My grandfather owned an electric car. It wasn't much more than a heavy duty golf cart with a hard shell (fully enclosed), but it could go 40 mph and go several miles on a charge. He lives in a small town in Iowa and he would use it to take my Grandmother out for dinner, run to the store down the street, etc.
It ran on car batteries, and he used the same set of batteries for over 10 years before they finally couldn't hold a significant charge. Car batteries are easily recyclable (see my previous posts from where I worked at a secondary lead refinery recycling car batteries).
He eventually sold the car to a man from California who drove to Iowa hauling a trailer so he could haul the car back to California. Unlike a lot of cars, my Grandfather got more money for the car than he paid for it 10 years before.
Actually, this is a very good book. After reading Tom Clancy's The Sum Of All Fears I was interested in finding out 'just how difficult is it to make an atomic bomb?'
I found this book at my local Half Prices Books store and picked it up cheap. It's an interesting read, and there is an awful lot of history involved that a majority of Americans don't know about.
I highly recommend this book even though it's not a recent release.
Newspaper subscriptions are one of the exceptions to most don't call lists, so even with the new legislation we can still expect to receive calls from newspapers and non-profit organizations.
if youve ever got motor oil on your hands youll notice it feels warmer than water of the same temperature. It doesnt carry heat away like water will.
True, but water is about a zillion times more evaporative than oil, so if you get any water on you, especially if it's warmer than body temp, it's already evaporating and thus feels cooler than warm oil would.
If you have ever got your hands wet in the winter time, you'll notice that it literally sucks the heat right out of your hand because the relative humidity in winter is usually very low and it doesn't take much to make the water on your hands start evaporating. If you got cold oil on your hands (at the same temperature as the cold water) it won't feel nearly as cold as it's not evaporating. It will pull enough heat out of your hands to reach thermal equilibrium and then stop.
If you have ever splashed hot water on yourself, you'll notice that even if you get burned, the inital 'hot' part of it is over with almost immediately. Hot oil on the other continues to feel hot and will continue to burn you much longer.
In an enclosed system where there is no evaporation, the difference won't be nearly as great.
Has anyone ever built a water-cooled PC that uses an external fountain as a radiator? Obviously you would want it far enough away from the PC so as to prevent splashing, but I think one of those little zen rock fountains would make an interesting and relaxing radiator, as long as you remembered to keep adding water...:-)
It sounds to me like even if you buy the DVD player, you would still need to subscribe to a service to get updates for new DVDs that come out.
Maybe the MPAA is concerned that someone else might be siphoning off 0.000000000000000000000001% of the revenue stream generated by DVD sales and rentals?
Hairspray? That is kid's stuff
on
Potato Bazookas
·
· Score: 1
We made spud guns a few years back that run on compressed air. You get a section of 4" PVC pipe and cap one end. Drill a hole in the cap and install a tire valve in that hole. That's where you charge it with an air compressor. The length of the 4" PVC pipe determines the amount of 'charge'.
The other end of the 4" pipe is capped with a 4" to 2" (or 1.5") reducer and that is attached to an underground lawn sprinkler valve. The other side of the valve is attached to a chuck of 1.5" or 2" pipe, depending on how big of spud you want to shoot.
Although it doesn't really matter what shape you build it in, we found the most effecient way was to stand the 4" tube and the barrel tube on the ground, tape them together, and then attache the reducers, elbows and the sprinkler valve at the end that had been on the ground. You could theoretically build it all in a straight line, but with a decent sized thank and a barrel of any significant length, it would be very awkward.
Hook up a couple of 9V batteries to a momentary contact switch and attach to the sprinkler valve.
Voila, a compressed air spud gun.
Why compressed air you ask? Simple. In a hairspray spud gun, you have to spray just the right amount of hairpspray, quickly close the breech, point the gun and fire. If you don't get the right amount of hairspray or time it just right you get a misfire, or worse yet, no fire. Compressed air spud guns can be loaded and fired several minutes, possibly hours, later with no problems.
We used a high quality PVC piping that was rated at something like 300 psi and we never used more than 60 psi of pressure to charge it for safety and that seemed to be just as powerful as a normal hairspray spud shooter.
Just for fun, we put an end cap on the barrel and drilled a 3/8" hole in it. Then filled the barrel with water, charged it with air, and voila, the 'super soaker from hell' was born.
