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That's a good amputee-cat video, but there is no running. There's accelerated walking, call it scampering if you want, but it's not running.

I've ordered a number of "Velleman" kits http://www.vellemanusa.com/ for various projects. They're quite similar to heathkits and others mentioned. The problem with kits like those is that they don't really teach you about electronics so much as they're just good soldering practice. A bit more professional and adult in execution than the wire+spring kits sold by rat-shack but just as empty in the theory it teaches.

If you're really interested in leaning about electronics the first thing you need to do is pick a project, pick something that someone else has already done and posted the schematics and other information about. Then head over to to this website Its the home page for a highschool electronics club but IMO it's some of the best info on the web on the basic theory about how electronics work as well as how to read diagrams, understand components and solder them together, everything you need to get started.

now you've got a project and some basic knowledge head over to a site like SparkFun loads of useful parts and kits to get you started on nearly any project. I order 99% of my parts from Digikey if they don't have it there you'd be hard pressed to find it elsewhere, it's not very beginner friendly though... Mouser Electronics is much more suited for beginners but their pricing is also a little higher and their selection not as good.

I didn't get into electronics until I was in college and I didn't study electronics in college at all. I basically just picked a project and then just did as much research and self teaching as I needed to get it done, then picked a harder project then a harder project until I am where I am today. I've actually had a couple of my custom electronics projects published in magazines and I only started learning this stuff about 6 or so years ago, not even knowing how to solder or what a resistor is. The resources above were invaluable though

Having good equipment is important too. Go to the rat-shack and buy their 15Watt iron, a spring stand with a sponge, some .22mm silver bearing solder, a de-soldering iron, a nice set of helping hands, a nice set of miniature pliers, a nice set of cutters/strippers/crimps, and some 22ga stranded hookup wire. You'll spend about $50 and have pretty much everything you need to tackle any DIY electronics project. You should also consider spending a bit of cash on a good multimeter, which isn't necessary but HIGHLY recommended for troubleshooting or reverse engineering.

Good Luck and have fun :)

I completely agree with your first suggestion, Lessons in Electric Circuits by Tony Kuphaldt. I think he's done a fantastic job.

I would also highly recommend The Electronics Club. There are wonderful explanations, example circuits, and a recommended starter kit of parts and components, including suggestions for how to organize everything. It's a great site.

I completely agree with your first suggestion, Lessons in Electric Circuits by Tony Kuphaldt. I think he's done a fantastic job.

I would also highly recommend The Electronics Club. There are wonderful explanations, example circuits, and a recommended starter kit of parts and components, including suggestions for how to organize everything. It's a great site.

I don't really understand LoC, so I googled a figure.
http://www.uplink.freeuk.com/data.html

10 Terabytes: The printed collection of the US Library of Congress

mage@prometheus:~$ calc 7/8
                0.875
mage@prometheus:~$ calc 10/.875
                ~11.42857142857142857143

11.43 seconds per LoC

And I remember the Oric 1, what's your point? :-)

Apparently the term "JOINT STEREO" is misleading, as there are 2 types. One type is good and the other..not so good. But there is plenty of myth surrounding this. It's not as simple as JOINT_STEREO = bad;

http://harmsy.freeuk.com/mostync/

Heh, parent correct.

For those interested, see the wiki, or this page. "Joint Stereo" can refer to a number of techniques, some of which work better than others, and some implimentations are better than others. I had incorrectly assumed it to be a compression feature not worth the bit savings ~ and it's MusicMatch's fault ;-)

Actually, I think it can all be broken into a complex series of 'nand' logical gates.
http://www.kpsec.freeuk.com/gates.htm#substituting
I mean, unless there's a type of math that computers can't do, I'm no mathematician.

...gotta start saving for that H-alpha telescope. Believe it or not, for about $500 you can buy a telescope that allows you to view the sun through a filter with a bandwidth of less than .1 nm. This gives you an idea of what you can see with it.

Yes, but if you count the Computer Aided Dispatch system for the London Ambulance Service back in 1992, the brits certainly get the prize.

I started on the Apple ][ with Robot Wars. I loved programming those robots so much, that I later wrote my own port of it for Windows. I still have it out there for free with it's own BotBasic language. It still gets some hits and positive comments from punters.

Typically, capacitors discharge like this and batteries like this.

That means the voltage of batteries usually behaves more constant than that of capacitors when discharging. This surely has it's repercussions through the power lost at the power management units.

There's no need to resort to nanoflywheels. All you need is a bridge rectifier. It uses four diodes to convert AC into pulsed DC. There's almost certainly one in the power supply of the computer you're using right now.

Some cool artificial life programs...

Evolutionz
Avida
AntWorld

And a whole list of others here.

Excellent post - very logical and well thought out. Just one comment - a rheostat is usually a two-terminal variable resistor placed in series with a voltage source. It is used adjust the current in a circuit.

The radio volume is adjusted with a potentiometer, which is a three-terminal variable resistor with a wiper to adjust the signal level.

