Other people mention Pelican, but that company appears to be rather half-assed about the way they make road cases - they seem to be a -lot- more interested in selling plastic flashlights. Strange.
Try instead SKB. I've been using their gear for years, with never a problem. Well-made, water-tight, light-weight, and (optionally) ATA-rated.
More serious companies include such names as Starcase and Anvil. These are heavier, and generally made out of fiberglass-laminated plywood with aluminum extrusions holding the joints together. They don't mind being loaded up with equipment and dropped off of a truck much at all - something not easily said about any plastic case. Both Starcase and Anvil will gladly build a custom box for whatever it is that needs moved, which isn't so easy with plastic.
Or, build your own. TCH sells all manner of hardware and materials for building serious road cases and racks. They've got extrusions, fiberglass/plywood laminates, and all manner of hasps, clasps, latches, and hinges, brackets, doohickeys, hoosiwatsits, and other very important widgets for case-building.
Re:You've helped us pay grocery bills and gasoline
on
#debian & IRC Politics
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· Score: 2
Wow.
Lilo really is a putz. And a lazy, slovenly, gluttonous one at that./me heads back to irc.lilofree.net
With the 16450 (or, gasp, 8250) UARTs common on old laptops, you're going to have issues keeping speeds reasonable. (57600 baud being a minimum value for "reasonable".)
Better to use ethernet. Standard hardware, and everything else already talks to it. Oh, and it's -really- fast, as far as these machines are concerned.
(yes, I've done SLIP, PPP, and plain terminal sessions with my Linux-equipped 386SL-25 laptop. Yes, I also tried PLIP, using an old laplink cable. Yes, I turned up the priority of the port's IRQ. Yes, I still had dropped characters and random strangeness. And yes, the IBM-branded PCMCIA 10base-T ethernet adapter I picked up off Ebay for $3 (!) works great, including the modem. Yes, it's a lot easier to plug into a hub anywhere one happens to be and be able to talk to the world, than it is to cart around a *nix box to tie into with RS-232. Oh. And, yes, Cat-5 is cheaper than shielded multi-conductor serial cable, and vastly easier to terminate. Also, yes, one saves a bit of RAM by not keeping the SLIP/PPP/PLIP code in memory - ethernet is cheaper.)
Too bad more 386 laptops don't have PCMCIA support.
I'm reasonably happy with my RioVolt SP-250 with iRiver firmware.
The later firmware builds reduce the already-rare skippage to almost nil, for me. (Hint: hold down the mode button after flashing to a recent build.)
I'd like to disagree about audio quality, however. It seems to sound good with my (reasonable, but not great) Sony headphones, but when plugged into my home stereo it is decisively dark-sounding and lacking dynamics, as if the top end is rolled off and a compressor is in-line.
Could be some kind of issue with the differing impedance of the stereo vs. headphones, and a cheap (or low-power) op-amp. I'd like to take it apart and see what I can do to it, but the warranty is not yet up.;)
Additionally, it fails miserably when plugged into the car via the aux input on my Blaupunkt reciever and a Koss cigarette lighter adapter (hint: Amazon sells them). In addition to the dark, compressed sound described above, it exhibits a flaw wherein one can hear, rather loudly, the motors move the head and spin the CD. I'd chalk up this latter behavior to a nasty ground loop, except for the fact that some remnants of the noise hang around even when it's running from its own batteries (thus, no ground loop is possible). Could just be RFI confusing the ADCs in the Blau head unit, too, but in any case the two of them don't get along well.
I bought it originally because I didn't want to spend the time and effort to design an MP3 player for the car, and I didn't want to drop enough cash on an in-dash unit to make owning one worthwhile.
It doesn't serve the in-car purpose very well at all, for me.
But as a portable player, for use with headphones? It's great. The interface is intuitive once you've used it a couple of times, and iRiver is -not- in the habit of hiding esoteric features and settings from their users.:)
Ramsey Electronics has a selection of AM and FM transmitters, either in kit form or pre-assembled.
On the main page is a blurb about their 35-Watt model, which would be sufficient for covering a small town.
There is an active community (or there was, on usenet) of people who modify their products for various things... it has all the smells and tastes of OSS.
I picked up their cheapest FM Stereo kit some time ago for less than $50, but never got around to completing it. IIRC, it was advertised to work at a few hundred feet, with several available hacks to double or quadruple that.
Sony had (years ago - it may still exist) at one point an in-dash Minidisc recorder.
It was programmable with timers and such to record specific shows on specific stations, but MD lacks the simutaneous play-and-record TiVo-like functionality.
The engineering looks fine. You can see that there is a definate section near each connector where some rigidity-enhancing substance has been applied to the ribbon, to keep things from fraying back to the IDE connector.
Conductors toward the extreme edges don't look like they're under undue stress.
The whole thing is packed into some kind of inexpensive, flexible jacketing material which is loose-fitting enough to allow the conductors to move within, which reduces stress on the wire.
Engineering-wise, it look+s justfine. The quesition remains as to whether or not ATA-100 can tolerate being shredded like this, however - the specification calls for alternating signal and ground wires on a flat ribbon. But it does appear from the photograph that it has been split into pairs of wire consisting of one signal and ground wire each, which, given the circumstances, is also good engineering practice.
(and, 'sides, I've never heard anyone complain about overall flakiness with such cables. And every wire I've ever purchased from c2go has been of good to exceptional build quality, including some custom multi-conductor audio cables I had them build a few years back. The solder joints were beautiful.)
I've got some shell script which handily and reliably spits out VBR-encoded MP3 episodes of whatever NPR time slots I elect to record.