Sure, but if you add the word "internet" to it, it automatically qualifies for a new patent... or at least that's what a lot of the current stupid patents would lead you to believe.
Another excellent way of making the point is saying that Kazaa is like the phone company. They both have legitimate reasons for existing, allowing people to communicate and share information amongst themselves.
However, like Kazaa, the phone company can be used for illegal actions - you can make obscene phone calls (not the phone company's fault) - you could call your bookie and arrange an illegal wager (not the phone company's fault) - you could call a hitman and have him take out your nagging, whining, bitchy, 'I don't have to have sex with you ever again' wife (not the phone company's fault).
If you have small furry animals running around your house, you have to be *real* careful.
My brother had (notice the correct use of the past tense) a hamster who got out of his cage and some how ended up inside of his HP LaserJet 4xx (which ever one was the really big network model) and when he went to print a page it started making funny noises and the page only came half way out of the printer streaked with red splotches... Ewwwww.
I've got some of these NdFeB magnets and if you don't have some now, go order some! They are incredibly powerful and a ton of fun to play with. I got mine from a user on ebay who calls himself Pie. He also runs a website called WonderMagnet.com.
Don't ignore those safety warnings, these suckers are STRONG and will hurt you if you're not careful. I bought a whole stack of them and sold two to a co-worker - within minutes he had let them slam together and they shattered sending little sharp pieces (they're a metallic ceramic and break like glass) flying in all directions. To mis-quote A Christmas Story - you'll put your eye out, kid!
Except that the ink itself isn't really all that expensive. There is no way that Lexmark is going to convince me that the extra 15-20 mL of ink is worth $38.50.
Even if we assume that there is only an extra 10 mL ink per cartridge, that would mean that their ink was worth around $1900 per litre which makes it about 3,000x the cost of Mountain Dew: Code Red (to put it in terms that the average/.'er can understand).
I can understand them claiming that the manufacturing cost of ink cartridges is high due to precision, or electronics, or whatever, but $2K per litre of ink is just flat out unbelievable.
I just bought replacement inkjet cartridges for a female friends Lexmark printer.
Total cost of inkjet cartridges $77 U.S.
Cost to buy an identical printer with cartridges included $82 U.S.
Either the printer itself only costs $5 to manufacture, or the prices on the inkjet catridges are artificially inflated to produce large profits.
Maybe in the future we should all make it a point to simply buy a whole new printer instead of buying replacement cartridges. Maybe after a year of selling only printers with negative profit values they'll re-examine their business model.
As a chemist who has had the misfortune of experiencing chemical burns due to my boss' stupidity, I can't stress the importance of protecting yourself enough!
As I've stated before, I used to work in a secondary lead refinery. There were massive air filtration units to remove part of the lead dust from the air - we still had to wear respirators - and collect it in large canvas bags that were repeatedly shaken by the collection equipment to get the dust to fall to the bottom of the bags.
The dust collected in these bags was very fine (large lead particles don't traditionally remain airborne for very long at 1G). Fine metallic dusts are highly flammable when mixed with an oxidant.
One of the methods we used for determining various elemental levels was to combine a fixed amount of a sample with an equal amount of Sodium Peroxide (which is a highly reactive oxidizer), heat the sample mixture until it became molten and then drop the crucible full of molten reactive material into a beaker containing a fixed amount of de-ionized water. After the rapid reaction of the very hot oxidizer coming into contact with the water, we would fish out the crucible and run the water through an atomic adsorption spectrophotometer which would tell us how much of which element were present. In addition to being a very cool reaction to watch, it would take almost any material and convert it into a water soluble salt so it could be read on the spec.
Because of the reactivity of Sodium Peroxide (which all by itself will burst into flames when mixed with water) we would only use this method on material that was traditionally non-flammable such as the slag from the various furnaces.
The person who was promoted to lab manager when the original manager left was not a chemist, and had never taken a chemistry class in his life and didn't understand the basic rules of chemistry (i.e., hot glassware looks exactly the same as cold glassware) and was often times caught doing something stupid.
