growth in the use of solar and wind power. However, one of the biggest challenges with this type of energy is the issue of availability.
Solar panels and wind turbines produce electricity only when the sun shines and the wind blows. This results in a mismatch between power production and usage, which makes it difficult for utilities to adjust to rapid changes in demand.
For example, when power demand in a city is at its highest (typically in the evening), there is often a shortage of renewable energy. This has led to the use of fossil fuel-powered plants to bridge the gap, resulting in increased carbon emissions. To overcome this challenge, researchers are exploring various energy storage solutions that can help ensure that electricity is available when it is needed.
Systems Being Tested in China and Texas
Energy Vault has tested its technology at a smaller scale in Switzerland, where the company is headquartered. The company is now building two large-scale facilities, one in China and the other in Texas, to test the viability of gravity storage technology.
The Chinese system is located in a 400-foot-tall building and will have an energy storage capacity of 100 megawatt-hours — enough to power 3,400 homes for an entire day. The Texas system, on the other hand, is located in a 460-foot-tall (but narrower) building and will provide power company Enel with 36 MWh of capacity.
Advantages to Gravity Batteries
Unlike traditional batteries, gravity batteries can be placed in a wide range of locations.
For example, they can be used in urban environments or in remote locations, and their design can be customized to fit the specific needs of a location. In areas with a lot of wind, gravity batteries can be designed to take advantage of the wind to lift the bricks, reducing the need for solar panels.
The potential uses for gravity batteries are almost limitless. They could be used to provide power to homes and businesses, as well as to provide backup power in case of an outage. They could also be used to store excess power generated by renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind, which could then be used to supplement the grid during times of high demand.
Additionally, gravity batteries could be used to power electric vehicles, reducing our reliance on fossil fuels.
Cost to Implement
Cost will be a major factor in determining which storage technology prevails, including initial manufacturing and continuing operations.
A 2022 US Department of Energy study concluded that gravity energy storage is relatively expensive in smaller installations. Where it's most economical is in high-capacity systems that generate power for relatively long periods of time — 10 hours or more.
Energy Vault has not disclosed the cost of the two systems under construction, but the company agrees that the technology offers advantages for long-duration power needs. (Source: energy.gov)
Longevity is also a cost factor over the lifetime of the plant. Batteries lose capacity with use, the same way phones don't run as long after a couple of years of ownership. However, gravity storage components, like pulleys and generators, can be maintained indefinitely.
Email Client, Thunderbird, Freezing for Tens of Seconds at a Time
Recently, opening Thunderbird lets it open and display the first unread email. Then you don't know whether it will freeze or let you scroll up and down to read the text.
After several frozen emails, you close Thunderbird hoping to jolt it into actually reading some emails.
Sometimes it will work for a few emails and then closes up again.
There are many references to this occurrence on the internet, but NOTHING seems to have been done by Thunderbird to help.
When you have tens of thousands of emails, you don't want to try anything as drastic as a "RESET".
I came across some other advice recently, "To run Thunderbird in "SAFE" mode, hold down the shift key when starting the program."
See the Mozilla webpage, showing how to start Thunderbird in Safe Mode.
Starting Thunderbird in Safe Mode
It doesn't sound like a permanent fix, but I've been lucky so far.
There is a complicated method for resetting the program, but it involves DELETING the INDEX files! Presumably, it will rebuild them. It doesn't sound good for the emails!
Does anyone know of any email client program, like Thunderbird, which lets you import emails in bulk (and is SAFE)?
Here's hoping — Ed.
Quantum Computing to Boost Security using Random Numbers
See the InfoPackets article by John Lister on April 20, 2023, at 02:04 pm EDT.
Quantum computers could produce genuinely random numbers according to new research. It could boost security, an ironic effect given fears over the ways cyber criminals could use quantum computing.
In extremely simplified terms, a quantum computer uses quantum physics in which something can exist in more than one state at a time. That's in contrast to traditional computing where data is stored in bits that represent either a 0 or a 1 at any given time.
To date, the main claimed advantage of quantum computing has been processing speed. The same "bit" representing multiple states removes a significant slowdown on the way a computer carries out an operation. One analogy is that it's like the way somebody could solve a maze substantially quicker if they could somehow try multiple routes at the same time.
Now researchers at the University of Texas believe they've found a practical way to take advantage of another feature of quantum computers: generating genuinely random numbers. (Source: newscientist.com)
When 'Random' Is Predictable
Existing random number generators are not actually random. Understanding this borders on the philosophical, but the principle is that a traditional computer will always carry out instructions in a predictable manner. Knowing how the computer generates the "random number" will, in principle, make that number predictable.
Computers get around this by producing "pseudorandom" numbers that reduce the predictability enough to make it impractical to predict the number. For example, they may include a variable such as the precise time the calculation happened, and use this as part of the calculation to produce the number. This is also referred to as a random 'seed'. (Source: computerhope.com)
Quantum computing uses physics that includes a degree of genuine randomness. That could greatly increase security that uses random (or pseudorandom) numbers to make an encryption process difficult or impossible for a third party to reverse.
True Randomness Confirmed
The problem until now has been that there's been no way to tell if a "random number" truly is a random production of quantum computing or is simply a traditional computer producing pseudorandom numbers and trying to pass them off as random.
