We already have an IP shortage! what if everyone started hopping IP's?
havn't they ever heard of encryption?
sheesh
Quick! lets change our business model!
on
Palm In Trouble?
·
· Score: 3
1. Hire consultants!
2. Fire the CEO!
3. Hire consultants to hire a new CEO! (preferably someone dynamic who's not afraid to axe all of our good employees!)
4. Hire a new PR firm to issue a zillion press releases about our new CEO and our new direction
5. Change everything just in time for the market to change again.
Many people have been attacked by this thing in New Delhi. this monkey guy is no joke. They say he has iron hands and terrorizes people who sleep on rooftops.
If you wanna record realvideo streams get a program called streambox vcr. its still floating around out there somewhere... its great cause it downloads the stream at its actual encoded bitrate (not the rate your crappy internet connection streams it at) you might have to dig around for it cause I think realnetworks threatened them outta business IIRC.
From there use something like totalrecorder to convert the downloaded.rm file into a useful format.
I have an old sparc10 with OpenBSD 2.8 on it. The box was running solaris in a previous life, and was just sitting in a corner since our ERP system moved to a cursed NT box. I never even considered Linux. OpenBSD made the most sense after only a little bit of research.
Some of the firecodes are outta control. THere is absolutely no reason why I should run 9million feet of expensive fragile and hard to fish plenum cable just because the drop ceiling doubles as a cold air return in my 2 story building! Its not like the people on the non-existant 18th floor are gonna die, and its not like the entire freakin' drop ceiling isn't going to be turing my office into a towering inferno way before the damn pvc jackets on the wire are going to melt and release some deadly fumes.
And same goes for all the firewall crap. the network guys have to fish everything through a couple undersized conduits and seal them up with special fire-retardant goo while the heating and cooling doods just leave big gaping holes between the drywall and the ductwork. Nice double standard there. Half the building inspectors out there are brain dead anyway.
firecodes suck, except for the parts about exits. those are kinda important.. i like fire exits:)
be aware that a basement outside wall often is thicker than other outside walls. So the holes might not come through where you expect.
No doubt! we were wiring a cable from the little digital dish into the basement of a friend's house and he decided to drill right next to the electrical main comin' in the house with like 240v 50amp service... he said he thought he was several inches to the right of the line, but as things normally go that wasn't quite the case. He drilled just through the insulation on the electrical main and caused some very scary fireworks about 3 feet from my face. (i was the lucky guy on the inside in the basement)
Luckily nobody was hurt and the house didn't burn down. melted half the drill bit, but at least it didn't melt me or my friend.
so let that be a lesson to ya kids! big wires don't mix with big drill bits!
You were reading information about Monsanto's "Terminator Seeds" -- There was a story on Slashdot a while back about it.
The reason everyone was up in arms about it was that these "terminator seeds" could poossibly grow into plants that would cross pollenate with other non-modified plants and theoretically pass these "terminator" attributes on to other species.
Just do a google search on terminator + monsanto and you'll come up with tons of links.
Poor people are poor because they want to be poor.
Children do not deserve a quality education if they can't afford it.
A $500 tax cut for the average American is generous. A $40,000 tax cut for the upper.05% is fair because they pay more taxes. Estate taxes are bad.
Oil is good. Fossil fuel dependency is good. the more oil we have access to, the more gooder the good is. Exploring alternative energy sources and encouraging efficiency is bad.
Government funded research is bad. Social programs are bad. Better weapons technology is good.
The middle class is thriving. The middle class has a higher standard of living than 10 years ago. There is a larger and more vibrant middle class today than ever before in our country's history.
This post is to inform you that you are in direct violation of my patent on posts that mention posts that attempt to pre-empt other lame attempts at humorous posts regarding patents.
A Christmas Story for Coilers
by Fr. Tom McGahee
(Originally written Christmas of 1998)
(Slightly Modified for Christmas, 1999)
The story begins innocently enough... Meanwhile, out in the garage, Bill the Frankfurter was busily lashing together his latest concoction: In keeping with the Christmas Spirit, Bill was building a rather large Christmas Decoration for the front yard. To the uninitiated it looked simply like a large aluminum Christmas tree mounted on a pedestal of some sort. In reality, the aluminum Christmas tree was merely the Topload on Bill's latest Tesla Coil. Bill knew full well that the geometry of the tree did not really lend itself well to being an EFFICICIENT topload. But that was all-right. Bill was more interested in shock value than he was in efficiency. Actually, the pedestal was the "extra" coil of Bill's experimental Magnifier Tesla Coil. According to his calculations the "extra" coil should be capable of throwing arcs at least 6 feet long. One of these days, if he could manage to scrape up the necessary cash, he would try building one of those as yet untried polymorphic toroid structures designed by that guy who was advertising plans for them on the Tesla List. But not today.
He chuckled to himself as he struggled to move the "extra" coil and Christmas tree topload out of the garage and onto the front lawn. His wife was currently curled up in front of the fireplace with a romance book and two cats. Bill hated cats, but for the sake of his wife he tolerated their presence in his home. Bill strapped the coil/tree assembly to the top of the little American Flyer sled, and wrestled it into position on the front lawn. The final position was about 7 feet away from the shoveled walkway that led from the street to his front door. Bill always used the side door, but he had In-Laws coming over tonight, and *they* always used the Front Door. He figured the 6 foot arcs would be hurled mostly upward, and there would be no chance of the arcs actually coming any where near the In-Laws as they came down the little shoveled path that he had prepared.
He carefully positioned a couple of dozen old polyethylene buckets to hold the transmission line, which was several lengths of 1/2 inch copper tubing that he had brazed together. He giggled to himself deliriously as he fastened the transmission line in place and attached it to the base of the "extra" coil. Then he attached the other end of the transmission line to the anti-corona ring of his secondary coil.
