Posts by Mage

Re: leaving each end welded

Car batteries can do the welding spanner bit. Doesn't vapourise Sometimes the case shatters

Re: systematically check any new PSU

I also check old stuff bought off eBay or donated by friends. I've seen stuff that had the rotary plug type setting set to 200 or 210.

Some stuff is 220V only and very occasionally has underspec'ed mains transformers so needs a series resistor even for our 230 V.

Electricity (before Brexit) was harmonised across the EU to 220V. But actually they just gave everyone new tolerance limits and the UK had the biggest + limit as the UK nominal 240V can be 245 V.

Modern SMPSUs can work maybe 80V to 260V, though labelled 110V - 240V. They might even try to run at an even lower voltage. But if it's 500W the 2.1A at about 235V to 245V becomes maybe 5A during a brown-out. SMPSUs are a different problem to old AC/DC gear that half wave rectified the direct mains, or tube lamps with no PF correction cap to the Electricity Grid, as reducing the supply voltage a little increases the current load.

Safety googles.

Re: Supply pipe location

They complained I had a leak or excessive consumption.

We turned off the main stop cock and consumption continued.

After an hours investigation he turned off the water entirely. Except it didn't.

The meter and tap in the street in front of our house works next door's water.

Ours is two up the street. He thought the one in the middle didn't have an outlet.

So next door had high consumption.

But the toilet and washing machine in the shed gets water from somewhere else.

Re: Long term I expect WiFi and LTE to converge.

No, that's nonsense, unless you purely mean the air interface. But various versions of WiFi and various versions of Mobile have had similar Air interfaces.

WiFi is a free connection to your broadband. You can to an extent controi how many devices use yours, but the spectrum is shared.

LTE is designed for mobility, seamless handover between masts (bases) and CHARGING you. There is no control of contention other than refusing connections. You may not connect at all if it's busy. The spectrum is shared with an unknown number of other customers.

Re: Easy peezy, lemon squeezy

We had Thin-net aka cheaper net from 1994 to 1998. A 10 M bps shared medium. We moved in 1998 and installed cat5 (not even cat5e) and used initially 10/100 Hubs, then 10/100 switches and now all 100/1000 switches with no change to the cables. The distance possible is just shorter on Cat5 and some of it might be as good as Cat5e.

Wifi was a shared 2 Mbps in 2001. Then 54 Mbps, then Turbo 108 Mbps Some of it can do over 300 Mbps but mostly a SHARED 100 Mbps approx due to all the neighbours with SkyQ and WiFi Printers as well as regular WiFi. Our server, modem, on microwave link, firewall/router, Airpoints x2 and switch is all on UPS, so the wifi goes twice as fast during a power cut.

WiFi 6 as per previous versions has a fantasy headline speed in most of the real world, as has 3G, 4G, 5G with economical numbers of customers.

If you can put mains wire, then you can run LAN cable, Most of the cost in an office might be cable terminations, the patch panels and managed switches. Not the actual cable and install.

Similarly any premises with mains electricity, water and sewage can cheaply have fibre. Promotion of Satellite and Mobile for basic premises internet (and it's not broadband) is due to market distortions and poor national comms regulation.

Re: The Wire - without the drama

Power Line ethernet is really wireless using the entire AM HF and part of VHF. It will work with an airgap. They cheat in the EMI testing.

Re: I. AM. OUTRAGED!

SATA - IDE adaptors at about €6 work for HDDs, CD-ROMs and DVD drives.

Far more compatible and faster than a USB adaptor.

I do have one older Mobo with Linux and a floppy port. The 5.25", 3.5" and 3" drives do work and using a library, even CP/M formats including Amstrad. I compiled the Joyce Emulator too, which was a bit of work to get all the aged dependencies. But it works with real 3" drives or files emulating drives.

Warning: the 3" drives have the +5V and +12V reversed, but I knew that from using a 3.5" drive in the PCW8256 (with RAM upgraded to 512).

You can use 8" or 3" drives on a regular floppy port just with a dumb cable adaptor. But Apple II 100K 5.25" drives won't work on anything except an Apple II; proprietary.

USB Floppy adaptor/drive ONLY works for regular FAT12 MSDOS discs. No good for CP/M, Amstrad or Amiga.

I'm not sure if Amiga discs can be read on the setup and I have an idea the Hard Sectored discs (a hole per sector instead of just one) might not work. ACT 1/ Victor 9000 5.25" floppies won't work either as they are variable speed to increase capacity.

Periodically backups need transferred to new mediums. Writeable CDs, DVDs and Flash can fade. Other formats of tape, MO disc, floppy, HDD etc need interfaces and/or drives unavailable.

I THINK I've everything copied off old IDE drives lying around and I did copy the old MFM drives content on XTs and ATs to IDE on an AT clone. (5 M, 10 M and 20M byte drives).

Re: cultural issues

Why? It's to acquire information about USA roads. They don't much care about the EU, UK, Kenya or Chinese roads.

Re: If you don't use Chrome

I can confirm some sites have 3 or 4 pages of images on Waterfox and the same site might have 1 or none on Chromium.

Also some sites simply don't work at all now except on Chromium based browsers, such as FEC (Farnell etc).

Re: their cars are using to identify stuff

USA Roads.

Re: Sydney thinks it is Oz

It's 14,665 kilometres between Sydney and Perth if you can fly direct. Which you can't. Driving is impossible unless you mean the OTHER Perth.