As a mere hobbyist, some of my designs use ICs with 0.4mm pitch pins (0.2 mm gap between the pads). I have made my own PCBs at home to mount these on. It takes care but it can be done and it doesn't require more than a magnifying glass. However, thanks to reasonably low cost PCB prototyping houses, I usually get the PCBs for that sort of thing made by one of those these days:-) I've even soldered 0.4mm pitch LQFP with a normal soldering iron with a pointy tip.
Hand soldering 0603 discrete components isn't hard and can be done with a normal soldering iron tip. Some hobbyists have used 0402 parts (and I bet some masochist has tried 0201), but I think 0603 for me is a good tradeoff between small size and my ability to handle them.
However, I've found solder paste and hot air really is the way to go. It's so much easier and neater. I have a little syringe of the stuff, it needs an incredibly small amount of it on each pad, and for ICs, just a bead of solder paste run along the pads. For hot air, I use an inexpensive hot air gun which on the low setting is the correct temperature for reflow. Surface tension is also your friend - slightly misaligned components will magically align themselves as the solder paste melts.
Others use electric skillets for reflow, or toaster ovens. Lots of hobbyists are doing fun things with tiny components now. Last night, I was soldering leadless packages on a home made PCB, using solder paste and hot air. Nearly all of my electronics projects now use fine pitch surface mount, and with hot air and paste I can mount resistors and capacitors etc. much faster than I can the equivalent through hole parts.
Hot air is also great for rework - use a nozzle to just heat the IC you want to get off, wait for it to all warm up, then remove it with tweezers.
I love nixie tubes. I bought a big box of Russian ones for very little money a couple of years ago.
I'm thinking of making a decent bench power supply, and of course the voltage and current displays will be done with nixies:-) Mixing old with new, the electronics to drive the display (apart from the Russian 74141 equivalents) will all be fine pitch surface mount.
It wouldn't render the whole point of building the LHC an epic fail. Read Richard Feynman's chapter on "cargo cult science" (the last chapter of "Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman") as for why you don't stop repeating an experiment just because someone's already done it. It's unbelievably bad science to just stop doing an experiment because it's been done before.
It also weighs about 250 pounds in our drizzly, imperial weights.
As an experiment, I got an 80W monocrystalline panel to power stuff in the garden. It was going to cost me just as much to lay and connect up mains cables, so I thought it would be a good time to experiment.
The conclusion is that current technology solar panels aren't all that useful or cost effective. Even on a nice day, you can only count on averaging something like 10% of the panel's rated output (due to the hours of darkness), so over a period of 24 hours I can count on just 192 watt hours off an expensive 80W monocrystalline panel. I can't even run a 10 watt pond pump off it with any reliability, all it's really good for is the LED lighting system since that's only on for part of the day and uses hardly any power.
To run a puny 10 watt pond pump with any reliability I'd have to have the panel track the sun.
The other thing is that the panel only makes peak power on a clear sunny day with >20 miles visibility. Even a slight haze layer cuts output by about 30%. A bright day with some cirrus cloud, but shadows still being cast, will get you only about 1/3rd of peak power.
Why does getting a T1/T3 in the USA take so long? When we got an equivalent circuit from our local telecoms provider, it was like "Is this Friday OK for installation?"
But it's not ludicrous to say in general, a population's brain will reach its peak at around age X. If you were to make a wide study of mental capacity vs age in the population, and plot a graph of where the mental peak of each person in the population, you'd probably get a bell curve. If this study is right, the peak of this bell curve would be about 39. Some people will degrade earlier, some later - but averaged out over a few million people, you can say some general things about what you tend to expect of that population.
An old, big box analogue scope of sufficient bandwidth is great for a hobbyist. They are inexpensive, plentiful on ebay, and they are very reliable. I have an old Gould dual trace 20 MHz scope and it's been worth more than its weight in gold. For computer projects (i.e. microcontroller stuff with AVRs, and 8 bit CPU projects with things like the Z80), I got a Thurlby LA-4800 logic analyzer - more expensive than the scope, but still not too expensive, and the user interface is easy enough that it doesn't matter that it didn't have an instruction manual (it provides on-screen help for all the functions). I use the scope about 10 times more than I do the logic analyser though.