One day when the floor supervisor brought in a sample of lead dust from the shaker bags to be tested, Tom (the new manager) got a hold of the sample and volunteered to do the analysis. I watched him weigh out equal amounts of dust and Sodium Peroxide, but before he could combine them in the zirconium crucible I pointed out to him that you really shouldn't mix highly flammable materials with a highly reactive oxidizer.
He politely told me to mind my own business and that he was the lab manager and he knew what he was doing. I then proceeded to move quickly away from him and watched carefully from across the lab as he not only proceeded to mix the two materials together (luckily without incident) but then proceeded to pick up a pestle and try to grind the two materials together in the crucible.
For those who have never worked with potentially explosive materials, they can be set off by a variety of sources including, but not limited to, heat, pressure and shock. When you combine two reactive materials in a metal crucible and then proceed to grind them together with a heavy porcelain pestle, you introduce heat, pressure and shock. Needless to say within about two seconds the materials combined together in a very impressively large flash, severely burning the hand holding the pestle and burning off just the upper part of his eyebrows that extended beyond the top of his safety glasses.
I have never had to bite my tongue so hard before or since in my life to keep from laughing directly in his face.
This was almost as funny as the time when he got red phosphorous on his asbestos gloves which were already contaminated with sulfur and potassium nitrate and then proceeded to try and dust off his gloves by rubbing them on the front of his (luckily) flame-retardent shirt. He apparently didn't know that sulfur, phosphorous and potassium nitrate is the basic recipe for strike-anywhere matches...
Ah, then that explains why I looked like a fool. My sister who is 22 had never seen E.T. before. I rented it a couple of weeks ago and was telling her about how Spielburg had P.C.'d the movie by changing guns to walkie-talkies and changing the line about going out for Halloween looking like terrorists, and then lo and behold, she says "terrorists" and everybody had guns... guess I played the wrong version of the movie.
Guess that also explains why I didn't notice any new scenes updates...
This is really no different then selling anything else in a Pawn Shop. They need a record in case the material turns out to be stolen.
I frequently take old CDs, DVDs and books that I no longer need to Half Price Books to help clear out the clutter in my home (I own 500+ legitimately purchased CDs, thousands of books, etc). They routinely ask for identification, make sure that the name and signature match the receipt that I sign and then hand me my cash. I don't know if they keep a record or not, but they don't copy my driver's license or ask for a SSN or anything like that.
I'm as protective of my privacy as most knowledgable geeks are and I don't have a problem with this.
Seriously though, you mean if I wrote "Sertifyed Chek" on a piece of brown paper with a crayon and handed it to the delivery guy, it would still be the original shipper's fault for getting screwed?
Hopefully at the very least, FedEx and UPS keep a database of names/addresses when people report crap like this so they don't keep accepting bad checks from the same guy day after day and then claiming no responsibility... of course they probably don't keep a database for that very reason, they can just claim ignorance and point to their disclaimer...
I've never sent anything COD, but wouldn't FedEx be partly to blame for accepting a phony/counterfeit cashier's check?
It's not the tablet that's expensive, it's the pen
on
Examining a Tablet PC
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I went to a local CompUSA store with a co-worker who was very interested in buying a tablet PC. He currently lugs his laptop to meetings every day and he wants something a little more horizontal.
There was one tablet on display, but no stylus to operate it. I tried using my PDA stylus to no avail. A salesperson eventually wandered over to help and said he'd have to go get the special pen they keep under lock and key. When he came back after a couple of minutes I asked why they didn't have it on some sort of chain so people could use it, he told me that the pens for the tablet PCs they stock sell for between $150 and $300 each depending upon the brand (they appear to be interchangable as we used a Toshiba pen on a non-Toshiba tablet) and they had already had two grow legs and walk away.
As someone who has lost at least 3 PDA styli in the past few years (yes, I was one of those kind of geeks who bought a Pilot the first week it was released) I know it's just a matter of time before I would lose the tablet's pen, and there is no way in hell I'm going to tie myself to a PC that is useless without a $300 pen that can be lost that easily.
After leaving, I got to wondering if the tablets could be used with the same kind of stylus that a graphics tablet uses, as those can be purchased for far less than $150. I'll need to remember to take my Wacom pen with me next time I go shopping...
Slashdot Mirror
My grandfather owned an electric car. It wasn't much more than a heavy duty golf cart with a hard shell (fully enclosed), but it could go 40 mph and go several miles on a charge. He lives in a small town in Iowa and he would use it to take my Grandmother out for dinner, run to the store down the street, etc.