The secondary coil consisted of a single layer of high voltage test prod wire wrapped in a solenoid fashion around a fair-sized plastic garbage can. The test prod wire was "on loan" from Bill's employer. The employer was unaware of this fact, but Bill appreciated his generosity all the same. The garbage can was a slightly used Rubber-Maid garbage can that Bill had swiped from the kitchen earlier in the day. The garage was permeated with the odor of aging tuna fish. The plastic garbage can was nestled inside a piece of slightly damp cardboard sonotube that was several inches larger in diameter than the garbage can. Bill had "borrowed" the sonotube from a construction site a few blocks away that was not very heavily guarded. One of these days he would return it. If he managed to remember, of course... The primary consisted of several turns of heavy battery cable that Bill had found laying around in the back of one of his buddies' trucks. (All of Bill's buddies drive trucks...)
Most of the high voltage capacitors were homebrew poly caps in sections of PVC pipe and under mineral oil (actually an off-brand of cattle laxative that he had seen mentioned by Gary Weaver on the Tesla List.) Not being able to find any decent clear poly, Bill had managed to scrape up a mixture of "construction" grade poly (that had lots of interesting things imbedded in it), and some smooth and shiny BLACK poly that he thought might work well, despite his fleeting concern that it might contain large quantities of carbon in the form of lampblack. What the heck, what did he have to lose by trying???
Dozens of these capacitors were wired in series - parallel to achieve the required voltage and capacitance rating. Just a few days before, he had discovered a mistake in his calculations and had realized that he still needed more capacitance. Remembering a series of posts on the Tesla List about MMC and EMMC caps, Bill had decided to try his hand at making EDEMMCB caps. (Extremely Dangerous Extended Monolithic Modular Capacitor Banks) Let's see, now, he was sure that Terry Fritz or one of those guys had posted something about being able to run them at something like 3 times their rated DC voltage. So with his 14.4KV One Eared Pole Pig he would need about a 4.8KV rating on the caps. Being a somewhat conservative kind of a guy (at least when it comes to things electrical), he decided to round that up to a 5KV DC rating. He smiled broadly at the thought of all the extra margin of safety he had engineered into this EDEMMCB capacitor.
He had purchased one hundred.1 microfarad 500 volt DC off-brand snubber caps at the local Radio Shack for a buck a piece. What the heck. It was Christmas. He could afford to splurge a little. He didn't have any of that printed circuit board stuff to mount the capacitors onto, so he just spot soldered strings of ten capacitors together. He kept the leads the full length and just spot soldered the very ends of the capacitors together. That way if a capacitor were to accidentally fail he could just snip off the very end and turn them back into Radio Shack for a full refund. The only problem with leaving the leads so long was that the strings of capacitors were quite long. Fifty inches to be exact. He wasn't about to waste any precious money on high megohm resistors, so there were no bleeder resistors across any of the caps. The ten strings of capacitors were laid out side by side on the concrete floor. As was his custom, Bill lashed all the capacitor strings together using Radio Shack clip leads.
Imagine Bill's consternation when he measured the total capacitance of his poly caps and EDEMMCB capacitor only to discover that he was still off by.01001 microfarad from the magic capacitor value that TESLAC had spit out.
Not wanting to spend any more money and time on poly caps or more strings of EDEMMCB caps, he decided to revert to making the tried and true Beer Bottle Caps. He had tried making Soda Bottle Caps once, but they were not nearly so much *fun* to make as Beer Bottle Caps.
Bill had invited a couple dozen of his closest friends over for a Bring Your Own Booze - Beer Bash. His wife finally busted up the party at 4 AM Sunday morning. Bill emptied out whatever beer still remained in the bottles (I leave it to your own imagination to figure out just how he did this). After many many trips to the bathroom he finally had all the empty beer bottles he needed. There were a fair number of aluminum cans as well. These he put in the plastic garbage bag in the kitchen. While his wife wasn't looking he stole all the aluminum foil and corn oil and salt that he could find and proceeded to build a couple of tub-fulls of beer bottle caps, which he then wired into the existing capacitor grid using his few remaining Radio Shack clip leads.
The spark gap was an old circular saw blade that was missing a couple of teeth. Why bother to pay big bucks to that Wingate guy for a precision built and properly balanced tungsten gapped rotary spark gap with G-10 fiberglass wheel when you could make your own for next to nothing? Bill's own rotary spark gap was powered by an ancient single phase AC motor that Bill had scrounged from the local dump for a few bucks. The motor and circular saw blade were connected via a belt and pulley arrangement, since the shaft of the AC motor was somewhat bent, and could not reliably direct-drive the saw blade. As it was, when the spark gap motor was powered on, the wooden base to which the entire Spark Gap assembly was bolted would shake all over the place and make an awful racket. Bill had jerry-rigged a device that allowed him to vary the phasing on the spark gap by rotating the motor by pulling on a four foot long two-by-four. Bill had wanted to use a ten-foot-pole, but Malcolm Watts told him that nobody would want to come near it with a ten-foot pole. That seems to have convinced him.
Looking through the archives, Bill had found a posting by John Freau on how to convert small AC motors into fully synchronous motors. Oblivious to the fact that the conversion pertained only to SMALL AC motors, Bill modified his motor anyhow, and found that after filing away large chunks of his rotor that the modification only made his motor lopsided. Now it REALLY jumped around when he turned on the power. So he held the rotary spark gap assembly wooden base plate as still as he could by temporarily holding it down with a couple of old lawn mower engines that he had hanging around. He made a mental note to drop John a nasty note telling him how useless his modification had been.
Back a few feet from the spark gap was the one eared pole pig. Thick high voltage cables snaked across the floor from the Pig to the Spark Gap and the rest of the Tesla Coil. Not wanting to cut the cables, (which he had borrowed from work without asking) Bill had left each cable its original length of fifty feet.
The pig was fed a diet of 220 VAC from a 100 amp service line. Now, the pole piggie was only rated at 10KVA, but Bill had read somewhere on the List that you could actually push a pig to two or three times its rated power capacity if you kept the run short, (so that you didn't boil off all the oil). Bill planned to test out this theory tonight.
