Posts by Stoneshop 5956 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2009
When travelling I take a 6 way 13A UK mains block plugged up with all the power blocks & USB chargers, then fit a single international adapter on the 13A plug.
Back in the mists of time I acquired a four-way socket with an IEC14 inlet. Unfortunately, after several moves it's now Somewhere In A Box, and I look forward to the day That Box emerges from the Large Stash Of Boxes.
Ah, that's where you would use HV differential. But of course the installed host adapter would be a single-ended one, the storage box would be LVD, and none of the cables around would have the appropriate plugs, requiring a chain of at least three cables to go from the HA to the box, plus another one to put the terminator on the bus.
(I've worked at a place that had systems using a shared HVD bus with two HAs and two storage boxes, with a sort of multiway socket in the middle)
Challenging expenses. My last employer tried that exactly once on me...
Working as a contractor, I had a car (leased for me by the agency. NOT the vehicle I asked for and which was agreed to, but that's another story). Cars need to be serviced, on a schedule. So one day I report at the garage, and get offered something only slightly larger than a Peel P50. I'm 1m97; the place I'm contracted out to is 75km, one way. The combination of these three factors says 'hernia'.
I manage to drive home and extract myself from the mobile soup can, put on my motorcycle gear and head off to work, passing by the garage to drop off the keys and suggesting they get a midget to collect the thing. Even at -10C the trip is much more comfortable than the 2km from the garage to my home. The end of the day I ride back, only slightly hampered by snowfall and stupid car drivers not knowing how to deal with that. Next day I need to use the motorcycle again as I was too late (see: stupid car drivers) to go to work again, and back. The next day is a Saturday and I can collect my car at leisure. So far so good.
Then, at the end of the month I get a phone call from the agency's finance department. They object to two petrol card statements showing 'Regular 95' instead of 'Diesel'. I counter by stating I'm not a philantropist, and as the vehicle I had to use to get to work runs on Regular 95, that's what I put in the tank[0]. As it's a substitute for the company car I simply use the petrol card provided to top up. "No, you were supposed to get a replacement car for the day your car was at the garage. Which the garage states was a diesel as well, so you were using your own car. Which we won't reimburse you for." "Well, how am I going to get to work if I can't frigging fit in the replacement provided? How would you like a bill for the chiropractor?" "You could be filling the tank on your own car[1] every day using the company petrol card." "Tell me, did I do that? The distance is 150k there and back, and you can see I used about eleven litres on each of those two days. That's what my motorbike uses going that distance, nothing beyond that. So shut the bloody fuck up about me using that card inappropriately."
After a few more similar incidents, and the agency forgetting to offer the company I was contracted out to a contract extension I simply cut them out of the loop and got a temp contract directly with the company
[0] I know for a fact it can run on diesel, with reduced performance.
[1] It's not a car, you twat.
How? 'They' took away our watercoolers, which had been installed about a year earlier at a comparatively substantial cost (additional power and cold water piping; the 'unit on the kitchenette counter' model, not the 'keg on a pillar' model), citing maintenance cost.
Soon after, they upgraded the coffee machines. I'd like to think they had to because of increased usage.
Meanwhile, Kensington's residents may object to a cashless audit trail. Rather awkward if statements show parking charges from a quick visit to one's mistress, or master.
To that end one keeps multiple bank accounts, multiple agendas as well as multiple bookkeepers. Savings can be made by having said bookkeepers double as mistresses/masters (as applicable)
(the one with the hidden pockets with the hidden agendas in them, thanks)
27 year-old plane design. Without knowing the tail number, you don't know when this plane was built — it could have been built last month (I believe they're still building them).
C/n / msn: 25865/430
First flight: 1992-04-21 (26 years 10 months)
I'm thinking some sort of pitot tube issue but this would also be unlikely.
Pitot tubes icing up in flight (see 'cold front' comment above) can cause this, but it tends to be more problematic if the pilots don't have much in the way of external visual references. Like in the middle of the night at FL300+ over the ocean, less so at 6000 feet around noon.