The hardest part was setting up the parameters for LAME to both not sound horrible, consume up little space, and take advantage of the fact that FM radio is already mid-side stereo encoded.
It was free, too. Though it did take a $20 sound card and an old Kenwood tuner to make it work, the expense of hardware is quickly overshadowed by the lack of a monthly bill and the ability to archive things easily and automatically.
I used to do remodelling. Not the fancy sort where Jane Smith needs to rework the kitchen to fit in a truckload of new Jenn-Aire appliances, but the dirty sort where Jane Smith burns up half of her house with her new Jenn-Aire appliances and needs someone to rebuild it.
One of the larger jobs I was involved in was a Salvation Army thrift store. The insurance company wrote off all of the stock on the sales floor, and our instructions were to get rid of everything.
Among the barely-used Atari joysticks and the Timex-Sinclair computer that I brought home with me, was an ancient, portable General Electric radio.
This thing has a single speaker, a switch for AM/FM, and knobs for tuning and volume. It runs on a 9V battery. It gets better AM reception than the $500 Rotel tuner/preamp attached to my stereo or the $350 Blaupunkt in the car, and I have no trouble getting clear reception of stations several hundred miles away, even during the day.
It was marked at $6.
If terrorists (teehee) knock out the power company, how would you get news and information??
Radio.
(Some restrictions may apply. Tuner not available seperately. See store for details. etc.)
Too bad that the Extigy, while having a fine 24-bit DAC, is forever limited to being a 16-bit audio device by the 16-bit DSP which is irrevocably placed in front of it.
Ah, the splendors of marketing-driven technology.
And no word on drivers for the beast, either. Last I heard, Creative Labs was still being tight-assed about specifications. (probably for similar reasons to that above.)
On occasion, I'll buy pop at places like Sam's Club. The Coke there comes packaged as four six-packs on a currogated cardboard tray.
And I've noticed, several times, that the side of this tray will have odd numbers and letters sprayed onto it (date codes and such), along with the word "sugar" or some contracted, but recognizable form of "corn syrup."
I like the corn syrup Coke better, myself...
No idea if this applies outside of the upper-left corner of Ohio or not.
On a ~4-year-old K6-2 350 with 64 megs of RAM, running FreeBSD and default IDE parameters, I get 19 megabyte-per-second I/O on the 30 gigabyte, 5400rpm (pre-Quantum) Maxtor hard drive it has, according to bonnie with a 500 megabyte test file.
bonnie, for the unaware, is a benchmark written specifically to eliminate an operating system's buffer/cache from the equation, and does well at this task as long as you specify a test size which is significantly larger than system RAM (or whatever else the machine can use for caching).
Therefore, a 500 meg test on a 64 meg PC is a fine measure of sustained throughput. It also conducts its testing at the filesystem level, and thus presents a valid measure of real-world performance in a cross-platform fashion - including disk fragmentation and other factors that really do slow things down in real life.
We'd all be doing ourselves a favor if we used bonnie for such discussions of this sort. It's free, C, and easy to compile wherever things can be compiled.
No idea what transfer mode things are happening at, except that it can't possibly be any faster than DMA33, as DMA66 and its funky 80-wire cable hadn't yet reared its ugly head toward the world.
Cables are plain old 40-conductor jobs which came with the generic, bargain-hunter motherboard.
Don't tell me I'm just lucky, here. Or that this is an isolated event.
And don't tell me there's such a thing as a professional-grade IDE anything. It's all trash. But it's fast, cheap, and demonstrably has been for years.
...and in Ohio, at least, the SS number on a drivers livence is completely optional.
Which is to say, when you go in to renew your Ohio license next time 'round, mention to the clerk that you don't want your SS number on your new card, and it won't be there.
I'm working in retail, justnow. I don't do much work as a till-monkey, but I do take checks from from a few people daily. The register reads the magnetic account number on the check, does some funky database magic, and (100% of the time since I've been there) accepts the check without requiring ID of any sort.
Personally, I'm worried about the mag-stripe readers I've been seeing in gas stations lately. They're supposedly there just to verify age, but there's a a lot more personally-identifiable information in that stripe than a birthday.
Fortunately, the stripe on my SS#-free card is unreadable by some odd twist of fate. And somehow, I don't seem to have any trouble buying beer, except for the 30 seconds or so it takes for the clerk to give up on swiping the card and just look at the fucking thing.
Light bulbs are generally rated by the power they consume, not by the light they create. An incandescant bulb creates a lot of heat, and a little bit of light, in terms of energy and efficiency. To top it off, unless you've got a window or an open door for that small amount of light to escape through, -all- of it will be turned into heat after some amount of reflection inside the room.
Which is to say: A 200W light bulb may produce various amounts of light at various levels of quality, but will always produce 200W of heat.
Your best bet? I'd vote on hitting a DJ supply store (or a guitar shop, or audio rental place - wherever you find musicians, DJs, or both) either online or locally. Note, however, that if all they have is a collection of PAR cans (glorified coffee cans with common flood lights), you're in the wrong place.
More complicated DJ lights have to deal with the same problems you have: efficiency (heat inside the fixture), color temperature, lifespan, cost, and durability. They need to be close to point-source, so that the gobo patterns they project will be easier to focus. And they need to be extremely bright.
I, once upon a time, had a Martin Robozap mounted on the wall at home. This fan-cooled light weighs 20-25 pounds, IIRC, and has a servo-driven mirror with two 150W overhead projector bulbs aimed at it. Whenever I fired it up, I had to increase air circulation in the room else it would get terribly warm, fairly quickly. I imagine the same would happen with a 300W floor lamp...
