I seem to recall reading a National Geographic article about kids in Mexico employed smashing open lead-acid batteries with hammers to extract the lead. I'm sure there are greener ways of recycling them, but the heaps of e-trash in Gungdong leads me to think a lot of old batteries end up there for that kind of recycling. Since these batteries are still good, I can see them ending up in a surplus auction. I tend to stock my UPS with lightly used surplus batteries and they are good for nearly as long at a fraction of the price.
That idea came up when this item was posted to Hack A Day The reason for the limited reception range is that receivers use pathetically small, internal antennas: Mine was about 1/32 wavelength. With a full wave antenna or directional antenna, you can easily pick them up from outside a building. After I added a lager (1/4 or 1/8 wave) antenna to my receiver, I could type with my keyboard outside the house.
Pagers use different frequencies then phones. The way they work is that each pager has a specific frequency that they listen on, usually printed on the back, and they decode all the pages that are delivered on that frequency. The pager picks out the messages that are assigned to it by looking at the pager number of the pages, when the number matches its own, the message is displayed. Each frequency has probably 10000 or so pagers on it (best guess). This is for one way pagers, POCSAG is the most common protocol. It's not exactly secure though, anyone with a scanner hooked up to a computer can decode all the messages on a given frequency.
The only lack of common sense is in people who think that a bomb is going to have wires hanging out of it or blinking lights on it. Bombs look like backpacks, garbage cans, and lunch bags, the last thing a bomb would look like is a bomb.
Not really, the difference in weight (50ug) is quite a bit. Correctly calibrated balances have no problem discerning between a few micrograms. The best balance I saw could go down to 0.1ug, and there are much better ones out there.
My 10 year old Panasonic Toughbook had a gel casing for the hard drive. I like that solution better since there is no potential for leaks. Even if the fluid was nonconductive you would still have to replace it.
I hate to think what airlines would think of all this evil liquid being allowed on board as well.
The "set "keyword.enabled" to false" suggestion by "the_cowgod" worked for me though. I didn't see any difference with browser.xul.error_pages.enabled set to true or false.
The only reason they used hemp was that the Philippines got captured by Japan. This cut off the U.S. from it's source of Abaca Fiber (Manila Hemp) that was preferred by the navy for making ropes due to it's resistance to corrosion by sea water. Nylon replaced natural fibers after WWII.
Those won't work as they are for laptops, for ipods it would need a smaller, female connector. I do recall seeing a laptop-ipod connector around though, maybe that combined with a gender changer would work.
Well I wouldn't want 120KV lines in my house, kinda dangerous since they arc 5 feet or so. You would also have to have a transformer to upconvert from street voltage to 120KV, those are expensive. Just because you increase the voltage to offset the current flow, it will not negate the fact that you are sending 12KW through, you need big wires for that.
Although they do discharge on their own, it is not as fast as Ni-MH. They are good for at least 6 months IIRC. Even regular batteries lose their charge over time, the only ones that I'm aware of that don't are Li-C batteries. Just using them in hi-drain devices made a lot of sense in the past, but now that they cost next to nothing I find it makes sense for me to use them in almost any application.
The most expensive charger I bought ($90 at the time) thought it was a good idea to discharge my Ni-MH batteries before charging them, killing their lifetime. The cheep ones do need you to remember them to keep from killing via overcharge, but this is easily solved with an external timer. Since they are not rapid chargers I don't have to worry about starting with a slow charge.
Rather then waste money and time on the pricey ones, I just but the really cheep ones from the local dollar store @ $0.50. That way I can put them into low drain and occasional use devices like remotes, alarm clock backup, flashlights, portable test equipment, etc.
The ones I get now are made in china and are labeled as 600/300mAh for AA/AAA. I also go with older, but never used chargers from a local surplus store that go for under $5 each. I used to buy really expensive chargers and batteries, but found that it was much easier to just buy a lot of cheep ones then a few expensive ones.
The only issues with them are that I go through them faster and therefore more end up having to be disposed of properly and I have to carry more of them around for high drain devices. These issues don't really bother me as I'm sure the mAh on the cheep ones will go up over time and they are lighter then the expensive ones so carrying around more isn't too bad.
The fastest, most intricate wire-wrap board I recall seeing was a prototype of the first Apple PowerPC based computer. I forgot the title of the movie it was in, maybe someone here remembers?. The complexity of it was jaw dropping, I never knew you could do something so complex and fast with wire-wrapping.
The windows version is on usenet, I'm sure the linux version will show up soon. You might be able to extract the jar file from the windows installer and run it.
Microsoft never released DirectX for linux, but I can play DirectX 9 games under WineX just fine. I'm sure someone will hack together a patch to get DirectX 10 working under XP/2K eventually.
Re:Cell providers are the problem, not the phone
on
Inside Apple's iPhone
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· Score: 1
When I wrote that I was thinking of my beloved Kyocera QCP-6/7135 Palm OS based smartphone.
That phone is old news now, but Palm OS is a great UI, and it had every feature that I could reasonably want. Every feature I could want would include playing doom3 on it and and be able to emulate a full PC, but I can't expect that from a phone.
It could however act as a dumb terminal, interface with my multimeter, control winamp, have a map of my city with gps, give me a good book to read while waiting in line, act as a remote control for any TV, and the speakerphone actually worked.
