Posts by Stratman 803 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jul 2007
Not strictly on topic, but 'interesting' nevertheless.
Many moons ago a colleague always carried a modified 13A mains plug in his staying-away-in-a-hotel kit. The fuse was replaced by the thickest copper wire he could fit in it, the same wire joined L and N. When he was kept awake by a television blasting at full volume because the occupant of a nearby room had fallen asleep, he'd plug it in and take out the breaker giving him a good night's sleep.
Way back when a prince was marrying his blushing bride at St. Paul's Cathedral, our OB truck was to provide the main coverage. Come the morning of the big day we had an 'everybody must attend' safety briefing. Our truck was parked on the far corner of a grass square, diagonally opposite the side door which was our way in. For the few days before we had been taking the direct route across the grass rather than the path round two sides of the rectangle. "On no account must you walk across the grass to go in to the cathedral," said the scary man doing the briefing. He explained that's what terrorists would do, take the direct route. "Anybody who steps off the path will be shot."
On a similar vein, Trooping the Colour during Northern Ireland 'troubles' brought similar arrangements. One summer little Stevie was given the job of getting the sound of the Queen's arrival at Horse Guards. "Right, so there are police snipers on those roofs and you want me to point this at the Queen? Okay." 'This' was a Sennheiser 816 gun mike in a Rycote windshield (non furry variety) with pistol grip.
A long time ago we were televising something from a big London theatre. As various things were powered up and switched on, a cameraman (EMI 2001 for spotters, shows how long ago it was) called in and said his viewfinder was black, no picture. We looked at his camera and there was black on the main output as well. I trotted inside to troubleshoot and spotted the problem as I walked towards it. Phil, our professional cameraman and all round nice guy, had forgotten to remove the lens cap. It cost him a round at lunchtime.
When on an outside broadcast and monitors or viewfinders suffered from reflections, a quick and easy fix of sorts was to put some neutral density (ND) filter sheet over the screen. It worked quite well, reducing the reflection's brightness relative to the image by fifty percent. The light from thereflection has to go through the ND twice (once on the way in, once on the way out), the image only once. Turning up the contrast a bit solved the other side effect.
When on an OB quite a few years ago, covering a world famous dog show, we rigged a couple of standalone portakabins with various bits of equpiment. As is the way of things their names were scrawled with magic marker on 50mm wide PVC tape and stuck to the doors. We called them Additional Recording and Sound Equipment, and Field Editing and Compilation Kit.
We got a few knowing smiles, mostly from fellow tekky types, and they stayed there for the duration.
At his primary school my eldest son, now in his middle thirties, was in his classroom one day when the teacher announced that something had gone wrong and the school computer (a BBC Micro) couldn't print any more. My lad, about seven years old at the time, put up his hand and asked if he could have a look. Ever keen to encourage inquisitiveness the teacher agreed. He switched off the computer and printer, removed the printer lead, blew in both ends and switched everything back on. To the utter joy and amazement of his teacher it all worked.
We had a CPC6128 at home and even at that tender age he'd learnt that with faults like that it was usually the bit in between that was the problem.
I've never been more proud!
Before retirement I worked for a world famous broadcasting corporation in outside broadcasts. We had quite a large technical stores, where kit over and above that which our OB vehicles were equipped was stored for when it was needed. Extra cameras, vt machines, microphones, the full gamut. A storekeeper noticed that during quiet periods a lot of this kit stayed in the store. To cut a long story short, he ran a short term hire business using the equipment he figured wouldn't be needed for a few days. He did very well out of it, until a random audit threw up some questions that only he could answer.
A long time ago I worked for a world famous broadcasting corporation based in Britain, in telly outside broadcasts. At the time we were using Philips LDK5 cameras whose base ends had two cameras worth side by side in a ninteen inch rack with their hefty power supplies under the desks, 3U above ground level. These had protruding push button on/off switches. Being Philips they provided guards around them and being Philips they usually fell off. The spring was nicely strong and they didn't change state until they were released. This is important.
We were doing a routine Match of the Day one weekend and midway through the first half a colleague who was sat at his desk stretched out his legs and we all heard an ominous click. "Don't move!" we yelled at him. The sole of his shoe had depressed the guardless on/off button and he now faced the rest of the half holding the moderately strong action switch pressed in . Oh how we laughed.
To his credit he lasted the rest of the first half without releasing it but looked in some discomfort as he limped off for his half time cuppa.
I enabled it in about:config (and restarted Firefox, to save another fifty posts) but it doesn't work for me. I went to a German newspaper site, the icon was nowhere to be seen. Asking the intertubes suggests Fifefox Nightly is needed at the moment, and as you mention in the article, release 118 is when the masses will be blessed with it.
Make it as easy to cancel Prime as it is to sign up. Same number of clickthroughs, buttons of equal prominence, no double, triple, quadruple or more negatives and make joining Prime a separate transaction as opposed to now where it's intricately entangled with making a purchase.
Bitcoins that I mined uses ASIC not GPU, that is ETH. Is it wasteful? Heck yes. That is the point. It cost to create it, so it has value
Not to me it doesn't. It only has value if someong else thinks it does, and I'd seriously question their judgement and perception of value.
Crypto-currency markets are being rocked after a popular token lost 99% of its value, dragging down a so-called "stablecoin" with it. (Link to BBC Tech report on tumbling funny money)
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