Now, Bill SHOULD have had a number of things that he didn't. Such as common sense, an ON/OFF switch, and adequate fuses. Bill just couldn't bring himself to pay good money for something that was designed to self-destruct. Instead of fuses he had placed large metal bolts in the fuse holders. Much more robust, don't you think??
Being something of a cheapskate, Bill had decided not to bother with installing a silly little thing like an ON/OFF switch, because the guy at the dump wanted more than two bucks for the ones he had in the big box marked "Electrical Stuff". He knew that he needed something to limit the current to the pole pig, so he decided to wire a couple of defective toaster ovens and a couple of strings of Christmas tree bulbs in *parallel* with the primary of the pole pig. He could have SWORN that he had read a post somewhere (maybe on the Tesla-2 List) about putting some sort of a load in series or parallel or something or other with the transformer primary.
Bill knew that a variac was really a "must", but he didn't have one. He was originally going to use a 5 amp Triac that was on sale at Radio Shack, but when he got there they were all out. But then he remembered having read a post that seemed to imply that you could modify a three phase AC motor to act as some kind of a variable transformer. Sneaking into the dump under cover of darkness, he liberated a 400 pound three phase AC motor that had once seen service in an office building as the elevator motor. Luckily for him he owned a truck with a crane attached. Heh heh. A few whacks with an axe in just the right places and he had de-commisioned one set of windings. He knew he only needed two. But which two? He hoped it was the two that still remained. He welded two metal stubs to the casing and then welded a three foot length of one inch diameter solid steel rod to the rotor shaft. Now the motor shaft could only turn 90 degrees.
It was still a minute or two before the In-Laws were scheduled to arrive. One last check and Bill was ready for an operational test. He turned on the rotary spark gap motor. Whump! Whump! Whump! Whump! Whump WhumpWHUMPwhumpawhumpawumpawupa... Yes, the spark gap assembly was a bit, uh, vibrational, but seemed to be holding together OK. Bill lined the plug up with the socket (remember, he had no ON/OFF switch), and rammed the plug into the socket. BZZZZSHHHT! The spark gap lit up with bright actinic light and would have fried Bill's eyeballs in no time at all if not for the fact that Bill (always safety conscious) had quickly put on a pair of welding goggles. Now he could look at the spark gap arc with impunity. Which he did. Unfortunately, the goggles were so dark that that was ALL that Bill could see.
Carefully shielding his eyes with his left hand, he used his right hand to gingerly lift the goggles and look at the Christmas tree on the front lawn.
Outside, the Christmas tree came to life with a pale glow of pink and blue corona that fuzzed out for about two feet. But no arcs. No streamers. What a bummer! He stuffed another wad of cotton in each ear so that he could think again, and taking a deep breath of the ozone-soaked air, he groped his way over towards the modified three phase motor. Grabbing a hold of the metal rod, he strained to change the angle of the rotor. Suddenly a forest of fierce white arcs as thick as his arm broke out between the primary and the secondary. DARN!
He released the control rod. TWANG!!!! The rod slammed itself into the short stub that acted as a stop. Bill yanked the plug out of the socket. This was not an easy task, as the plug was sort of welded into the socket. But a few good whacks with a monkey wrench and the plug came loose. The only sound was the whappawhappawhapa of the rotary gap assembly, and the insistent buzzing that was only in Bill's ears. DARN! The secondary was arcing to the primary. Maybe if he added a capacitive load to the secondary he could get this sucker to stop arcing. He looked around for something... anything... to use as a capacitive load. His eyes came to rest on the leering sharp-toothed smile of his butane tank work of art, the Halloween Tank-O-Lantern. To amuse the neighbors and anyone else foolish enough to approach his house at Halloween, he had fashioned a gruesome Tank-O-Lantern by using a cutting torch to fashion leering eyes and drooling teeth from the once-smooth surface of the butane tank. The various burn marks from the cutting torch operations made the tank look even more sinister when the light played on it just right.
Grabbing the Tank-O-Lantern, he managed to get it to sit on top of the existing anti-corona ring. It wobbled a bit, but what the heck.
For the second time that evening, Bill rammed the plug into the socket. Again the spark gap burst into life. The horrendous roar of the spark gap beat against his ears as he grabbed the control rod and pulled. A fierce blue corona outlined the eyes and teeth of the leering Tank-O-Lantern, and as he gleefully peeked out from under the welding goggles, Bill could plainly see that beautiful two to three foot arcs were issuing forth from the branches of the aluminum Christmas tree. Not bad. The system was obviously a little out of tune, and he didn't have much more time before the In-Laws would arrive, so he would just have to run it the way it was. But he wanted the tree to look a bit more Christmas-sy so he whacked the plug with the monkey wrench again and turned off the high voltage. Then he made a quick surreptitious trip to the attic and got some really awful Christmas ornaments, (the ones that his In-Laws had given him and his wife years ago), and used them to decorate the tree.
Unknown to Bill, while he was out decorating the tree, his wife came out to the garage with a bag full of garbage that she didn't want in her kitchen for her parents to see. Looking around in the garage she spied what she knew was a plastic garbage can sitting inside what looked like a cardboard container of some kind. Seeing no other garbage container around, she decided to dump the load of trash into the plastic garbage can. So she did. And with interesting results.
Bill was totally unaware that the coupling and inductance of his coil had been changed slightly by the addition of various beer cans and tuna fish containers that had been dumped into the core of his beloved experimental Magnifier Coil.
The addition of the gaudy glass Christmas tree ornaments had little effect on the capacitance of the Christmas Tree Topload, but Bill's last-minute addition of a large copper toilet ball to the very *top* of the tree had changed the isotropic capacitance of the total topload just enough that the "extra" coil and topload were in perfect tune.
When Bill saw his In-Laws exit their car and begin their trip down the shoveled walkway that led within a few feet of the Christmas Coil, he stationed himself next to the power outlet and waited until they were at just the right spot.
