Ham radio operators have been launching amateur satellites for decades. The rules of space operation are out there for anyone who wants to dig into them.
If iFolder were mature, and if the server ran on anything sane or common, I'd agree with you. But for the moment, setting up an OpenSUSE VM on my XP box just to run one piece of software isn't what I call fun. It's a project worth watching, certainly.
It was 2 or 3 weeks ago that my bookstore-owning uncle was telling me how, when the Oz series was first popular, it had the same sort of frenzy that now surrounds Harry Potter. Kids loved it, parents read it too sometimes, nutcases decried it as anti-Christian...
First, go back and read this ZFS thread from a few days ago. Good stuff about storage arrays that essentially manage themselves. One of my major points of paranoia has been silent data corruption, and ZFS has the best handling of that (end-to-end checksumming) of which I'm currently aware.
Second, have you given any thought to power management? Most desktop drives eat around 10 watts when operating, falling to 2 while in sleep mode. Multiplied across a pile of drives, that's a lot of power, heat, and noise. Consider this:
Put your OS on a CF card, or a mirrored pair if you're paranoid. (Dual CF-IDE adapters are all over the place.) Keep frequently used data on a mirrored pair of laptop drives, which are fairly quiet and don't need much cooling. Don't worry about wearing them out with spindle starts and stops, since they're laptop drives and they're made for it. A five-minute spindown timeout would probably be appropriate. Put your bulk storage on a RAID-5 or RAID-6 stripe set of regular desktop drives, and give them a longer spindown timeout, say 30 minutes, so they only stop the spindles at night.
Now here's the question: Could ZFS be instructed to only scrub the storage when the platters are spinning? If it's been half an hour since the last user access, pause the scrub and spin the drives down...
Automatically moving frequently-used files between the big RAID and the quiet mirror is an exercise left to the reader.;)
And of course, MMC has already been stillborn for years. It's used by experimenters because the standard is slightly easier than SD to implement, but with dedicated chips to handle the grunt work, there's again no use for MMC. CF is slipping because the zillion-pin connector is too bulky. SD is still going strong with the introduction of SDHC, though the fact that the original standard puked at the 2GB mark is pretty embarassing.
However, USB's speed limit is going to become an issue pretty soon. What would be nice is a physical box size for SATA memory sticks. They're going to happen anyway, but if they all happen with different shapes (like USB memory sticks), you won't be able to design a camera or mp3 player that uses them as internal storage.
I've written to the SATA folks to ask them to define such a physical memory stick standard. If you think it's a good idea, please do the same.
This is the phone thinking it has a hands-free kit plugged in, or some such. Clean the connector on the bottom, or have it repaired.
Motorola's horrible little connectors on cellphones rate pretty high on my list of engineering messes, btw. What was wrong with modular connectors? What was wrong with D-sub, for that matter? The charging connector on a cellphone takes a lot of stress and should be at least as strong as, say, the charging connector on a laptop.
Toyota got this half-right. My Matrix has a 1.3-ish gallon tank, so when it's low I can just dump a whole gallon in, no problem.
How do I know it's low? The rear sprayer stops working. apparently the pump draws from a higher level in the tank than the front sprayer.
Why is that silly? The Canadian version of the same car has a low-fluid indicator light. The US version does not. Also, the Canadian dashboard reads temperatures in Celsius, and the US version reads in Fahrenheit. There's no way to switch between the two.
Back in the AT days when the keyboard was more important than the mouse, there existed a "key lock", which was a physical lock on the front of the machine that disabled the keyboard. Insert key, turn, remove key, machine is now useless. I'm explaining this in detail because I'm sure some whippersnappers out there have never encountered it.
In a perfect world, both wires leading from the switch behind the lock would be isolated from the lock body. On our 386, one of them was common with the metal lock, which was mounted in the plastic front panel. Since the plug wasn't polarized, you had a 50% chance of getting this wire connected to ground. In our case, this wire was apparently connected to the keyboard controller. Thus, scuffing across the carpet and then touching the lock resulted in the machine freezing. One day, it also resulted in a funny smell and visible smoke from the power supply fan.
