At age ~45 I finally gave in to glasses. The optometrist told me that I had chosen an appropriate set of readers for my condition. Since my employer would pay for them, I went for prescription bifocals. I tried progressives at first, but found (as you did) that the field of vision was not sufficient to see one monitor clearly, let alone two. Within a few days I went back to the eyeglass store and told them to heck with vanity, give me the ones with the lines. Those worked well.
Fast forward 10 years: I seem to need a stronger lens these days, and no longer have vision benefits. I just buy readers of the least strength that feels usable at the cheap stuff store, and take them off or look over them when I need to see far away. The frames are not as well constructed as the prescription glasses were, but at 99 cents per pair at my local hardware store I don't cry when a cheap set gets scratched, broken, or lost. And if I need to do close-up work such as soldering, I put on 2 pair at once.
POTS works when the power goes out. It uses power supplied from the central office. I don't have to resort to extraordinary measures to keep it working when the lights go off. When the remnants of Hurricane Ike hit us in Cincinnati, my lights were off for days. But my POTS line kept working. We were without service for a while a day or two after the storm hit, when the batteries in the LEC's remote terminal ran down. But Cincinnati Bell parked a generator outside it and the service came back up.
The entire family have mobile phones, but I'll keep my POTS line until they pry it from my cold, dead fingers. I don't use any cordless phones. I keep a couple of Western Electric phones in service, including 2500-series touch-tone and 500-series rotary-dial sets. They were designed for 40-year service life, and will continue to work long after the newer phones with their needless features have died.
On top of that, I'm a ham radio operator. Our stuff keeps working when the infrastructure fails. For intrafamilial communication we have FRS/GMRS rigs that the nonlicensed members of the family know how to use.
The sue-your-customer mentality of the **AA has put me off buying CDs. The last ones I bought were from a Goodwill store. And I don't download music, either. BTW much of the music I've bought over the years has been from the performer, at the concert.
1) ISTR that there's something wacky about US smog regulations, such that many European automotive Diesel engines fail to meet them. But ISTR reading that progress is being made in harmonizing these regulations with those of Europe.
2) Petrol is priced lower than Diesel here, typically by 20%. Diesel is not favorably taxed, as it is in Europe.
3) After the 1973 oil crisis the US carmakers made some attempts to sell Diesel-engine cars. But they were based on their petrol engine designs of the time, and most of them sucked. That left Diesels with a bad reputation in the minds of US carbuyers.
I drive a Toyota Sienna minivan. When first got it I drove in the fast lane at 65..75 mph and was getting about 22 mi/gal. I've moved to the slow lane and now usually am at 55..60 with the cruise control on. I let the testosterone-crazed go around me instead of driving fast enough to keep them off my rear bumper. I leave a large gap and try to avoid braking. I'm seeing 25 mi/gal in these conditions. The (automatic) transmission doesn't come out of lockup even when maintaining 55 uphill. Next step is to remove some of the rear seats to lighten the load.
Digital TV "just works" until it doesn't, and then it can be difficult to determine why it broke. The signal strength indication from your tuner does not tell the entire story. The signal could be too strong or too weak. The signal might be reflecting from buildings or other objects, so the best antenna orientation might be different from the Antennaweb prediction. Furthermore, multipath might be what's killing the reception. A picture is worth 2K bytes, so try a visual method for optimizing the antenna placement and orientation. I didn't catch whether you were trying to receive analog NTSC or digital ATSC. Even if your preferred signal is ATSC, try connecting an NTSC receiver to your antenna and moving the antenna around for best reception of NTSC signals from transmitters that are on the same band (vhf vs. uhf) and are colocated with the ATSC transmitters you're trying to pick up. In the analog world, multipath is readily visible as ghost images. The ghosts are caused by the signal arriving at your antenna via several paths with different lengths, hence different time delays. "Best reception" means strong-enough signal with least ghosting. Once you get a decent analog signal, reconnect the digital tuner and try again.
On the ground floor you might be out of luck in any event because the path changes constantly with the movement of vehicles and pedestrians; this is one reason why cable has been successful in cities, where signal strength is not always an issue. If you're in an older building, there may be an MATV connection (Master Antenna TV; rooftop antenna with distribution to all apartments) coming out of the wall; try it. It would probably be an F connector like the cable companies use, but the signal would be the frequencies and modulation (8VSB, not QAM) of over-the-air TV channels. But don't be too disappointed if the MATV system doesn't work; many have fallen into disrepair.
