It sounds like many of you have great fun with the surplus stores near you. I live in Durban, South Africaand the only surplus store I know of is Sad Sack's which is army surplus. Does anyone know of electronic/computer/scientific/geek surplus places in Durban or South Africa in general?
I have started a CS degree through Unisa in South Africa and I have to learn 3 languages this year. for Intro to programing 1 I have Pascal. Intro to programing 2 is C++ and Intro to visual programing is Dephi. Unfortunatly the compilers/dev tools used in the books are all winblows based, meening I now have to duel boot between windows and linux. Apparently next year they wil be using C++ for Intro to programing 1 but that dosn't help me. I can see I am going to be very confused by the end of the year trying to ad these 3 new languages to the languages I already know(basic, perl, php). I guess there is no chance of me kicking my caffine addiction this year.:-)
I have similar experiences with my audio equipment. I live about 500 meters from a light house where there is a 1KW morse code beacon. Unfortunatly just a bit of speaker wire ia all that is needed to recieve the signal. I end up hearing the beacon through my PC speakers and on recorded minidiscs(I don't have spdif).
During my ham radio training I learned a reason why this could happen. In many speaker systems you will find a crossover unit. This is basicly an inductor(coil) and a capacitor. This forms a tuned circuit that is designed to accept or reject signals of various frequencies. In som e cases the small amount of signal picked up by the speaker leads is enough to turn your speakers alone into radios.
I have even heard of rusty old fences "tuning in" to radio stations and amazing passers by.
btw, our local(Durban, South Africa) ham radio group set up a field station at the above mentioned light house a few years back. Forgeting about the beacon, they wondered why there were sparks between the antenna leads and a grounded bus bar on the desk. 1KW at 2m from your antenna can be rather scary.
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Dunno about you guys, but I had to learn about van der Waals forces in high school chemistry/Physical Science.
I am in South Africa so maybe our the school curiculam is probably different to the rest of the world.
Hi all
It sounds like many of you have great fun with the surplus stores near you. I live in Durban, South Africaand the only surplus store I know of is Sad Sack's which is army surplus. Does anyone know of electronic/computer/scientific/geek surplus places in Durban or South Africa in general?
thanks
SmilyBorg
P-)
Sounds like a new implimentation of RFC 1149(A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers) http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt
The last implimentation(http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/) was rather slow, though using a usb drive you could send packets in large bursts. P-)
I have started a CS degree through Unisa in South Africa and I have to learn 3 languages this year. for Intro to programing 1 I have Pascal. Intro to programing 2 is C++ and Intro to visual programing is Dephi. Unfortunatly the compilers/dev tools used in the books are all winblows based, meening I now have to duel boot between windows and linux. Apparently next year they wil be using C++ for Intro to programing 1 but that dosn't help me. I can see I am going to be very confused by the end of the year trying to ad these 3 new languages to the languages I already know(basic, perl, php). I guess there is no chance of me kicking my caffine addiction this year.:-)
I have similar experiences with my audio equipment. I live about 500 meters from a light house where there is a 1KW morse code beacon. Unfortunatly just a bit of speaker wire ia all that is needed to recieve the signal. I end up hearing the beacon through my PC speakers and on recorded minidiscs(I don't have spdif).
During my ham radio training I learned a reason why this could happen. In many speaker systems you will find a crossover unit. This is basicly an inductor(coil) and a capacitor. This forms a tuned circuit that is designed to accept or reject signals of various frequencies. In som e cases the small amount of signal picked up by the speaker leads is enough to turn your speakers alone into radios.
I have even heard of rusty old fences "tuning in" to radio stations and amazing passers by.
btw, our local(Durban, South Africa) ham radio group set up a field station at the above mentioned light house a few years back. Forgeting about the beacon, they wondered why there were sparks between the antenna leads and a grounded bus bar on the desk. 1KW at 2m from your antenna can be rather scary.