So we immediately shut the power off (back when men were men and power switches actually interrupted the AC input!) and opened the machine to see whence the magic smoke had come. The metallic sticker on the keyboard BIOS chips was shriveled and charred, and even after the time it took us to get the cover off, it was still hot to the touch. Uh oh.
Just on a lark, we decided to fire the beast back up and watch the fireworks. With the cover off and safety glasses all around.... it booted! As if nothing had happened! We unplugged they keylock from the motherboard, put the cover back on, and the machine served us well for many more years. I'd have to check which mobo is in the basement DOS box but I think it might still be with us.
So what the heck happened? IANAEE, but I think it was a textbook case of latchup.
As the article states, hot-plugged connections often result in unpredictable power sequencing, which can also result in latchup. This could be one of the failure modes when hot-plugging keyboard with DIN plugs. Note that the power and ground contacts in a USB connector are longer than the data contacts, ensuring that they make first and break last. That's proper sequencing, and prevents the data lines from acting as surrogate power conductors for a portion of a mating cycle.
My latest light peeve is a 3Com wireless card. When nothing's happening, the light which should be glowing steadily or off entirely, blinks brightly at about 1Hz. When there's activity, instead of flickering along with packets, it blinks faster, in the 3-5Hz range. Are there large or small packets? Can't tell. Can I detect activity out of the corner of my eye? Nope, that information's masked.
What blows my mind is that it must've taken some effort to implement this system, which is much more complex than the simple "LED connected to TX" that you'd expect. Why?
Actually, Ricochet poletops can be used to infer certain environmental conditions too, specifically the propagation of 900MHz and 2.4GHz signals. You can do this indirectly, by watching packet headers and tracking the paths that packets take between radios (longer hops if conditions are good), which has been done in at least one area for some time now. It's fascinating data; I hope to have pretty animated graphs of it some time soon. You could also do it directly, by interrogating each radio's node table periodically, to see the SNR and RSSI to each other radio it knows about.
Prior to Ricochet, Metricom built Utilinet, designed to replace leased-line telephone circuits for control of utility switch and pump stations. Utilinet nodes could read their own power supply's input voltage, as well as temperature and a few other parameters. If anyone ever did cool stuff with this data, I'd like to hear from them.
EVDO can't support the subscriber density that Ricochet can/could. Get a dozen active users per square mile and EVDO gets pretty sluggish. Ditto with EDGE/HSDPA.
Wireless data is driven by the principle of geographic frequency reuse. If you can make short-distance transmissions, you can use less power, which means there can be someone else using the same channel just a short distance away. If you're far from your tower and need a lot of power, you tie up the channel for a wider area, meaning that fewer subscribers can be satisfied per unit of spectrum.
With a microcellular network like Ricochet, there are several poletops per square mile, and the same channel might be in use several times within a square mile. With cellular towers, a single sector usually serves several square miles, so a lower user density saturates the spectrum. Ricochet never achieved user density to come anywhere close to capacity, whereas many urban EVDO sites run maxed out for hours a day.
Metricom's Ricochet was ahead of its time, and not marketed effectively. They built a very dense, capable network, anticipating the internet growth that didn't materialize until many years later. They didn't have the financial resources of a giant cellular company to weather the lull, and their recurring costs killed them. Their assets were sold at auction, and have since changed hands several times. YDI/Proxim currently maintains Ricochet networks in the cities where they inherited contractual obligations, but the rest of the markets sit abandoned.
Ricochet's still relevant in areas where cable and DSL aren't available, because while not speedy by today's standards, it wipes the floor with dialup and is more than adequate for most uses. The deployment cost is dirt-cheap, and the modems can be had for a song. That's part of the problem though, because you can't sell a customer a $100 modem if they can get it for $5 on eBay.
The modems are also useful for peer-to-peer networking over distances that wifi can't touch. They do a mile in open space, and half a mile pretty reliably in an urban environment. The 900MHz band is wide open, and penetrates buildings much better than 2.4GHz. If you get 'em above the terrain, they'll do five or ten miles on the stock antennae. There's some user-driven research on the Ricochet Wiki if you're interested.
The wind blowing on that unit isn't caused by the cars, and that wind doesn't always benefit the cars.