I've gotten good results with a 4-bay UHF bowtie antenna (intended for outside mounting) hung inside a window. But YMMV, so the easiest solution for you might be Basic Cable.
At the risk of sounding "me-too"-- I do not pirate music or software, and I resent the RIAA's assumption that because I choose to own a particular piece of hardware, that it will as a matter of course be used to pirate their product. When I get an mp3 player I anticipate that its primary use will be to time-shift radio broadcasts, listen to podcasts in the car, and/or to listen to music from my CD and LP collections as I have with my portable tape and CD players. I have never downloaded music. I don't copy music or video that I borrow from the library. I have taught our kids both explicitly and by example that it's not cool to do so.
Many of the CDs I own, I bought because I first heard samples of the artist's work on the radio. Others have been bought from the performer at a concert or dance. My family and I have bought very few CDs from the major labels, though, since the RIAA began suing its customers.
The way the record companies have ripped off the artists, their business model deserves to die anyway. The recording industry's notoriously creative accounting does not lead me to trust their claims that their revenues are down. And even if revenues are down, the likely cause is boring, homogenized product (*cough* Clear Channel *cough*) combined with competition from other forms of entertainment. They have no right to assume that if people are opting not to buy their overpriced product, then they must be acquiring it illicitly. This particular consumer is choosing to do without, thank you.
The RIAA and BSA don't have a God- or Congress-given right to a perpetual revenue stream any more than the player-piano-roll and buggy-whip distributors did. They can keep their greedy fingers out of my pockets.
Install Opera and browse with the loading of graphics off by default. Rightclick and download only the graphics that look useful. This saves time and bandwidth by avoiding the downloading of adverts and other gratuitous graphics. I did this all the time when I was on dialup with a 28.8 Kbit/sec modem and a 25MHz cpu -- the text downloaded quickly and I would download only 1 image in 20. I recommend Opera to anyone who's on a skinny pipe.
HF is useful for close-in work also. Using an antenna optimized for Near-Vertical Incidence Skywave propagation, the signal is reflected off the ionosphere to be received by stations within 200mi radius or so. NVIS works in situations where VHF and UHF fail due to the lack of a line-of-sight path, such as between stations located in different valleys. In fact, US amateurs were recently granted additional frequencies near 5 MHz in order to be able to choose an optimal frequency for NVIS in the face of changing ionospheric conditions. NVIS has been known and used as far back as WW2. -N3HAT
The last time I was in Office Depot they were blowing out Cybiko Xtreme units for $50. They network using a 900 MHz Part 15 radio. I didn't get any (too many projects already) and I don't know how easily they can be separated from the logic, or whether they can be reflashed to some other purpose. Anybody tried hacking them?
Depends on whether the fuse in question is in the mains input to the power supply or in the speaker output lead.
If it's intended to protect an output device against a shorted speaker lead, you *do not* want a slow-blow fuse. Fuses, and your time to replace them, are a lot less expensive than output transistors and the shop labor to replace them.
In any event, the fuse should be replaced with one of the same size and rating as is marked on the equipment. The designer will (or should) have considered the inrush current in the specification of the fuse.
No, you don't want a slow-blow fuse -- they're meant to protect motors and other high-inrush-current loads, when driven by wires and switches that can withstand momentary overloads. To protect the output transistor of your amplifier you want a fast-acting fuse.
8AG and AGX fuses are 1/4 inch diameter and 1 inch long; 3AG and AGC fuses are 1/4 inch diameter and 1-1/4 inch long. There are other physical sizes including 2AG and 5x20mm. All come in slow-blow, normal-blow, and fast-acting. So you need the correct physical size to fit the holder as well as the correct electrical rating to fit the application.
Check Bussmann and Littelfuse for tech data. Check Digi-Key, Allied, Newark, any other electronic distributor for price and availability. But watch for minimum order value rules. Radio Shack claims that if they don't have it, they can order it -- I've never tried.
I agree, much of Ikea's stuff now is particle board covered with pictures of wood and is not worth having. But some of their furniture is still solid wood and is pretty decent. The catch is that you have to finish it yourself.
When we decided to homeschool we converted a room to an office / classroom using Ikea's Ivar line. The basic pieces are reasonably priced but the corner pieces and cabinets are a bit more costly. I was able to pick up some of it in the scratch-and-dent department and saved a few bucks.
