Slashdot Mirror
Putting the 'Tech' back in 'Low-Tech'?
Bingo Foo asks: "Have you sharpened a pencil lately? Today was my daughter's first day of first grade. Last night, in preparation, I sharpened some pencils for her. I haven't sharpened a pencil in years, and it was an entirely new experience. It's not made of wood! I'm not talking an inferior substitute, either; it was made of some uber-substance, the way Plato would have envisioned a pencil. What other kinds of technology have changed under our noses while we've been upgrading our kernels? How technological has low-tech become?" I would be interested in knowing who made those pencils and what they were made out of, for one thing.
A couple of things I've noticed that have changed:
a) table tennis balls - they don't bust as easily and a stinky yellow gas doesn't come out of them anymore when they do
b) light bulbs - they last longer. nuf zed.
c) the public's attention span - no explanation required
sorry I didn't proof read my work so here it is again sorry I have not thought of all that must I change out side of the computer world and other little things I find on /. for example, take calling card in Europe they seem to have microchips on them.
and many other products, that I can not thing of right now.One of my favorite things in life is when a product with no computer based features gets some, like cars if you look at old cars there is every little computer tech to none depending on how far back you look and now we a GPS telling us to make a right there blocks down and one day we might have internet connectivity in our cars.
I have been thinking about placing a linux PC in the trunk of my car, and setting up a voice recognition mp3 player. with more then a enough space for a few weeks of music.
I can't remember the Web page with the program
When I was a boy the goverment stole everything from us.
I don't know exactly what you may be talking about, it's been years myself since I set eyes on a pencil. But all *my* pencils in high school (about 5 years ago) were made of glue + sawdust.
:-P
While technically still wood, it really _does_ _not_ look like wood until you start taking it apart, or do some research on it.
Of course, I'd heard strange stories of some weird plastic type of pencil, and of course there's the cheap rubber versions.. (inferior imo)
Those damn Chinese pencils! Man, they were impossible to sharpen, though I think they were more "real wood" than most American pencils. They smelled funny when you sharpened them; like sawdust, I suppose.
I also remember the "Princess" brand being the strongest in "pencil pop". Anyone else play pencil pop? It's a stupid game where you crack at the middle of each other's pencil until one breaks. I played it about twice until I got tired of losing pencils.
Are they those wood-like plastic pencils?
Did you know that if you heat them gently over a bunsen burner you can tie them in knots?
The things you discover in high-school chemistry.
One of the guests informed me that there was a shortage of good quality cork in the world (I think only 2 nations produce it or something) and that they had been looking for a replacement for a while. I'm told that it is quite difficult to get a man-made substance to act like natural cork
The advantages of man-made corks are that it won't break up in the bottle, so you don't have bits of cork floating in your drink, and also the man-made cork is more reliable than natural cork (It seals better, so there is less risk of air getting into the bottle and the wine going bad)
If anyone has more accurate info, can you post it? Like I said, I was drinking at this party, and that may have affected my recall of some information... *g*
More recent light bulbs only have most of the air removed, allowing the fillament to oxidise, causing it to fail. The brand of lightbulb sold at my local supermarket seem to have had very little air removed at all, judging by their lifetime.
Try this: http://cajun.sourceforge.net/
I don't know about voice recognition, but it should get you going in the right direction. I've been intending to put a mp3 player in my car too, but I'm having problems with power (I don't want to use an inverter).
I'm just amazed that a manufactured substance is cheaper than wood...granted you have to chop down the tree, but still the idea of it.
Lately, I've seen another ubiquitous item formerly made of a natural substance that is now made of plastic...cups at fast food chains.
I don't know about you, but I prefer the idea of a wooden pencil eventually decomposing - nature knows what to do with it, as opposed to the plastic stuff....This trend will eventually catch up with us when all the garbage dumps are full.
..........FULL STOP.
More recent light bulbs only have most of the air removed, allowing the fillament to oxidise, causing it to fail.
Really? And this imperfect vacuum, is intended as a trick to make you buy more bulbs or is a problem of the manufacturing process?
I thought that bulbs died because of random evaporation of the wolfram of the wire, independently of air.
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Personally, when it comes to non-mechanical pencils, I much prefer REAL wood to any of the new uber-substances they might be using. There's just something satisfying about the way real wood pencils crunch in the pencil sharpener... and the smell of real wood and graphite when they're freshly sharpened.