His face twitched nervously, and he made a strange gurgling sound as he waited anxiously for his In-Laws to reach the perfect spot. And then they were there.
Gleefully he jammed the plug into the socket and then ran excitedly over to the control rod. Little beads of sweat broke out on his forehead as he grasped the rod firmly with both hands and pulled madly back on the control rod.
Meanwhile, inside the garbage can secondary, RF induction heating was taking place on the cat food tin cans. The heat caused the garbage to shift suddenly, and in that instant a wonderful serendipity took place. For a few fleeting cycles, PERFECT resonance was achieved! Megawatts of energy happily surged back and forth in the slipshod tank circuit of the amazing Christmas Coil. Phase angles slipped past one another invisibly and fell in-synch. Due to a couple of missing teeth on the makeshift rotary spark gap's circular saw blade the caps ceased to fire for a moment, and the capacitor bank experienced an Anomalous Resonant Rise. An instant later the excessive voltage caused a particularly massive dump of energy into the primary circuit at precisely the right phase angle, and the resulting surge in energy passed from the base of the wildly glowing Tank-O- Lantern down the copper tubing transmission line, which looked as though it were ringed with fire. The transmission line was just exactly the right length to allow the electrical wave travelling down it to slam into the base of the "extra" coil precisely at a zero voltage, MAX current node. Richard Hull would have been proud. The "extra" coil and the Christmas Tree Topload with round copper toilet ball were exactly matched to the impedance required, and the massive driving force of megawatts of resonant energy caused the "extra" coil to react like a spring that had been hit hard with a hammer. The resulting jump in energy caused the voltage at the Christmas Tree to exceed the breakdown voltage of the winter air. With a mad, screeching KaBOOOM the air broke down, and a single solitary streamer launched itself into the cold night air. Up, UP, *UP* it surged, sending a seething, writhing, liquid bolt of pure white electricity stabbing through the darkness. Then, seeking the path of least resistance, it arched over and began its lethal descent. Escaping the intense electrostatic forces that existed at the surface of the aluminum tree, the mighty bolt of man-made lightning swerved around and headed straight for the nearest conductive object it could find!!!
The In-Laws would have been toasted alive were it not for the one object that caught the Arc's attention. Beyond the In-Laws, a good twenty feet from where the Lightning Bolt had launched itself from the infamous Copper Toilet Ball, was an old fashioned lamp post. It put out a dim but somewhat cheery quantity of light that seemed to beckon to the Wayward Lightning Bolt. Like a giant white arm, the lightning bolt swerved around from its upward climb and slammed full force into the cheery lamp post.
PHHHHHHHT! KABLAMMMMM! Like a gigantic flash lamp the lightning bolt lit up the night with an instant of blinding whiteness and a deafening BLAM that reverberated in the In-Law's ears long after their knees had stopped shaking. Where the mighty arc hit, the metal of the lamp-post went incandescent and exploded into a shower of hot sparks that rained through the air and burnt their way through the snow.
The momentary surge of primary current was too much for the EDEMMCB capacitor strings. One moment they were as cool as the night air, then the next instant they exploded like 100 Chinese firecrackers. When the EDEMMCB caps exploded this placed too much of an electrical burden on the other capacitors in the system. First the Beer Bottle caps shattered and sent shards of glass whizzing in all directions. Then the once-sturdy home-made rolled caps exploded like a bunch of defective cannon. They all burst at once and spewed hot liquid laxative throughout the garage, and all over poor Bill, who was already feeling pretty sh***y as it was.
A flash of light. A moment of raw, awesome beauty, a might explosion, and then DARKNESS as all the electricity for blocks around ceased to flow.
It is a Christmas that Bill will always remember. It is a Christmas that his wife and In-Laws will never let him forget.
***** This is just a story. Any resemblance to any persons living or dead named Bill is merely coincidental.
As the author of this tale I want to say that the story is not meant to be a plan for how to build your own Arcstarter -er- I mean, Magnifier Coil.
The theory contained herein is only partially believeable, and is not meant to be a factual accounting of what actually happens in a Tesla Coil.
This is not an endorsement of Radio Shack or any of their products.
Cat lovers will please refrain from sending nasty e-mails to either Bill or myself.
Plans for the Christmas Coil may be made available if enough persons are interested. I should mention that the plans are purely experimental, which is why I will only be charging a token $25 for the plans.
I hope that all of you enjoy this little romp in the spirit in which it was written. I hope that none of those mentioned by name or otherwise implicated in the plot take offense at what has been written.
I wrote it especially for my good friend (at least he WAS my good friend), Bill the Arcstarter Pollack. But, as the disclaimer said, it is not actually ABOUT him. Even though he does hate cats and builds Tank-O-Lanterns, and dabbles in Tesla Coils. This story is just about a Bill who happens to be an awful lot LIKE Bill Pollack. The real Bill would *never* borrow anything from work without asking. He is beyond reproach. He is my friend.
Written by Fr. Tom McGahee
(reposted on the TCML in November2000)
"the only way that human cloning could become a big problem in this regard is if everybody decides to do it."
ANYONE can clone anything with our fabulous new CLONE YOUR OWN @ HOME kit!
* build an army of geeks to do your bidding!
* replicate your liver in your bathtub and throw your own homeade entrails at passers-by!
* create fabulous monsters in your basement and force them to do battle with other fabulous monsters! (clone battle arena available in 2004)
* YOU are the master of their fates!
* Clone yourself! kill yourself! what fun! nobody will ever know if its the REAL you!
* Join in the worldwide devaluation and devolution of human life!
This article is pure crap. Professor soggybottoms invents ten fabulous new technologies that will instantaneously revolutionize the entire computer industry, all while fixing himself a ham sandwich...
Slashdot Mirror
and the article was really light on details, but there are alot of better ways to be secure.