Aeronautical engineers have spent hundreds of thousands of man-hours making sure that there is no way for a single failure to crash an aircraft.
s/no way/extremely unlikely/
Just recently I came across an accident report on a China Southwest crash involving a Tupolev 154 (built in 1990, so roughly the same age as this craft). The cause was a single nut, incorrectly installed during maintenance; instead of a castle nut with locking pin, a self-locking nut was used. When it came undone it messed up the elevator trim, and the plane went into an unrecoverable stall.
A cassette? Too convenient. For playing vinyl elsewhere you get out your Dansette (upgraded to stereo and battery power) or an authentic portable record player like the Lesa Mody. And if you're going with magnetic tape anyway the True Hipster would not be seen with anything but a Nagra, although an Uher Report could be considered passable.
The one with the oversize pockets, thanks
Data centre for a telco. Needs No-break installed. Generator shed gets built, stonking big diesel genny gets carted in and the guys from Perkins (or whoever manufactured that beast) gets the thing chugging. They listen, probe, do a few adjustments, listen some more, consider it Fine, let it run some more and figure it's time to push the Engine Stop button, sign off on the job and hand it over to the sparkies to let them do their bit. Alas, the Engine Stop button didn't., as it apparently wasn't yet hooked up. "OK, maybe it's that other button".
That didnt't stop the engine either, but it did stop the computer room.
I bought two Alexas, to communicate with distant Parent with dementia who can forget how phones work
Two RasPi's, each with a speaker and a microphone array, and when one of them picks up sound at a more than background level (i.e. it gets spoken to), it opens a connection to the other one and transmits the sound which then gets played. Can be implemented with standard utilities, even with some kind of voice mailbox functionality (probably most useful on your end).
"OK Google, navigate to X"
"Location data for X not found, please be more specific"
"OK Google, navigate to X, $country, $region."
"Location data for X, $country, $region not found, please be more specific"
"OK Google, navigate to X, $country, $province, $region, $district."
"Location data for X, $country, $province, $region, $district not found, please be more specific"
"Oh, fucking hell"
"Calculating route to Hell, Trøndelag, Norway via Fucking, Upper Austria, Austria."
Argos' 3-for-a-tenner travel adapters are earthed, not that it'll help in this situation.
An unearthed Euro plug (CEE 7/16 or 7/17) will fit an earthed CEE 7/3 (Schuko ) or CEE 7/5 (French) socket, as they should, and there won't be any problem fitting them in an earthed BS1363-to-Euro adapter.
(Earthing might be less important if you have an RCD-protected supply, but I still trust a wire fuse more than I trust a chunk of complicated electronics.)
An RCD breaker is not at all a bunch of complex electronics. It's a set of coils, one per phase and one for neutral, arranged on a common core so that the fields induced by the passing currents cancel out if there's no residual leakage. If a ground fault happens, the fields don't cancel any more and the resulting magnetism pulls away a latch, releasing a spring that pushes open the breaker contacts.
So, is 10,000 tonnes a second a little or a lot?
Yes.
For comparison, the Earth is about 6E21 tonnes, which at a rate of 10kton/sec would be gone in 6E17 seconds, 1.67E14 hours, 19E9 years. Slow enough to not bother me.
"The cabling was the thickness of my forearm. There was no screen. The data was recorded onto two compact cassette tapes; one held the addresses, the other the letter. The Redactron merged the two. We could send out two to three hundred letters a day, compared to our competitors' 25. "
We haven't timed our Flexowriter, but as a rough estimate its speed is more like 300 letters a day than 25. It works roughly the same as the Redactron, but it's close to a decade older and driven by paper tape, reading the main letter from one tape and the names,addresses etc. from a second. You could even hook up one of their electromechanical calculators, interfaced through a big box of relays, and print out invoices and such. And while the Redactron apparently had some line-editing capabilities, with paper tape based devices you can simply copy them up to the point where the correction needs to be made, add the modified text, then continue copying after skipping the incorrect part of the original. Plus, with a bit of practice you can actually read the tape to see what's on it and whether it's correct. Try that with a compact cassette.
It's likely to be similarly noisy.
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