Locally, the bulbs were fairly expensive, but I was able to find the type online for ~$10 from some specialty lighting shop that primarily just sold light bulbs. They were a halogen bulb, with an integral reflector. IIRC, it's a pretty common type for overhead projectors.
Speaking of overheads, why not use one? You've appearently got an LCD display - just lay it on top of an overhead projector. Should be cheap, if buying used. Just clean up the optics and re-arrange the innards so that it's concentrating as much light as possible on the LCD display, and things should be peachy.
I hope it's obvious, but it appearently isn't because at least two posters have mentioned it: don't use white LEDs. You'll -never- achieve even satisfactory focus using an array of LEDs, let alone good focus. Now, if it were possible to make them bright enough that you'd only need one for the project, it'd be a different story...
sheesh. Leave the sales-speak for another place, or at least pepper it with some useful technical content. Or humour. Or something other than a fucking sales pitch. And, no, mention of "3 months at $30" does not qualify as useful or funny.
'sides, my cable modem is faster, and cheaper, from TWC WOH. 2m/384k.
It sucks so much faster than any DSL I've ever laid eyes on, that I get hard just thinking about it. And in a few seconds, when I click "submit," it'll be just like the Fourth of July.
Given the size and quantity of off-white crustations adhering to the ceiling above my desk (approximately one per page load), I do suspect that I've lost the security deposit on this apartment. And even considering that, it's -still- cheaper than DSL, though I suspect it does get into break-even territory once fluid replenishment is factored in. That's a -lot- of spooge, easily measured in units of gallons per minute and coffee, while cheap, isn't quite free.
A, a P90 would have no trouble moving 10-12 megs of data, a second. A P60 could do it. As could a 486, and probably a 386, if one could get away from the ISA bus (PCMCIA is 16MHz, 16-bit, IIRC - a bit quicker...). As for the triviality of doing this in the context of ethernet: in feeding this data to an NIC in 1500-byte chunks and waiting for whatever handshaking which must transpire between drivers and their respective NICs, not to mention network overhead due to collisions and such, things tend to slow down. You'll never get 100 megabits per second out of 100 megabit per second ether. 'Sides, 100Mb/s ethernet was a -tad- uncommon, if existant, in the day when the P90 was new. Sneakernet was the order of the day. People weren't sure whether token ring, or ATM, or which of the ethernets (10base-T, -2, -FX or, horror, -5) were going to make it big, if any at all. Case in point: I've got a 486 here which can't keep up with 10base-T. Did you sleep through this era, or were you just not yet born?
B, if 100Mb/s ethernet operates at 31.25MHz, I'd love to know how. AFAIK, it's serial, and binary (dual state) - thus, one bit per cycle. this link seems to indicate that things are running at 100MHz on the wire.
C, sure, yeah, whatever. You missed the bit where I mentioned benchmarking and CPU utilization, obviously. And since it's just a fileserver, it doesn't need CPU for anything other than serving files. Who cares if it's inefficient, as long as it's doing the job as well as it is capable of? Unless the CPU turns out to be a bottleneck in such an arrangement, things would work JustFine. Everyone wants UDMA133, even if they don't know what it is or that it exists at all - that doesn't mean it's needed to flood such a slow medium as 100base-T.
D, bonnie tells me that, given a 200-meg test file, I'm getting local block reads and writes at a bit over 19 megabytes per second on this 30-gig Maxtor. But transfers across the network are still 5 or 6 megs per second, depending on phase of moon. Were things running full-duplex with a high-dollar Cisco switch, I might expect them to be somewhat faster, but they're not. It is apparent to me that you missed an important element of my description, the word "unswitched."
Show me an example of a machine of similar calibre to this K6-2 333, overclocked to 350 with a first-gen generic Super7 motherboard and 1 meg of L2, where half-duplex 100 megabit ethernet performs with any superiority to this using normal methods of TCP/IP data transfer between itself and another machine of similar ilk, and I'll eat my hat.
In closing, I'd like to remind you of two things:
First, my original point that the combination of a modern hard drive and slower IDE interface is not a bottleneck on a common 100MHz ethernet segment stands true.
Second, I wish in the future you might actually read the postings to which you might like to reply, and then apply a touch of critical thinking to the points you think you might like to make. If most of your writing is like this, I do suspect that you'll have talked yourself out of the effort of producing that same majority if you follow these two simple steps.
I really doubt that the IDE interface is a limiting factor in such a machine.
I haven't met a low-end Pentium yet which is capable of saturating 100MHz ethernet, even in applications where disk IO is not part of the equation.
A new 80 gig drive would be vastly faster than the network, even at PIO 4 (16MB/sec, IIRC) or DMA33 or whatever old-school speed you've got the IDE interface running at.
If your network is not running full-duplex, you'll also have an impossible time saturating the wire because of that -- ethernet gets a lot more efficient when it can talk and listen at the same time, without looking out for collisions.
That all said, run bonnie or some other benchmark on the disk. If you see throughput in excess of, say, 7 or 8 megabytes per second, with sufficiently low CPU utilization to leave a bit for the overhead of tending to the NIC and Samba, then neither the hard disk nor its interface are any sort of bottleneck, and you should look elsewhere for an improvement in speed.
A P233MMX CPU can be had for less than $20, these days, and would probably be trivial to configure on your AOpen board.