Scott Aaronson and Shih-Han Hung say they've found a way to tell the difference. It involves asking the computer in question to generate random numbers, then trying to repeat the process on a traditional computer to try to get the same results. If they can, the process is clearly not genuinely random.
Ultimately it could mean being able to create genuinely random numbers. That could help in security cases where encryption is so important that the users need certainty that nobody could replicate a pseudorandom number and thus reverse encryption.
Fun Facts:
Five Fun Facts about the Big Bang
See the SymmetryMagazine article by Matthew R. Francis on 08/23/16 [ sic ].
Astronomers Edwin Hubble and Milton Humason in the early 20th century discovered that galaxies are moving away from the Milky Way. More to the point: Every galaxy is moving away from every other galaxy on average, which means the whole universe is expanding. In the past the whole cosmos must have been much smaller, hotter and denser.
That description, known as the Big Bang model, has stood up against discoveries and competing theories for the better part of a century. So what is this "Big Bang" thing all about?
The Big Bang happened everywhere at once.
The universe has no centre or edge, and every part of the cosmos is expanding. That means if we run the clock backward, we can figure out exactly when everything was packed together — 13.8 billion years ago. Because every place we can map in the universe today occupied the same place 13.8 billion years ago, there wasn't a location for the Big Bang: Instead, it happened everywhere simultaneously.
The Big Bang may not describe the actual beginning of everything.
"Big Bang" broadly refers to the theory of cosmic expansion and the hot early universe. However, sometimes even scientists will use the term to describe a moment in time — when everything was packed into a single point. The problem is that we don't have either observations or a theory that explains that moment, which is properly (if clumsily) called the "initial singularity."
The initial singularity is the starting point for the universe we observe, but there might have been something that came before.
The difficulty is that the very hot early cosmos and the rapid expansion called "inflation" likely happened right after the singularity wiped out most — if not all — of the information about any history that preceded the Big Bang. Physicists keep thinking of new ways to check for signs of an earlier universe, and though we haven't seen any of them so far, we can't rule it out yet.
The Big Bang theory explains where all the hydrogen and helium in the universe came from.
In the 1940s, Ralph Alpher and George Gamow calculated that the early universe was hot and dense enough to make virtually all the helium, lithium and deuterium (hydrogen with a neutron attached) present in the cosmos today; later research showed where the primordial hydrogen came from. This is known as "Big Bang nucleosynthesis," and it stands as one of the most successful predictions of the theory. The heavier elements (such as oxygen, iron and uranium) were formed in stars and supernova explosions.
The best evidence for the Big Bang is in the form of microwaves. Early on, the whole universe was dense enough to be completely opaque. But at a time roughly 380,000 years after the Big Bang, expansion spread everything out enough to make the universe transparent.
The light released from this transition, known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB), still exists. It was first observed in the 1960s by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. That discovery cemented the Big Bang theory as the best description of the universe; since then, observatories such as WMAP and Planck have used the CMB to tell us a lot about the total structure and content of the cosmos.
[ WMAP: the NASA mission that mapped the cosmic microwave background. The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe was a mission to map the background radiation of our Universe. In doing so, it revolutionised the field of cosmology. ]
[ The Planck Objective: To map the relic radiation from the Big Bang with improved sensitivity and resolution, and testing theories on the birth and evolution of the Universe.
Mission: Planck was ESA's time machine, looking back to the dawn of time close to the Big Bang, about 13.7 billion years ago. Planck's objective was to analyse, with the highest accuracy ever achieved, the remnants of the radiation that filled the Universe immediately after the Big Bang — observed today as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). ]
One of the first people to think scientifically about the universe's origin was a Catholic priest.
In addition to his religious training and work, Georges Lemaître was a physicist who studied the general theory of relativity and worked out some of the conditions of the early cosmos in the 1920s and '30s. His preferred metaphors for the origin of the universe were "cosmic egg" and "primeval atom," but they never caught on, which is too bad because …
It seems nobody likes the name "Big Bang."
Until the 1960s, the idea of a universe with a beginning was controversial among physicists. The name "Big Bang" was coined by astronomer Fred Hoyle, the leading proponent of an alternative theory where the universe continues forever without a beginning.
His shorthand for the theory caught on, and now we're stuck with it. Calvin and Hobbes' attempt to get us to adopt "horrendous space kablooie" has failed so far.
The Big Bang is the cornerstone of cosmology, but it's not the whole story. Scientists keep refining the theory of the universe, motivated by our observation of all the weird stuff out there. Dark matter (which holds galaxies together) and dark energy (which makes the expansion of the universe accelerate) are the biggest mysteries that aren't described by the Big Bang theory itself.
Our view of the universe, like the cosmos itself, keeps evolving as we discover more and more new things. But rather than fading away, our best explanation for why things are the way they are has remained — the fire at the beginning of the universe.
"This ENDS Big Bang!" James Webb Finds Cluster of 7 Ancient Structures At The Edge Of The Universe.
This is one of the latest findings from the James Webb Space Telescope "Proving" that the "Big Bang" is all "FAKE NEWS".
See what you think of these two findings — Ed.
Meeting Location & Disclaimer
Bob Backstrom
~ Newsletter Editor ~
Information for Members and Visitors:
Link to — Sydney PC & Technology User Group
All Meetings, unless explicitly stated above, are held on the
1st Floor, Sydney Mechanics' School of Arts, 280 Pitt Street, Sydney.
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