Why can’t I walk past Maplin without buying stuff I don’t need? Good news – after weeks of slaving over a seemingly interminable office refurb, occupying seven days a week and painstakingly documented in this column ad nauseam, I finally found some time to get some chores done. Time for me! Time that doesn’t involve paying bills or having to apologise for missing deadlines! Time not …
"This is the magical period during the working day that American psychologists call "personal time", British wage-slaves refer to as "lunch hour" and which only the French get right by making it last twice as long."
IMHO the French get it totally wrong. I was horrified that my new employer enforces a full hour's lunch break. I haven't had to take the full hour since about 1988. I'd much rather take half an our (legal minimum and all that) and get home half an hour earlier. Actually I'd rather take nothing other than drink and piss breaks and get home even earlier, but the law demands that I am given half an hour and must take it.
Even if you happen to work in town rather than an out of town "business park" wandering round the same old shops every day gets old after a few weeks. If you work, as I do, in a motorway-side business park you've killed all the time you're going to in buying and eating a sandwich and the rest is enforced web browsing, reading, or whatever. Time that could be much better spend if you weren't at work.
Lunch breaks of over 15 minutes? Waste of time. And in your case, money.
Even more annoying is the fact that working as I do about ten minutes from work the temptation is to come home at lunch time and thus spend twenty minutes travelling every lunch time.
Taking less than an hour over what the French consider a good lunch is a crime against culinary art. Simply relaxing under the Provencal sunshine whilst savouring first class food is an excellent way to relax and unwind (I realize that it can rain in France as well ;-) ).
Mind you, they are clueless about breakfast. For breakfast, bring on the British! Bring on the bacon, sausage, fried bread, eggs, baked beans ... THE WORKS!!
Maybe the French need their extensive lunch because they eat a tiny bit of bread and jam for breakfast, so when lunchtime arrives they are half starved. The British, being fortified at breakfast with a much bigger meal can survive off the odd sarnie for lunch.
Darn, I'm hungry now!
I discovered Maplin in the 70s. In conjunction with Electronics Today International. Drooling over pictures of the monophonic synthesiser you could build, and a pre-Sinclair computer of some description.
In those days, they were a mail-order only outfit AFAICR. And there was intense rivalry between Maplin-ers, and Tandy-ers.
And, for the upmarket end of town, Elektor. Still around too.
On the other hand, ETI begat Computing Today, and look where that led.
OK, Elektor wins.
"[Maplin] were a mail-order only outfit AFAICR"
I think so too. Until recently I still had the green-covered catalogue with the Concorde on the front (?).
Before Maplin there was Home Radio. Who else remembers them?
And Watford Electronics. And Henry's.
Henry's had an actual shop in Edgware Road. In the late 1970s I worked in Westbourne Grove, near the shop of Zaerex Valves, another regular advertiser in Practical Wireless. One night the shop burned down - probably the sensible course for a valve supplier in the solid-state age.
"One word, 'Proops'" Now you're talking. Remember Smiths of Edgeware Road - cases and cases of EF50's; and all the 'surplus' shops in Newport Street cheek by jowl with St John's Hospital. We actually used a fair amount of 'surplus' gear at work, adapting some of those aerial cameras as recorders for oscilloscopes. Gernsback's Radio Electronics, Wireless World were my staple reading on the train home from work long before ETI came out; they were only 2/6 each at W H Smith's in Victoria station.
Mind you, the department I worked in did still have a couple of gold-plated quartz fibre electrocardiographs wirg rgeir massive magbets - sadly no longer in use their place having been taken by the Almqvist and subsequent 'tronic models.
>> And Watford Electronics. And Henry's.
I remember my Mum driving me down to Watford Electronics when they were in Cardiff Road in Watford on a Sunday morning. Tiny little shop. Queues out the door. Hobbyists picking up chunky old 0.5W carbon resistors, Mullard "tropical fish" capacitors and glass bodied OC transistors!! I am that old ...
BiPak were another mail order supplier I remember
There's still a Henry's in the Edgware Road, same location for the last 40-odd years. Not sure if it's the same ownership though as all the other shops seem to have gone.
Then there was Lasky's (the length of TCR)!
I've still got a load of Bulgin plugs (but no sockets) bought from Home Radio.
With regard to Maplin prices, they were the cheapest place to buy the little half-length lithium PRAM batteries for the original iMacs. I seem to remember buying them at about £3.90 or thereabouts. Now they are over £9.00 - which is a bit steep when I can buya pack of 4 AA Lithium Enenergisers for less than £6.00.
>> "[Maplin] were a mail-order only outfit AFAICR"
No they DID have one shop - in London Road, Westcliffe-on-sea in the mid 1970s
My mother in law lived just round the corner from them :)
Also in the area were Scientific and Technical who sold all the tat that you didn't want by mail order ...
(Still waiting for a calm, dry day to try out my Christmas present : a radio controlled helicopter - from Maplin!!!)
How can you compare '70s Maplin to Tandy?
Maplin actually sold the components you wanted, and also put together the kits of parts from the ETI projects to save you having to order them seperately yourself. And the catalogue was as good as a reference book when it came to the pin-outs for transistors and that 74LS105 and 4114 static memory that you were soldering on to the project you were making out of Vero-board.