Here in Rightpondia, we have a word for it, "smidsy", which stands for "Sorry Mate I Didn't See You".
Unfortunately, I have had two friends killed in the last 6 months by car drivers doing a smidsy. The first one, the car driver died too. He failed to stop at a stop sign, and drove straight out into the path of my friend, who was a big guy on a big bike. The most recent one, just a few weeks ago, was three 18 year olds in a people carrier (tr. US: minivan) suddenly pulling out of a junction without looking. The driver of that one survived, and hopefully will go to prison and be banned from driving for a few years. Hopefully, he will decide to never drive again.
In both instances, it happened on a straight road, in good visibility, good weather, good lighting. The car drivers simply hadn't looked.
I've been hit by cars twice on my bike (bicycle), and both times...straight roads, good visibility, good weather. Once, the driver failed to yield the right of way and simply pulled right across my path. The most recent one, an older gentleman hit me from behind (he was doing about 50 mph, two inches more to the left and he'd have killed me).
I played Shades far too much, and when the 200 quid telephone bill arrived, I was promptly banned from using the modem (and paying back that much on a typical 15 year old's odd job money took a long long time). I evaded the ban by playing only once or twice a week, for just half an hour at a time such that the cost of the phone calls would be lost in the general noise of the telephone bill. That was probably in 1987 or so.
The worst bit was when the edge connector from the VTX5000 modem to the Spectrum wobbled a bit, crashing the Spectrum. It always happened in the middle of a fight, too.
Then there were the archwizards. Who can forget Lordant (the bastard).
When I got to university, I ran a MUD for a while (using LPMud), well, until someone wrote a dodgy piece of LPC which ended up filling the filesystem that I was on, and the uni admins came down on me like a ton of bricks. So we had to play on the internet. After being brought up on Shades, a true hack and slash mud where player killing wasn't just allowed, it was openly encouraged, I found the rather wimpy muds that forbade player killing rather tame! Of course, when I ran the LPmud, the rules were Shades-style - hack and slash.
Shades, incidentally, is still running. Telnet games.world.co.uk 23. I believe it ran on a PDP-11, and is now running on an emulator for said machine.
We stick with svn because it works for what we do, and it works well. There's only two of us who are developers anyway, so the benefits of git aren't of any importance. There really wouldn't be any benefit on changing - svn does what it says on the tin, and what it says on the tin works very well for us.
Eventually we will hit some physical / cost limit on RAM, and then good programming will become a requirement. OF course, by then, there won't be anyone left who knows how to do that...
Of course there will - there are plenty of embedded device programmers who are well acquainted with the bare iron, and having to code economically. There are still a lot of people around today who make a living from writing 8 bit software on systems with 2K of RAM.
It's actually very handy to be able to capture video on a laptop. I've used my G4 PowerBook (still going strong, no intention to replace etc.) to do just this - I spot someone who has some interesting video that could be added to what I'm doing, so I ask them if I could pull their video off their camera.
Even though my PowerBook is over 4 years old, I still get more than 2 hours of use out of the battery, which is usually more than enough to grab the video I need. I've used the otherwise 'dead time' of travelling to edit video, too.
At 5.8 psi you become unconscious, but even at 90% of normal atmospheric pressure (13 psi) most people would be strongly affected by the reduced oxygen saturation.
No, that's nowhere near right. At 13 psi you can function just fine. I've done vigorous exercise all day long at over 10,000 feet (that's 700 millibars, atmospheric pressure at sea level is 1013.25 millibars). In fact, anyone who's been skiing in Utah has done vigorous exercise at 700mb or 10.15 psi. If most people were strongly affected at 13 psi, Denver would be uninhabited (Denver is at 850 millibars, or 12.3 psi).
