The C ("common") wire is usually not connected to the thermostat when you have a dumb thermostat. If you're lucky, the installer decades ago put in a cable with an unused (usually blue) wire. This is the wire you need to power a thermostat, and it's usually easy to hook up... if it's there.
When I put in my own smart thermostat, I hooked up the fucking C wire, so I wouldn't have to worry about batteries. In fact, it's had the low battery icon up for weeks now, and I can't be arsed to replace them. If power went out, there would be no power for the fans anyhow, and when it came back up, what wasn't stored in flash (like manual overrides) would get reloaded the next time it contacted the cloud. And (hopefully) the cloud would set its clock. Even with a wrong clock, using the stored schedule would still keep it running enough to keep pipes from freezing in the winter or the house from overheating in the summer.
But yeah, if you are using a battery-powered thermostat and the batteries die, the relay doesn't click, and you don't get heat or cool. But you can hot-wire it just as parent post says. If you have a spare light switch it might be a better idea to hook the wires up to that so you can turn it off easily. Of course you still have to be there, which doesn't help if it's a vacation house, etc.
The vending machine industry is gonna looooove that idea. Not. At least very few vending machines take pennies, so dropping the penny won't be a problem.
And the main problem with the Sacajawea dollar is they use a crappy yellow metal that looks like shit after moderate circulation, ending up with low enough contrast that you can't see the features anymore. You can still tell what they are because pennies are the only other yellow metal coin. They should have kept it as a silver metal coin and made it with a smooth edge like a nickel to avoid the "looks like a quarter" problem.
At first it was just to prove to everybody that they could land accurately enough to be safe, and it wouldn't land in a populated area.
But they still need the boat because the center first stage of Falcon Heavy will be too far downrange for a land landing. They want to eventually be able to refuel the stage on the boat and launch it back to an on-shore landing pad.
Because the code combinations used made it much harder to resync. Apple GCR had special combinations that would only appear at the start of sector ID or sector data. Commodore only had a limited number of codes and none of them were reserved for sync. I was writing my own decoder for the track data and there was no guaranteed way to find the start of a sector or ID, you had to kind of guess.
Anyone in the Austin TX area (or San Antonio) want a bunch of TRS-80 Model IV and 4P stuff? Reply while this thread is still alive and I'll get in contact with you. I will NOT ship them, but I can deliver personally anywhere in the I-35/45/10 triangle on a day-trip if you're really serious.
From what I've seen back in the day, the main difference in CP/M disk "formats" was 1) the number of sectors/tracks/sides, and 2) the offset to the directory. The OS itself was stored at the beginning of the disk and could very a little in size. They also couldn't be very big. Back in the early '80s I helped keep a business's computer working. It ran CP/M on a 5 megabyte hard drive. The hard drive had four partitions. The fourth may have been a runt partition, but they wouldn't have been much bigger than the 1.2 megabytes of a DSDD 77-track 8" floppy drive.
The thing it, it should be relatively easy to read 5 1/4" CP/M disks on an 286/386/486 era PC with the right software to talk to the disk controller chip directly. The big low-level difference was 512-byte sectors in MS-DOS vs (usually) 128-byte sectors in CP/M. Most other 8-bit era floppies used 256-byte sectors. Some old PC disk controller chips couldn't handle single-density format. But if they were 8-inch CP/M disks it would have taken real work to read them.
Another issue is that paper is paper. Not only is there going to be some redundancy in the data, but you don't need something special to read it. Magnetic storage came in many formats, only a few of which became mainstream. We get used to being able to read a CD from the '80s in a modern BD-ROM drive. But aside from 3 1/2" and 5 1/4" and maybe Zip 100, no other magnetic disk format became mainstream since the '80s. 8-inch disks are the ancestor of 5 1/4" but not directly plug-compatible like 3 1/2" was.
A Catweasel or similar board at least lets you read the lowest level of formatting, which is the time between flux reversals. I can read FM, MFM, Apple GCR, and Commodore GCR by appropriate post-processing of the track data. Beyond that, I can read the filesystem in the disk image with the right software. But I can't make a disk fit in the wrong type of drive.
I'm still wishing I hadn't passed up those two or three Amstrad CP/M computers at thrift stores back in the '90s, because they aren't making 3" floppy drives anymore. That is also the format that Nintendo used for the Famicom floppy drive. There was yet another 3 1/4" disc format that was a miniature 5 1/4" disc that I think only Smith Corona typewriters used, but I don't think I've ever seen one of those in person. Once Apple and HP (?) adopted the Sony 3 1/2" drive back in 1984, the others vanished before almost anyone even heard of them.