It ran on car batteries, and he used the same set of batteries for over 10 years before they finally couldn't hold a significant charge. Car batteries are easily recyclable (see my previous posts from where I worked at a secondary lead refinery recycling car batteries).
He eventually sold the car to a man from California who drove to Iowa hauling a trailer so he could haul the car back to California. Unlike a lot of cars, my Grandfather got more money for the car than he paid for it 10 years before.
Click here
Actually, this is a very good book. After reading Tom Clancy's The Sum Of All Fears I was interested in finding out 'just how difficult is it to make an atomic bomb?'
I found this book at my local Half Prices Books store and picked it up cheap. It's an interesting read, and there is an awful lot of history involved that a majority of Americans don't know about.
I highly recommend this book even though it's not a recent release.
Newspaper subscriptions are one of the exceptions to most don't call lists, so even with the new legislation we can still expect to receive calls from newspapers and non-profit organizations.
If only there was a [+1 Insightful but Offtopic]...
Per means that it's more, so H2O is Dihydrogen oxide (no mon), and H2O2 is Dihydrogen PERoxide.
Cool! I was thinking of using one of those little desktop ones, but this guy went one step further!
if youve ever got motor oil on your hands youll notice it feels warmer than water of the same temperature. It doesnt carry heat away like water will.
:-)
True, but water is about a zillion times more evaporative than oil, so if you get any water on you, especially if it's warmer than body temp, it's already evaporating and thus feels cooler than warm oil would.
If you have ever got your hands wet in the winter time, you'll notice that it literally sucks the heat right out of your hand because the relative humidity in winter is usually very low and it doesn't take much to make the water on your hands start evaporating. If you got cold oil on your hands (at the same temperature as the cold water) it won't feel nearly as cold as it's not evaporating. It will pull enough heat out of your hands to reach thermal equilibrium and then stop.
If you have ever splashed hot water on yourself, you'll notice that even if you get burned, the inital 'hot' part of it is over with almost immediately. Hot oil on the other continues to feel hot and will continue to burn you much longer.
In an enclosed system where there is no evaporation, the difference won't be nearly as great.
Has anyone ever built a water-cooled PC that uses an external fountain as a radiator? Obviously you would want it far enough away from the PC so as to prevent splashing, but I think one of those little zen rock fountains would make an interesting and relaxing radiator, as long as you remembered to keep adding water...
It sounds to me like even if you buy the DVD player, you would still need to subscribe to a service to get updates for new DVDs that come out. Maybe the MPAA is concerned that someone else might be siphoning off 0.000000000000000000000001% of the revenue stream generated by DVD sales and rentals?
We made spud guns a few years back that run on compressed air. You get a section of 4" PVC pipe and cap one end. Drill a hole in the cap and install a tire valve in that hole. That's where you charge it with an air compressor. The length of the 4" PVC pipe determines the amount of 'charge'.
The other end of the 4" pipe is capped with a 4" to 2" (or 1.5") reducer and that is attached to an underground lawn sprinkler valve. The other side of the valve is attached to a chuck of 1.5" or 2" pipe, depending on how big of spud you want to shoot.
Although it doesn't really matter what shape you build it in, we found the most effecient way was to stand the 4" tube and the barrel tube on the ground, tape them together, and then attache the reducers, elbows and the sprinkler valve at the end that had been on the ground. You could theoretically build it all in a straight line, but with a decent sized thank and a barrel of any significant length, it would be very awkward.
Hook up a couple of 9V batteries to a momentary contact switch and attach to the sprinkler valve.
Voila, a compressed air spud gun.
Why compressed air you ask? Simple. In a hairspray spud gun, you have to spray just the right amount of hairpspray, quickly close the breech, point the gun and fire. If you don't get the right amount of hairspray or time it just right you get a misfire, or worse yet, no fire. Compressed air spud guns can be loaded and fired several minutes, possibly hours, later with no problems.
We used a high quality PVC piping that was rated at something like 300 psi and we never used more than 60 psi of pressure to charge it for safety and that seemed to be just as powerful as a normal hairspray spud shooter.
Just for fun, we put an end cap on the barrel and drilled a 3/8" hole in it. Then filled the barrel with water, charged it with air, and voila, the 'super soaker from hell' was born.
