Posts by Stoneshop

Self-stocking internet fridge faces a delivery come down

Re: Burglar Alarm Fix

a different PIN number

Ah, those personal PIN numbers usually associated with automatic ATM machines.

Drone delivery

"The last thing I want is one hackable device talking to another hackable device on my doorstep while my futuristic local burglar of 2020, who has just hacked into my fridge to make it think I’ve run out of milk, patiently waits at my front porch for the imminent drone delivery to save him the trouble of bringing a crowbar."

Of course, the well-prepared futuristic burglar of 2020 will have a one-click purchase link on his phone, for a crowbar*, for immediate drone delivery to said front porch.

To prevent leaving electronic traces, it will be ordered through the targeted house owner's account.

* I prefer the somewhat more versatile Stanley FuBar, especially the XXL, for stuff that needs to be separated sans regard for the aesthetics afterwards.

Garmin

I installed a nice female English voice onto it, which for some reason I find comforting. (That's "English" as in "from England".) I derive endless amusement from her calling the on- or off-ramp a "slip road", and other English phrasings.

Ours is set to Afrikaans. It's far more different from Dutch than English is from American, in grammar, vocabulary as well as pronunciation, but for us it's perfectly comprehensible in general, and driving instructions are a very limited set of sentences anyway.

For maps I've changed to Openstreetmap.

Re: Test for success

Luckily, the Marketing Department have a solution. They ship loads of crappy products as free samples to dishonest and greedy "reviewers" who then write glowing "independent" reports about how wonderful the thing is. And we all believe them and assume that if stuff (as described above) doesn't work, it's our fault or failure.

"it is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all. In other words – and this is the rock-solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxywide success is founded – their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws."

Tesla driver dies after Model S hits tree

Re: go see the pictures @Stoneshop

It does indeed, but after opening this article I can view the picture full-size.

A Twitter link from there has a link to an article stating the case has been closed: Tesla found no technical problems leading to the crash, it's a one-sided accident with a single fatality so no liability to sort out.

Re: go see the pictures

See pictures - Driver exceeding 100Km/h on a road that would better be termed a woodland foot path.

If that's hyperbole, it's seriously out of place. And if you took the path in the background in this photo to be the road he was on, you're utterly wrong; it's just a path leading into the wood from the road he was on (N415). Which is properly paved, marked, is as good as straight for nearly its entire length with two very minor bends, a set of traffic lights on that stretch, and has a speed limit of 80km/h. Which he exceeded, as per Tesla, by almost 100%.

Most stunning here is that on ElReg we see so many ill advised folks *debating* the situation.

I see very little of that, mostly with regard to battery chemistry, where it's you just guessing whether it's a LHD car. Which is easily verifiable information, and to save you the effort: all of continental Europe is LHD.

Re: Bah!

Just require a cutoff switch before the non-standard input enters the house grid, like how a master breaker works.

PV installations tend to have one already, either separate or as part of the inverter. Problem is, that's not enough. A single decent panel can output 18V at 10A or more; a PV setup tends to have several panels in series ("strings"), with one or more strings feeding the inverter. If you interrupt the string(s) at the inverter (which may be deep inside the house, so there's another problem in actually finding and reaching it, especially when the house is on fire) there can still be 150 to 250V DC present between the leads of each string.

Breakers between every second or third panel and the next in a string might be a solution, but requires a lot of extra cabling to bring each of those points in the circuit down from the roof where the panels are to a point where the fire brigade can see and reach them.

Re: A technology dilema

Particularly since there was a point when the driver couldn't be approached due to the fire?

It wasn't the car that was on fire, several batteries thrown clear of the car from the crash were.

The problem concerning the car itself were the batteries still inside, and the potential hazards they might pose.

Re: own EV happens to have the exact same problem

I wonder if EV safety could be improved if they were to run off a bag of spuds in the boot.

You might get an electric vehicle to move if it's not much heavier than that sack of potatoes. Better to turn them into alcohol and use that as fuel for an IC engine.