Some people are strongly affected at 10,000 feet - they typically tend to be smokers, or people in very poor health. But for most of us, the worst we feel is a little bit of a headache under strenuous exertion; while hiking briskly uphill at 12000 feet, I got a mild headache which cleared up as soon as we stopped. I've been up to 14,500 feet, with no ill effects (although that high you do start to feel a little mental degradation).
FFS didn't anyone read the article? This isn't mandatory, it's activated by the owner of the phone when they want to use this feature. Presumably, if you're on a train or a passenger in a car, you'd just *not turn the feature on!*
Perhaps you just got lucky. Apart from a few outliers, my spam has been steadily increasing. This time in 2006, I was getting around 50 a day. Today, I usually get 250-300 per day. The only thing keeping email usable is SpamAssassin which works remarkably well.
I love snow tires. I was staying with a friend in SLC in February and I was driving his car (an old Honda Civic, 1991 model with nearly 200K miles) with snow tires. While 4 wheel drive SUV in front was in a 4 wheel slide, by just taking it gently and easily as I went up Little Cottonwood Canyon, I had no wheelslip and had no trouble getting to the top in that Civic.
Best one I saw while going up the Cottonwood Canyons, was a few years ago, a 4wd truck came roaring past us, so sure of his traction on the snow covered road. Half a mile further, we passed him because his truck was off the road in the ditch, well and truly stuck.
I think a couple of years is pessimistic. My mobile phone battery is 4 1/2 years old - while it's noticeably weaker than when new, it's certainly not useless and is still good enough. My laptop, a PowerBook, is 4 years old and I'm still getting around 3 hrs out of a charge (when it was new I could get a bit more than 4 hours or so, if memory serves). Admittedly I don't live in a hot country.
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I use "ssh -X" every day to securely run X clients on remote systems. Encrytped and secure. It's not hard.
Hot air is your friend for soldering.
As a mere hobbyist, some of my designs use ICs with 0.4mm pitch pins (0.2 mm gap between the pads). I have made my own PCBs at home to mount these on. It takes care but it can be done and it doesn't require more than a magnifying glass. However, thanks to reasonably low cost PCB prototyping houses, I usually get the PCBs for that sort of thing made by one of those these days :-) I've even soldered 0.4mm pitch LQFP with a normal soldering iron with a pointy tip.
Hand soldering 0603 discrete components isn't hard and can be done with a normal soldering iron tip. Some hobbyists have used 0402 parts (and I bet some masochist has tried 0201), but I think 0603 for me is a good tradeoff between small size and my ability to handle them.
However, I've found solder paste and hot air really is the way to go. It's so much easier and neater. I have a little syringe of the stuff, it needs an incredibly small amount of it on each pad, and for ICs, just a bead of solder paste run along the pads. For hot air, I use an inexpensive hot air gun which on the low setting is the correct temperature for reflow. Surface tension is also your friend - slightly misaligned components will magically align themselves as the solder paste melts.
Others use electric skillets for reflow, or toaster ovens. Lots of hobbyists are doing fun things with tiny components now. Last night, I was soldering leadless packages on a home made PCB, using solder paste and hot air. Nearly all of my electronics projects now use fine pitch surface mount, and with hot air and paste I can mount resistors and capacitors etc. much faster than I can the equivalent through hole parts.
Hot air is also great for rework - use a nozzle to just heat the IC you want to get off, wait for it to all warm up, then remove it with tweezers.
I love nixie tubes. I bought a big box of Russian ones for very little money a couple of years ago.
I'm thinking of making a decent bench power supply, and of course the voltage and current displays will be done with nixies :-) Mixing old with new, the electronics to drive the display (apart from the Russian 74141 equivalents) will all be fine pitch surface mount.
It wouldn't render the whole point of building the LHC an epic fail. Read Richard Feynman's chapter on "cargo cult science" (the last chapter of "Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman") as for why you don't stop repeating an experiment just because someone's already done it. It's unbelievably bad science to just stop doing an experiment because it's been done before.