Sure, but if you add the word "internet" to it, it automatically qualifies for a new patent... or at least that's what a lot of the current stupid patents would lead you to believe.
Another excellent way of making the point is saying that Kazaa is like the phone company. They both have legitimate reasons for existing, allowing people to communicate and share information amongst themselves.
However, like Kazaa, the phone company can be used for illegal actions - you can make obscene phone calls (not the phone company's fault) - you could call your bookie and arrange an illegal wager (not the phone company's fault) - you could call a hitman and have him take out your nagging, whining, bitchy, 'I don't have to have sex with you ever again' wife (not the phone company's fault).
If you have small furry animals running around your house, you have to be *real* careful.
My brother had (notice the correct use of the past tense) a hamster who got out of his cage and some how ended up inside of his HP LaserJet 4xx (which ever one was the really big network model) and when he went to print a page it started making funny noises and the page only came half way out of the printer streaked with red splotches... Ewwwww.
I've got some of these NdFeB magnets and if you don't have some now, go order some! They are incredibly powerful and a ton of fun to play with. I got mine from a user on ebay who calls himself Pie. He also runs a website called WonderMagnet.com.
Don't ignore those safety warnings, these suckers are STRONG and will hurt you if you're not careful. I bought a whole stack of them and sold two to a co-worker - within minutes he had let them slam together and they shattered sending little sharp pieces (they're a metallic ceramic and break like glass) flying in all directions. To mis-quote A Christmas Story - you'll put your eye out, kid!
Except that the ink itself isn't really all that expensive. There is no way that Lexmark is going to convince me that the extra 15-20 mL of ink is worth $38.50.
/.'er can understand).
Even if we assume that there is only an extra 10 mL ink per cartridge, that would mean that their ink was worth around $1900 per litre which makes it about 3,000x the cost of Mountain Dew: Code Red (to put it in terms that the average
I can understand them claiming that the manufacturing cost of ink cartridges is high due to precision, or electronics, or whatever, but $2K per litre of ink is just flat out unbelievable.
I just bought replacement inkjet cartridges for a female friends Lexmark printer.
Total cost of inkjet cartridges $77 U.S.
Cost to buy an identical printer with cartridges included $82 U.S.
Either the printer itself only costs $5 to manufacture, or the prices on the inkjet catridges are artificially inflated to produce large profits.
Maybe in the future we should all make it a point to simply buy a whole new printer instead of buying replacement cartridges. Maybe after a year of selling only printers with negative profit values they'll re-examine their business model.
As a chemist who has had the misfortune of experiencing chemical burns due to my boss' stupidity, I can't stress the importance of protecting yourself enough!
As I've stated before, I used to work in a secondary lead refinery. There were massive air filtration units to remove part of the lead dust from the air - we still had to wear respirators - and collect it in large canvas bags that were repeatedly shaken by the collection equipment to get the dust to fall to the bottom of the bags.
The dust collected in these bags was very fine (large lead particles don't traditionally remain airborne for very long at 1G). Fine metallic dusts are highly flammable when mixed with an oxidant.
One of the methods we used for determining various elemental levels was to combine a fixed amount of a sample with an equal amount of Sodium Peroxide (which is a highly reactive oxidizer), heat the sample mixture until it became molten and then drop the crucible full of molten reactive material into a beaker containing a fixed amount of de-ionized water. After the rapid reaction of the very hot oxidizer coming into contact with the water, we would fish out the crucible and run the water through an atomic adsorption spectrophotometer which would tell us how much of which element were present. In addition to being a very cool reaction to watch, it would take almost any material and convert it into a water soluble salt so it could be read on the spec.
Because of the reactivity of Sodium Peroxide (which all by itself will burst into flames when mixed with water) we would only use this method on material that was traditionally non-flammable such as the slag from the various furnaces.
The person who was promoted to lab manager when the original manager left was not a chemist, and had never taken a chemistry class in his life and didn't understand the basic rules of chemistry (i.e., hot glassware looks exactly the same as cold glassware) and was often times caught doing something stupid.