The wind in the (been-shot-down-before) turnpike story is a draft caused by the cars' motion, and benefits their efficiency because it acts like a slight tailwind for each vehicle. Eliminating that tailwind would have a large energy cost, compared to the minor harvest from the turbines.
You might also enjoy Irregular Webcomic, which is written by a physics Ph.D and illustrated with LEGO minifigs. The subjects are weird and hilarious, and when there's a joke you might not get, the author provides annotations. Lately the annotations have gotten quite broad, catering to non-English-native readers, but in the beginning they only appeared for truly obscure jokes.
I went back to strip 1 and read the whole archive. It took me over a week, and I felt like I'd just attended a semester of school. The funny thing was, I truly wanted to learn all that stuff, because it was helping me appreciate humor. I think that's one of the strongest motivators ever.
You should really be looking at lunchbox machines. It's a portable form factor that puts a more-or-less-standard motherboard behind an LCD panel, with a bunch of slots and usually a few drive bays. Next Computing's offerings seem to top out at 16GB, but that's at least a little headroom.
If you're stuck on the traditional battery-powered laptop form factor, Dell even offers a 4GB-capable machine, though like all 32-bit machines, it sets aside some of that for device address space, leaving you with about 3GB for apps.
Usenet for distribution, and Bittorrent to fetch the missing pieces of a file, could be pretty cool. As for near/far pieces, play with the "LAN peer finder" in Azureus. It finds local peers and moves the data without touching the internet. I used it to copy the Modarchive torrents from my desktop to my laptop, since the wireless here is unreliable, and Bittorrent has an incredible robustness against flaky connections.
Here's some legislation I'd like to see: Last time I made the 'take me off your list' phone call, I asked where they'd gotten my number in the first place. They claimed not to know. Perhaps the folks staffing the call center didn't know, because they were just contracted to answer 'take me off your list' calls, and that's fine. But what drove me mad is that they also wouldn't tell me who contracted them, or whose list I was actually on in the first place.
Two requirements: First, tell me who the hell you are and who hired you. Anonymity and marketing shouldn't go together.
Second, tell me where you got my number/name/whatever, and where they got it, and where they got it, back up the chain not a specific number of hops, because that would just encourage shell companies, but back a certain amount of time, say, seven years. If they can't provide a total backtrace of my record including who initially gathered it and what technique they initially used, I should be entitled to damages.
And what it means for regular users when there's no budget or appetite for cavalry-calling is that they suffer at the hands of recklessly clueless Excel fiends who think they're God's gift to project management.
Those same manager folks would, even if there was plenty of budget for software development, staunchly insist that their million-column spreadsheets are working fine, while forcing underlings to spend half (literally, half, I counted) their time maintaining and updating disparate copies of the same data in different sheets used by different managers.
Make it easy enough for an idiot to do, and every idiot will.
Of course, there are plans afoot to actually transmit data over fluid-filled hoses, cardboard tubes, and whatever else can be cooked up by then. See my sig for the details.
The charger is much more important than the batteries you're putting in it. Most brands perform just fine, for a while. Knowing when a set (or an individual cell) is past its peak is the key. I picked up a LaCrosse BC-900 charger just over a year ago, and it's awesome. Most chargers leave you "blind" as to the actual capacity, they just tell you "this one's full!". Being able to really test the batteries is great. I found a neglected set in a box that I hadn't touched in about 4 years. Some of them had failed short. After a moment with a benchtop power supply I'd awoken them, but none would hold much charge. (showing ~500mAh capacity) So I tossed 'em in the LaCrosse for a refresh cycle, and after a few days they were all performing within a few percent of their original rating. No other charger would've given me the information I needed, or the automatic refresh cycle, to bring those back from the dead.
My BC-900 melted last week. It was the rev-32 firmware, which apparently wasn't careful enough about stopping activities when a cell overheated. It took out a Powerex 2300mAh cell, which was sputtering and smoking and stank up the whole end of the house. I've got an email in to LaCrosse right now, but even if they won't replace my (three months out of warranty) unit for free, I plan to pick up a new one (running rev 33 firmware) as soon as possible. A near-fire hasn't diminished my love of this charger, that's how revolutionary it is.