We ended up with 2 workstations, each of which is L-shaped and has a cabinet and plenty of shelf space for books, CPUs, printers, and UPSes. There are bookshelves above and storage shelves below desktop height. The 20 inch deep by 32 inch wide shelves make a nice computer workstation. The shelves are individually adjustable on metal dowels so the kids' workstations are customized to their sizes. I added plastic drop keyboard drawers from the computer store rather than pay Ikea's price for wooden ones.
I bought individual shelves rather than boxed sets of 5 so I could inspect each one. That way I was able to avoid the ones that are warped, cupped, waney, or have knots in undesirable places -- I would not have been so picky if I were using them for storage, but for furniture which I will use for a writing surface, I care. The price is the same whether you get the individual pieces or the 5-packs. I sanded each piece all over to get rid of the remaining planer marks, and rounded the edges. We needed 2 coats of stain and 2 coats of polyurethane (3 coats on the shelf tops).
It was a lot of work but we ended up with furniture that is flexible, fits the space, and matches the color of the other woodwork in the house. Total cost: about $750 (list) for the 2 workstations, each of which is 6 feet high, 20 inches deep, and has 6 feet of frontage; plus another $150 for 8 feet wide x 6 feet high of 12 inch deep bookshelf in another room. This does not include the cost of sandpaper, steel wool, brushes, stain, and 2 (or was it 3?) gallons of polyurethane varnish. Not to mention a man-month of the SO's and my time.
Long distance vhf reception may be the result of ionospheric conditions (sporadic E skip, e.g.). A more common cause in my experience is tropospheric ducting ("trop"). Trop creates a waveguide in the atmosphere. It is often caused by a temperature inversion. Although the speed of light is nearly as fast in air as it is in a vacuum, it does differ slightly. And it is lower in dense, cool air than in thin, warm air. In other words, the refractive index of cool air is higher that of warm air. The signals are bent back to earth when they hit a discontinuity in the refractive index caused by a layer of warm air overlaying a region of cool air. Inversion layers commonly form on cool, clear nights. So you will often hear anomalous FM reception in the morning -- distant stations heard between local stations, or even interfering with weak locals.
A Yahoo search on "temerature inversion radio propagation" will enlighten the curious - this is one result. Or run to the library and look in "The Radio Amateur's Handbook".
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned "Elements of Programming Style" by Kernighan & Plaugher. Lots of good advice here. And all of their bad examples are taken from other programming texts.
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At age ~45 I finally gave in to glasses. The optometrist told me that I had chosen an appropriate set of readers for my condition. Since my employer would pay for them, I went for prescription bifocals. I tried progressives at first, but found (as you did) that the field of vision was not sufficient to see one monitor clearly, let alone two. Within a few days I went back to the eyeglass store and told them to heck with vanity, give me the ones with the lines. Those worked well.
Fast forward 10 years: I seem to need a stronger lens these days, and no longer have vision benefits. I just buy readers of the least strength that feels usable at the cheap stuff store, and take them off or look over them when I need to see far away. The frames are not as well constructed as the prescription glasses were, but at 99 cents per pair at my local hardware store I don't cry when a cheap set gets scratched, broken, or lost. And if I need to do close-up work such as soldering, I put on 2 pair at once.
POTS works when the power goes out. It uses power supplied from the central office. I don't have to resort to extraordinary measures to keep it working when the lights go off. When the remnants of Hurricane Ike hit us in Cincinnati, my lights were off for days. But my POTS line kept working. We were without service for a while a day or two after the storm hit, when the batteries in the LEC's remote terminal ran down. But Cincinnati Bell parked a generator outside it and the service came back up.
The entire family have mobile phones, but I'll keep my POTS line until they pry it from my cold, dead fingers. I don't use any cordless phones. I keep a couple of Western Electric phones in service, including 2500-series touch-tone and 500-series rotary-dial sets. They were designed for 40-year service life, and will continue to work long after the newer phones with their needless features have died.
On top of that, I'm a ham radio operator. Our stuff keeps working when the infrastructure fails. For intrafamilial communication we have FRS/GMRS rigs that the nonlicensed members of the family know how to use.
The sue-your-customer mentality of the **AA has put me off buying CDs. The last ones I bought were from a Goodwill store. And I don't download music, either. BTW much of the music I've bought over the years has been from the performer, at the concert.