FWIW, I've got a K6-2 350 router/file server/print machine, with a 30-gig drive of a couple years old. I haven't done fancy IDE interface tweaking under FreeBSD and have no idea what transfer mode it's using, and the motherboard is positively ancient so I'd be surprised if even DMA33 were an option. But it shoots files across the (half-duplex) network at 5 megabytes per second, generally, which I recall being a vast improvement over the Pentium machines which predated it.
AFAIK, all Clear Channel stations (read: the majority of commercial radio in the US) are using lossy-compressed music for their regular programming already, and have been for some time.
If Slashdot's search engine didn't suck so badly, I'd dig up the years-old post from one of their programming directors.
If I recall, it is not MP3 that they're using. Bell Labs' PAC format rings a bell, though.
I hear artifacts all the time on the radio, though usually on the advertising spots -- I'd imagine that the Ad People are busily sending eachother MP3s these days instead of carts or open-reel tape.
Even the local 150-watt college station uses compressed audio on a PC for their spots, though they do have three nice Tascam decks for playing real music and one remaining cart player (down from -six-).
That's why I like my 32x Plextor. It's nearly silent, and has a few very neat programmable options:
The disc can be automagically spun down to a slower speed if excessive vibration is detected. This keeps it quiet, but should also help with CDs that are ready to burst into shrapnel.
The drive can slow down for read errors, or just zip along as fast as possible as often as possible. (this latter option might be good for video, where it's more important that data arrive on time than it is for it to be accurate)
The drive can be told -never- to spin faster than a given speed. (great for ripping audio CDs)
The drive can be instructed to start transferring data before the disc reaches whatever speed is considered ideal (based on the above parameters).
That last option, combined with programmable idle spin-down time, can eliminate spin-up delays in almost all cases.
If I wanted to, I could have my drive running at 1x, -all day-, waiting for me to access it. And when I finally do want some data from it, it'll start transferring immediately, and then start spinning up to some quick-but-sane speed.
I've gotten thousands of hours (not power-on hours, but real-live usage) out of this thing in the 3 or 4 years I've owned it, and it hasn't missed a beat yet.
And support? It doesn't have a flashable firmware, but Plextor sent me the latest ROM (as in, a tangible IC) free-of-charge, just for asking. I didn't need it, but I'd been restoring damaged audio CDs, and it did help a bit with that.
Otherwise, I've never had to talk to Plextor support for anything I've owned or spec'd from them.
Not a very good business model, though - I'll probably never need to replace it.;)
The intake for said heater is, at least on every car I've ever had the displeasure of working on, just in front of the windshield and completely exposed to the elements. Rain will pour into this opening, snow will collect in it, and so forth.
Last winter, I decided to play nice and started my girlfriend's 1996 Pontiac Grand Am before clearing off the snow, saving her the effort. I turned the defroster on, and set the fan to high, and, lo, it began snowing inside of the car.
I got a kick out of that and watched for a moment. It didn't last long - presumably, it had sucked up all available loose snow, or the heater core had reached sufficient temperature to melt it, whereupon it would either drain or evaporate and get blown into the passenger cabin.
In either case, there's plenty of real live moisture in a car in the wintertime, ready to condensate on whatever relatively cold items are contained therein.
Including hard drives.
Unless of course, you never open the car, and seal off any venting to the outside world until it warms up a bit outside.
More likely, you'll be dodging trucks on a busy street, trying to hustle into the driver's seat without being killed. Your footwear will be covered with a thick, grey icey goop, which will readily be melted by the car's heater, eventually evaporate, and then condensate on anything cold once you turn off the car (especially things like nice, cool metal hard drives), where it will eventually freeze, and wait around for you to start the cycle over again.
So. Don't connect the PC to the car's ventilation system. mmkay?
Re:Shuttlecom have a fascination with Javascript
on
Shuttle SS51 Reviewed
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· Score: 2
You didn't mention you wanted it -cheap-.;)
If you can spare a PCI slot, buy a Zoltrix Nightingale and the toslink adapter for it. Should cost less than $25, shipped.
The card is a bit limited in the scope of what it can do (for instance, it -only- supports 44.1 or 48KHz, has no internal synth or resampling or DSP or anything else), but is bit-perfect from end to end - a claim that no other consumer-oriented card I know of can make.
The card+daughtercard combo I have of that gives me toslink I/O, coax out, and 4 (nearly worthless) channels of analog out. I've never used the coax out, but the toslink worked fine within its very predictable set of limitations.
I find, however, that I'm happier with the SB Live 5.1 that I snagged for a $30-35, which includes a coax output. Every now and then, I want to play non-windows games, or do non-44.1/48k things, and the Zoltrix card was making that too hard. The Live 5.1 card makes it easy. *shrug* Some people complain that the coaxial output on it is completely devoid of any similarity to any written standard for SP/DIF, but it Works Fine (tm) with the aforementioned Audio Alchemy box which predates it by several years.
Or, your Soundblaster 64's E8k chip has a coaxial SP/DIF output, already. The trick is to get MP3s to play using the synth chip instead of however it's normally done - I saw patches for this, ages ago... On my AWE 32s, there's a two-pin jumper next to a fat, square IC labeles Ensoniq which is the digital out, though I've never tried it myself.
Slashdot Mirror
Other people mention Pelican, but that company appears to be rather half-assed about the way they make road cases - they seem to be a -lot- more interested in selling plastic flashlights. Strange.
Try instead SKB. I've been using their gear for years, with never a problem. Well-made, water-tight, light-weight, and (optionally) ATA-rated.
More serious companies include such names as Starcase and Anvil. These are heavier, and generally made out of fiberglass-laminated plywood with aluminum extrusions holding the joints together. They don't mind being loaded up with equipment and dropped off of a truck much at all - something not easily said about any plastic case. Both Starcase and Anvil will gladly build a custom box for whatever it is that needs moved, which isn't so easy with plastic.
