Posts by Phil the Geek 106 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Oct 2007
Munich is lovely: warm, green, clean, sunny and cosmopolitan. Drive along the wide, smooth road from northern Munich toward nearby Augsburg and on the way you'll see some wooden towers that wouldn't look out of place in a wild west fort. Nearby are the bases of huts and a substantial building. Yes, it's Dachau concentration camp. Two hours there will change the rest of your life. Never trust a totalitarian regime, be it Nazi, Russian, Chinese or the good ol' U.S. of A.
I was working in the PC industry while Amstrad were selling home computers and they were definitely hiring engineers. The (possibly apocryphal) word was that the pre-Apprentice Mr. Sugar had a habit of addressing employees as "Oi, you" which was one of the reasons I didn't apply.
The McDD MBA regime at Boeing made a decision to axe the 757 and to develop the ancient 737 even further, to wring yet more profit out of it. If they had developed the 757 instead they could've fitted the modern big turbofans under the wings, so no MCAS would have been needed and the world would hardly have noticed a little panel falling off now and again. Oh and 346 people would still be alive.
I had an ASHP installed earlier this year. I did all the pre-installation work (rads, plumbing, loft insulation, outside unit hardstanding) myself. There was a bit of Excel for rad sizing and just basic DIY*. If I had known then what I know now, I would have done much more of the installation myself.
The system just works - let the software do its stuff and forget about it. The only noise you hear inside the house is flow noise from the radiator circulation pump, which is programmed a bit OTT. I've seen the matrix frosted up in cold misty weather, but it clears itself and carries on.
If you expect it to do exactly the same thing, exactly the same way as a gas combi, you'll not like it. If you just want to be warm, with ample hot water, it's great. Same end, different means. I'm running on a 100% renewables tariff, so the real bottom line, carbon footprint, is infinitely improved.
*1960s cavity insulated house. It could be a bugger in a Victorian or older property.
I set up Mint on an old Vista laptop for my Mum, who's 88 years old. She's a smart cookie but not at all experienced with computers. She gets along just fine with it and uses it for her Tesco online shopping and general web use.
She told me she'd had a phone call from "the Windows Technical Support Centre". What did you say to them, I asked, nervously. "Go away, I run Linux", she said.
A good little book this...
Before the war the author was an actor, but he ended up as a radar operator in night fighter Mosquitoes. They initially defended Britain from German bombers but later flew over Germany, preying on the German night fighters that were trying to attack British bombers. It's well-written and once I had started I couldn't put it down.
Yep, forward-biased makes them glow, in simple applications you use a series resistor to set the current/brightness to the desired level. The resistor often consumes more energy than the LED, hence the use of more sophisticated controllers in lighting applications.
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned the Q-word - Quantum. LEDs are one of the most visible (ha!) demonstrations of quantum physics. The real magic is when the recombination takes place; electrons drop to a lower energy level, emitting the excess energy as a photon (a particle of light). The frequency or colour of light is determined by the energy of its photons, and the exotic materials in LEDs are chosen to get the right "energy gap" to get the required colour.
The macro world we sense has continuously-variable energy levels (e.g. the orbit of a planet, the speed of a car, etc) but at the atomic level only certain discrete energy levels are possible, hence the emission of a very defined quanta of light energy from recombination, and therefore the tight spectral purity of LEDs.
Having played with a 6502 (Ohio SuperBoard anyone?) I designed 8085 (enhanced 8080) and 8086 boards for my first employer. 8086 wasn't just a PC chip - BT's System X digital telephone exchanges used it in some subsystems. After the 286 I designed 386 hardware (and met Gordon Moore at the 386's UK launch!!!) and stayed involved with all the subsequent generations up to Pentium 4. Now I just tinker (for a living) with other people's boards...
When Intel first launched Pentium, the MS Word spell checker insisted on correcting it to "Penis".
I repaired a dead Toshiba Tecra M9 recently using a downloaded service manual - which I found invaluable, even though I'm very experienced with PC hardware.
Preventing access to the manuals is just plain anti-social. I hope it costs them a small reduction in residual values and hence a few or more new product sales.
I needed to send a camera back to Argos for repair, and they use a local petrol station on my way to work. Brilliant, as personal deliveries are frowned on at my company. Now it's Amazon too - excellent.
Bad news for eBay though! They could offer a service for sellers to drop off and buyers to pick up. But will they?
Where I used to work one of our directors had a total LCD failure on his MacBook Air. It was just over a year old and Apple quoted £480 for the repair. I thought it was going to be expensive, but not THAT expensive.
He didn't particularly like the Apple so he bought a nice new Dell instead and kept the change:-)
I've been using Ubuntu on my laptop and desktop since Hardy Heron, and I've been very happy with it. I use Win7 at work and I definitely prefer Maverick. I've tried Unity and I hate it - I can see it could be good on a tablet but that's not what I'm using.
I stayed with 10.10 to avoid Unity but I was aware I would have to transition sooner or later. Yesterday I upgraded to Mint and so far I'm delighted.