Disks are not as bad as tape because the magnetic particles in tape have another layer of tape on the other side to stick to. As long as you keep them indoors in air-conditioned space without extreme humidity and away from anything magnetic, getting 25 years from floppy disks is no problem. Still, there's no telling how long they will still be readable beyond that.
Back around 2005 or so, I imaged all my old TRS-80 disks from the '80s using a Catweasel board, and they read just fine. The only read errors seemed to be ones from back in the day. (I also imaged a bunch of Apple II and C64 and a few CP/M floppies that I had lying around at the time. That's when I learned that Commodore's GCR encoding was shit, and Woz was indeed a genius.)
The real problem is if you have 8-inch disks, because you have to find an 8-inch drive. Seeing "CP/M" in the summary implies that they might have been on 8-inch disks. Then you have to hook the drive up. They use almost completely different data and power connectors from 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" drives. (These days it might be easiest get an adapter board made.) They also usually want a head-load signal, something that became obsolete early in the 5 1/4" era. I have a stack of disks (CP/M, TRSDOS-II, TRS16-Unix, even RT-11) and some TRS-80 Model 2/12/16 drives to hook up to that Catweasel board someday.
I was thinking that too, but "I hired two physician assistants and a person trained in Breathalyzers to watch her and take blood alcohol levels over a 12-hour period and had it run at the same lab used by the prosecution". So in the hospital she did have breath tests, and this may imply they apparently also drew blood. I'm pretty sure you don't use a lab for breath tests. But if they didn't actually draw blood, it could have been from alcohol in her digestive system that was far enough down that it couldn't be absorbed.
Not that the article is all that great to begin with because of the wonderful grammatical fail of "the hospital police took the woman to wanted to release her immediately". (Yes, that is from TFA!)
I think a bigger problem than building transmission lines is protecting them. There's a lot of crazy people out there who like to blow up anything that they can't find written about in their favorite book. Power transmission lines are single points of failures that are hundreds of miles long. Not that sand dunes aren't likely to bury the transmission lines first.
Unintended consequences like, for instance... a big reason why the Amazon basin is so fertile is that lots of nutrients constantly get blown in from the Sahara. If things happened that made the Sahara less of a desert, the Amazon rain forests could suffer.
And you know what? I actually prefer it that way. I like how rough around the edges the original movie is. (And FWIW, I still have never watched episode 1-3 and am not really interested in episode 7.) But then I'm an early Gen-Xer, not some damn millennial, running through people's lawns all the time, and needing a bunch of flashy special effects shit to keep my brain from shutting down.
Fry's in Austin certainly is stocked with a decent selection of electronic parts. Just the basic stuff; if you want a microcontroller chip, you'll have to go mail order. But there are still a few parts that don't get restocked often enough. It's still a lot more than you could ever hope for from Radio Shack.
They used to have some SMT resistors and other parts but they dropped most SMT stuff a few years ago. I guess if you are the type who wants to do SMT parts, it won't hurt for you to wait a day or two for mail order (you'll probably be waiting longer for PC boards anyhow), so that was probably a good decision.
As long as we're nowhere near practical nuclear fusion, Helium 3 is indeed the domain of lunatics. (and yes, I see what you did there) Anyone who seriously suggests it be used as an energy source in any time scale less than 50 years from now is either completely clueless or batshit insane.
3He isn't even a first-generation fusion fuel, so until we have any fusion at all, it's not worth spending a single penny on. Unless you want exceptionally light party balloons, I suppose.
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The C ("common") wire is usually not connected to the thermostat when you have a dumb thermostat. If you're lucky, the installer decades ago put in a cable with an unused (usually blue) wire. This is the wire you need to power a thermostat, and it's usually easy to hook up... if it's there.
When I put in my own smart thermostat, I hooked up the fucking C wire, so I wouldn't have to worry about batteries. In fact, it's had the low battery icon up for weeks now, and I can't be arsed to replace them. If power went out, there would be no power for the fans anyhow, and when it came back up, what wasn't stored in flash (like manual overrides) would get reloaded the next time it contacted the cloud. And (hopefully) the cloud would set its clock. Even with a wrong clock, using the stored schedule would still keep it running enough to keep pipes from freezing in the winter or the house from overheating in the summer.