Or, build your own. TCH sells all manner of hardware and materials for building serious road cases and racks. They've got extrusions, fiberglass/plywood laminates, and all manner of hasps, clasps, latches, and hinges, brackets, doohickeys, hoosiwatsits, and other very important widgets for case-building.
Wow.
/me heads back to irc.lilofree.net
Lilo really is a putz. And a lazy, slovenly, gluttonous one at that.
Serial, eh?
With the 16450 (or, gasp, 8250) UARTs common on old laptops, you're going to have issues keeping speeds reasonable. (57600 baud being a minimum value for "reasonable".)
Better to use ethernet. Standard hardware, and everything else already talks to it. Oh, and it's -really- fast, as far as these machines are concerned.
(yes, I've done SLIP, PPP, and plain terminal sessions with my Linux-equipped 386SL-25 laptop. Yes, I also tried PLIP, using an old laplink cable. Yes, I turned up the priority of the port's IRQ. Yes, I still had dropped characters and random strangeness. And yes, the IBM-branded PCMCIA 10base-T ethernet adapter I picked up off Ebay for $3 (!) works great, including the modem. Yes, it's a lot easier to plug into a hub anywhere one happens to be and be able to talk to the world, than it is to cart around a *nix box to tie into with RS-232. Oh. And, yes, Cat-5 is cheaper than shielded multi-conductor serial cable, and vastly easier to terminate. Also, yes, one saves a bit of RAM by not keeping the SLIP/PPP/PLIP code in memory - ethernet is cheaper.)
Too bad more 386 laptops don't have PCMCIA support.
I'm reasonably happy with my RioVolt SP-250 with iRiver firmware.
;)
:)
The later firmware builds reduce the already-rare skippage to almost nil, for me. (Hint: hold down the mode button after flashing to a recent build.)
I'd like to disagree about audio quality, however. It seems to sound good with my (reasonable, but not great) Sony headphones, but when plugged into my home stereo it is decisively dark-sounding and lacking dynamics, as if the top end is rolled off and a compressor is in-line.
Could be some kind of issue with the differing impedance of the stereo vs. headphones, and a cheap (or low-power) op-amp. I'd like to take it apart and see what I can do to it, but the warranty is not yet up.
Additionally, it fails miserably when plugged into the car via the aux input on my Blaupunkt reciever and a Koss cigarette lighter adapter (hint: Amazon sells them). In addition to the dark, compressed sound described above, it exhibits a flaw wherein one can hear, rather loudly, the motors move the head and spin the CD. I'd chalk up this latter behavior to a nasty ground loop, except for the fact that some remnants of the noise hang around even when it's running from its own batteries (thus, no ground loop is possible). Could just be RFI confusing the ADCs in the Blau head unit, too, but in any case the two of them don't get along well.
I bought it originally because I didn't want to spend the time and effort to design an MP3 player for the car, and I didn't want to drop enough cash on an in-dash unit to make owning one worthwhile.
It doesn't serve the in-car purpose very well at all, for me.
But as a portable player, for use with headphones? It's great. The interface is intuitive once you've used it a couple of times, and iRiver is -not- in the habit of hiding esoteric features and settings from their users.
Ramsey Electronics has a selection of AM and FM transmitters, either in kit form or pre-assembled.
On the main page is a blurb about their 35-Watt model, which would be sufficient for covering a small town.
There is an active community (or there was, on usenet) of people who modify their products for various things... it has all the smells and tastes of OSS.
I picked up their cheapest FM Stereo kit some time ago for less than $50, but never got around to completing it. IIRC, it was advertised to work at a few hundred feet, with several available hacks to double or quadruple that.
Sony had (years ago - it may still exist) at one point an in-dash Minidisc recorder.
It was programmable with timers and such to record specific shows on specific stations, but MD lacks the simutaneous play-and-record TiVo-like functionality.
Isn't that -exactly- what X11 is for?
Or is Cat-5 not enough of a "special cable" to suit your antics?
I'm looking at the picture right now.
The engineering looks fine. You can see that there is a definate section near each connector where some rigidity-enhancing substance has been applied to the ribbon, to keep things from fraying back to the IDE connector.
Conductors toward the extreme edges don't look like they're under undue stress.
The whole thing is packed into some kind of inexpensive, flexible jacketing material which is loose-fitting enough to allow the conductors to move within, which reduces stress on the wire.
Engineering-wise, it look+s justfine. The quesition remains as to whether or not ATA-100 can tolerate being shredded like this, however - the specification calls for alternating signal and ground wires on a flat ribbon. But it does appear from the photograph that it has been split into pairs of wire consisting of one signal and ground wire each, which, given the circumstances, is also good engineering practice.
(and, 'sides, I've never heard anyone complain about overall flakiness with such cables. And every wire I've ever purchased from c2go has been of good to exceptional build quality, including some custom multi-conductor audio cables I had them build a few years back. The solder joints were beautiful.)
Contorted? Obviously. Bad engineering? Naah.
Wouldn't Tux E-Cab be a much beter pun?
AppleScript? What is this?
I've got some shell script which handily and reliably spits out VBR-encoded MP3 episodes of whatever NPR time slots I elect to record.
The hardest part was setting up the parameters for LAME to both not sound horrible, consume up little space, and take advantage of the fact that FM radio is already mid-side stereo encoded.
It was free, too. Though it did take a $20 sound card and an old Kenwood tuner to make it work, the expense of hardware is quickly overshadowed by the lack of a monthly bill and the ability to archive things easily and automatically.