Also, the UI extended into how the various buttons worked on the phone. Like if I was with a client and my phone started buzzing (had it set to vibrate then ring) I could subtly press the big easy to reach button on the top of the phone (that was also the IR port) and the call would get directed to my mailbox, and vibrate again (in a different way) if they left a message. I could do this without having to think and keep talking to my client without them knowing and having my pitch interrupted.
Cell providers are the problem, not the phone
on
Inside Apple's iPhone
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
There are lots of easy to use phones with every feature you could want, great UI, etc.
The problem is cell providers who make most phones ones that force you to pay ridiculous fees for things that you should be able to get for free (like ringtones, backgrounds, etc). This is the reason why apply had problems with the iPhone the first time around, because the cell companies wanted to charge people for being able to transfer songs to their phones.
For me VOIP on a PDA is the way to go. Works great with with my wireless broadband, or wi-fi hot-spots if they are around. Not the most reliable setup for incoming calls, but having a $10/month pager solves that problem.
I don't know about the first one. If you unplug it in front of them then you are implying that the test is for them not to use the keyboard. IMO it would be better in this case to unplug the keyboard or disable it in software.
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I seem to recall reading a National Geographic article about kids in Mexico employed smashing open lead-acid batteries with hammers to extract the lead. I'm sure there are greener ways of recycling them, but the heaps of e-trash in Gungdong leads me to think a lot of old batteries end up there for that kind of recycling. Since these batteries are still good, I can see them ending up in a surplus auction. I tend to stock my UPS with lightly used surplus batteries and they are good for nearly as long at a fraction of the price.
I think you are missing the point on its cost: Titanium isn't expensive to buy, but it is very expensive to machine.
That idea came up when this item was posted to Hack A Day The reason for the limited reception range is that receivers use pathetically small, internal antennas: Mine was about 1/32 wavelength. With a full wave antenna or directional antenna, you can easily pick them up from outside a building. After I added a lager (1/4 or 1/8 wave) antenna to my receiver, I could type with my keyboard outside the house.
Last I checked, Gmail does not send bounce messages.
I hate to think what airlines would think of all this evil liquid being allowed on board as well.
Wow. I knew phone rates here in North America were artificially inflated, but I had no idea it was that bad.
The "set "keyword.enabled" to false" suggestion by "the_cowgod" worked for me though. I didn't see any difference with browser.xul.error_pages.enabled set to true or false.
i386 is in alt.binaries.cd.image.linux, posted by Necronomicon.
Both are about 1/2 done as of now, and both are desktop.
Well I wouldn't want 120KV lines in my house, kinda dangerous since they arc 5 feet or so. You would also have to have a transformer to upconvert from street voltage to 120KV, those are expensive. Just because you increase the voltage to offset the current flow, it will not negate the fact that you are sending 12KW through, you need big wires for that.
The most expensive charger I bought ($90 at the time) thought it was a good idea to discharge my Ni-MH batteries before charging them, killing their lifetime. The cheep ones do need you to remember them to keep from killing via overcharge, but this is easily solved with an external timer. Since they are not rapid chargers I don't have to worry about starting with a slow charge.
The ones I get now are made in china and are labeled as 600/300mAh for AA/AAA. I also go with older, but never used chargers from a local surplus store that go for under $5 each. I used to buy really expensive chargers and batteries, but found that it was much easier to just buy a lot of cheep ones then a few expensive ones.
The only issues with them are that I go through them faster and therefore more end up having to be disposed of properly and I have to carry more of them around for high drain devices. These issues don't really bother me as I'm sure the mAh on the cheep ones will go up over time and they are lighter then the expensive ones so carrying around more isn't too bad.
Yeah, that must have been it.
The fastest, most intricate wire-wrap board I recall seeing was a prototype of the first Apple PowerPC based computer. I forgot the title of the movie it was in, maybe someone here remembers?. The complexity of it was jaw dropping, I never knew you could do something so complex and fast with wire-wrapping.
The windows version is on usenet, I'm sure the linux version will show up soon. You might be able to extract the jar file from the windows installer and run it.
It is in alt.binaries.warez.ibm-pc
When I wrote that I was thinking of my beloved Kyocera QCP-6/7135 Palm OS based smartphone.
That phone is old news now, but Palm OS is a great UI, and it had every feature that I could reasonably want. Every feature I could want would include playing doom3 on it and and be able to emulate a full PC, but I can't expect that from a phone.
It could however act as a dumb terminal, interface with my multimeter, control winamp, have a map of my city with gps, give me a good book to read while waiting in line, act as a remote control for any TV, and the speakerphone actually worked.
Also, the UI extended into how the various buttons worked on the phone. Like if I was with a client and my phone started buzzing (had it set to vibrate then ring) I could subtly press the big easy to reach button on the top of the phone (that was also the IR port) and the call would get directed to my mailbox, and vibrate again (in a different way) if they left a message. I could do this without having to think and keep talking to my client without them knowing and having my pitch interrupted.
The problem is cell providers who make most phones ones that force you to pay ridiculous fees for things that you should be able to get for free (like ringtones, backgrounds, etc). This is the reason why apply had problems with the iPhone the first time around, because the cell companies wanted to charge people for being able to transfer songs to their phones.
For me VOIP on a PDA is the way to go. Works great with with my wireless broadband, or wi-fi hot-spots if they are around. Not the most reliable setup for incoming calls, but having a $10/month pager solves that problem.
Difference?... One is poisonous, the other is not.