But yeah, if you are using a battery-powered thermostat and the batteries die, the relay doesn't click, and you don't get heat or cool. But you can hot-wire it just as parent post says. If you have a spare light switch it might be a better idea to hook the wires up to that so you can turn it off easily. Of course you still have to be there, which doesn't help if it's a vacation house, etc.
The vending machine industry is gonna looooove that idea. Not. At least very few vending machines take pennies, so dropping the penny won't be a problem.
And the main problem with the Sacajawea dollar is they use a crappy yellow metal that looks like shit after moderate circulation, ending up with low enough contrast that you can't see the features anymore. You can still tell what they are because pennies are the only other yellow metal coin. They should have kept it as a silver metal coin and made it with a smooth edge like a nickel to avoid the "looks like a quarter" problem.
At first it was just to prove to everybody that they could land accurately enough to be safe, and it wouldn't land in a populated area.
But they still need the boat because the center first stage of Falcon Heavy will be too far downrange for a land landing. They want to eventually be able to refuel the stage on the boat and launch it back to an on-shore landing pad.
Because the code combinations used made it much harder to resync. Apple GCR had special combinations that would only appear at the start of sector ID or sector data. Commodore only had a limited number of codes and none of them were reserved for sync. I was writing my own decoder for the track data and there was no guaranteed way to find the start of a sector or ID, you had to kind of guess.
HD floppy disks in the '90s were pretty crappy. Ah, the fun of trying to install Slackware from floppies and having disk errors.
Anyone in the Austin TX area (or San Antonio) want a bunch of TRS-80 Model IV and 4P stuff? Reply while this thread is still alive and I'll get in contact with you. I will NOT ship them, but I can deliver personally anywhere in the I-35/45/10 triangle on a day-trip if you're really serious.
I have a Kaypro-10 around somewhere. The Kaypro-10 has a 10-megabyte hard drive. It was probably the king of CP/M luggables.
From what I've seen back in the day, the main difference in CP/M disk "formats" was 1) the number of sectors/tracks/sides, and 2) the offset to the directory. The OS itself was stored at the beginning of the disk and could very a little in size. They also couldn't be very big. Back in the early '80s I helped keep a business's computer working. It ran CP/M on a 5 megabyte hard drive. The hard drive had four partitions. The fourth may have been a runt partition, but they wouldn't have been much bigger than the 1.2 megabytes of a DSDD 77-track 8" floppy drive.
The thing it, it should be relatively easy to read 5 1/4" CP/M disks on an 286/386/486 era PC with the right software to talk to the disk controller chip directly. The big low-level difference was 512-byte sectors in MS-DOS vs (usually) 128-byte sectors in CP/M. Most other 8-bit era floppies used 256-byte sectors. Some old PC disk controller chips couldn't handle single-density format. But if they were 8-inch CP/M disks it would have taken real work to read them.
Another issue is that paper is paper. Not only is there going to be some redundancy in the data, but you don't need something special to read it. Magnetic storage came in many formats, only a few of which became mainstream. We get used to being able to read a CD from the '80s in a modern BD-ROM drive. But aside from 3 1/2" and 5 1/4" and maybe Zip 100, no other magnetic disk format became mainstream since the '80s. 8-inch disks are the ancestor of 5 1/4" but not directly plug-compatible like 3 1/2" was.
A Catweasel or similar board at least lets you read the lowest level of formatting, which is the time between flux reversals. I can read FM, MFM, Apple GCR, and Commodore GCR by appropriate post-processing of the track data. Beyond that, I can read the filesystem in the disk image with the right software. But I can't make a disk fit in the wrong type of drive.
I'm still wishing I hadn't passed up those two or three Amstrad CP/M computers at thrift stores back in the '90s, because they aren't making 3" floppy drives anymore. That is also the format that Nintendo used for the Famicom floppy drive. There was yet another 3 1/4" disc format that was a miniature 5 1/4" disc that I think only Smith Corona typewriters used, but I don't think I've ever seen one of those in person. Once Apple and HP (?) adopted the Sony 3 1/2" drive back in 1984, the others vanished before almost anyone even heard of them.
Disks are not as bad as tape because the magnetic particles in tape have another layer of tape on the other side to stick to. As long as you keep them indoors in air-conditioned space without extreme humidity and away from anything magnetic, getting 25 years from floppy disks is no problem. Still, there's no telling how long they will still be readable beyond that.