Re: own EV happens to have the exact same problem

right, lithium being the second most chemically reactive substance in the known universe, and the most reactive of all of the metals.

It is not.

Reaction with water gets more violent with the periodic table row going up

Re: @AndyS

Dunno. I personally think the actual recommendation should be to drive in a way that allows you to avoid perfectly stationary trees,

Given that Tesla now reports, via AP, that the driver was doing 155km/h* (nearly 100mph for youse non-metric types) prior to the crash he was either unaware (unlikely) of this recommendation, temporarily unable to heed this advice for any number of reasons, or he decided to throw it to the wind..

BTW, I do worry about trees next to the road, but rather in a way that makes that I'm aware of their presence and not having cause to meet them through other events.

* if correct, that's nearly twice the speed limit for that road.

Re: @AndyS

I would have thought that not having a massive block of incompressible cast iron or aluminium in between you and the other object limits the amount of energy that can be absorbed by the crumple zones when compared to an empty void.

I think you have that the wrong way round. With that massive block of incompressible cast iron or aluminium, an impact that displaces the front of the engine will displace the back by more or less the same amount (give or take the deformability of mostly bolted on stuff). With a bonnet holding separate bits of gear such as boxes of electronics and the ventilation/aircon system for the passenger compartment, you can design the front crumple zone for optimum energy absorbtion; any incompressibility of the bits in it is way less relevant.

Re: Toss a Fluke DVOM in the rescue truck

And a thermometer: you want to know whether any of the battery cells has developed internal problems, and is now near the point of thermal runaway.

Never mind that for this you need to poke around in whatever inaccessible place (design, and/or state of wreck) the batteries are.

Re: UPS

"A car battery - which is what a UPS is, tied to an inverter - is 12v 400A or more. I guarantee you that you don't want that discharging through you in any way."

No. A car battery is 12V & 400AH. Amp-Hours is the unit. That means it is theoretically rated to supply 400amps for 1 hour or 200 for 2 hours etc.

400Ah is a honking big car battery; most are 40 to 70Ah for family cars, and up to 100Ah for the average van. I read it as 400A current capability, or in car battery parlance, Cold Cranking Amps, the current it can deliver to your start motor on a frosty morning with your engine's content resembling molasses.

Re: best advice. Second best, do exactly what firefighters...

A water short here is a friend, since it will simply discharge intact cells, taking them out of the equation.

Erm, quickly discharging one of those cells will release all the energy present in it, heating the cell and whatever it's shorting it. Now consider there are a bunch of those cells in a more or less enclosed space.

Not good.

The problem with applying water is that once you start you have to keep going until every last scrap of exposed lithium is reacted and gone,

As said elsewhere, it's not metallic lithium you're dealing with (holds for all types of Lithium rechargeables; only primary cells contain some metallic Li). It's a packet of energy that wants to go somewhere, and is capable of doing so vigorously which is, in essence, the problem.

Re: UPS

A car battery is 12v 400A or more.

Correct.

I guarantee you that you don't want that discharging through you in any way.

The average person's resistance between their fingertips is several tens of kOhms. Now please apply Ohm's Law to calculate the current through a 12kOhm* resistor, with a 12V, or even 24V source.

1mA with 12V, or 2mA in case of a 24V battery.

Which will take even a small 40Ah battery 4000 hours to discharge. I couldn't handle that, but rather because of boredom and getting hungry, not because of that one milliamp

Any actual danger from an UPS is the AC output and other mains circuitry, same as conventional mains.

There has been, AFAIK, one fatality from a 9V battery, when a sailor rammed the probes of his Simpson VOM through the skin on the fingers of his left and right hand, with the current now finding a much lower resistance path through his body's internals, including his heart.

* makes for easy calculation, and is way below the average. My own is several 100kOhm, even when sweaty.

Re: A technology dilema

I would guess they'd have made sure they were stood on something insulating and started cutting anyway.

