I live in the country, and I cover the whole of Scotland and down to about half way down England. I can't just hop on a train to get into town because I'd need to work out some way of carrying nearly a tonne of spare parts and test equipment with me.
I use a 2.5mm tip for most through-hole, and if I need to remove an IC I just cut the legs away. There's no point wasting time with them.
I have no longer got the patience, eyesight or manual dexterity to cope with fiddly through-hole parts.
For SMD ICs I use a 4mm tip. A little drop of flux on the pads, tack the chip down at one corner, then drag-solder and it's perfectly stuck in seconds.
In "storytelling" for example, the storyteller just telling the "and then the prince arrived on his mighty stallion" might be interrupted by the question "when was the stallion born and where?" by someone in the audience. *THAT* could be implemented quite good in hypertext.
It could also be implemented quite well by telling the person asking the question to give up with the irrelevant questions. Possibly followed by the application of a captive-bolt gun.
Relabel some of the controls for channel and volume up and down and source select, and you're sorted.
Seriously. It's so intuitive to use as an on-screen pointing device for more complex selections, but it's about the size of the remote that came with my last TV. You could mount the IR LEDs for the "sensor bar" somewhere in the bezel, without having to have extra stuck-on bits.
The electronic components are all before everything became SMD, so it's still possible to do basic circuit board repair yourself.
Just as an aside, it's far easier to do SMD repairs than through-hole. You just need to get rid of that 200W soldering iron you use on those valve base lugs and car battery terminals.
Okay, if I say that homeopathy is bunk and you say that I'm making a sweeping generalisation, then does this mean you're saying that homeopathy might not be bunk?
I guess you're right; it looks like there's solid evidence that homeopathy, astrology, AGW and young Earth creationism really do have a solid basis in science - and you only need to fiddle the numbers a little bit to prove it!
Current-controlled in nearly all systems. I have *never* seen a current-controlled one in anything from 600cc Yanmar marine diesels to 16 litre Rolls-Royce industrial diesels.
I'll take your word for it though. Particularly if you can show me a manufacturer and part number.
I am, however, fairly enthusiastic about keeping things nicely ecologically friendly. People whinging on about the Magic Carbon Pixie with no real idea of what they are talking about (like, leaving out the all-important "dioxide" part, or knowing what the method behind CO2-induced greenhouse effect is) just piss me off.
No, I think blind AGW faith is for the kind of credulous fools that believe any old rubbish the press throws at them without bothering to examine the facts.
The glow plug controller isn't current-controlled, it's a monostable driving a big relay. If you're lucky, it might sense underbonnet temperature and back off from a maximum in the coldest temperatures of about 20 seconds, right down to about 5 seconds when it's fairly warm.
Modern common-rail diesels don't have them at all.
If your diesel is making smoke under load, you have a claggy air filter or you've fiddled with the fuelling and got it wrong.
Even older engines are surprisingly clean if they're well-maintained. It also helps if you run on cleaner fuels, which is why I'm converting my 1988 Citroen CX to run on gas.
It depends where you are. If I lived in the US, with its lax standards of food safety and animal welfare, I'd be vegetarian too.
Another poster recommended eating organic foods. Yeah. Handy hint - if you're going to eat organic vegetables, make sure you wash and peel them carefully, and give them a good boil. Oh, and use hand sanitiser.
The organic bit is pretty disgusting too. I've shovelled tons of it on the farm.
Uhm, no. The heater plugs are on for about ten seconds before you start the engine.
If your diesel engine is making *any* visible smoke at all there's something wrong with it. Diesels don't produce smoke when they are working properly.
Actually, you change down to maintain control of the car better, particularly when you have a long downhill stretch with tight bends.
You need to do this on automatics, too, otherwise you will overheat the brakes quickly - not to mention making the car horribly unstable and wobbly to drive.
The problem is that there are "believers" on both sides of the fence. So you've got the Big Oil-faithful, and you've got the Magic Carbon Pixie-faithful. The former are probably wrong, the latter are probably right for the wrong reasons.
The global warming believers - when they're not gibbering on about homeopathy and astrology - will go on at length about how over the past decade we've seen record high temperatures in summer. Of course, because they're only parrotting what they've read online or heard from other global warming believers, they don't know (or care) that we've also seen record *low* temperatures in winter. Well, we've seen some pretty low summer temperatures, too, depending on where you look, but "ZOMG CARBON!"
I wonder if they also believe their car can accelerate to 1000mph, because they only measure the time it spends accelerating and not slowing down?
Which is why you stick it in the "coal bunker" that you *are* allowed to have, looking through the fibreglass panel in the roof. Or, you tuck it out of sight of the road round the back of the house. Since you've typically got insanely high levels at the LNB you can get away with a much longer cable run than with an aerial, even before you start getting into amplifiers.