Back around 2005 or so, I imaged all my old TRS-80 disks from the '80s using a Catweasel board, and they read just fine. The only read errors seemed to be ones from back in the day. (I also imaged a bunch of Apple II and C64 and a few CP/M floppies that I had lying around at the time. That's when I learned that Commodore's GCR encoding was shit, and Woz was indeed a genius.)
The real problem is if you have 8-inch disks, because you have to find an 8-inch drive. Seeing "CP/M" in the summary implies that they might have been on 8-inch disks. Then you have to hook the drive up. They use almost completely different data and power connectors from 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" drives. (These days it might be easiest get an adapter board made.) They also usually want a head-load signal, something that became obsolete early in the 5 1/4" era. I have a stack of disks (CP/M, TRSDOS-II, TRS16-Unix, even RT-11) and some TRS-80 Model 2/12/16 drives to hook up to that Catweasel board someday.
I was thinking that too, but "I hired two physician assistants and a person trained in Breathalyzers to watch her and take blood alcohol levels over a 12-hour period and had it run at the same lab used by the prosecution". So in the hospital she did have breath tests, and this may imply they apparently also drew blood. I'm pretty sure you don't use a lab for breath tests. But if they didn't actually draw blood, it could have been from alcohol in her digestive system that was far enough down that it couldn't be absorbed.
Not that the article is all that great to begin with because of the wonderful grammatical fail of "the hospital police took the woman to wanted to release her immediately". (Yes, that is from TFA!)
I think a bigger problem than building transmission lines is protecting them. There's a lot of crazy people out there who like to blow up anything that they can't find written about in their favorite book. Power transmission lines are single points of failures that are hundreds of miles long. Not that sand dunes aren't likely to bury the transmission lines first.
Unintended consequences like, for instance... a big reason why the Amazon basin is so fertile is that lots of nutrients constantly get blown in from the Sahara. If things happened that made the Sahara less of a desert, the Amazon rain forests could suffer.
If it's John Cage, maybe?
So is this why "breakage" is still a part of record contracts when selling music online?
Spaceballs: the Flame Thrower! (The kids love this one.)
May the Schwartz be with you!
Yeah, and then he finds that guy from American Graffiti who drives him all over the place. He probably rolled his spaceship, too.
And you know what? I actually prefer it that way. I like how rough around the edges the original movie is. (And FWIW, I still have never watched episode 1-3 and am not really interested in episode 7.) But then I'm an early Gen-Xer, not some damn millennial, running through people's lawns all the time, and needing a bunch of flashy special effects shit to keep my brain from shutting down.
Did you know that it was initially in such low demand by theatres that theatres were required to show it if they wanted to show a specific other movie? Bet most of you have never heard of that other movie. Star Wars was a completely unexpected hit.
If ISS ever gets VASIMR installed, it shouldn't need boost missions.
Fry's in Austin certainly is stocked with a decent selection of electronic parts. Just the basic stuff; if you want a microcontroller chip, you'll have to go mail order. But there are still a few parts that don't get restocked often enough. It's still a lot more than you could ever hope for from Radio Shack.
They used to have some SMT resistors and other parts but they dropped most SMT stuff a few years ago. I guess if you are the type who wants to do SMT parts, it won't hurt for you to wait a day or two for mail order (you'll probably be waiting longer for PC boards anyhow), so that was probably a good decision.
In my limited experience, it will become un-hidden when they create a newer "version" of the KB3035583 update.
The only way you can be completely sure is by turning off downloads completely.
Space: it costs tens of thousands of dollars a kilogram to ship stuff into LEO.
Yeah, but this is helium! It'll float to Earth all on its own!
As long as we're nowhere near practical nuclear fusion, Helium 3 is indeed the domain of lunatics. (and yes, I see what you did there) Anyone who seriously suggests it be used as an energy source in any time scale less than 50 years from now is either completely clueless or batshit insane.
3He isn't even a first-generation fusion fuel, so until we have any fusion at all, it's not worth spending a single penny on. Unless you want exceptionally light party balloons, I suppose.
You won't see that because Apple already squatted on U+F8FF at the end of the Private Use Area. But that's what happens when you sell your own computers with your own operating system. Let's see KitKat fork BSD with their own UI on top and then we can talk.