Seconded the soldering iron. I can't believe I suffered with $8 junk soldering irons for so long. I got a refurb Edsyn Loner from these folks a few months ago and the difference is phenomenal. Run, don't walk, to your nearest supply house and pick up a temperature-controlled iron.
The constant-wattage irons get themselves too hot when they're just sitting there, and as soon as you start using them, they dump all their heat into the part and get too cold. If you get one with enough watts to avoid the latter effect, it exacerbates the former.
Closed-loop temperature control is sweet. The element is like 60 or 100 watts, and when you first turn the unit on, it runs full blast so the iron comes up to temperature in seconds. Then it backs off and idles at a very low duty cycle to maintain the temperature. When you touch it to a part, even a fairly large one, it pours on the right amount of power. I've had good luck soldering large connections and alligator clips that would suck the heat right out of a 30-watt junker.
For sixty bucks, the temperature-controlled iron made a bigger difference in my workbench technique than any Panavise or swing-arm lamp ever could. Highly recommended.
Contrast the iOpener, which was a little web terminal sold at a loss with the plan of recouping the cost by selling service subscriptions. But rather than following the cellphone model, where the hardware is only discounted if you sign up for service, they just trusted that nobody would buy the hardware without also buying service.
When hackers realized it was a generic PC and started buying them en masse, iOpener responded by smearing glue on the circuit board, changing the BIOS, and generally sticking their head in the sand. Linksys got it right with the WRT54GL: sell the good hardware directly to hackers at a fair price.
Today, iOpener is but a sad little footnote in the annals of hardware-hacker history, while the WRT54G(L) is riding high.
Every once in a while, I get angry at hackers who aim to make Xbox or PSP hardware more useful by imbuing it with software that doesn't suck. "Why would you aid the enemy by embracing their hacker-hostile business?", I agonize. Then I remember that those game systems are sold at a loss. Awesome.:)
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Ham radio operators have been launching amateur satellites for decades. The rules of space operation are out there for anyone who wants to dig into them.
If iFolder were mature, and if the server ran on anything sane or common, I'd agree with you. But for the moment, setting up an OpenSUSE VM on my XP box just to run one piece of software isn't what I call fun. It's a project worth watching, certainly.
It was 2 or 3 weeks ago that my bookstore-owning uncle was telling me how, when the Oz series was first popular, it had the same sort of frenzy that now surrounds Harry Potter. Kids loved it, parents read it too sometimes, nutcases decried it as anti-Christian...
Yup, had one of those in my CF-25 six or seven years ago. I read TFA and don't see anything novel or non-obvious about Sony's claims. Le sigh.
First, go back and read this ZFS thread from a few days ago. Good stuff about storage arrays that essentially manage themselves. One of my major points of paranoia has been silent data corruption, and ZFS has the best handling of that (end-to-end checksumming) of which I'm currently aware.
;)
Second, have you given any thought to power management? Most desktop drives eat around 10 watts when operating, falling to 2 while in sleep mode. Multiplied across a pile of drives, that's a lot of power, heat, and noise. Consider this:
Put your OS on a CF card, or a mirrored pair if you're paranoid. (Dual CF-IDE adapters are all over the place.) Keep frequently used data on a mirrored pair of laptop drives, which are fairly quiet and don't need much cooling. Don't worry about wearing them out with spindle starts and stops, since they're laptop drives and they're made for it. A five-minute spindown timeout would probably be appropriate. Put your bulk storage on a RAID-5 or RAID-6 stripe set of regular desktop drives, and give them a longer spindown timeout, say 30 minutes, so they only stop the spindles at night.
Now here's the question: Could ZFS be instructed to only scrub the storage when the platters are spinning? If it's been half an hour since the last user access, pause the scrub and spin the drives down...
Automatically moving frequently-used files between the big RAID and the quiet mirror is an exercise left to the reader.
And of course, MMC has already been stillborn for years. It's used by experimenters because the standard is slightly easier than SD to implement, but with dedicated chips to handle the grunt work, there's again no use for MMC. CF is slipping because the zillion-pin connector is too bulky. SD is still going strong with the introduction of SDHC, though the fact that the original standard puked at the 2GB mark is pretty embarassing.