The radio tuning used a variable capacitor similar to the one in this picture http://www.kpsec.freeuk.com/photos/rapid/capvar.jp g

It has two sets of plates with thin polyethylene film between them to prevent shorting. The film also increase the dielectric constant which increases the maximum capacitance in the small volume available. Rotating the control shaft changes the amount the plates overlap, which changes the capacitance. An inductor in parallel with the capacitor provided a resonant circuit. The resonant frequency is expressed by

F = 1 / (2 * pi * sqrt(LC))

where

F = resonant frequency
pi = 3.1415926...
L = inductance in Henries
C = capacitance in Farads

For a typical maximum capacitance of 365 pF, the inductance required to resonate at 560 KHz is 221.29uH. In order to resonate at 1,600 KHz with the same inductor, the capacitance would have to be reduced to 44.7pF.

A separate capacitor ganged with the first is required to tune the local oscillator to a frequency 455KHz above the desired signal.

This allows the incoming signal to mix with the oscillator to produce an intermediate frequency of 455KHz which is where most of the amplification takes place. The concept comes from a French patent during WWI. Armstrong was serving with the US military at the time, and built a version to try to intercept German transmissions, which were thought to be at a much higher frequency than existing receivers could tune to.

Armstrong later got a patent on the concept, and is now considered the father of the superheterodyne techique, as well as the regenerative and superregenerative receivers, and, of course, FM radio transmission and reception. He ended his life by donning his hat and cape and walking off the balcony of his hotel room. Some dozens of floors above the sidewalk below. Mike

As a scuba diver I've been thinking more along the lines of atmospheric pressure. In my opnion a more imediate problem.

The bones becoming weaker takes days (or longer) to become a significant problem) as far as I'm aware.

A bigger or more dense planet will have higher gravity so logically the atmospheric pressure would be greater at ground level.

Assuming the pressure is almost doubled, then there is only 5 hours before they need to think about decompressing. Take a look at http://www.bsac.freeuk.com/bsac88.xls (note every 10 meters the pressure is doubled).

We all know about how if you change pressures too quickly you can get decompression sickness (aka the bends). Well they do it instantly and I've never noticed any decompression chambers on that base.

Commercial divers do something similar. Most only do partial decompression underwater and instead rely on chambers. After all it's not only more comfortable to sit in a pressurized room and do something like sleep, read etc, than float in cold water, but safer (though harder on the body).

More importantly is the risk they have of Gas Embolism (aka burst lung). Where the effects of decompression sickness take a while to set in (relatively speaking), Embolism's can happen almost instantly and over a much smaller pressure difference. Even an instant pressure change of 25% can cause serious problems. eg a change from 1250mb to 1000mb (1bar)

One of the first things you learn when you start diving is to always breathe (or at the very least always breathe out if you're going up). The chest can take a large pressure pushing inwards, the lungs can't take much of a pressure outwards before they tear and you get air in your chest cavity. Just like if you try to put too much air into a baloon, it explodes. Think of that baloon being your lungs.

Ofcourse if the planet is smaller, with a less dense atmosphere (lower pressure) the rick of the lungs exploding is when they go to the planet rather than when they come back.

In the past, BBC developments have shaped (or at least steered) the adoption of technology in the UK

Yeah, so I guess they owe us all big time for that! ;)

i agree.

all programmers should start with wiring 7400 series nand gates and work up from there.

i don't think the modern humanized aspects of programming languages are inheritantly evil, but to start at that level and never comprehend what is going on across the wires is a mistake.

http://www.kpsec.freeuk.com/components/74series.ht m

So it'll be flagging spam as communications from a criminal network. No, wait: "from the mass of emails": that's any message that's not spam is a possible criminal conspiracy!

Actually, spam might work well as the internet equivalent of the shortwave numbers stations: meaningless garbage that actually means something to one specific recipient....

Oh.. right. :) I knew that.

The first system I used with this facility was RISC OS which was on the Acorn 32 bit RISC computers and was back in 1989. In fact the operating system supports a protocol which allows anyone to replace the standard help application. It was another six years before I saw it on a Windows platform.

etc, etc.

Type Ia supernovae take about a month to reach their peak brightness. While this is a Type II, a different class of explosion, I think the timescale is comparable. Accoring to this page the supernova had an apparent visual magnitude of 11.3 in early August. This is a factor of 100 dimmer than the naked eye can see under the best conditions (magnitude 6 is the dimmest the unaided eye can see).

If you're unsure of why a higher number means a dimmer object, or just want more information, czech out the Wikipedia entry on visual magnitudes.

By the way, the last supernova that was visible to the naked eye was SN1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

At least there are other natural herbs in some parts of Europe you can get that are unavailable in the US.

Legend has it they originally banned that one in the US because it competed with the synthetic rope/cotton industry, so there is a precedent for this sort of thing.

Although I personally use VIM with a handful of macros to drive my own todo list, I found the following tools to be really great todo managers (cross platform, console based):

Developer ToDo - http://swapoff.org/DevTodo

ToDo List Manager - http://www.rrbcurnow.freeuk.com/tdl/

HNB (which is also great for many other purposes) - http://hnb.sourceforge.net/

happy to give you a ride down to the local coffee shop.