That will only help against the case where a hazardous voltage (i.e. 50V or more) exists between the car and the ground. With a crashed car not standing on its four wheels only that's not likely to be the case. The problem, as I expect it was, is that it's very likely that one side of the battery pack is now connected to the car body through damaged isolation, and any wire should be treated as now carrying the full voltage of the pack against the body. With over 300V present you don't want to accidentally touch a frayed wire, and the amperage available will make cutting stuff not the sanest of propositions.

Car journalist fail

Tesla investigating accident is like a butcher certifying his own meat

The gist of the article is that he thinks Tesla should not be involved (I can see both pro and con that argument), but there's one particular fail: "Er rijden al zeker zes jaar elektrische auto's rond. Van Nissan en Renault weet ik dat de accu bij een crash wordt ontladen, zodat er geen spanning meer op de auto staat". Translated: Electric cars have been around for six years already. I know that with Nissan and Renault the batteries are discharged, so there's no voltage present on the car.

Discharging the batteries would release whatever amount of energy was in them, either causing or exacerbating a fire. I suppose he meant "disconnected", and while it might be a transcription error, it appears to be a direct quote.

Anyway, with a car (and its battery packs) that damaged the fire brigade may well be hesitant in accepting that battery safety measures did work correctly, and the car is now inert.

Re: standard operating procedures

It shows where to cut it open,

I'm not sure if the tree knew about those instructions. Judging from available images, it probably didn't, and I can't blame the fire brigade for being hesitant because of that.

Re: Traditional EV

The sulphuric acid is dangerous but easily and quickly diluted with water.

Or milk.

Re: standard operating procedures

I'm not sure how many of these got wrapped around trees and combusted

Not without a rocket sled and a couple of gallons of petrol.

World eats its 10 millionth Raspberry Pi

Re: Oh no, they've gone all Apple

The first one would be going all Microsoft.

Microsoft? You mean HP, don't you, and only if there was just one single Pi on that pallet.

Spoof an Ethernet adapter on USB, and you can sniff credentials from locked laptops

Re: Yes, that's one of the bad design decisions of USB

If you replace your keyboard, for example, and you must enter a password,

Hot-plugging while locked only for HID, anything else can wait until the user is at the console again. There'll probably be flaws in this approach too and other ways to extract credentials from a locked machine, but at least this attack will be foiled.

Wired

If the laptop has an ethernet port already, you can simply plug into that to get the same effect.

For an autonomous device able to collect the data the same way as described here that would require a short length of cable, a port (or at least the magnetics thereof), something that speaks IP, and a power source. Doesn't need to be much bigger than the USB dongle, but not all laptops have Ethernet ports anymore, and if they do they're often not quite as accessible as its USB ports. Desktop PCs have their network port somewhere on the rear and nearly always in use anyway, but a free USB port on the front would be there in a lot of cases.

And the USB device gets provided with power by the target.

Re: Inconspicuous dongle

If the idea is to leave the dongle connected to a LAN for remote access then it needs to plugged in permanently.

Have you read the article? It doesn't. It collects the credentials the PC thinks it's sending to the domain controller (because that new interface is now the default gateway), then it gets pulled out again by the cleaner/janitor/inconspucuous visitor. Needs 13 seconds for that.

Afterwards the collected data gets used to access the target in some other way.

Second 'dimmer switch' star spotted

Star Constructors, Inc.

There's probably some outfit similar to Magrathea, but dealing in stars, not planets.

And they're clearly sourcing electrical kit from Lucas.

Dude, you got a Dell lawyer: HPE sues high-flying ex-exec after defection to EMC

"innovative methodologies"

[citation needed], as they say.

It's time for humanity to embrace SEX ROBOTS. For, uh, science, of course

Re: The ROTM began long ago

You want the XQJ-37 Pan-Sexual Roto-Plooker

Lose a satellite? Us? China silent on fate of Gaofen civilian/spy sat

we even know of the failures of the puny Nork rockets

North Korea tends to announce theirs, so that their capability to utterly destroy the imperialist capitalist scum won't be swept under the carpet. It's therefore comparatively easy for observers to view the brilliant achievements of the North Korean scientists and engineers, even if they then need to try to belittle those achievements by claiming there were only three successful launches where actually there were four, with two so perfectly alike and synchronised that they appeared to the ignorant as being photoshopped.