It also weighs about 250 pounds in our drizzly, imperial weights.
As an experiment, I got an 80W monocrystalline panel to power stuff in the garden. It was going to cost me just as much to lay and connect up mains cables, so I thought it would be a good time to experiment.
The conclusion is that current technology solar panels aren't all that useful or cost effective. Even on a nice day, you can only count on averaging something like 10% of the panel's rated output (due to the hours of darkness), so over a period of 24 hours I can count on just 192 watt hours off an expensive 80W monocrystalline panel. I can't even run a 10 watt pond pump off it with any reliability, all it's really good for is the LED lighting system since that's only on for part of the day and uses hardly any power.
To run a puny 10 watt pond pump with any reliability I'd have to have the panel track the sun.
The other thing is that the panel only makes peak power on a clear sunny day with >20 miles visibility. Even a slight haze layer cuts output by about 30%. A bright day with some cirrus cloud, but shadows still being cast, will get you only about 1/3rd of peak power.
That's absolutely clbuttic!
Why does getting a T1/T3 in the USA take so long? When we got an equivalent circuit from our local telecoms provider, it was like "Is this Friday OK for installation?"
The irony is that they called their cloud computing initiative after something without clouds. An azure sky is a cloudless one!
But it's not ludicrous to say in general, a population's brain will reach its peak at around age X. If you were to make a wide study of mental capacity vs age in the population, and plot a graph of where the mental peak of each person in the population, you'd probably get a bell curve. If this study is right, the peak of this bell curve would be about 39. Some people will degrade earlier, some later - but averaged out over a few million people, you can say some general things about what you tend to expect of that population.
My Sinclair ZX Spectrum is ready in less than 2 seconds. Now I have made an ethernet card for it, I can be on IRC within 5 seconds of power up!
An old, big box analogue scope of sufficient bandwidth is great for a hobbyist. They are inexpensive, plentiful on ebay, and they are very reliable. I have an old Gould dual trace 20 MHz scope and it's been worth more than its weight in gold. For computer projects (i.e. microcontroller stuff with AVRs, and 8 bit CPU projects with things like the Z80), I got a Thurlby LA-4800 logic analyzer - more expensive than the scope, but still not too expensive, and the user interface is easy enough that it doesn't matter that it didn't have an instruction manual (it provides on-screen help for all the functions). I use the scope about 10 times more than I do the logic analyser though.
Here in Rightpondia, we have a word for it, "smidsy", which stands for "Sorry Mate I Didn't See You".
Unfortunately, I have had two friends killed in the last 6 months by car drivers doing a smidsy. The first one, the car driver died too. He failed to stop at a stop sign, and drove straight out into the path of my friend, who was a big guy on a big bike. The most recent one, just a few weeks ago, was three 18 year olds in a people carrier (tr. US: minivan) suddenly pulling out of a junction without looking. The driver of that one survived, and hopefully will go to prison and be banned from driving for a few years. Hopefully, he will decide to never drive again.
In both instances, it happened on a straight road, in good visibility, good weather, good lighting. The car drivers simply hadn't looked.
I've been hit by cars twice on my bike (bicycle), and both times...straight roads, good visibility, good weather. Once, the driver failed to yield the right of way and simply pulled right across my path. The most recent one, an older gentleman hit me from behind (he was doing about 50 mph, two inches more to the left and he'd have killed me).
I played Shades far too much, and when the 200 quid telephone bill arrived, I was promptly banned from using the modem (and paying back that much on a typical 15 year old's odd job money took a long long time). I evaded the ban by playing only once or twice a week, for just half an hour at a time such that the cost of the phone calls would be lost in the general noise of the telephone bill. That was probably in 1987 or so.
The worst bit was when the edge connector from the VTX5000 modem to the Spectrum wobbled a bit, crashing the Spectrum. It always happened in the middle of a fight, too.
Then there were the archwizards. Who can forget Lordant (the bastard).