Now, if only they could invent a wooden pencil that would remain sharp all of the time! Because despite loving wooden pencils, I can't stand the pencil not being sharp... back to good old mechanical pencils.
There's been a scare for the past few years about a cork shortage. Actually, the worldwide cork crop (>90% of which is grown in Portugal) has been susceptible to a taint known as 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA). If you've ever uncorked a bottle and it smelled musty, like damp cardboard or old newspaper, you've experienced a "corked" or tainted bottle of wine. Unfortunately, the human palate can detect as few as 4 parts per trillion of TCA.
Over the past few years, tremendous research has gone into both cork alternatives and remedies to this blight. So, currently we can choose between a number of plastic and other artificial cork alternatives (Cellukork, Twin Top). At the same time, the TCA blight seems to have been at least contained, if not eliminated. According to Amorim, the cork crop is growing at around 4% per year. This is good news, but considering the fact that cork can be harvested from a tree only once every 9 years, I believe we're going to see a lot more artificial replacements in the future...
deGleep
lumpy@DONTLIKEPORKINACAN.fc.net
"I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers."
*The wine is invariably cheap shit, and you deserve better.
*Plastic corks are driving the Portugese cork farmers out of business, with fairly disastrous results for an impossibly beautiful part of the earth.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
The pencils that I find really amusing are the mechanical ones that are made to look like the classic yellow No. 2 wooden pencil. The lead feeds automatically as you use it, and can't be pushed back up into the body, so it marks on the inside of bags and pockets like a real wooden pencil too.
For farm animals. Until the past few years, most farmers/ranchers wrote numbers and letters onto the eartags using a long-lasting paint of sort. It has about the consistency of india ink and is a pain in the ass to work with as it's quite permanent on most everything. (It'll dye formica countertops, etc.)
Now they've switched over to a sandwiched rubber system. A layer of black rubber sandwiched between two outer layers of colored rubber. One simply takes a dremel type tool and etches the number out. The tags last a lot longer, have more contrast, and are far easier to work with.
----
----
Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
I think we're going to be seeing a lot of this - new technology masquerading as old tech.
Look at the e-book formats - there's no practical reason why an e-book should open like a traditional book. That design was made for bound sheets of paper, not for a single electronic display surface and a cover. Nevertheless, e-book designers who forego the oldfashioned "opening book" design are asking for trouble.
What I'm getting at is that what we're seeing is new technology being deliberately designed to evoke the traditional tech. The point, I suppose, is that people are comfortable with the old tech, and that designers are trying not to scare them too much by offering them a total redesign. Instead, they are getting "masquerade tech", which appears innocuously similar to stuff they are already familiar with.
Now, back in the Hugo Gernsback days, in the early days of our fascination with high-tech, people couldn't get things futuristic enough - even the cars had wings, flanges and all kinds of totally superfluous stuff. Heck, even the refrigerators looked like space stations.
So, what has changed? Why do people suddenly feel more comfortable with old-fashioned usage paradigms, favouring them over futuristic design?
My guess is that it has to do with the acceleration of technological change. People are beginning to feel the psychological crunch of the fast-approaching Singularity, and they are reacting by seeking comfort in traditional modes of thought.
If I'm right, we'll see more of this, not less. As the pace of technological change accelerates, the popularity of masquerade tech should increase.
Of course, I could be wrong, and this could be just another fashion fad. I doubt it, though - I think this is a more deply rooted phenomenon.
- Peter Ravn Rasmussen
I've seen some pencils made from recycled blue jeans. Hold up pretty good too, but it's like sharpening fabric!
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Many of today's pencils are made from plastic (I think the "lead" might be plastic too, or maybe just real low-quality graphite). They BEND, it's simply obscene. Not only that, but they don't sharpen as sharp, they're always dull, you can't make them sharp, it's absolutely horrible. And the erasers never work right either. BUT! There is no need to dismay! Dixon Ticonderoga makes high-quality pencils, that aren't plastic! They sharpen correctly, it's fantastic. So, whenever you go out to buy pencils because of the coming EMP soon to beset our homey little planet, go out and buy yourself a Dixon Ticonderoga pencils; you won't be dissappointed.
