Reigning in Some of the iTunes Bloat

I use iTunes almost strictly for listening to podcasts, even though I own a Zune, because it lets me group my podcasts into smart playlists (even if it's an inelegant solution). So, I have no use for the iPodService that starts up every time you run iTunes. In fact, even if you disable that service from within services.msc, iTunes will reset its status to Manual and re-open the service. That's very annoying and smacks of malware behavior. So, the easiest way to disable this in Windows XP is:

1. Press WindowsKey + R to get to the Run menu.
2. Type services.msc and hit Enter.
3. In the main pane of the services window, scroll down until you find iPodService.
4. Double-click that, and click the Stop button.
5. Then change the Startup type to Disabled.
6. Close services.msc.
7. In Windows Explorer, navigate to C:\Program Files\iPod\bin\
8. Change the extension of iPodService.exe to something else. I changed mine to iPodService.dontrun. If you don't see an extension, you'll have to enable it within Windows Folder Settings.
9. Create a blank text file and name it iPodService.exe.

If you were to just delete iPodService, iTunes would only re-install it the next time it is run. In this case, iTunes sees that the file it wants to run is there, doesn't reset the service state, and probably tries to run the fake executable. I'm not to sure on that last one, but the end result is you don't get iPodService running in the background. All bets are off on the next update.

You can perform this same trick on other iTunes processes that you don't need. For example, I also disable iTunesHelper (located in the iTunes install directory). If you like to re-organize your music collection in a program other than iTunes, you should leave this running as it keeps the music data in sync. If you do all of your adjustments within iTunes, then this process is useless. I can't guarantee that replacing any other process won't trigger a re-install.

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How Nuclear Power (Probably) Works

I saw this comment posted on the Freakonomics Blog by user AaronS (a frequent commenter), and I thought it served as a good explanation for how a nuclear power plant operates. Granted, I don't know much about nuclear power, but this sounds right. Here's the explanation (almost) verbatim:

A lot of folks see the world “nuclear” and get a bit concerned. That’s understandable. But some years ago, my cousin, who is an electrical engineer for TVA, took me on a tour and made it very simple. Here it is the elementary explanation (and the best one I understand):

A nuclear plant is really a huge steam engine. It’s sole purpose is to produce steam that will turn a massive turbine (or turbines), and which will, in turn, produce electricity.

To produce the steam, atomic material is submerged in a large tank of water. (This tank, by the way, along with all the pipes connected to it, is completely self-enclosed. This water never runs into the river or the ground, but stays in the pipe.) This atomic material, being active, has a lot of atoms/electrons flying around. They bump into each other at an increasing rate of speed, generating heat. Of course, being submerged in water, this heats up the water, generating steam.

Before I go further, lest someone think it might all get out of hand, to prevent overheating (a meltdown), each nuclear plant has, in the tank of water, “rods” of material that serve as a kind of magnet to these very active atoms. When those rods are lowered, those atoms stop flying around, stopping the heating process. And when it’s time to produce more steam, the rods are lifted as needed.

OK, so all that steam runs along these self-enclosed pipes and turn the turbine, producing electricity. But that water has to then be cooled. What happens is there is a parallel pipe of cold water that runs alongside the pipe filled with the steam. This allows the heat to transfer to the cooler water, thus turning the steam back into water for further use in the nuclear process.

This cool water (now hot), was likely drawn from a river and is not radioactive. But it is still hot. What to do with it? Well, it is pumped up to those huge cooling towers.

Inside the cooling tower, about halfway down, is a “field” of dimpled rectangular plates (about 4 inches by 12 inches, if memory serves). This non-radioactive hot water is sprayed on those dimpled plates, the dimples serving to provide more surface area for cooling purposes. As the water trickles down the plate, it is exposed to the cool air, and cools down. But it does produce the steam/condensation that you may see rising from these cooling towers. As big as they are, you think that is where the real work is being done, but it’s just cooling off water.

I know that won’t cut it with some of you engineers, but that’s the very simple version of how nuclear energy works…and perhaps shows that we should not be so fearful about it as we have sometimes been led to be.

— Posted by AaronS

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