I have -years- of Car Talk on CD-R, for instance.
How far back does audible.com's archive go?
I used to do remodelling. Not the fancy sort where Jane Smith needs to rework the kitchen to fit in a truckload of new Jenn-Aire appliances, but the dirty sort where Jane Smith burns up half of her house with her new Jenn-Aire appliances and needs someone to rebuild it.
One of the larger jobs I was involved in was a Salvation Army thrift store. The insurance company wrote off all of the stock on the sales floor, and our instructions were to get rid of everything.
Among the barely-used Atari joysticks and the Timex-Sinclair computer that I brought home with me, was an ancient, portable General Electric radio.
This thing has a single speaker, a switch for AM/FM, and knobs for tuning and volume. It runs on a 9V battery. It gets better AM reception than the $500 Rotel tuner/preamp attached to my stereo or the $350 Blaupunkt in the car, and I have no trouble getting clear reception of stations several hundred miles away, even during the day.
It was marked at $6.
If terrorists (teehee) knock out the power company, how would you get news and information??
Radio.
(Some restrictions may apply. Tuner not available seperately. See store for details. etc.)
Too bad that the Extigy, while having a fine 24-bit DAC, is forever limited to being a 16-bit audio device by the 16-bit DSP which is irrevocably placed in front of it.
Ah, the splendors of marketing-driven technology.
And no word on drivers for the beast, either. Last I heard, Creative Labs was still being tight-assed about specifications. (probably for similar reasons to that above.)
On occasion, I'll buy pop at places like Sam's Club. The Coke there comes packaged as four six-packs on a currogated cardboard tray.
And I've noticed, several times, that the side of this tray will have odd numbers and letters sprayed onto it (date codes and such), along with the word "sugar" or some contracted, but recognizable form of "corn syrup."
I like the corn syrup Coke better, myself...
No idea if this applies outside of the upper-left corner of Ohio or not.
Odd.
On a ~4-year-old K6-2 350 with 64 megs of RAM, running FreeBSD and default IDE parameters, I get 19 megabyte-per-second I/O on the 30 gigabyte, 5400rpm (pre-Quantum) Maxtor hard drive it has, according to bonnie with a 500 megabyte test file.
bonnie, for the unaware, is a benchmark written specifically to eliminate an operating system's buffer/cache from the equation, and does well at this task as long as you specify a test size which is significantly larger than system RAM (or whatever else the machine can use for caching).
Therefore, a 500 meg test on a 64 meg PC is a fine measure of sustained throughput. It also conducts its testing at the filesystem level, and thus presents a valid measure of real-world performance in a cross-platform fashion - including disk fragmentation and other factors that really do slow things down in real life.
We'd all be doing ourselves a favor if we used bonnie for such discussions of this sort. It's free, C, and easy to compile wherever things can be compiled.
No idea what transfer mode things are happening at, except that it can't possibly be any faster than DMA33, as DMA66 and its funky 80-wire cable hadn't yet reared its ugly head toward the world.
Cables are plain old 40-conductor jobs which came with the generic, bargain-hunter motherboard.
Don't tell me I'm just lucky, here. Or that this is an isolated event.
And don't tell me there's such a thing as a professional-grade IDE anything. It's all trash. But it's fast, cheap, and demonstrably has been for years.
This one has a wingspan of 290 feet.
This implies that somewhere there's a pair of aircraft hangar doors more than 290 feet wide.
Surely there's not many hangars capable of hiding this kind of beast (unless it somehow folds up like Optimus Prime, but it doesn't)
And according to this extremely fine, semi-technical and detailed article what has to happen to allow Pink Floyd to tour (I believe this to be absolutely authoritive, given the context), the largest aircraft hangar in the world is at Norton Air Force Base in San Bernadino, California.
And, despite my best efforts, I can't find a single reference to just how big the doors on -any- hangar at that place are.
Bummer.
...and in Ohio, at least, the SS number on a drivers livence is completely optional.
Which is to say, when you go in to renew your Ohio license next time 'round, mention to the clerk that you don't want your SS number on your new card, and it won't be there.
I'm working in retail, justnow. I don't do much work as a till-monkey, but I do take checks from from a few people daily. The register reads the magnetic account number on the check, does some funky database magic, and (100% of the time since I've been there) accepts the check without requiring ID of any sort.
Personally, I'm worried about the mag-stripe readers I've been seeing in gas stations lately. They're supposedly there just to verify age, but there's a a lot more personally-identifiable information in that stripe than a birthday.
Fortunately, the stripe on my SS#-free card is unreadable by some odd twist of fate. And somehow, I don't seem to have any trouble buying beer, except for the 30 seconds or so it takes for the clerk to give up on swiping the card and just look at the fucking thing.
Light bulbs are generally rated by the power they consume, not by the light they create. An incandescant bulb creates a lot of heat, and a little bit of light, in terms of energy and efficiency. To top it off, unless you've got a window or an open door for that small amount of light to escape through, -all- of it will be turned into heat after some amount of reflection inside the room.
Which is to say: A 200W light bulb may produce various amounts of light at various levels of quality, but will always produce 200W of heat.
Your best bet? I'd vote on hitting a DJ supply store (or a guitar shop, or audio rental place - wherever you find musicians, DJs, or both) either online or locally. Note, however, that if all they have is a collection of PAR cans (glorified coffee cans with common flood lights), you're in the wrong place.
More complicated DJ lights have to deal with the same problems you have: efficiency (heat inside the fixture), color temperature, lifespan, cost, and durability. They need to be close to point-source, so that the gobo patterns they project will be easier to focus. And they need to be extremely bright.
