Tommy Peters' Bicycles

“Looks like my Pizza Slicer” – a poster on BikeRadar aptly described it. In the mid-19th century Peugeot manufactured the Coffee Grinder, to take the chore out of pounding beans and towards the end of the millennium, it finished Bicycles, Motorbikes and Motorcars. When I ride the TeamLine, my instinct is that form and function of the manual Coffee Grinder influenced Armand's design of his prototype bicycle. Given the basic theory of proximity that elements are related, a bond is implied when proximity of elements in similar or parallel designs fuse or are logically positioned to form a similar structure. In Armand's equation, the evolved design elements of the Coffee Grinder were parallel to the evolving design of his prototype Bicycle and thus, logically positioned to form a similar structure. Simply put, the crank circulating under Armand’s hand that crushed his beans to its logical conclusion provided a clue that followed the evolv...

"Shame is like everything else, live with it long enough and it becomes part of the furniture" - Rushdie.   Preamble: - Shah Jahan did not construct the Taj Mahal. The Mughal appropriated the Hindu Temple-Palace from a Rajput resident - renovated  it to conceal its Vedic-inspired origins, and laid claim to constructing it. Period. The syndicated discourse says the reign of the Mughals in India was free, fair and even romantic. For instance, it says the Taj Mahal was born out of a sad story of love and that Shah Jahan, a distraught widower and the 17th-century emperor at the time, took ‘22 years’ to ‘construct’ the ‘mausoleum’ in memory of one of his dead wives - Mumtaz. Two points in the above paragraph are accurate. Jahan indeed commanded India and that he was a Mughal. Some cultures describe him as a romantic sort - perhaps because of the polygamist he was, maintained a harem of women and had an incestuous relationship with his own daughter, which...

Dripping faucet @ home Thomas Kerk Boon Leng said - in camera technology - he is not impressed with 'megapixel size’ but rather with the depth of the image sensor, which translates to film speed or the ISO number. He said most early digitals top out at 400 and current ones at 800, but if you find one with 1600 - pay attention. I experimented with a FinePix S9500 and was surprised that Fuji's 2005 model (a hybrid rather than an SLR) tops out at 1600 with RAW capability. RAW is simply the digital equivalent to the old film negative. It is an uncompressed file format captured by the camera’s sensor and unlike JPEG, almost no processing is applied by the unit. Post-processing is done externally by one of several programs such as AdobeRGB, CameraRAW or Rawker, a Mac application. I captured the dripping faucet in my kitchen in RAW - in Manual mode with the lights on but without Flash. ISO was set to 1600. Post-processing was done by Rawker . (Click ima...

Tommy's iMac drive cluster (Click on image for larger view) Following an earlier post , allow me to explain the cluster of icons, which represent the drives, on my iMac's desktop (if necessary, click on the image for a larger view):- The Guitar icon is a Western Digital Studio holding a terabyte of iTunes data through a FireWire 800. iTunes is the 'brain' of the Mac Experience and therefore, the icon is appropriately placed at the centre of the apple. The Umbrella is a Western Digital Home and a clone of the Studio, wired through a FireWire 400 running a SmartUpdate schedule in real-time by SuperDuper. Being a backup drive, the U mbrella was purposefully chosen and placed, suggesting support, at the bottom of the Guitar. The Leopard is the iMac’s hardrive, chosen to represent the operating system and appropriately placed as if the animal is entering into the apple through its bitten part . The wireless Time Capsule appears behind the Leopard from ti...

Fatimid 'Hubal' pendant Preamble: Civilians have no business, let alone capacity, debating a programmed Juramentado. None. They have capacity for reason, commonsense and perhaps, points of law. The Allah issue in Malaysia is simmering and Juramentado is poised at the blocks. Stage 1 - A period (of centuries apparently) when the term was not an issue. Stage 2 - The Executive Order banning the term. Stage 3 - The Judicial Application to set aside the Executive Order. Stage 4 - The Judicial Order upholding the Executive Order. Stage 5 - The Appeal setting aside the Judicial Order, allowing use of the term. At what stage did Juramentado go postal? Five stages are in the equation but on hindsight, identifying the stage it charged is now academic. It gunned off the blocks at Stage 2 while most believe Stage 5 invoked its frenzy. To identify triggers, one must study its environment, ideology and text suffused in its tabula rasa . Embracing...

Finished workflow (click on image for larger view) Automator is a Mac application. As the name implies, it ‘automates’ a given task via pre-set workflows. There are enough workflows in the Automator Library to piece a given task. Text To Audio is one. It involves four individual workflows that starts with ‘Get Contents of Clipboard’ and ends with ‘Add Songs To (iTunes) Playlist’. A fifth action saves the program as a Script or Application. A student asked me to piece a Text To Audio workflow to deal with her ‘dead time’ in traffic. Her objective was to ‘hear’ her assignments rather than ‘read’ them. The screen-cast depicts the evolution of the workflow saved as a Script, which runs from the Finder bar. A workflow saved as an Application runs just as effectively from the dock. The second part of the screen-cast is the Speech converted from this blog post. Alex, the Mac’s digital commentator, is the presenter. Cheers, Tommy Credits: Ben Waldie is the author of...

compassionate • methodological • carefree "The courage of this amazing girl reflects the courage of her father and loving family" A reason I write is to craft logical narratives based on logical foundations. I assemble evidence and seek opinion. Much alike living from day to day - so I thought. Tayalan rang. I was, as always, upbeat at the prospect of engaging my dear friend - until he mentioned his daughter. A drive to the sea-front over Christmas brought life into perspective. From the awe of nature, I sought an answer - a 'teaching moment' . I was downcast, just thinking of her and the 'cracking' of her father's heart. When I met her yesterday, she was exactly as she was several years ago, notwithstanding the transcendent moment of her life. Kisha is still a happy little thing, despite the pain she obviously bears. In masking her grief, she applies the Talmudic concept to the letter. Her loving father is in the process of crafti...