When I got to university, I ran a MUD for a while (using LPMud), well, until someone wrote a dodgy piece of LPC which ended up filling the filesystem that I was on, and the uni admins came down on me like a ton of bricks. So we had to play on the internet. After being brought up on Shades, a true hack and slash mud where player killing wasn't just allowed, it was openly encouraged, I found the rather wimpy muds that forbade player killing rather tame! Of course, when I ran the LPmud, the rules were Shades-style - hack and slash.
Shades, incidentally, is still running. Telnet games.world.co.uk 23. I believe it ran on a PDP-11, and is now running on an emulator for said machine.
We stick with svn because it works for what we do, and it works well. There's only two of us who are developers anyway, so the benefits of git aren't of any importance. There really wouldn't be any benefit on changing - svn does what it says on the tin, and what it says on the tin works very well for us.
Of course there will - there are plenty of embedded device programmers who are well acquainted with the bare iron, and having to code economically. There are still a lot of people around today who make a living from writing 8 bit software on systems with 2K of RAM.
Lucky you. My spam load has remained the same.
It's actually very handy to be able to capture video on a laptop. I've used my G4 PowerBook (still going strong, no intention to replace etc.) to do just this - I spot someone who has some interesting video that could be added to what I'm doing, so I ask them if I could pull their video off their camera.
Even though my PowerBook is over 4 years old, I still get more than 2 hours of use out of the battery, which is usually more than enough to grab the video I need. I've used the otherwise 'dead time' of travelling to edit video, too.
I don't really care so long as Uhura is wearing the 1960s style short skirt uniform!
No, that's nowhere near right. At 13 psi you can function just fine. I've done vigorous exercise all day long at over 10,000 feet (that's 700 millibars, atmospheric pressure at sea level is 1013.25 millibars). In fact, anyone who's been skiing in Utah has done vigorous exercise at 700mb or 10.15 psi. If most people were strongly affected at 13 psi, Denver would be uninhabited (Denver is at 850 millibars, or 12.3 psi).
Some people are strongly affected at 10,000 feet - they typically tend to be smokers, or people in very poor health. But for most of us, the worst we feel is a little bit of a headache under strenuous exertion; while hiking briskly uphill at 12000 feet, I got a mild headache which cleared up as soon as we stopped. I've been up to 14,500 feet, with no ill effects (although that high you do start to feel a little mental degradation).
FFS didn't anyone read the article? This isn't mandatory, it's activated by the owner of the phone when they want to use this feature. Presumably, if you're on a train or a passenger in a car, you'd just *not turn the feature on!*
Perhaps you just got lucky. Apart from a few outliers, my spam has been steadily increasing. This time in 2006, I was getting around 50 a day. Today, I usually get 250-300 per day. The only thing keeping email usable is SpamAssassin which works remarkably well.
I just wish Ford would come up with something that would cause drivers to stop, and then both look and see when they come to a junction.
I've had two friends killed in 4 months by other drivers failing to stop at an intersection, and pulling out into oncoming traffic.
I love snow tires. I was staying with a friend in SLC in February and I was driving his car (an old Honda Civic, 1991 model with nearly 200K miles) with snow tires. While 4 wheel drive SUV in front was in a 4 wheel slide, by just taking it gently and easily as I went up Little Cottonwood Canyon, I had no wheelslip and had no trouble getting to the top in that Civic.
Best one I saw while going up the Cottonwood Canyons, was a few years ago, a 4wd truck came roaring past us, so sure of his traction on the snow covered road. Half a mile further, we passed him because his truck was off the road in the ditch, well and truly stuck.
That's only the market share of desktop systems. Linux has been for most of its existence primarily a server OS.
I think a couple of years is pessimistic. My mobile phone battery is 4 1/2 years old - while it's noticeably weaker than when new, it's certainly not useless and is still good enough. My laptop, a PowerBook, is 4 years old and I'm still getting around 3 hrs out of a charge (when it was new I could get a bit more than 4 hours or so, if memory serves). Admittedly I don't live in a hot country.