I, once upon a time, had a Martin Robozap mounted on the wall at home. This fan-cooled light weighs 20-25 pounds, IIRC, and has a servo-driven mirror with two 150W overhead projector bulbs aimed at it. Whenever I fired it up, I had to increase air circulation in the room else it would get terribly warm, fairly quickly. I imagine the same would happen with a 300W floor lamp...
Locally, the bulbs were fairly expensive, but I was able to find the type online for ~$10 from some specialty lighting shop that primarily just sold light bulbs. They were a halogen bulb, with an integral reflector. IIRC, it's a pretty common type for overhead projectors.
Speaking of overheads, why not use one? You've appearently got an LCD display - just lay it on top of an overhead projector. Should be cheap, if buying used. Just clean up the optics and re-arrange the innards so that it's concentrating as much light as possible on the LCD display, and things should be peachy.
I hope it's obvious, but it appearently isn't because at least two posters have mentioned it: don't use white LEDs. You'll -never- achieve even satisfactory focus using an array of LEDs, let alone good focus. Now, if it were possible to make them bright enough that you'd only need one for the project, it'd be a different story...
I'll second that. I've got an LJ III sitting in the closet, which worked fine when last used.
It does need a new paper feed roller, but that should be cheap or easily salvaged from a surplus machine.
Do you always spam so flagrantly?
sheesh. Leave the sales-speak for another place, or at least pepper it with some useful technical content. Or humour. Or something other than a fucking sales pitch. And, no, mention of "3 months at $30" does not qualify as useful or funny.
'sides, my cable modem is faster, and cheaper, from TWC WOH. 2m/384k.
It sucks so much faster than any DSL I've ever laid eyes on, that I get hard just thinking about it. And in a few seconds, when I click "submit," it'll be just like the Fourth of July.
Given the size and quantity of off-white crustations adhering to the ceiling above my desk (approximately one per page load), I do suspect that I've lost the security deposit on this apartment. And even considering that, it's -still- cheaper than DSL, though I suspect it does get into break-even territory once fluid replenishment is factored in. That's a -lot- of spooge, easily measured in units of gallons per minute and coffee, while cheap, isn't quite free.
A, a P90 would have no trouble moving 10-12 megs of data, a second. A P60 could do it. As could a 486, and probably a 386, if one could get away from the ISA bus (PCMCIA is 16MHz, 16-bit, IIRC - a bit quicker...). As for the triviality of doing this in the context of ethernet: in feeding this data to an NIC in 1500-byte chunks and waiting for whatever handshaking which must transpire between drivers and their respective NICs, not to mention network overhead due to collisions and such, things tend to slow down. You'll never get 100 megabits per second out of 100 megabit per second ether. 'Sides, 100Mb/s ethernet was a -tad- uncommon, if existant, in the day when the P90 was new. Sneakernet was the order of the day. People weren't sure whether token ring, or ATM, or which of the ethernets (10base-T, -2, -FX or, horror, -5) were going to make it big, if any at all. Case in point: I've got a 486 here which can't keep up with 10base-T. Did you sleep through this era, or were you just not yet born?
B, if 100Mb/s ethernet operates at 31.25MHz, I'd love to know how. AFAIK, it's serial, and binary (dual state) - thus, one bit per cycle. this link seems to indicate that things are running at 100MHz on the wire.
C, sure, yeah, whatever. You missed the bit where I mentioned benchmarking and CPU utilization, obviously. And since it's just a fileserver, it doesn't need CPU for anything other than serving files. Who cares if it's inefficient, as long as it's doing the job as well as it is capable of? Unless the CPU turns out to be a bottleneck in such an arrangement, things would work JustFine. Everyone wants UDMA133, even if they don't know what it is or that it exists at all - that doesn't mean it's needed to flood such a slow medium as 100base-T.
D, bonnie tells me that, given a 200-meg test file, I'm getting local block reads and writes at a bit over 19 megabytes per second on this 30-gig Maxtor. But transfers across the network are still 5 or 6 megs per second, depending on phase of moon. Were things running full-duplex with a high-dollar Cisco switch, I might expect them to be somewhat faster, but they're not. It is apparent to me that you missed an important element of my description, the word "unswitched."
Show me an example of a machine of similar calibre to this K6-2 333, overclocked to 350 with a first-gen generic Super7 motherboard and 1 meg of L2, where half-duplex 100 megabit ethernet performs with any superiority to this using normal methods of TCP/IP data transfer between itself and another machine of similar ilk, and I'll eat my hat.
In closing, I'd like to remind you of two things:
First, my original point that the combination of a modern hard drive and slower IDE interface is not a bottleneck on a common 100MHz ethernet segment stands true.
Second, I wish in the future you might actually read the postings to which you might like to reply, and then apply a touch of critical thinking to the points you think you might like to make. If most of your writing is like this, I do suspect that you'll have talked yourself out of the effort of producing that same majority if you follow these two simple steps.
I really doubt that the IDE interface is a limiting factor in such a machine.
I haven't met a low-end Pentium yet which is capable of saturating 100MHz ethernet, even in applications where disk IO is not part of the equation.
A new 80 gig drive would be vastly faster than the network, even at PIO 4 (16MB/sec, IIRC) or DMA33 or whatever old-school speed you've got the IDE interface running at.
If your network is not running full-duplex, you'll also have an impossible time saturating the wire because of that -- ethernet gets a lot more efficient when it can talk and listen at the same time, without looking out for collisions.