However, USB's speed limit is going to become an issue pretty soon. What would be nice is a physical box size for SATA memory sticks. They're going to happen anyway, but if they all happen with different shapes (like USB memory sticks), you won't be able to design a camera or mp3 player that uses them as internal storage.
I've written to the SATA folks to ask them to define such a physical memory stick standard. If you think it's a good idea, please do the same.
This is the phone thinking it has a hands-free kit plugged in, or some such. Clean the connector on the bottom, or have it repaired.
Motorola's horrible little connectors on cellphones rate pretty high on my list of engineering messes, btw. What was wrong with modular connectors? What was wrong with D-sub, for that matter? The charging connector on a cellphone takes a lot of stress and should be at least as strong as, say, the charging connector on a laptop.
Toyota got this half-right. My Matrix has a 1.3-ish gallon tank, so when it's low I can just dump a whole gallon in, no problem.
How do I know it's low? The rear sprayer stops working. apparently the pump draws from a higher level in the tank than the front sprayer.
Why is that silly? The Canadian version of the same car has a low-fluid indicator light. The US version does not. Also, the Canadian dashboard reads temperatures in Celsius, and the US version reads in Fahrenheit. There's no way to switch between the two.
Back in the AT days when the keyboard was more important than the mouse, there existed a "key lock", which was a physical lock on the front of the machine that disabled the keyboard. Insert key, turn, remove key, machine is now useless. I'm explaining this in detail because I'm sure some whippersnappers out there have never encountered it.
In a perfect world, both wires leading from the switch behind the lock would be isolated from the lock body. On our 386, one of them was common with the metal lock, which was mounted in the plastic front panel. Since the plug wasn't polarized, you had a 50% chance of getting this wire connected to ground. In our case, this wire was apparently connected to the keyboard controller. Thus, scuffing across the carpet and then touching the lock resulted in the machine freezing. One day, it also resulted in a funny smell and visible smoke from the power supply fan.
So we immediately shut the power off (back when men were men and power switches actually interrupted the AC input!) and opened the machine to see whence the magic smoke had come. The metallic sticker on the keyboard BIOS chips was shriveled and charred, and even after the time it took us to get the cover off, it was still hot to the touch. Uh oh.
Just on a lark, we decided to fire the beast back up and watch the fireworks. With the cover off and safety glasses all around.... it booted! As if nothing had happened! We unplugged they keylock from the motherboard, put the cover back on, and the machine served us well for many more years. I'd have to check which mobo is in the basement DOS box but I think it might still be with us.
So what the heck happened? IANAEE, but I think it was a textbook case of latchup.
As the article states, hot-plugged connections often result in unpredictable power sequencing, which can also result in latchup. This could be one of the failure modes when hot-plugging keyboard with DIN plugs. Note that the power and ground contacts in a USB connector are longer than the data contacts, ensuring that they make first and break last. That's proper sequencing, and prevents the data lines from acting as surrogate power conductors for a portion of a mating cycle.
An old essay on "Internet vs Interweb" access, which only seems to get more relevant with time.
My latest light peeve is a 3Com wireless card. When nothing's happening, the light which should be glowing steadily or off entirely, blinks brightly at about 1Hz. When there's activity, instead of flickering along with packets, it blinks faster, in the 3-5Hz range. Are there large or small packets? Can't tell. Can I detect activity out of the corner of my eye? Nope, that information's masked.
What blows my mind is that it must've taken some effort to implement this system, which is much more complex than the simple "LED connected to TX" that you'd expect. Why?
Actually, Ricochet poletops can be used to infer certain environmental conditions too, specifically the propagation of 900MHz and 2.4GHz signals. You can do this indirectly, by watching packet headers and tracking the paths that packets take between radios (longer hops if conditions are good), which has been done in at least one area for some time now. It's fascinating data; I hope to have pretty animated graphs of it some time soon. You could also do it directly, by interrogating each radio's node table periodically, to see the SNR and RSSI to each other radio it knows about.
Prior to Ricochet, Metricom built Utilinet, designed to replace leased-line telephone circuits for control of utility switch and pump stations. Utilinet nodes could read their own power supply's input voltage, as well as temperature and a few other parameters. If anyone ever did cool stuff with this data, I'd like to hear from them.
