Posts by Sailingfree

Outback shocker left Aussie techie with a secret not worth sharing

Done the kzzrrtt trick too

Again old skool telephony, live system, 50V battery.

This time in the UK in the late 70s and I was installing some new shiny digital optical kit for a big utility in a room full of gently humming racks and blinking lights After the mechnical installation was done, the next step was to connect the new kit to the 50VDC bus bar which was of course live. This involved feeding the big fat red wire through trunking and racks, tying it up neatly with waxed string into the power loom and then wrapping it round a tag on the bus. It then needed soldering to the bus!! We had an almighty 'unearthed' soldering iron for just this job, so when it was really hot and almost glowing I touched the iron to the tag and kzzzrrttt *BANG*, silence and at least one 'oh f**k' from the asembled station staff. The cable to the iron was a smoldering smoking dripping mess. Lucky I was wearing large glasses fashionable at the time as I was showered with bits of molten copper, thankfully no serious burns. Turns out a helpful apprentice had noticed the iron was not earthed and 'fixed' it on a previous job. Took out the west midlands network for several hours while everything was fixed up..

Soon after they changed the procedure so a nut and bolt was used to connect new feeds to the bus bars with a crimped eyelet.

Japan complains Fukushima water release created terrifying Chinese Spam monster

Re: Japanese versus Chinese seafood

puhlease some of us are eating lunch ....

False negative stretched routine software installation into four days of frustration

so roll on the weekend ...

How Arm aims to squeeze device makers for cash rather than pocket pennies for cores

Re: Licencing Per-Device

I take your point about the effect on obtaining components, but in my experience all the boards I’ve come across with ARM processors have the chip firmly soldered to the board, are there actually any socketed ARM processors.

Don't worry, that system's not actually active – oh, wait …

Not very IT related, but it was just before going off to UNI in the mid 70's. I had a job as a night porter in a large hotel in Norwich. At one point we had a film crew in and they all appeared one moring at 5am demanding breakfast. The duty manager had sloped off with his girlfriend so it was left to myself and another raw recuit to fry up bacon, eggs and make some toast. There was a huge toaster machine that would do a couple of dozen slices at a time that I asked the other guy to start up and get the slices ready for the crew. Sadly he thought it would be quicker if he moved it to to the middle of the kitchen - just under the fire detection system. Cue a whole hotel fire alarm, fire engines, police and lots of very angry guests in night clothes milling around. We had a talking to and actually thanked for trying to help out but that we shouldn't have had to try to make breakfast and never saw that manager again.

Take the morning off because Outlook has already

Re: Microsoft proves that the 365 branding was a terrible choice

And of course the always predictable Portuguese Take Another Plane

A kitchen splashbork on sale at the Cardiff IKEA

Re: Biggest problem with PIs

It’s down to the sd card using a FAT fs for booting which is super fragile, and most standard Linux having everything on an ext4 read/write partition. With some hackery putting most of the log files, tmp files etc in ram and mounting / read only I run my pi boat computer with a read only fs with no problems for nearly 4 years now, and have done similar for bananapis. But yes, in general this is why standard raspberry pi’s are *not* a good idea for grown up signage systems. Emmc is good, but you still want to run on a read only file system.