That all said, run bonnie or some other benchmark on the disk. If you see throughput in excess of, say, 7 or 8 megabytes per second, with sufficiently low CPU utilization to leave a bit for the overhead of tending to the NIC and Samba, then neither the hard disk nor its interface are any sort of bottleneck, and you should look elsewhere for an improvement in speed.
A P233MMX CPU can be had for less than $20, these days, and would probably be trivial to configure on your AOpen board.
FWIW, I've got a K6-2 350 router/file server/print machine, with a 30-gig drive of a couple years old. I haven't done fancy IDE interface tweaking under FreeBSD and have no idea what transfer mode it's using, and the motherboard is positively ancient so I'd be surprised if even DMA33 were an option. But it shoots files across the (half-duplex) network at 5 megabytes per second, generally, which I recall being a vast improvement over the Pentium machines which predated it.
Good luck!
AFAIK, all Clear Channel stations (read: the majority of commercial radio in the US) are using lossy-compressed music for their regular programming already, and have been for some time.
If Slashdot's search engine didn't suck so badly, I'd dig up the years-old post from one of their programming directors.
If I recall, it is not MP3 that they're using. Bell Labs' PAC format rings a bell, though.
I hear artifacts all the time on the radio, though usually on the advertising spots -- I'd imagine that the Ad People are busily sending eachother MP3s these days instead of carts or open-reel tape.
Even the local 150-watt college station uses compressed audio on a PC for their spots, though they do have three nice Tascam decks for playing real music and one remaining cart player (down from -six-).
hrm.
;)
That's why I like my 32x Plextor. It's nearly silent, and has a few very neat programmable options:
The disc can be automagically spun down to a slower speed if excessive vibration is detected. This keeps it quiet, but should also help with CDs that are ready to burst into shrapnel.
The drive can slow down for read errors, or just zip along as fast as possible as often as possible. (this latter option might be good for video, where it's more important that data arrive on time than it is for it to be accurate)
The drive can be told -never- to spin faster than a given speed. (great for ripping audio CDs)
The drive can be instructed to start transferring data before the disc reaches whatever speed is considered ideal (based on the above parameters).
That last option, combined with programmable idle spin-down time, can eliminate spin-up delays in almost all cases.
If I wanted to, I could have my drive running at 1x, -all day-, waiting for me to access it. And when I finally do want some data from it, it'll start transferring immediately, and then start spinning up to some quick-but-sane speed.
I've gotten thousands of hours (not power-on hours, but real-live usage) out of this thing in the 3 or 4 years I've owned it, and it hasn't missed a beat yet.
And support? It doesn't have a flashable firmware, but Plextor sent me the latest ROM (as in, a tangible IC) free-of-charge, just for asking. I didn't need it, but I'd been restoring damaged audio CDs, and it did help a bit with that.
Otherwise, I've never had to talk to Plextor support for anything I've owned or spec'd from them.
Not a very good business model, though - I'll probably never need to replace it.
Bzzt.
The intake for said heater is, at least on every car I've ever had the displeasure of working on, just in front of the windshield and completely exposed to the elements. Rain will pour into this opening, snow will collect in it, and so forth.
Last winter, I decided to play nice and started my girlfriend's 1996 Pontiac Grand Am before clearing off the snow, saving her the effort. I turned the defroster on, and set the fan to high, and, lo, it began snowing inside of the car.
I got a kick out of that and watched for a moment. It didn't last long - presumably, it had sucked up all available loose snow, or the heater core had reached sufficient temperature to melt it, whereupon it would either drain or evaporate and get blown into the passenger cabin.
In either case, there's plenty of real live moisture in a car in the wintertime, ready to condensate on whatever relatively cold items are contained therein.
Including hard drives.
Unless of course, you never open the car, and seal off any venting to the outside world until it warms up a bit outside.
More likely, you'll be dodging trucks on a busy street, trying to hustle into the driver's seat without being killed. Your footwear will be covered with a thick, grey icey goop, which will readily be melted by the car's heater, eventually evaporate, and then condensate on anything cold once you turn off the car (especially things like nice, cool metal hard drives), where it will eventually freeze, and wait around for you to start the cycle over again.
So. Don't connect the PC to the car's ventilation system. mmkay?
You didn't mention you wanted it -cheap-. ;)
If you can spare a PCI slot, buy a Zoltrix Nightingale and the toslink adapter for it. Should cost less than $25, shipped.
The card is a bit limited in the scope of what it can do (for instance, it -only- supports 44.1 or 48KHz, has no internal synth or resampling or DSP or anything else), but is bit-perfect from end to end - a claim that no other consumer-oriented card I know of can make.
The card+daughtercard combo I have of that gives me toslink I/O, coax out, and 4 (nearly worthless) channels of analog out. I've never used the coax out, but the toslink worked fine within its very predictable set of limitations.
I find, however, that I'm happier with the SB Live 5.1 that I snagged for a $30-35, which includes a coax output. Every now and then, I want to play non-windows games, or do non-44.1/48k things, and the Zoltrix card was making that too hard. The Live 5.1 card makes it easy. *shrug* Some people complain that the coaxial output on it is completely devoid of any similarity to any written standard for SP/DIF, but it Works Fine (tm) with the aforementioned Audio Alchemy box which predates it by several years.
Or, your Soundblaster 64's E8k chip has a coaxial SP/DIF output, already. The trick is to get MP3s to play using the synth chip instead of however it's normally done - I saw patches for this, ages ago... On my AWE 32s, there's a two-pin jumper next to a fat, square IC labeles Ensoniq which is the digital out, though I've never tried it myself.