1) ISTR that there's something wacky about US smog regulations, such that many European automotive Diesel engines fail to meet them. But ISTR reading that progress is being made in harmonizing these regulations with those of Europe.
2) Petrol is priced lower than Diesel here, typically by 20%. Diesel is not favorably taxed, as it is in Europe.
3) After the 1973 oil crisis the US carmakers made some attempts to sell Diesel-engine cars. But they were based on their petrol engine designs of the time, and most of them sucked. That left Diesels with a bad reputation in the minds of US carbuyers.
I drive a Toyota Sienna minivan. When first got it I drove in the fast lane at 65..75 mph and was getting about 22 mi/gal. I've moved to the slow lane and now usually am at 55..60 with the cruise control on. I let the testosterone-crazed go around me instead of driving fast enough to keep them off my rear bumper. I leave a large gap and try to avoid braking. I'm seeing 25 mi/gal in these conditions. The (automatic) transmission doesn't come out of lockup even when maintaining 55 uphill. Next step is to remove some of the rear seats to lighten the load.
Digital TV "just works" until it doesn't, and then it can be difficult to determine why it broke. The signal strength indication from your tuner does not tell the entire story. The signal could be too strong or too weak. The signal might be reflecting from buildings or other objects, so the best antenna orientation might be different from the Antennaweb prediction. Furthermore, multipath might be what's killing the reception.
A picture is worth 2K bytes, so try a visual method for optimizing the antenna placement and orientation. I didn't catch whether you were trying to receive analog NTSC or digital ATSC. Even if your preferred signal is ATSC, try connecting an NTSC receiver to your antenna and moving the antenna around for best reception of NTSC signals from transmitters that are on the same band (vhf vs. uhf) and are colocated with the ATSC transmitters you're trying to pick up. In the analog world, multipath is readily visible as ghost images. The ghosts are caused by the signal arriving at your antenna via several paths with different lengths, hence different time delays. "Best reception" means strong-enough signal with least ghosting. Once you get a decent analog signal, reconnect the digital tuner and try again.
On the ground floor you might be out of luck in any event because the path changes constantly with the movement of vehicles and pedestrians; this is one reason why cable has been successful in cities, where signal strength is not always an issue.
If you're in an older building, there may be an MATV connection (Master Antenna TV; rooftop antenna with distribution to all apartments) coming out of the wall; try it. It would probably be an F connector like the cable companies use, but the signal would be the frequencies and modulation (8VSB, not QAM) of over-the-air TV channels. But don't be too disappointed if the MATV system doesn't work; many have fallen into disrepair.
I've gotten good results with a 4-bay UHF bowtie antenna (intended for outside mounting) hung inside a window. But YMMV, so the easiest solution for you might be Basic Cable.
Many of the CDs I own, I bought because I first heard samples of the artist's work on the radio. Others have been bought from the performer at a concert or dance. My family and I have bought very few CDs from the major labels, though, since the RIAA began suing its customers.
The way the record companies have ripped off the artists, their business model deserves to die anyway. The recording industry's notoriously creative accounting does not lead me to trust their claims that their revenues are down. And even if revenues are down, the likely cause is boring, homogenized product (*cough* Clear Channel *cough*) combined with competition from other forms of entertainment. They have no right to assume that if people are opting not to buy their overpriced product, then they must be acquiring it illicitly. This particular consumer is choosing to do without, thank you.
The RIAA and BSA don't have a God- or Congress-given right to a perpetual revenue stream any more than the player-piano-roll and buggy-whip distributors did. They can keep their greedy fingers out of my pockets.
Install Opera and browse with the loading of graphics off by default. Rightclick and download only the graphics that look useful. This saves time and bandwidth by avoiding the downloading of adverts and other gratuitous graphics. I did this all the time when I was on dialup with a 28.8 Kbit/sec modem and a 25MHz cpu -- the text downloaded quickly and I would download only 1 image in 20. I recommend Opera to anyone who's on a skinny pipe.
HF is useful for close-in work also. Using an antenna optimized for Near-Vertical Incidence Skywave propagation, the signal is reflected off the ionosphere to be received by stations within 200mi radius or so. NVIS works in situations where VHF and UHF fail due to the lack of a line-of-sight path, such as between stations located in different valleys. In fact, US amateurs were recently granted additional frequencies near 5 MHz in order to be able to choose an optimal frequency for NVIS in the face of changing ionospheric conditions. NVIS has been known and used as far back as WW2.