Tech-for-insurers biz out of action for 10 days now. Hope they had, er...

the mirror was some 15 minutes behind

That's not a mirror, that's a backup of sorts.

The HP SAN gear I know is easy enough to run as a real remote mirror set. And if you don't want that because you want to be able to cut the link in case some data at the primary site gets corrupted and you want to keep the secondary site from joining in the fun, you have to have some kind of cutout switch you can activate, which obviously requires you (or some monitoring stuff) to detect the problem within the replication delay.

The primary konking out because of a power failure would have been taken care of with a real mirror.

Appliance-maker Liebherr chillin' with Microsoft, prototyping another Internet fridge

Re: Never mind all that...

What sort of barbarian keeps Chianti in the /fridge/?!??

Nothing wrong with that

Re: Only question I have about a 'connected' appliance....

1. People think it is cool

It's a fridge.

It's supposed to be.

Liebherr

Has another division known for building gear that can move shit out of the way.

I've got a job for them

'I'm sorry, your lift has had a problem and had to shut down'

Elevator

"Phil arguably beats Charles, though, because this Sydney lift wanted a login and was running Windows98 well after it was deprecated"

"Where do you want to go today?"

"Up"

The elevator will then inquire whether you have considered all the possibilities that down might offer you.

Still got a floppy drive? Here's a solution for when 1.44MB isn't enough

Re: @ D@v3

(like whatever was used for transferring the signal to the tape head).

In those MP3player-to-cassette adapters, it tends to be just another cassette head. Problem with 8-track is that the head moves vertically, so your contraption has to deal with that.

Re: @Stuart Longland

I wonder how hard it'd be to sense the position of the head.

A CCD out of a (small) scanner, like for business cards?

Re: What I'd like to see

A USB dongle that I can plug into a PVR (or other box) that will appear to the box to be a standard USB drive, but in reality connects wirelessly to wherever your actual storage resides.

There's the Eye-fi SD card, adding wireless connectivity to certain digicams (not all of them, and I doubt that it'd work in a SD card reader which you'd need to plug one into any random USB host).

Re: Datavue Spark

One retro-project that I did attempt was to put an 8 GB (8 because the computer won't see any more) IDE SSD in a circa-1994 Thinkpad 701C (butterfly keyboard), for sexy and silent (no fan) computing--but I didn't make it work.

As I have a couple of 701's, one of them rather broken electronically, a project I have in mind is a Butterfleee: an Asus EEE in a Butterfly casing. Requires several round tuits, though, which haven't turned up yet. And it's probably going to morph into a ButterPi once those tuits do materialise.

The Libretto 110 with a 16G PATA SSD works like a charm. It's got W98SE on it; but I do have Linux distros from around that time ...

Re: Only real use for this one....

but not the more manufacturer specific ones like variable speed Sirius computer floppies, CBM PETs, Apple ][ etc.

I don't know about the other ones, but Apple ][ drives didn't use a hardware stepper controller in the drive itself for the head positioner; the controller generated the required signals in software, driving the stepper motors directly from the controller through 4 transistors. Cheaper initially because the drives contained less electronics, but soon the balance tipped as standard drives were produced in ever-greater numbers. Several ][ clones offered floppy controllers that had a standard Shugart interface.

Re: Really?

Seldom have I seen a better example of the answer to a question that no one asked you.

There, FTFY.

Re: Yeah, but...

Also, since this is an 8-bit wide parallel connection, why is the speed listed as Kilobits per second instead of Kilobytes per second?

Because it isn't (parallel, that is)

Re: Looks over engineered

You need to add a level converter to the Pi anyway (Pi GPIO's are 3.3V logic, floppy drive is 5V logic), a pin header in the right place, couple of Blinken LEDs, and design a chassis to mount it all on anyway. Once you're dealing with all that, you might as well design the entire circuit board using any parts you're familiar with that are fit for the task.