EVDO can't support the subscriber density that Ricochet can/could. Get a dozen active users per square mile and EVDO gets pretty sluggish. Ditto with EDGE/HSDPA.
Wireless data is driven by the principle of geographic frequency reuse. If you can make short-distance transmissions, you can use less power, which means there can be someone else using the same channel just a short distance away. If you're far from your tower and need a lot of power, you tie up the channel for a wider area, meaning that fewer subscribers can be satisfied per unit of spectrum.
With a microcellular network like Ricochet, there are several poletops per square mile, and the same channel might be in use several times within a square mile. With cellular towers, a single sector usually serves several square miles, so a lower user density saturates the spectrum. Ricochet never achieved user density to come anywhere close to capacity, whereas many urban EVDO sites run maxed out for hours a day.
Metricom's Ricochet was ahead of its time, and not marketed effectively. They built a very dense, capable network, anticipating the internet growth that didn't materialize until many years later. They didn't have the financial resources of a giant cellular company to weather the lull, and their recurring costs killed them. Their assets were sold at auction, and have since changed hands several times. YDI/Proxim currently maintains Ricochet networks in the cities where they inherited contractual obligations, but the rest of the markets sit abandoned.
Ricochet's still relevant in areas where cable and DSL aren't available, because while not speedy by today's standards, it wipes the floor with dialup and is more than adequate for most uses. The deployment cost is dirt-cheap, and the modems can be had for a song. That's part of the problem though, because you can't sell a customer a $100 modem if they can get it for $5 on eBay.
The modems are also useful for peer-to-peer networking over distances that wifi can't touch. They do a mile in open space, and half a mile pretty reliably in an urban environment. The 900MHz band is wide open, and penetrates buildings much better than 2.4GHz. If you get 'em above the terrain, they'll do five or ten miles on the stock antennae. There's some user-driven research on the Ricochet Wiki if you're interested.
The wind blowing on that unit isn't caused by the cars, and that wind doesn't always benefit the cars.
The wind in the (been-shot-down-before) turnpike story is a draft caused by the cars' motion, and benefits their efficiency because it acts like a slight tailwind for each vehicle. Eliminating that tailwind would have a large energy cost, compared to the minor harvest from the turbines.
You might also enjoy Irregular Webcomic, which is written by a physics Ph.D and illustrated with LEGO minifigs. The subjects are weird and hilarious, and when there's a joke you might not get, the author provides annotations. Lately the annotations have gotten quite broad, catering to non-English-native readers, but in the beginning they only appeared for truly obscure jokes.
I went back to strip 1 and read the whole archive. It took me over a week, and I felt like I'd just attended a semester of school. The funny thing was, I truly wanted to learn all that stuff, because it was helping me appreciate humor. I think that's one of the strongest motivators ever.
You should really be looking at lunchbox machines. It's a portable form factor that puts a more-or-less-standard motherboard behind an LCD panel, with a bunch of slots and usually a few drive bays. Next Computing's offerings seem to top out at 16GB, but that's at least a little headroom.
If you're stuck on the traditional battery-powered laptop form factor, Dell even offers a 4GB-capable machine, though like all 32-bit machines, it sets aside some of that for device address space, leaving you with about 3GB for apps.
Usenet for distribution, and Bittorrent to fetch the missing pieces of a file, could be pretty cool. As for near/far pieces, play with the "LAN peer finder" in Azureus. It finds local peers and moves the data without touching the internet. I used it to copy the Modarchive torrents from my desktop to my laptop, since the wireless here is unreliable, and Bittorrent has an incredible robustness against flaky connections.
Hey, Esquire ran "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" in 1971. Occasionally the big rags catch onto things happening in one subculture or another.
30,000 is quite a lot of people. How many years has this been going on? I didn't find any links to past info on the site.
Here's some legislation I'd like to see: Last time I made the 'take me off your list' phone call, I asked where they'd gotten my number in the first place. They claimed not to know. Perhaps the folks staffing the call center didn't know, because they were just contracted to answer 'take me off your list' calls, and that's fine. But what drove me mad is that they also wouldn't tell me who contracted them, or whose list I was actually on in the first place.