If you're in a conservation area, you're quite likely not allowed a terrestrial TV aerial either.
Not entirely. It's quite possible for services to share spectrum, but part of Ofcom's remit is to ensure that licences are only issued in such a way that interference between them is minimised.
So, for example, I havea radio repeater, and about 30 miles away, the ambulance service in the next county to the north runs a repeater on one of the same frequencies. It's not a massive problem, because there's a hill in between that UHF can't really get through. No biggie. However, they won't assign the same frequency to anyone much further away to the south, because it's flat and the signal will travel a long way - far beyond the "expected" range of my licence. Planning is everything.
I don't see why it would be a problem. Simply keep the LTE kit off the same frequencies used by TV transmitters in a given area, which is pretty much what Ofcom are paid vast amounts of money to do.
Of course you have OTA TV service; you just use satellite instead.
The other great thing about satellite is that the dishes are small and usually mounted relatively low down and close to a wall. This means they are far less susceptible to high winds than a big dangly Yagi stuck up on a tall pole.
Furthermore, in quite a bit of the UK there is no real terrestrial coverage - much of the north of Scotland has no terrestrial digital and isn't ever likely to have it. We've used digital satellite for years, because even the analogue terrestrial service was extremely poor. I used to have two stacked 24-element industrial spec Yagis aimed at the nearest transmitter, with two signal boosters to drive the 300m of coax back to the house. It would probably have been cheaper to move the house 300m to where the signal was...
A set top box costs about the same as a DVD *player*, which frequently costs less than the discs you put in it.
My local Tesco has STBs and DVD players for about £15 each. They're crap but they work. If you *really* want to throw money at the problem you can get a dual-tuner DVR with DVD and 320GB hard disk for about 50 quid.
Oh come on, have you ever read it? All it needs is to print the masthead in white-on-red and have a 16-year-old with her boobs out on page 3 and a ranty article about Internet paedophiles on facing page 2.
Slashdot Mirror
I live in the country, and I cover the whole of Scotland and down to about half way down England. I can't just hop on a train to get into town because I'd need to work out some way of carrying nearly a tonne of spare parts and test equipment with me.
This is not exactly an uncommon situation.
I use a 2.5mm tip for most through-hole, and if I need to remove an IC I just cut the legs away. There's no point wasting time with them.
I have no longer got the patience, eyesight or manual dexterity to cope with fiddly through-hole parts.
For SMD ICs I use a 4mm tip. A little drop of flux on the pads, tack the chip down at one corner, then drag-solder and it's perfectly stuck in seconds.
In "storytelling" for example, the storyteller just telling the "and then the prince arrived on his mighty stallion" might be interrupted by the question "when was the stallion born and where?" by someone in the audience. *THAT* could be implemented quite good in hypertext.
It could also be implemented quite well by telling the person asking the question to give up with the irrelevant questions. Possibly followed by the application of a captive-bolt gun.
Relabel some of the controls for channel and volume up and down and source select, and you're sorted.
Seriously. It's so intuitive to use as an on-screen pointing device for more complex selections, but it's about the size of the remote that came with my last TV. You could mount the IR LEDs for the "sensor bar" somewhere in the bezel, without having to have extra stuck-on bits.
The electronic components are all before everything became SMD, so it's still possible to do basic circuit board repair yourself.
Just as an aside, it's far easier to do SMD repairs than through-hole. You just need to get rid of that 200W soldering iron you use on those valve base lugs and car battery terminals.
Okay, if I say that homeopathy is bunk and you say that I'm making a sweeping generalisation, then does this mean you're saying that homeopathy might not be bunk?
I guess you're right; it looks like there's solid evidence that homeopathy, astrology, AGW and young Earth creationism really do have a solid basis in science - and you only need to fiddle the numbers a little bit to prove it!
Current-controlled in nearly all systems.
I have *never* seen a current-controlled one in anything from 600cc Yanmar marine diesels to 16 litre Rolls-Royce industrial diesels.
I'll take your word for it though. Particularly if you can show me a manufacturer and part number.
I don't know what those are.
I am, however, fairly enthusiastic about keeping things nicely ecologically friendly. People whinging on about the Magic Carbon Pixie with no real idea of what they are talking about (like, leaving out the all-important "dioxide" part, or knowing what the method behind CO2-induced greenhouse effect is) just piss me off.
No, I think blind AGW faith is for the kind of credulous fools that believe any old rubbish the press throws at them without bothering to examine the facts.
AGW is anti-scientific nonsense.