If you went in to Tandy, all that you came out with was a realization that they were not really an electronics store. You only used Tandy when they had the week long cumulative 10% discount per day sales that they needed to have in order to clear the stuff they could not sell full price, or you were so desperate for a component that you would risk disappointment because they did not have what you needed.
And for the people who mention Radio Spares and Farnell, at that time you had to have a trade account before they would even send you a catalogue, let alone sell something to you! For the hobbiest, Watford Electronics were the only real mail-order alternative, although they did run from a shop on Watford High Street which was a real blast to visit because of all the miscellaneous useful junk they had there.
Unfortunately, Maplin today are a shadow of what they used to be. If you want specific components (last time I wanted a set of capacitors to repair the power supply in an out-of-warranty Sky HD box - yes a Thompson one) they did not have all of the values I needed, so I had to go somewhere else. All they appear to have now are the component grab-bags, a small number of kits, many dating back to the ETI days, some tools and various gadgets you can buy cheaper elsewhere.
I remember trying out all the guitar amps that Maplin sold back about 1988/89 then and not a one of them "worked fine" new. The tone of every one of them was awful. Sure most were cheaper than the Lead 12 Stack I bought in the end, but that sounded fantastic the Maplin kit didn't.
Those Maplin things were worse than the much cheaper things you could get from discount shops and mail order catalogues. Which sums up an awful lot of Maplin's stock. It's sheap and nasty stuff sold at an elevated price.
My 'bedroom' has eight outlet sockets. Plugged into those are six extension leads and two three-way adaptors. (30) I have three vacant sockets left, and most of the stuff that is plugged in with 13 amp plugs draw less than 300mA anyway.
How dare you have too many adaptors! No-one has too many adaptors and never will until someone standardised a low voltage home rail circuit to replace the exponentially growing population of adaptors for everything since someone figured out that it was a neat way of reducing heat in stuff.
Did you see that? I very nearly exploded there. I had to say goodbye to an old amp that thoughtfully provided power outlets to everything connected to it and it cost me six sockets!
"a low voltage home rail circuit to replace the exponentially growing population of adaptors for everything since someone figured out that it was a neat way of reducing heat in stuff."
Power over Ethernet. You know it makes sense (even if the stuff has no need for LAN connectivity, the Ethernet socket with a 75c PoE chip behind it is (to my eyes) a very sensible way of getting more-than-USB power (20W or so maybe, realistically?) to a variety of small devices without each needing a different wallwart.
>No-one has too many adaptors and never will until someone standardised a low voltage home rail circuit
You do realise that the lower the voltage the larger amount of energy is lost as heat?
At least a good number of my 'wall-warts' are USB-based these days, so phones, mice, tablets, ereaders etc are catered for. Half the time you don't need the wall-wart because there will be a device (PC, TV, stero etc) near by that has a USB socket.
A 12v standard would be nice, but to be honest I don't have much in the way of 12v kit... and in any case, I guess 12v kit might vary too much in the amount of current it draws.
"You do realise that the lower the voltage the larger amount of energy is lost as heat?"
?
Switched mode power supplies can be designed so the same power supply barely cares whether the input (or output) is 5V, 12V, or somewhere higher. And they're efficient too, largely regardless of the input and output voltages.
Or did you have something else in mind?
"the step-down transformer."
You do realise that practically no routine consumer or professional electronics device powered from the mains has used *transformers* in power supplies for the last decade or more? Switched mode rules. Cheap, compact, cheap, flexible, cheap, high efficiency, cheap, and above all, cheap. Even wall-warts tend to be switched mode these days. They're cheap, you see.
This post has been deleted by its author
The problem is that there aren't enough sockets, so replacing something that can be daisychained (multiple BS1363 four-ways) with something that's purely radial (so massive bundle of cable) is going the wrong way.
Aside from that, PoE is only 13W anyway, and even the new PoE+ is only ~20W after cable losses. As the wattage increases the efficiency drops rapidly due to the thin wires in Cat5/5e/6.
10W USB sockets could actually replace most of the adapters in an average home.
You can already buy a big block of 'fast charge' USB sockets for not very much - eg This one from Maplin. (Oh no...)
That EU idea of standardising laptop PSUs is basically the only hope of more-than-10W supplies. Once you have a standard voltage and connector the market cna provide.
10W USB sockets could actually replace most of the adapters in an average home.
And if you're handy with a soldering iron, it's also easy to re-purpose an old PC power supply to power quite a few 5v and 12v devices (or other values that can be made up by combining the 3v3, +/-5v and +/-12v rails). It's a whole lot cheaper than a proper bench supply, but quite adequate for a lot of uses. The older ATX standard supplies more current on the 5v rail, so it's quite suitable for the plethora of 5v devices (like Pis, phones, tablets, etc.) around now, so providing the PSU still works, even ancient PCs can have some salvage value.
Extra credit for running a small controller (eg, 'duino or Pi) off standby voltage and using it to switch on/off the main PSU transformer and/or individual power outputs so you can remotely switch devices on/off as needed to save on leccy costs.
I was surprised at how efficient and cheap DC-DC converters are these days (a byproduct of switchmode supplies becoming commonplace I think). A rail at 24 or 48v, short circuit protected (thus allowing lower insulation requirements and less fire risk than mains) with switchmode voltage converters at point of use. Maybe even with a data pair allowing the device to request the correct voltage from the outlet?
Yes, another standard, but with modern trends, maybe a good idea?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