Do you live in The Netherlands too? Otherwise there is no reason to drive me down to the coffee shop.

As someone who hopes one day to get a private pilots licence, by reading the ASRS I've found out about loads of common mistakes, many of the "holy crap that was close!" variety. The same thing would be harder to implement for the computing industry, but if done right could prevent Therac-25 or London Ambulance Service CADS style disasters.

Damn, Mr Dewey was definitely on to something. Who would've thought the categody 133.7 is fraud"?

I believe that Grey Area in Amsterdam is running a training programme for US proprietors.

You're forgetting the Fisher Price Pixelvision camera, which is still a cult classic. It recorded about 5 minutes of grainy black and white onto a 90-minute audio tape. You could get the things for cheap as hell back in the day and now they're extremely rare as they're wanted by film students and art snobs around the world. I kid you not. I once drove a fella around town while he made a short film on one of these things.

The pixelvision.

That said, this is probably overkill for your stated purpose of categorizing email messages. A good email search engine would probably serve you better.

Columbo's First Name and The Supreme Court - The "Philip Columbo" Story

It might not be the exact recipe from your local Indian restaurant, but you can find a recipe here or here for instance.

Has anyone else got difficulties getting used to ./'s new colours?

Then, I bought a bunch of 10/100 Ethernet cards that had EEPROM sockets and used EtherBoot to create a boot image for it. You can also make a boot image on the web here, here, or here .

You'll need a way to program the EEPROM, but there are lots of places to get info about that.

The only directories that are not identical across the virtual machines are /etc, /var, along with the obvious /dev, /boot, /proc, and so on. /usr and /home are the same mount on each "machine."

Well, it should be easy, considering Doom was already ported to Pocket PC here and here.

You can just get the abandonware version for PC; there are a few sites that have it up, including even the star map. Works great on multiboot OS/2, but then again, everything not expressly designed to be incompatible works great on OS/2.

Enjoy Freenet & Frost while you can.

I have used freeuk's dial up service (with both Windows and Linux - even though its not listed as supported by them)

Although I haven't used it for a while (I think the last time was 9 months ago whilst setting up a new office whilst waiting for our DSL line to be fitted) one used to be able to sign up instantly for a free account.

There are many other free ISP's - just do a google search

click this link

Get 18000 C64 songs in the transfer volume of 30 minutes 128kBit/s internet radio: The High Voltage SID collection.

aww JEAH! old sk00l ghetto synth in da hizzaus!

as mentioned above, the sidstation uses SID chips from the commodore 64 to generate all sorts of crazeh beeps and gronks-- the site also has a ton of demos as well.

for all you crazeh c64 SID toon fans, be sure to check out the High Voltage SID Collection! tons of great SID toons from your childhood, including, but not limited to:

- Contra! bew bew bee boop ba boodaboop!
- Commando! chikkachikkabowgronk!
- Ultima IV! ba blinng! ba da bling! ba da bling. ba da blonng...
- and who could forget the cutting edge voice synth of Neuromancer? SSSHOMM SHINNGS MMEEEVVERR CHANNNSGE!

you'll need the SIDPlay plugin to listen to these things with winamp. don't forget you can move the slider doohickey to choose from multiple tracks within each SID toon! WOOHOO!

It's an inside joke. This web page has more information.

And this for Jodie Shaw

Early post for Jodie Shaw!

As a Computer Engineering Major, this tosses a significant portion of my degree out the window, but, I suppose, it's a good thing. Aliasing (Java) and Folding (no link) were always a pain.

"The only thing called "America" without a north/south/central modifier is the United States Of America."
May be when you say America like:
Capitan America
America On-Line

But America is a continent. Africa is a continent too.
If America uses north/south/central modifier is because the TV want's.

Because most of Yankies think that they are the most special people in the world. And they have forget that his grandfathers where from Africa, Europa and Asia. (Yes this things are continents)
But this news are about Africa not America.

Here are some numbers stations links.

...what kind of person seriously goes to a coffee shop with a view to getting their laptop out and doing a bit of surfing? (actually, come to think of it, the same sort of person who would drink "frappucino"(?), and want to embed video in a Word doc.)

I personally prefer the relative comfort of my desk @ work or my home (in both of these places I can also drink coffee, and it doesn't cost $4 a cup).

The only coffee shop I want to spend time in is the kind they have in Amsterdam ;-)

----------------------------

Oy, you kids. Never played Percy the Potty Pigeon, huh?

And speaking of crap games, the denizens of comp.sys.sinclair have been holding contests for the past few years to see who can make the most tongue-in-cheek parodies of rotten games past (and present). The results are the comp.sys.sinclair Crap Games Compos. This year there's a similar competition for Commodore 64 fans as well. These guys are totally bent, I tell ya. Scan these pages and look at how many of the ideas all of you are coming up with that've already been done.