Why? It doesn't have to be different to be good. Book publishers don't "have" to differentiate the way the pages turn to sell paperbacks. I worked for a big computer company that just "had" to differentiate its products, even if the differentiators utterly sucked. That company doesn't exist any more, because in their differentiation ego trip they forgot that the users/customers were king.
PS I think Unity's childish icons look like Microsoft Money circa 1995. Separated at birth?
The OP's command will brick your system unless you have the necessary repositories enabled.
The joy of Ubuntu was it worked superbly straight out of the box. Now you have to dick about endlessly to get to a productive desktop - which is an unproductive activity.
And why do Unity's icons remind me of Microsoft Money circa 1995?
I'll stick with my trusty Meerkat until it's no longer supported (please Canonical, change 10.10 to LTS). Maybe Ubuntu will have re-connected with reality by then, if not I'll select the strongest alternative - Mint, Squeeze or Arch I suppose.
The gutter press will LOVE this - allegedly... Imagine if you somehow obtained the location databases of a bunch of celebs, sports people and politicians. Then you do a bit of SQLing to find the location/time correlations. If they have a regular schedule, your photographers are there waiting the next time they meet. Conclusion: don't carry an iThingy if you're in the public eye!
Apple know they only have a limited time in the sun with phones and pads. The Androids are racing to the bottom and destroying the high margin Apple craves. So this is Apple playing delaying tactics. They will probable get a chunk of their patent portfolio destroyed by prior art if it goes to court, but Apple won't mind too much if it buys them time until they can apply their brand and attention to detail to the Next Big Thing.
Did Tesla actually watch Top Gear before submitting their product for review? They would have seen the Ford GT caned for its 75-mile range in Top Gear test track mode, and would have known TG wouldn't get 211 sedate-mode miles out of the Tesla. The Ford GT ran out of fuel on the test track - sound familiar?
Ford is litigious enough to attack Ferrari for accidentally creating a branding link between beautiful Italian supercars and Ford's F-series on-road tractors - but didn't sue Top Gear over the GT's 75 miles. So why is Tesla suing? Do they need the publicity? Or did Darl McBride join Tesla and I didn't notice?
The Beeb say they will vigorously defend, so Tesla is in for a massive overdose of Streisand Effect. Chumps.
I once received a CV with a cover letter starting with "Dear Sir or Madman". Oh the dangers of spell-checkers.
Someone who made it as far as an interview only asked questions about the contacts he might make in the job and then when his mobile rang mid-interview he answered it and had a conversation with the caller. He didn't get the job either.
If you ever have an hour to kill in Coventry, go to the Transport Museum - Thrust SSC is there along with the control caravan. They also have a simulator where you get a mild impression of what Andy Green felt. It was a brutally fast car - I guarantee you will grin when you see the speedo numbers flash by as it gets into its stride.
I reckon it's more like brain science.
On a serious note I'm curious to know whether the problem constitutes an EM susceptibility fail under CE-marking approvals, or if the field strength is above CE test levels. If the former, blame the STB/cable modem vendors, if the latter blame everyone else.
If Vulture-1 was released at 89,000 feet and didn't encounter any significant air drag until it got down to (say) 70,000 feet, it would have reached 337m/s - which is comfortably supersonic at that altitude!
There are a lot of variables, and of course there is a little atmosphere up there, so it would have been slower in reality. It'd be nice to see a z-axis analysis of the GPS data though.
Is maybe, just maybe, our heroic Playmonaut's first name Chuck?
PS Awesome project, awesome pics and video. Truly fab job folks.
Well remembered sir!
The Apricot F1 and also the Apricot Portable (a big black Toblerone with an LCD) had IR keyboards and trackballs. The protocol was very simple and there was a risk that adjacent systems in an office might cross-couple, so fibre optic cables were provided to ensure they didn't.
Phil Jones and his collaborators have crossed the line between Science and Marketing. They have abdicated their position of impartiality and objectivity and instead have been evangelising a meme.
They might be right, but as with anyone selling something very costly, they must expect to be asked a lot of tough questions.
I recently bought one of those ebuyer.com no-OS laptops. It's great - very well made, 4GB RAM, Core Duo T6600, 1680x1050 display and only 350 quid delivered - prices are so low when there's no MS tax to pay. It works superbly with Ubuntu and OO, and the most satisfying thing is MS didn't get a penny:-)
Notwork Manager is shite isn't it? Whoever writes it seems to be on a crusade against automatic logon - if you do that, NM then pesters you for the default keyring password, somewhat defeating the object (I've seen Evolution do this too).
Ubuntu now have the simpler and superior wicd in the repositories, just type wicd into Add/Remove Applications and Bob will soon be your uncle.
"anyone who has ever had internet provided by them (whether on cable or not) will tell you that it is shite"
I've had Virgin cable internet for 7 years and the only problem I've had was a garden spade through the cable - fixed the next day. I'm on the basic package yet this afternoon I've downloaded something large (and legal!) at an average speed > 1Mbyte/sec. Not bad, and definitely not shite.
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