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
Also, no metal rods inside. Then, here's the strangest thing. The keyboard is attached to the rest of the typewriter by this long piece of rope and goes to this box, you see. The printing part is attached to this box by another rope. And you aren't supposed to look at the paper while you type. No sir. You look at this piece of glass that looks JUST LIKE a piece of paper. Yup, that's also attached to the box with a big piece of rope.
Oh yeah, there's one more piece of rope going into the box, and it's got this bar of soap sort of thing on the other end, but it isn't soap, and it has two buttons on it. And when you move it around (on a table, that is), this little arrow moves on the glass. When you press buttons on the soap sort of thing, you can sometimes make things happen, like printing the stuff you're typing onto a piece of paper.
Now you may be wondering how I ever figured out that this here Dell thing is a typewriter. Heck, it was easy. If I try doing anything else all I get is a BSOD.
what are known as eco pencils. They are made from processed recycled newspaper. The newspaper is pressed into a wood-shingle like substance with glue/heat. There are other kinds made from recycled blue jeans too.
The pencil is a relatively new device (compared to the thousands of years man has been making a mark). It has a fascinating history, and the book The Pencil is definitive. It shows how the technology evolves in such a 'low tech' device. This is a must read if you're the least bit interested. Buy from Barnes and Noble because they respect your privacy. If you want more about technological evolution in everyday things, the Zipper is also good.
The sad fact of the matter is that the vast majority of pencils come from overseas, which in turn comes from a rainforest. The culture of ecological sensitivity is just not present in someplace like China. Unless it says that it comes from a renewable source on the box, it is tropical wood. Worse, they are alot cheaper than an eco pencil (thats the way it is with any natural resource until it's gone). You may think that it doesn't matter because the amount of wood in a single pencil is small, but the amount of wood that is used to supply the 2 billion pencils we use each year is staggerring.
I myself am partial to the old-tech fountain pen with all its messy implications. Because that's what the nuns taught me to write with, as ballpoints weren't "proper" (don't laugh too hard - the fountain pen does produce a nicer line).
I am continually amazed by the constant improvements in everyday 'low tech' things. There was a day that you needed to use a tool to take off a bottlecap. Somewhere along the way the rifinement was made so that they could be screwed off. Same with the pull top on aluminum cans. The pull top used to litter the landscape, until it was improved with a tab. See Scientific American September 1994 for an excellent article on the aluminum beverage container.
The best 'tech' is not 'high tech' or 'low tech', but 'usability tech'. Technology should not be seen as a means to an end, but as a tool to make lives better.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I can remember my mom buying the ultra-cheap recycled newspaper pencils for me when I was in High School. Man did those things suck. Not only did they not sharpen well, the graphite would constantly break because the pencils were so flexible -- you could bend a new pencil almost 90 degrees before it would break, but also once they WERE sharpened, the outer layer of the pencil, made of newspaper wouldn't offer enough support for the 'lead', which tended to lead to tip-breaking, and more sharpening.
Stupid tree huggers.
"Wolfram" is an earlier name for tungsten.
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
The material that most pencils are made of is still, basically, wood. But it is wood ground to a powder, and then rebonded with a polymer into the desired shape. It saves an immense amout of wood, as the polymer is a thermoplastic! and thus the wood goo can be reworked (and you dont throw away the scraps of the distribution process.
Translation: Heat a modern pencil, Tie it into knots. It works.
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
This is the only place I've found online that has DC-DC Power Supplies, AT and ATX in various wattages, prices vary from around 100-200 USD.
Keypower DC to DC Power Supply
I plan on using these things for my off grid (solar and wind) powered computers and any car boxes I build. Have fun!
It's probably a CAN network, not a token ring network. CAN (Controller area network) networks are strange and cool. The packet headers describe the content, (e.g. battery voltage is ...), and there are no addresses. The interface chips are tiny and cheap, and made to talk to minimal microcontrollers. Packets are short 29 (or 11 in old versions) bits of header and 0-8 bytes of data. The network is supposed to work, albeit at reduced data rates, if either of the two wires is open or shorted to v+ or ground.
Does Solar power provide enough juice to run a computer? I guess it should be able to drive a lap top like device, but not anything bigger for an extended period of time?
I'd be very interested if you have a website for anything you are doing (esp solar power)
Have fun!
Always do :)