We already have an IP shortage! what if everyone started hopping IP's?
havn't they ever heard of encryption?
sheesh
1. Hire consultants!
2. Fire the CEO!
3. Hire consultants to hire a new CEO! (preferably someone dynamic who's not afraid to axe all of our good employees!)
4. Hire a new PR firm to issue a zillion press releases about our new CEO and our new direction
5. Change everything just in time for the market to change again.
(rinse, repeat)
Heard about the monkey man on NPR
Many people have been attacked by this thing in New Delhi. this monkey guy is no joke. They say he has iron hands and terrorizes people who sleep on rooftops.
and you think your neighborhood is unsafe...
If you wanna record realvideo streams get a program called streambox vcr. its still floating around out there somewhere... its great cause it downloads the stream at its actual encoded bitrate (not the rate your crappy internet connection streams it at) you might have to dig around for it cause I think realnetworks threatened them outta business IIRC.
.rm file into a useful format.
From there use something like totalrecorder to convert the downloaded
you're welcome...
xoxo
I have an old sparc10 with OpenBSD 2.8 on it. The box was running solaris in a previous life, and was just sitting in a corner since our ERP system moved to a cursed NT box. I never even considered Linux. OpenBSD made the most sense after only a little bit of research.
Secure by default baby!
-freq
Some of the firecodes are outta control. THere is absolutely no reason why I should run 9million feet of expensive fragile and hard to fish plenum cable just because the drop ceiling doubles as a cold air return in my 2 story building! Its not like the people on the non-existant 18th floor are gonna die, and its not like the entire freakin' drop ceiling isn't going to be turing my office into a towering inferno way before the damn pvc jackets on the wire are going to melt and release some deadly fumes.
:)
And same goes for all the firewall crap. the network guys have to fish everything through a couple undersized conduits and seal them up with special fire-retardant goo while the heating and cooling doods just leave big gaping holes between the drywall and the ductwork. Nice double standard there. Half the building inspectors out there are brain dead anyway.
firecodes suck, except for the parts about exits. those are kinda important.. i like fire exits
be aware that a basement outside wall often is thicker than other outside walls. So the holes might not come through where you expect.
No doubt! we were wiring a cable from the little digital dish into the basement of a friend's house and he decided to drill right next to the electrical main comin' in the house with like 240v 50amp service... he said he thought he was several inches to the right of the line, but as things normally go that wasn't quite the case. He drilled just through the insulation on the electrical main and caused some very scary fireworks about 3 feet from my face. (i was the lucky guy on the inside in the basement)
Luckily nobody was hurt and the house didn't burn down. melted half the drill bit, but at least it didn't melt me or my friend.
so let that be a lesson to ya kids! big wires don't mix with big drill bits!
-freq
WOW!
The rumors must be true. A hypersonic aircraft powered by liquid farts is just too cool not to believe!
xoxo
-freq
i love your sig.
i will definitely pass it around.
You were reading information about Monsanto's "Terminator Seeds" -- There was a story on Slashdot a while back about it.
The reason everyone was up in arms about it was that these "terminator seeds" could poossibly grow into plants that would cross pollenate with other non-modified plants and theoretically pass these "terminator" attributes on to other species.
Just do a google search on terminator + monsanto and you'll come up with tons of links.
See this hilarious article at the onion for guidance on why the world has no need for photogenics.
dood.
increase the size of the text font on your page. it looks like poop
style sheets be damned
Bless you son...
.05% is fair because they pay more taxes. Estate taxes are bad.
Now, Everyone Repeat after me:
Poor people are poor because they want to be poor.
Children do not deserve a quality education if they can't afford it.
A $500 tax cut for the average American is generous. A $40,000 tax cut for the upper
Oil is good. Fossil fuel dependency is good. the more oil we have access to, the more gooder the good is. Exploring alternative energy sources and encouraging efficiency is bad.
Government funded research is bad. Social programs are bad. Better weapons technology is good.
The middle class is thriving. The middle class has a higher standard of living than 10 years ago. There is a larger and more vibrant middle class today than ever before in our country's history.
Cheap foreign labor is good for America.
Do you want fried with that?
xoxo
-freq
Does your office actually respond to email in a meaningful way other than the obligatory email autoresponse?
Why in your opinion are dead trees still a more viable method of getting heard by representatives and senators?
This subject was addressed to some extent in a recent article here on slashdot
Sir,
This post is to inform you that you are in direct violation of my patent on posts that mention posts that attempt to pre-empt other lame attempts at humorous posts regarding patents.
-freq
and shake off the oppressive yolk of other men who wish to control our lives
down with those oppressive egg laying bureaucrats!
xoxo
freq
good point!
thanx!
This is my last slashdot post ever. period. for real! i mean it!
maybe i'll start a support group for recovering slash-o-holics like myself.
A Christmas Story for Coilers
.1 microfarad 500 volt DC off-brand snubber caps at the local Radio Shack for a buck a piece. What the heck. It was Christmas. He could afford to splurge a little. He didn't have any of that printed circuit board stuff to mount the capacitors onto, so he just spot soldered strings of ten capacitors together. He kept the leads the full length and just spot soldered the very ends of the capacitors together. That way if a capacitor were to accidentally fail he could just snip off the very end and turn them back into Radio Shack for a full refund. The only problem with leaving the leads so long was that the strings of capacitors were quite long. Fifty inches to be exact. He wasn't about to waste any precious money on high megohm resistors, so there were no bleeder resistors across any of the caps. The ten strings of capacitors were laid out side by side on the concrete floor. As was his custom, Bill lashed all the capacitor strings together using Radio Shack clip leads.
