Posts by Jess-- 387 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Nov 2009
The joys of a sagging mains supply.
we used to run rides and always had big batteries on charge (for the kiddies sit on rides) and you could watch the ammeter on the chargers bounce up & down in time with the bass from the sound system not from vibration purely from the power cable dropping voltage when the sound system pulled max power.
I remember grafting a C64 (that someone had crushed) into a C16 case creating what a lot of people at the time looked unusual (maybe even cool), A black C64
As for the A600, I'm not sure what the drawbacks were compared to the A500 (other than the loss of the expansion port & numeric keypad)
the built in modulator was far cleaner (signal wise) than the add-on for the A500 and properly combined composite without having use the modulator was useful (and a surprisingly clean signal).
The addition of the built in IDE interface was very useful (mine ended up with an ide - compactflash adaptor and a 256mb card in it), the PCMCIA slot was useful too, mine ended up with a 4mb memory card in (in addition to the extra 1mb with clock in the trapdoor).
I did add in a second kickstart rom (1.3 soldered on top of the 2.5 rom with the chip enable lines switchable on each) so that I could switch back to a real 1.3 rom rather than the soft version that was available but that was more of a "I have the spare chip and I can do this" rather than needing it for anything.
I suspect that the miles of steel rail make quite a nice antenna.
as I understand it the most basic (and used) block detection relies on train wheels shorting the left rail to the right rail and it's this basic detection that fails, it doesn't matter what you are using to carry the signal from the sensor to somewhere else when it's the sensor that being tricked.
My last few phones (various manufacturers) have all had the option to open the camera (current one is swipe the camera icon up on the lockscreen) and snap away without unlocking the phone, my current one will also let you view the pics you have taken (but only the ones you have just taken) in the photo gallery app but disables anything beyond view / delete options unless you unlock the phone
A pub pool table I used to play on was similar, it used to take 2 x 20p coins to release the balls but with only one coin in the right hand slot it would still wobble the rack enough to drop the coins with a few attempts and return the coin, rather than take the p*ss we only cheated every other game so that the table still made enough money to stay.
Substitute items have been fairly decent for our orders with most being things like AAA batteries instead of AA.
Our most annoying one was an order shortly before christmas that included several bottles of spirits (presents + own consumption) that were all delivered with the security covers in place, needless to say I now know the exact layout and strength of magnets required to release the catches. I did however pass one on as a present with the cover still in place as a joke with the gift recipient.
Surely anyone trying to set up a private 5g network is going to run into a major problem of not having a license to operate it?
Voda (or any other operator) selling femtocells that interlink with their network would get through because the equipment would be operating under their license but fred bloggs setting up their own network using raspberries and off the shelf radio modules are going to end up operating on frequencies that are already licensed to other people (and those people paid very heavily for those licenses)
I suspect that the amount of usable signal needed for an accurate time check from multiple sources would be far lower than the amount of signal needed to carry a phone call.
also a minimum of three sources would only be needed for an initial fix, once fixed a system could work on only two (since you are unlikely to move between the two possible positions in the time between readings).
Obviously the more sources of signal the better the fix accuracy will be, but when signals are lost most systems degrade gracefully either using dead reckoning or using inbuilt gyros to work out where they are moving, even the decade old pioneer stereo in my car has gyros and a compass built in, using these combined with a speed pulse from the ECU results in surprisingly accurate tracking when gps reception is blocked. although it did take the system a few 100 miles of driving for it to train itself for the sensors (presumably it needed to work out orientation and how far the vehicle travelled per pulse from the ecu)
I suspect that their "direct to cloud devices" will simply run just enough to connect to a remote virtual machine (hosted somewhere on azure) with anything plugged into usb ports etc automatically passed through to the VM.
of course with the need to run windows (or anything more than a VM client) the architecture of these devices wouldn't need to be x86 based or very powerful since all it's really doing is streaming video & audio.
they will probably end up being something very like the Steam Link boxes (which from memory were Arm7 based)
I recall speaking with someone involved with early terrain following attempts and being told of a slight error that they ran up against.
A few tests had been performed during the autumn / winter and everything had worked perfectly but on the day in january when it was demonstrated to the bigwigs it took off perfectly and went into a straight level flight as planned and then flew (perfectly straight and level) into the side of a mountain.