The glow plug controller isn't current-controlled, it's a monostable driving a big relay. If you're lucky, it might sense underbonnet temperature and back off from a maximum in the coldest temperatures of about 20 seconds, right down to about 5 seconds when it's fairly warm.
Modern common-rail diesels don't have them at all.
If your diesel is making smoke under load, you have a claggy air filter or you've fiddled with the fuelling and got it wrong.
Even older engines are surprisingly clean if they're well-maintained. It also helps if you run on cleaner fuels, which is why I'm converting my 1988 Citroen CX to run on gas.
It depends where you are. If I lived in the US, with its lax standards of food safety and animal welfare, I'd be vegetarian too.
Another poster recommended eating organic foods. Yeah. Handy hint - if you're going to eat organic vegetables, make sure you wash and peel them carefully, and give them a good boil. Oh, and use hand sanitiser.
The organic bit is pretty disgusting too. I've shovelled tons of it on the farm.
Uhm, no. The heater plugs are on for about ten seconds before you start the engine.
If your diesel engine is making *any* visible smoke at all there's something wrong with it. Diesels don't produce smoke when they are working properly.
Actually, you change down to maintain control of the car better, particularly when you have a long downhill stretch with tight bends.
You need to do this on automatics, too, otherwise you will overheat the brakes quickly - not to mention making the car horribly unstable and wobbly to drive.
quite simply ban the toxic infernal combustion engine from metropolitan areas, complete total 100% ban.
So then I'd need to keep two vans on the road, and somehow devise some way to drive both to work just in case I needed to go into the city centre?
The problem is that there are "believers" on both sides of the fence. So you've got the Big Oil-faithful, and you've got the Magic Carbon Pixie-faithful. The former are probably wrong, the latter are probably right for the wrong reasons.
The global warming believers - when they're not gibbering on about homeopathy and astrology - will go on at length about how over the past decade we've seen record high temperatures in summer. Of course, because they're only parrotting what they've read online or heard from other global warming believers, they don't know (or care) that we've also seen record *low* temperatures in winter. Well, we've seen some pretty low summer temperatures, too, depending on where you look, but "ZOMG CARBON!"
I wonder if they also believe their car can accelerate to 1000mph, because they only measure the time it spends accelerating and not slowing down?
I don't see how it's a "tax". In the US, do you call your cable TV fees a "tax"?
Which is why you stick it in the "coal bunker" that you *are* allowed to have, looking through the fibreglass panel in the roof. Or, you tuck it out of sight of the road round the back of the house. Since you've typically got insanely high levels at the LNB you can get away with a much longer cable run than with an aerial, even before you start getting into amplifiers.
If you're in a conservation area, you're quite likely not allowed a terrestrial TV aerial either.
Get your ADSL and mobile from the same supplier. It's much cheaper that way.
No-one pays for data these days anyway. You probably end up paying extra to get a contract without data...
Not entirely. It's quite possible for services to share spectrum, but part of Ofcom's remit is to ensure that licences are only issued in such a way that interference between them is minimised.
So, for example, I havea radio repeater, and about 30 miles away, the ambulance service in the next county to the north runs a repeater on one of the same frequencies. It's not a massive problem, because there's a hill in between that UHF can't really get through. No biggie. However, they won't assign the same frequency to anyone much further away to the south, because it's flat and the signal will travel a long way - far beyond the "expected" range of my licence. Planning is everything.
I don't see why it would be a problem. Simply keep the LTE kit off the same frequencies used by TV transmitters in a given area, which is pretty much what Ofcom are paid vast amounts of money to do.
Of course you have OTA TV service; you just use satellite instead.
The other great thing about satellite is that the dishes are small and usually mounted relatively low down and close to a wall. This means they are far less susceptible to high winds than a big dangly Yagi stuck up on a tall pole.
It's not hard to get around trees.
Furthermore, in quite a bit of the UK there is no real terrestrial coverage - much of the north of Scotland has no terrestrial digital and isn't ever likely to have it. We've used digital satellite for years, because even the analogue terrestrial service was extremely poor. I used to have two stacked 24-element industrial spec Yagis aimed at the nearest transmitter, with two signal boosters to drive the 300m of coax back to the house. It would probably have been cheaper to move the house 300m to where the signal was...
A set top box costs about the same as a DVD *player*, which frequently costs less than the discs you put in it.
My local Tesco has STBs and DVD players for about £15 each. They're crap but they work. If you *really* want to throw money at the problem you can get a dual-tuner DVR with DVD and 320GB hard disk for about 50 quid.
... which is probably less of a WTF because the P in "RSVP" doesn't stand for "promptly".
Oh come on, have you ever read it? All it needs is to print the masthead in white-on-red and have a 16-year-old with her boobs out on page 3 and a ranty article about Internet paedophiles on facing page 2.