I had the opportunity to visit the Stemme factory in Strausberg this week, and to fly a Stemme S6-RT motorglider.
This is the most recent aircraft produced by the people who make my wonderful Stemme S10-VT.
The Alexander Schleicher factory
I drove from Frankfurt airport to the Poppenhausen/Wasserkuppe area to visit the Alexander Schleicher (AS) glider factory.
Heading to Europe
This month I’m doing a research trip to Europe for various reasons.
I’ll be spending about one week in each of Germany, Switzerland and the UK.
Here are some impressions of the journey across the world from Adelaide to Frankfurt (via Dubai) on a Qantas/Emirates codeshare.
Electric Vehicles and Luxury Car Tax
Most first-world countries have a variety of incentives designed to encourage the purchase and use of Electric Vehicles (EVs) on public roads.
Wikipedia has a great summary of these incentives. Unfortunately, Australia is conspicuous by its absence from that list of enlightened countries. There are no meaningful incentives from the federal or state government in Australia to help to drive the adoption of zero emission vehicles.
Thoughts about my transition from Internode to NBNCo
Back on November 27th 2013, I found myself with a speaking role in a live performance event.
The event was called “Cutaway – a Ceremony“, and it was held at the home of the Vitalstatistix Theatre Company in historic Port Adelaide.
The over-arching theme was about ‘being a good ancestor’ – in other words, it was about the process of considering how each of us can choose to find their own way to leave society a little better through their efforts.
HFC in the National Broadband Network
HFC, the NBN, and the meaning of life
With the release of the NBNCo Strategic Review earlier this week, I’ve seen some very significant misunderstandings (and consequent angst) expressed about the inclusion of HFC into the mix of technologies intended for the NBN rollout.
This post is intended to be a counterpoint to those misunderstandings.
About AvPlan – and why I have invested in it
I’ve just made a substantial investment in AvSoft Australia Pty Ltd, the company behind AvPlan (http://www.avplan.com.au).
I hope that as you read this, the reasons why I was keen to invest in AvPlan should become obvious. That decision was driven from two strong passions of mine – technology and aviation. AvPlan represents a brilliant intersection between those two realms that presses all the right buttons for me 🙂
iMessage in IOS 7 loses link with your mobile number – and how to fix it
Like many other iPhone users, I upgraded to IOS 7 pretty much as soon as it came out.
There’s a subtle bug that seems to be impacting many people who upgraded early in the piece, such that iMessage has lost its internal ‘permission’ to use your mobile number as the source of iMessages transmitted over the Internet.
People aren’t necessarily picking up on this issue by themselves, because their problem isn’t actually visible to them. It is only visible to (and only a problem for) the other IOS users that they exchange messages with. It just lurks there, driving people batty, with necessarily having an obvious underlying cause.
I’ve written this post to explain the issue and how to fix it, mostly so I can tell my own friends about it without repeating myself constantly. I hope its also useful for others in the same way!
Experiences with MR16 LED downlights
Executive Summary:
I bought some LED downlights last year that were a disappointment. However, the latest products in this realm (especially this one, the Ecolume 4W MR16 LED lamp) are ‘the business’ – and (for my purposes) are a genuine (and energy efficient) drop-in alternative for Halogen lamps.
I’ve tested four different LED downlight products in order to reach this conclusion. Read on for the full story.
A blast from the past : Internode and Agile in 2002
Well, here’s a bit of a blast from the past.
I came across a couple of recordings of short TV programs aired back in 2002 about Agile and Internode.
The first one is about the Agile ‘Coorong Project’ – commissioned in 2001 and still working to this day…
The second one is about Internode, again aired in 2002. There are a lot of long term, wonderful Internodians in this video. Many of us had significantly more hair.
Its amazing to me to see the old monitors – the old huge monitors – and to be reminded how much desk space those things took up.
We had already come such a long way in 2002, from humble beginnings in 1991.
The building this was filmed in was our York St, Adelaide, office, a small laneway in Adelaide’s ‘East End’. That building no longer exists – it was knocked down in favour of residential apartments many years back.
My tastes in sports cars have evolved substantially since then too – that old Ferrari 308 has long since been superseded by a Tesla Roadster 🙂
Simon Hackett 
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