The final cause was found to be that the terrain wasn't being recognised any more because it was covered in a couple of inches of snow.
around here all the fttc connections fall over with the first flash within 5 miles from a thunderstorm.
it then takes 4 minutes with no further strikes to reconnect.
since a decent storm could take us offline for hours at a time we added a 4g dongle to the router as a failover, now we only notice if the fttc connection is down by the increased speed of the 4g connection.
You would almost think that these companies have furloughed most of their staff. Of course less people around means less chance of someone walking past a failing UPS and thinking that seems hotter than usual, we should check that it's ok.
DJI will be against it as it will deter people from flying drones due to ongoing costs even when the drone is gathering dust on a shelf.
With the added costs if people buy less drones DJI as (seemingly) the largest well known maker will be the hardest hit.
The cost to DJI to add the capability would be under $10 (probably nearer $5) per new drone, for them it's a one time cost.
for the consumer they have the cost of registration (presumably renewed annually per drone) and the cost of maintaining the data connection.
Running an IBM Model M keyboard (still with manufacturing label 1986 on the back) and it's still solid. A few keys have lost some of their texture (but not the lettering), it gets stripped every year or so and the keycaps take a trip through the washing machine & dryer (tied in an old football sock).
when it finally dies I will have to replace it with one of my 1987 ones.
the only downsides are that it can sound like a machine gun and there are no windows keys for various shortcuts.
I had to manually spin up a 2.5" external hard drive with the top cover removed recently (1Tb).
It had been dropped while running and the power had disconnected at the exact moment it hit the floor meaning that a combination of g-forces and lack of power left the heads on the platters rather than retracted.
when it tried to spin itself up it couldn't retract the heads (because they weren't floating) and it couldn't turn the platters because the heads were stuck.
A well timed spin of the spindle got the platters moving (with a screech) and the drive came back to life with everything apart from a couple of files intact.
once copied the drive was destroyed with a hammer.
I would love to know how much damage you think can be caused by the drone I have been flying around (for a bit of fun in the wind) this morning, it's a little over 2 inches square and an inch high.
I suspect the only other things in the air that it represents a danger to are insects.
my planes and helicopter on the other hand are seriously dangerous but aren't drones so from your point of view require no license or training
used to be duplexed with the base station operating around 451-453 Mhz and mobiles operating 13.9 Mhz higher (so if you hear the base on 452.8 the mobiles were on 466.7).
then they added a pitch inversion system (low audio frequencies become high and vice versa) which was referred to as Crypton.
then they switched to tetra and I gave up listening
I once had a spare nokia that had been deep fried (literally in a chip fryer) for 10 minutes.
after opening it up and mopping up the oil it powered up and worked perfectly, the screen looked a bit odd thanks to the oil between it and the backlight but it was perfectly usable.
never did get rid of the smell though.
They call you to try and sign you up for a new shiny & another 2 year lock in.
when it becomes clear that you aren't going to bite they offer to switch you over to sim only with a 12 month lock in.
only if you really insist do they switch you to a sim only monthly rolling contract
I think the last time I bought a complete system was somewhere around 1994, everything since then has been bits and pieces.
I tend to replace bits at 4 year intervals so...
year 1 : new motherboard / cpu (ram if required)
year 2 : new hard drives (the old ones are 4 years old and probably fairly full)
year 3 : new video card(s)
year 4 : anything else that needs replacing
current system..
I7 4790k (water cooled)
32Gb ram
nvidia gtx970 driving 3 23" ips screens @1920x1080 (5760x1080)
1tb SSD + 2x4tb spinning rust
It seems a lot of places with decent engineering capabilities churned out some variation of the 50P coins when they were first introduced, a "rumour" I heard was of a large facility near Hemel that dedicated almost an entire week of night shifts to mass producing passable copies and that at the end of the week all of the dies and cutters set up for the job were destroyed.
of course the fakes absolutely flooded the local area but were being accepted everywhere (because the fake coins outnumbered the genuine coins the genuine coins were suspected of being fakes).
About a month later the police visited the facility with a message along the lines of "We know it was you, You know it was you, but we can't prove it.... just don't do it again"
A distant relative was stationed overseas after the end of ww2 and ended up where the german subs were being decommissioned.
On his return to the UK a lot of his friends had souvenirs confiscated (guns etc) but all he had on him were a standard kit bag (no extras), 1 packet of cigarettes, 1 lighter and one matchbox.
The matchbox bought a farm outright and paid for livestock.
It was packed solid with platinum contacts that had been removed from switchgear on the german subs
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