Two requirements: First, tell me who the hell you are and who hired you. Anonymity and marketing shouldn't go together.
Second, tell me where you got my number/name/whatever, and where they got it, and where they got it, back up the chain not a specific number of hops, because that would just encourage shell companies, but back a certain amount of time, say, seven years. If they can't provide a total backtrace of my record including who initially gathered it and what technique they initially used, I should be entitled to damages.
And what it means for regular users when there's no budget or appetite for cavalry-calling is that they suffer at the hands of recklessly clueless Excel fiends who think they're God's gift to project management.
Those same manager folks would, even if there was plenty of budget for software development, staunchly insist that their million-column spreadsheets are working fine, while forcing underlings to spend half (literally, half, I counted) their time maintaining and updating disparate copies of the same data in different sheets used by different managers.
Make it easy enough for an idiot to do, and every idiot will.
Of course, there are plans afoot to actually transmit data over fluid-filled hoses, cardboard tubes, and whatever else can be cooked up by then. See my sig for the details.
The charger is much more important than the batteries you're putting in it. Most brands perform just fine, for a while. Knowing when a set (or an individual cell) is past its peak is the key. I picked up a LaCrosse BC-900 charger just over a year ago, and it's awesome. Most chargers leave you "blind" as to the actual capacity, they just tell you "this one's full!". Being able to really test the batteries is great. I found a neglected set in a box that I hadn't touched in about 4 years. Some of them had failed short. After a moment with a benchtop power supply I'd awoken them, but none would hold much charge. (showing ~500mAh capacity) So I tossed 'em in the LaCrosse for a refresh cycle, and after a few days they were all performing within a few percent of their original rating. No other charger would've given me the information I needed, or the automatic refresh cycle, to bring those back from the dead.
My BC-900 melted last week. It was the rev-32 firmware, which apparently wasn't careful enough about stopping activities when a cell overheated. It took out a Powerex 2300mAh cell, which was sputtering and smoking and stank up the whole end of the house. I've got an email in to LaCrosse right now, but even if they won't replace my (three months out of warranty) unit for free, I plan to pick up a new one (running rev 33 firmware) as soon as possible. A near-fire hasn't diminished my love of this charger, that's how revolutionary it is.
Seconded the soldering iron. I can't believe I suffered with $8 junk soldering irons for so long. I got a refurb Edsyn Loner from these folks a few months ago and the difference is phenomenal. Run, don't walk, to your nearest supply house and pick up a temperature-controlled iron.
The constant-wattage irons get themselves too hot when they're just sitting there, and as soon as you start using them, they dump all their heat into the part and get too cold. If you get one with enough watts to avoid the latter effect, it exacerbates the former.
Closed-loop temperature control is sweet. The element is like 60 or 100 watts, and when you first turn the unit on, it runs full blast so the iron comes up to temperature in seconds. Then it backs off and idles at a very low duty cycle to maintain the temperature. When you touch it to a part, even a fairly large one, it pours on the right amount of power. I've had good luck soldering large connections and alligator clips that would suck the heat right out of a 30-watt junker.
For sixty bucks, the temperature-controlled iron made a bigger difference in my workbench technique than any Panavise or swing-arm lamp ever could. Highly recommended.
Contrast the iOpener, which was a little web terminal sold at a loss with the plan of recouping the cost by selling service subscriptions. But rather than following the cellphone model, where the hardware is only discounted if you sign up for service, they just trusted that nobody would buy the hardware without also buying service.
:)
When hackers realized it was a generic PC and started buying them en masse, iOpener responded by smearing glue on the circuit board, changing the BIOS, and generally sticking their head in the sand. Linksys got it right with the WRT54GL: sell the good hardware directly to hackers at a fair price.
Today, iOpener is but a sad little footnote in the annals of hardware-hacker history, while the WRT54G(L) is riding high.
Every once in a while, I get angry at hackers who aim to make Xbox or PSP hardware more useful by imbuing it with software that doesn't suck. "Why would you aid the enemy by embracing their hacker-hostile business?", I agonize. Then I remember that those game systems are sold at a loss. Awesome.