Building one around a Pi is probably fine when you need just a few and you don't care much about a cobbled-together look. But if you're into runs of a hundred or more and they're going to be used in wildly different gear such as CNC machines, synthesisers and traffic light controllers spending some time on engineering can be quite worthwhile.

Re: 3.5Mb? Floppy?

Plenty of things used to plug into a floppy connector and NOT work without an OS driver (Zip Drives, Tape drives, MO drives etc)

Unless you can build a device that acts as a floppy as seen by the floppy controller and the BIOS, which would mean something that acts as if it has one or two heads (drive controller limitation), 1024 cylinders and 63 sectors (BIOS limitation), AND reads/writes data in a format compatible with the floppy disk controller, you'll need a driver or TSR to make it appear to the OS as a storage device. And you still had to tell the system, again through some driver or TSR, that there was another 'floppy' drive with an unusual number of tracks and sectors, where the BIOS setup only allowed 40/80 tracks and 8/9/15/18 sectors.

BTW, I've only seen tape drives connected to the floppy controller. ZIP were IDE, hooked up to the parallel port, or (later) USB. MO were predominantly SCSI. LS120 were IDE, and I think those 21MB flopticals were too, but I never saw one of those. In all those cases you wanted a faster interface because of the larger data capacity; with those QIC80 tapes it didn't really matter because the medium was slow

Re: @ D@v3

FWIW, it connects to the host via a (parallel) floppy drive connector,

Picking a nit: floppy cables may have 34 conductors (half of them ground), but parallel they're not. There's one serial data signal, plus a bunch of drive control and status signals such as step, direction, drive select, track 0 and write protect.

Ice to see you! Windows 10 fix for freezing PCs finally flung at folks

Re: Microsoft doesn't say if the update will fix the other issues-

Given past history,

Well, present history and future history did have to wait until time travel had been made possible.

Making us pay tax will DESTROY EUROPE, roars Apple's Tim Cook

Re: So, paying tax will destroy Europe

What it will destroy is your mile-high revenue generated by the difference between slave wages and the obscene prices you sell your stuff at.

Destroy? It's not an insignificant sum, but it's just a quarter of APPL's annual PROFIT.

Cook, stop moaning. Neither you, nor anyone employed by Apple* is going to be reduced to eating stale bread and wearing second-hand clothes.

* explicitely excluding supplier's employees, if that wasn't obvious.

USBee stings air-gapped PCs: Wirelessly leak secrets with a file write

Re: Air-gapped...

Laptop.

Known for being well-suited for sticking industrial interface cards in (SCADA).

Also prevents keyboard recording.

They do not.

Reports: Autopilot will go on strike if you're not paying attention

Re: eh?

"music is muted"? My first thought is that it should be cranked to wake the driver up.

And switched to the first few seconds of Pink Floyd's "Time".

Chinese CA hands guy base certificates for GitHub, Florida uni

Re: "the company would 'do better'"

They can't do any worse.

They can, though they might need to hire external "expertise" to achieve "better" results.

Sysadmin sticks finger in pipe, saves data centre from flood

Re: There's nothing quite like...

AC starts leaking in a LAN room,

Well, a computer room, not a dedicated LAN room, although it involved the LAN. And it wasn't much of a computer room either, merely a repurposed office where they had installed a raised floor to house a pair of VAX8200's.

The problem was the LAN getting gradually flakier, so I was called in to figure out what was happening, and solve it. After lifting a floor tile to check where the AUI cable went, it immediately became clear what the problem was: apparently the aircon had sprung a leak, and there was a serious quantity of a strange yellowish fluid under the raised floor. Pulling on the cable it transpired that the coolant had dissolved the linoleum flooring into something custard-like, engulfing a DELNI and some other unidentifiable stuff.

Getting a few AUI cables and a new DELNI, simply put on top of one of the systems, took care of the LAN problems; whatever they did with the custard was NMP.