.01001 microfarad from the magic capacitor value that TESLAC had spit out.
by Fr. Tom McGahee
(Originally written Christmas of 1998)
(Slightly Modified for Christmas, 1999)
The story begins innocently enough... Meanwhile, out in the garage, Bill the Frankfurter was busily lashing together his latest concoction: In keeping with the Christmas Spirit, Bill was building a rather large Christmas Decoration for the front yard. To the uninitiated it looked simply like a large aluminum Christmas tree mounted on a pedestal of some sort. In reality, the aluminum Christmas tree was merely the Topload on Bill's latest Tesla Coil. Bill knew full well that the geometry of the tree did not really lend itself well to being an EFFICICIENT topload. But that was all-right. Bill was more interested in shock value than he was in efficiency. Actually, the pedestal was the "extra" coil of Bill's experimental Magnifier Tesla Coil. According to his calculations the "extra" coil should be capable of throwing arcs at least 6 feet long. One of these days, if he could manage to scrape up the necessary cash, he would try building one of those as yet untried polymorphic toroid structures designed by that guy who was advertising plans for them on the Tesla List. But not today.
He chuckled to himself as he struggled to move the "extra" coil and Christmas tree topload out of the garage and onto the front lawn. His wife was currently curled up in front of the fireplace with a romance book and two cats. Bill hated cats, but for the sake of his wife he tolerated their presence in his home. Bill strapped the coil/tree assembly to the top of the little American Flyer sled, and wrestled it into position on the front lawn. The final position was about 7 feet away from the shoveled walkway that led from the street to his front door. Bill always used the side door, but he had In-Laws coming over tonight, and *they* always used the Front Door. He figured the 6 foot arcs would be hurled mostly upward, and there would be no chance of the arcs actually coming any where near the In-Laws as they came down the little shoveled path that he had prepared.
He carefully positioned a couple of dozen old polyethylene buckets to hold the transmission line, which was several lengths of 1/2 inch copper tubing that he had brazed together. He giggled to himself deliriously as he fastened the transmission line in place and attached it to the base of the "extra" coil. Then he attached the other end of the transmission line to the anti-corona ring of his secondary coil.
The secondary coil consisted of a single layer of high voltage test prod wire wrapped in a solenoid fashion around a fair-sized plastic garbage can. The test prod wire was "on loan" from Bill's employer. The employer was unaware of this fact, but Bill appreciated his generosity all the same. The garbage can was a slightly used Rubber-Maid garbage can that Bill had swiped from the kitchen earlier in the day. The garage was permeated with the odor of aging tuna fish. The plastic garbage can was nestled inside a piece of slightly damp cardboard sonotube that was several inches larger in diameter than the garbage can. Bill had "borrowed" the sonotube from a construction site a few blocks away that was not very heavily guarded. One of these days he would return it. If he managed to remember, of course... The primary consisted of several turns of heavy battery cable that Bill had found laying around in the back of one of his buddies' trucks. (All of Bill's buddies drive trucks...)
Most of the high voltage capacitors were homebrew poly caps in sections of PVC pipe and under mineral oil (actually an off-brand of cattle laxative that he had seen mentioned by Gary Weaver on the Tesla List.) Not being able to find any decent clear poly, Bill had managed to scrape up a mixture of "construction" grade poly (that had lots of interesting things imbedded in it), and some smooth and shiny BLACK poly that he thought might work well, despite his fleeting concern that it might contain large quantities of carbon in the form of lampblack. What the heck, what did he have to lose by trying???
Dozens of these capacitors were wired in series - parallel to achieve the required voltage and capacitance rating. Just a few days before, he had discovered a mistake in his calculations and had realized that he still needed more capacitance. Remembering a series of posts on the Tesla List about MMC and EMMC caps, Bill had decided to try his hand at making EDEMMCB caps. (Extremely Dangerous Extended Monolithic Modular Capacitor Banks) Let's see, now, he was sure that Terry Fritz or one of those guys had posted something about being able to run them at something like 3 times their rated DC voltage. So with his 14.4KV One Eared Pole Pig he would need about a 4.8KV rating on the caps. Being a somewhat conservative kind of a guy (at least when it comes to things electrical), he decided to round that up to a 5KV DC rating. He smiled broadly at the thought of all the extra margin of safety he had engineered into this EDEMMCB capacitor.
He had purchased one hundred
Imagine Bill's consternation when he measured the total capacitance of his poly caps and EDEMMCB capacitor only to discover that he was still off by
Not wanting to spend any more money and time on poly caps or more strings of EDEMMCB caps, he decided to revert to making the tried and true Beer Bottle Caps. He had tried making Soda Bottle Caps once, but they were not nearly so much *fun* to make as Beer Bottle Caps.
Bill had invited a couple dozen of his closest friends over for a Bring Your Own Booze - Beer Bash. His wife finally busted up the party at 4 AM Sunday morning. Bill emptied out whatever beer still remained in the bottles (I leave it to your own imagination to figure out just how he did this). After many many trips to the bathroom he finally had all the empty beer bottles he needed. There were a fair number of aluminum cans as well. These he put in the plastic garbage bag in the kitchen. While his wife wasn't looking he stole all the aluminum foil and corn oil and salt that he could find and proceeded to build a couple of tub-fulls of beer bottle caps, which he then wired into the existing capacitor grid using his few remaining Radio Shack clip leads.
The spark gap was an old circular saw blade that was missing a couple of teeth. Why bother to pay big bucks to that Wingate guy for a precision built and properly balanced tungsten gapped rotary spark gap with G-10 fiberglass wheel when you could make your own for next to nothing? Bill's own rotary spark gap was powered by an ancient single phase AC motor that Bill had scrounged from the local dump for a few bucks. The motor and circular saw blade were connected via a belt and pulley arrangement, since the shaft of the AC motor was somewhat bent, and could not reliably direct-drive the saw blade. As it was, when the spark gap motor was powered on, the wooden base to which the entire Spark Gap assembly was bolted would shake all over the place and make an awful racket. Bill had jerry-rigged a device that allowed him to vary the phasing on the spark gap by rotating the motor by pulling on a four foot long two-by-four. Bill had wanted to use a ten-foot-pole, but Malcolm Watts told him that nobody would want to come near it with a ten-foot pole. That seems to have convinced him.