One day when the floor supervisor brought in a sample of lead dust from the shaker bags to be tested, Tom (the new manager) got a hold of the sample and volunteered to do the analysis. I watched him weigh out equal amounts of dust and Sodium Peroxide, but before he could combine them in the zirconium crucible I pointed out to him that you really shouldn't mix highly flammable materials with a highly reactive oxidizer.
He politely told me to mind my own business and that he was the lab manager and he knew what he was doing. I then proceeded to move quickly away from him and watched carefully from across the lab as he not only proceeded to mix the two materials together (luckily without incident) but then proceeded to pick up a pestle and try to grind the two materials together in the crucible.
For those who have never worked with potentially explosive materials, they can be set off by a variety of sources including, but not limited to, heat, pressure and shock. When you combine two reactive materials in a metal crucible and then proceed to grind them together with a heavy porcelain pestle, you introduce heat, pressure and shock. Needless to say within about two seconds the materials combined together in a very impressively large flash, severely burning the hand holding the pestle and burning off just the upper part of his eyebrows that extended beyond the top of his safety glasses.
I have never had to bite my tongue so hard before or since in my life to keep from laughing directly in his face.
This was almost as funny as the time when he got red phosphorous on his asbestos gloves which were already contaminated with sulfur and potassium nitrate and then proceeded to try and dust off his gloves by rubbing them on the front of his (luckily) flame-retardent shirt. He apparently didn't know that sulfur, phosphorous and potassium nitrate is the basic recipe for strike-anywhere matches...
Ah, then that explains why I looked like a fool. My sister who is 22 had never seen E.T. before. I rented it a couple of weeks ago and was telling her about how Spielburg had P.C.'d the movie by changing guns to walkie-talkies and changing the line about going out for Halloween looking like terrorists, and then lo and behold, she says "terrorists" and everybody had guns... guess I played the wrong version of the movie. Guess that also explains why I didn't notice any new scenes updates...
I thought it was Agent Smith who explained this to Morpheus...?
I'll wait for the Super-Tiger-Dragon Edition...
This is really no different then selling anything else in a Pawn Shop. They need a record in case the material turns out to be stolen.
I frequently take old CDs, DVDs and books that I no longer need to Half Price Books to help clear out the clutter in my home (I own 500+ legitimately purchased CDs, thousands of books, etc). They routinely ask for identification, make sure that the name and signature match the receipt that I sign and then hand me my cash. I don't know if they keep a record or not, but they don't copy my driver's license or ask for a SSN or anything like that.
I'm as protective of my privacy as most knowledgable geeks are and I don't have a problem with this.
If you use your Ferrari to rob a bank, then the RIAA will claim that you actually robbed 4 banks.
Note to self: Never rely on FedEx for a C.O.D.
Seriously though, you mean if I wrote "Sertifyed Chek" on a piece of brown paper with a crayon and handed it to the delivery guy, it would still be the original shipper's fault for getting screwed?
Hopefully at the very least, FedEx and UPS keep a database of names/addresses when people report crap like this so they don't keep accepting bad checks from the same guy day after day and then claiming no responsibility... of course they probably don't keep a database for that very reason, they can just claim ignorance and point to their disclaimer...
I've never sent anything COD, but wouldn't FedEx be partly to blame for accepting a phony/counterfeit cashier's check?
I went to a local CompUSA store with a co-worker who was very interested in buying a tablet PC. He currently lugs his laptop to meetings every day and he wants something a little more horizontal.
There was one tablet on display, but no stylus to operate it. I tried using my PDA stylus to no avail. A salesperson eventually wandered over to help and said he'd have to go get the special pen they keep under lock and key. When he came back after a couple of minutes I asked why they didn't have it on some sort of chain so people could use it, he told me that the pens for the tablet PCs they stock sell for between $150 and $300 each depending upon the brand (they appear to be interchangable as we used a Toshiba pen on a non-Toshiba tablet) and they had already had two grow legs and walk away.
As someone who has lost at least 3 PDA styli in the past few years (yes, I was one of those kind of geeks who bought a Pilot the first week it was released) I know it's just a matter of time before I would lose the tablet's pen, and there is no way in hell I'm going to tie myself to a PC that is useless without a $300 pen that can be lost that easily.
After leaving, I got to wondering if the tablets could be used with the same kind of stylus that a graphics tablet uses, as those can be purchased for far less than $150. I'll need to remember to take my Wacom pen with me next time I go shopping...