-N3HAT
The last time I was in Office Depot they were blowing out Cybiko Xtreme units for $50. They network using a 900 MHz Part 15 radio. I didn't get any (too many projects already) and I don't know how easily they can be separated from the logic, or whether they can be reflashed to some other purpose. Anybody tried hacking them?
Depends on whether the fuse in question is in the mains input to the power supply or in the speaker output lead.
If it's intended to protect an output device against a shorted speaker lead, you *do not* want a slow-blow fuse. Fuses, and your time to replace them, are a lot less expensive than output transistors and the shop labor to replace them.
In any event, the fuse should be replaced with one of the same size and rating as is marked on the equipment. The designer will (or should) have considered the inrush current in the specification of the fuse.
No, you don't want a slow-blow fuse -- they're meant to protect motors and other high-inrush-current loads, when driven by wires and switches that can withstand momentary overloads. To protect the output transistor of your amplifier you want a fast-acting fuse.
8AG and AGX fuses are 1/4 inch diameter and 1 inch long; 3AG and AGC fuses are 1/4 inch diameter and 1-1/4 inch long. There are other physical sizes including 2AG and 5x20mm. All come in slow-blow, normal-blow, and fast-acting. So you need the correct physical size to fit the holder as well as the correct electrical rating to fit the application.
Check Bussmann and Littelfuse for tech data.
Check Digi-Key, Allied, Newark, any other electronic distributor for price and availability. But watch for minimum order value rules. Radio Shack claims that if they don't have it, they can order it -- I've never tried.
I agree, much of Ikea's stuff now is particle board covered with pictures of wood and is not worth having. But some of their furniture is still solid wood and is pretty decent. The catch is that you have to finish it yourself.
When we decided to homeschool we converted a room to an office / classroom using Ikea's Ivar line. The basic pieces are reasonably priced but the corner pieces and cabinets are a bit more costly. I was able to pick up some of it in the scratch-and-dent department and saved a few bucks.
We ended up with 2 workstations, each of which is L-shaped and has a cabinet and plenty of shelf space for books, CPUs, printers, and UPSes. There are bookshelves above and storage shelves below desktop height. The 20 inch deep by 32 inch wide shelves make a nice computer workstation. The shelves are individually adjustable on metal dowels so the kids' workstations are customized to their sizes. I added plastic drop keyboard drawers from the computer store rather than pay Ikea's price for wooden ones.
I bought individual shelves rather than boxed sets of 5 so I could inspect each one. That way I was able to avoid the ones that are warped, cupped, waney, or have knots in undesirable places -- I would not have been so picky if I were using them for storage, but for furniture which I will use for a writing surface, I care. The price is the same whether you get the individual pieces or the 5-packs. I sanded each piece all over to get rid of the remaining planer marks, and rounded the edges. We needed 2 coats of stain and 2 coats of polyurethane (3 coats on the shelf tops).
It was a lot of work but we ended up with furniture that is flexible, fits the space, and matches the color of the other woodwork in the house. Total cost: about $750 (list) for the 2 workstations, each of which is 6 feet high, 20 inches deep, and has 6 feet of frontage; plus another $150 for 8 feet wide x 6 feet high of 12 inch deep bookshelf in another room. This does not include the cost of sandpaper, steel wool, brushes, stain, and 2 (or was it 3?) gallons of polyurethane varnish. Not to mention a man-month of the SO's and my time.
Long distance vhf reception may be the result of ionospheric conditions (sporadic E skip, e.g.). A more common cause in my experience is tropospheric ducting ("trop"). Trop creates a waveguide in the atmosphere. It is often caused by a temperature inversion.
Although the speed of light is nearly as fast in air as it is in a vacuum, it does differ slightly. And it is lower in dense, cool air than in thin, warm air. In other words, the refractive index of cool air is higher that of warm air. The signals are bent back to earth when they hit a discontinuity in the refractive index caused by a layer of warm air overlaying a region of cool air. Inversion layers commonly form on cool, clear nights. So you will often hear anomalous FM reception in the morning -- distant stations heard between local stations, or even interfering with weak locals.
A Yahoo search on "temerature inversion radio propagation" will enlighten the curious - this is one result. Or run to the library and look in "The Radio Amateur's Handbook".
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned "Elements of Programming Style" by Kernighan & Plaugher. Lots of good advice here. And all of their bad examples are taken from other programming texts.