Looking through the archives, Bill had found a posting by John Freau on how to convert small AC motors into fully synchronous motors. Oblivious to the fact that the conversion pertained only to SMALL AC motors, Bill modified his motor anyhow, and found that after filing away large chunks of his rotor that the modification only made his motor lopsided. Now it REALLY jumped around when he turned on the power. So he held the rotary spark gap assembly wooden base plate as still as he could by temporarily holding it down with a couple of old lawn mower engines that he had hanging around. He made a mental note to drop John a nasty note telling him how useless his modification had been.
Back a few feet from the spark gap was the one eared pole pig. Thick high voltage cables snaked across the floor from the Pig to the Spark Gap and the rest of the Tesla Coil. Not wanting to cut the cables, (which he had borrowed from work without asking) Bill had left each cable its original length of fifty feet.
The pig was fed a diet of 220 VAC from a 100 amp service line. Now, the pole piggie was only rated at 10KVA, but Bill had read somewhere on the List that you could actually push a pig to two or three times its rated power capacity if you kept the run short, (so that you didn't boil off all the oil). Bill planned to test out this theory tonight.
Now, Bill SHOULD have had a number of things that he didn't. Such as common sense, an ON/OFF switch, and adequate fuses. Bill just couldn't bring himself to pay good money for something that was designed to self-destruct. Instead of fuses he had placed large metal bolts in the fuse holders. Much more robust, don't you think??
Being something of a cheapskate, Bill had decided not to bother with installing a silly little thing like an ON/OFF switch, because the guy at the dump wanted more than two bucks for the ones he had in the big box marked "Electrical Stuff". He knew that he needed something to limit the current to the pole pig, so he decided to wire a couple of defective toaster ovens and a couple of strings of Christmas tree bulbs in *parallel* with the primary of the pole pig. He could have SWORN that he had read a post somewhere (maybe on the Tesla-2 List) about putting some sort of a load in series or parallel or something or other with the transformer primary.
Bill knew that a variac was really a "must", but he didn't have one. He was originally going to use a 5 amp Triac that was on sale at Radio Shack, but when he got there they were all out. But then he remembered having read a post that seemed to imply that you could modify a three phase AC motor to act as some kind of a variable transformer. Sneaking into the dump under cover of darkness, he liberated a 400 pound three phase AC motor that had once seen service in an office building as the elevator motor. Luckily for him he owned a truck with a crane attached. Heh heh. A few whacks with an axe in just the right places and he had de-commisioned one set of windings. He knew he only needed two. But which two? He hoped it was the two that still remained. He welded two metal stubs to the casing and then welded a three foot length of one inch diameter solid steel rod to the rotor shaft. Now the motor shaft could only turn 90 degrees.
It was still a minute or two before the In-Laws were scheduled to arrive. One last check and Bill was ready for an operational test. He turned on the rotary spark gap motor. Whump! Whump! Whump! Whump! Whump WhumpWHUMPwhumpawhumpawumpawupa... Yes, the spark gap assembly was a bit, uh, vibrational, but seemed to be holding together OK. Bill lined the plug up with the socket (remember, he had no ON/OFF switch), and rammed the plug into the socket. BZZZZSHHHT! The spark gap lit up with bright actinic light and would have fried Bill's eyeballs in no time at all if not for the fact that Bill (always safety conscious) had quickly put on a pair of welding goggles. Now he could look at the spark gap arc with impunity. Which he did. Unfortunately, the goggles were so dark that that was ALL that Bill could see.
Carefully shielding his eyes with his left hand, he used his right hand to gingerly lift the goggles and look at the Christmas tree on the front lawn.
Outside, the Christmas tree came to life with a pale glow of pink and blue corona that fuzzed out for about two feet. But no arcs. No streamers. What a bummer! He stuffed another wad of cotton in each ear so that he could think again, and taking a deep breath of the ozone-soaked air, he groped his way over towards the modified three phase motor. Grabbing a hold of the metal rod, he strained to change the angle of the rotor. Suddenly a forest of fierce white arcs as thick as his arm broke out between the primary and the secondary. DARN!
He released the control rod. TWANG!!!! The rod slammed itself into the short stub that acted as a stop. Bill yanked the plug out of the socket. This was not an easy task, as the plug was sort of welded into the socket. But a few good whacks with a monkey wrench and the plug came loose. The only sound was the whappawhappawhapa of the rotary gap assembly, and the insistent buzzing that was only in Bill's ears. DARN! The secondary was arcing to the primary. Maybe if he added a capacitive load to the secondary he could get this sucker to stop arcing. He looked around for something... anything... to use as a capacitive load. His eyes came to rest on the leering sharp-toothed smile of his butane tank work of art, the Halloween Tank-O-Lantern. To amuse the neighbors and anyone else foolish enough to approach his house at Halloween, he had fashioned a gruesome Tank-O-Lantern by using a cutting torch to fashion leering eyes and drooling teeth from the once-smooth surface of the butane tank. The various burn marks from the cutting torch operations made the tank look even more sinister when the light played on it just right.
Grabbing the Tank-O-Lantern, he managed to get it to sit on top of the existing anti-corona ring. It wobbled a bit, but what the heck.
For the second time that evening, Bill rammed the plug into the socket. Again the spark gap burst into life. The horrendous roar of the spark gap beat against his ears as he grabbed the control rod and pulled. A fierce blue corona outlined the eyes and teeth of the leering Tank-O-Lantern, and as he gleefully peeked out from under the welding goggles, Bill could plainly see that beautiful two to three foot arcs were issuing forth from the branches of the aluminum Christmas tree. Not bad. The system was obviously a little out of tune, and he didn't have much more time before the In-Laws would arrive, so he would just have to run it the way it was. But he wanted the tree to look a bit more Christmas-sy so he whacked the plug with the monkey wrench again and turned off the high voltage. Then he made a quick surreptitious trip to the attic and got some really awful Christmas ornaments, (the ones that his In-Laws had given him and his wife years ago), and used them to decorate the tree.
Unknown to Bill, while he was out decorating the tree, his wife came out to the garage with a bag full of garbage that she didn't want in her kitchen for her parents to see. Looking around in the garage she spied what she knew was a plastic garbage can sitting inside what looked like a cardboard container of some kind. Seeing no other garbage container around, she decided to dump the load of trash into the plastic garbage can. So she did. And with interesting results.
Bill was totally unaware that the coupling and inductance of his coil had been changed slightly by the addition of various beer cans and tuna fish containers that had been dumped into the core of his beloved experimental Magnifier Coil.
The addition of the gaudy glass Christmas tree ornaments had little effect on the capacitance of the Christmas Tree Topload, but Bill's last-minute addition of a large copper toilet ball to the very *top* of the tree had changed the isotropic capacitance of the total topload just enough that the "extra" coil and topload were in perfect tune.
When Bill saw his In-Laws exit their car and begin their trip down the shoveled walkway that led within a few feet of the Christmas Coil, he stationed himself next to the power outlet and waited until they were at just the right spot.
His face twitched nervously, and he made a strange gurgling sound as he waited anxiously for his In-Laws to reach the perfect spot. And then they were there.
Gleefully he jammed the plug into the socket and then ran excitedly over to the control rod. Little beads of sweat broke out on his forehead as he grasped the rod firmly with both hands and pulled madly back on the control rod.
Meanwhile, inside the garbage can secondary, RF induction heating was taking place on the cat food tin cans. The heat caused the garbage to shift suddenly, and in that instant a wonderful serendipity took place. For a few fleeting cycles, PERFECT resonance was achieved! Megawatts of energy happily surged back and forth in the slipshod tank circuit of the amazing Christmas Coil. Phase angles slipped past one another invisibly and fell in-synch. Due to a couple of missing teeth on the makeshift rotary spark gap's circular saw blade the caps ceased to fire for a moment, and the capacitor bank experienced an Anomalous Resonant Rise. An instant later the excessive voltage caused a particularly massive dump of energy into the primary circuit at precisely the right phase angle, and the resulting surge in energy passed from the base of the wildly glowing Tank-O- Lantern down the copper tubing transmission line, which looked as though it were ringed with fire. The transmission line was just exactly the right length to allow the electrical wave travelling down it to slam into the base of the "extra" coil precisely at a zero voltage, MAX current node. Richard Hull would have been proud. The "extra" coil and the Christmas Tree Topload with round copper toilet ball were exactly matched to the impedance required, and the massive driving force of megawatts of resonant energy caused the "extra" coil to react like a spring that had been hit hard with a hammer. The resulting jump in energy caused the voltage at the Christmas Tree to exceed the breakdown voltage of the winter air. With a mad, screeching KaBOOOM the air broke down, and a single solitary streamer launched itself into the cold night air. Up, UP, *UP* it surged, sending a seething, writhing, liquid bolt of pure white electricity stabbing through the darkness. Then, seeking the path of least resistance, it arched over and began its lethal descent. Escaping the intense electrostatic forces that existed at the surface of the aluminum tree, the mighty bolt of man-made lightning swerved around and headed straight for the nearest conductive object it could find!!!
The In-Laws would have been toasted alive were it not for the one object that caught the Arc's attention. Beyond the In-Laws, a good twenty feet from where the Lightning Bolt had launched itself from the infamous Copper Toilet Ball, was an old fashioned lamp post. It put out a dim but somewhat cheery quantity of light that seemed to beckon to the Wayward Lightning Bolt. Like a giant white arm, the lightning bolt swerved around from its upward climb and slammed full force into the cheery lamp post.
PHHHHHHHT! KABLAMMMMM! Like a gigantic flash lamp the lightning bolt lit up the night with an instant of blinding whiteness and a deafening BLAM that reverberated in the In-Law's ears long after their knees had stopped shaking. Where the mighty arc hit, the metal of the lamp-post went incandescent and exploded into a shower of hot sparks that rained through the air and burnt their way through the snow.
The momentary surge of primary current was too much for the EDEMMCB capacitor strings. One moment they were as cool as the night air, then the next instant they exploded like 100 Chinese firecrackers. When the EDEMMCB caps exploded this placed too much of an electrical burden on the other capacitors in the system. First the Beer Bottle caps shattered and sent shards of glass whizzing in all directions. Then the once-sturdy home-made rolled caps exploded like a bunch of defective cannon. They all burst at once and spewed hot liquid laxative throughout the garage, and all over poor Bill, who was already feeling pretty sh***y as it was.
A flash of light. A moment of raw, awesome beauty, a might explosion, and then DARKNESS as all the electricity for blocks around ceased to flow.
It is a Christmas that Bill will always remember. It is a Christmas that his wife and In-Laws will never let him forget.
***** This is just a story. Any resemblance to any persons living or dead named Bill is merely coincidental.
As the author of this tale I want to say that the story is not meant to be a plan for how to build your own Arcstarter -er- I mean, Magnifier Coil.
The theory contained herein is only partially believeable, and is not meant to be a factual accounting of what actually happens in a Tesla Coil.
This is not an endorsement of Radio Shack or any of their products.
Cat lovers will please refrain from sending nasty e-mails to either Bill or myself.
Plans for the Christmas Coil may be made available if enough persons are interested. I should mention that the plans are purely experimental, which is why I will only be charging a token $25 for the plans.
I hope that all of you enjoy this little romp in the spirit in which it was written. I hope that none of those mentioned by name or otherwise implicated in the plot take offense at what has been written.
I wrote it especially for my good friend (at least he WAS my good friend), Bill the Arcstarter Pollack. But, as the disclaimer said, it is not actually ABOUT him. Even though he does hate cats and builds Tank-O-Lanterns, and dabbles in Tesla Coils. This story is just about a Bill who happens to be an awful lot LIKE Bill Pollack. The real Bill would *never* borrow anything from work without asking. He is beyond reproach. He is my friend.
Written by Fr. Tom McGahee
(reposted on the TCML in November2000)
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