Posts by Stoneshop 5954 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2009
I've got a SmartEVSE[0] charger installed. Uses a PIC 18F26K22.
[0] Its smarts are limited to sensing the mains current on the incoming feed and keeping that below the current rating for the primary fuses, so that they don't blow if the cooker hobs and the oven and the electrical boiler and the kettle and a few Magicoals are running, and then you get home plugging in the EV.
There are, as can be imagined, quite a few requests to support older and abandoned kit, but to satisfy such requests one needs coders familiar with that kit as well as having access[0] to those particular models. And having the time to work on porting.
Currently, there's quite the gap there.
[0] over the Christmas/New Year holiday a coder in Pakistan was working on porting Halium to the OnePlus 1, which for the moment looks to be left behind when that upgrade gets rolled out. The phone itself was here.
across the room from me. Not coding, but spreading the word, improving documentation, howto's and such, organising and holding talks, and reporting the niggles with using it as a daily driver.
Most of the supported devices are pretty solid. And if you're actively trying to stay out of the Google and Apple fangs it's a viable option.
You could also use a mode that 'flipped' sideways back-and-forth over a simulated 24x80 screen (SET24X80), showing either the left-51 or right-51 characters; must have been a bloody nightmare to use proactively...
The Osborne 1 mentioned above had a similar limitation, although it could show _52_ chars (of 80) on its 5" screen.
Yes Dad, it will be for homework. No Mum, I won't waste my time playing games, that's what losers do
While we were in the UK for Christmas we picked up some bayonet light bulbs as you can't easily get them in NL and we need them for some light fittings.
The LED bulbs in our Teasmades hail from a certain large Chinese tat bazaar where you can find them with just about any base in common use.
Someone who actually founded a virtual telecom operator a decade back had apparently never encountered rotary dial phones, or even seen someone operate one in a movie.
"Yes, you stick your finger in the hole with the right digit, then you ROTATE the dial until your finger hits the stop, after which you let go of the dial which will rotate back. Just sticking your finger in and poking doesn't achieve anything."
Heeft u een ‘Quantum Pendant’ (anti-5G) hanger of ‘negatief ionen’ sieraad of slaapmasker? Leg deze veilig weg
Nieuwsbericht | 16-12-2021 | 13:04
Heeft u een product met negatieve ionen werking die hieronder staan vermeld? Draag deze dan niet meer, leg deze veilig weg en wacht op inleverinstructie. Uit onderzoek, dat de ANVS heeft laten uitvoeren door het RIVM, blijkt namelijk dat deze specifieke producten ioniserende straling uitzenden. Het gaat om 10 producten. De hoeveelheid gemeten straling hiervan is laag. Dit betekent dat de kans op schade aan de gezondheid klein is. Maar bij continu en langdurig dragen van deze producten is op lange termijn gezondheidsschade niet volledig uit te sluiten. De bij de ANVS bekende verkopers in Nederland hebben te horen gekregen dat de verkoop verboden is en per direct stopgezet moet worden en dat zij hun klanten hierover moeten informeren.
Elk risico voorkomen
De 10 onderzochte consumentenproducten bevatten radioactieve stoffen. Ze zenden daardoor continu ioniserende straling uit. Hieraan wordt de drager blootgesteld, dit kan nadelige gevolgen hebben voor de gezondheid. Daarom zijn deze consumentenproducten met radioactieve stoffen wettelijk verboden.
Ioniserende straling kan weefsel en DNA beschadigen. De hoeveelheid straling die is gemeten aan de onderzochte producten is laag. Echter, in het geval van langdurig en continu dragen van deze onderzochte producten (een heel jaar 24 uur per dag) kan de in Nederland strenge limietwaarde voor blootstelling van de huid aan straling overschreden worden. De limietwaarde is ingesteld om het risico op elke vorm van gezondheidsschade te voorkomen. Bij deze consumentenproducten kan gezondheidsschade niet volledig uitgesloten worden, denk aan een rode huid. Gezien de lage straling is de kans hierop zeer klein. Om elk risico te voorkomen, roept de ANVS bezitters van deze producten op ze niet meer te dragen.
Do you have a 'Quantum Pendant' (anti-5G) pendant or 'negative ion' jewellery or sleep mask? Put it away safely
News message | 16-12-2021 | 13:04
Do you have a product with negative ion action listed below? If so, do not wear it anymore, put it away safely and wait for instructions on how to return it. Research commissioned by the ANVS to the RIVM has shown that these specific products emit ionising radiation. It concerns 10 products. The amount of radiation measured is low. This means that the chance of damage to health is small. However, if these products are worn continuously for a long time, long-term damage to health cannot be completely ruled out. The sellers in the Netherlands known to the ANVS have been told that the sale is prohibited and must be stopped immediately and that they must inform their customers about this.
[followed by a list of the items found to be hazardous, but only pictures, no details about the component substances]
Preventing any risk
The 10 consumer products investigated contain radioactive substances. They therefore continuously emit ionising radiation. The wearer is exposed to this and this can have adverse health effects. For this reason, these consumer products containing radioactive substances are prohibited by law.
Ionising radiation can damage tissue and DNA. The amount of radiation measured in the products investigated is low. However, in case of prolonged and continuous wearing of these investigated products (a whole year 24 hours a day), the in the Netherlands strict limit value for skin exposure to radiation may be exceeded. The limit value has been set to prevent the risk of any form of health damage. In the case of these consumer products, health damage cannot be completely excluded, for example, redness of the skin. Given the low level of radiation, the chance of this happening is very small. In order to prevent any risk, the ANVS calls on owners of these products not to wear them anymore.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
The smallest set were the user manuals, five or six IIRC. Then you had the system managers manual set which was twenty or so, and there was also the programmers' manual set detailing all the system libraries. Never had occasion to actually count those, but they easily took twice the shelf space of the system managers manuals.
On top of that you would have one or more binders for each of the installed products.
Indeed.
About a decade back we (hackerspace annex computer museum) were offered "a cellar full of computers". Most of those systems had been repurposed to create a campus-wide network for the students to use after the machines had been retired from their respective departments, with a lot being at least 25 years old already, so fairly interesting as museum inventory. Said cellar was underneath one of the flats on Twente University campus, and as three of the museum team (including me) had lived on the same type of flat we expected about 20m^2 floor space, piled fairly high with stuff.
The deal was 'all or nothing, no cherry-picking', so it wasn't a matter of just going there with some van; it was clear it wouldn't easily fit in one. So we arranged a visit to check things out.
It was not just the cellar we had (rightly) figured.
It was the entire crawlspace underneath the rest of the flat too. And it was not just systems and peripherals. There were dozens and dozens of boxes with documentation. And media. Tape reels and cartridges, floppies and several disk packs. Especially the documentation convinced us to take the offer.
Of course we then needed a plan to move it all out. All. Of. It. Which can be seen here.
Most of that documentation has now been scanned and uploaded to archive.org, currently amounting to 1424 manuals. Stuff larger than A4/letter still needs to be done as well as microfiches, plus some books we don't want to cut up. Once we get the required tape drives fixed and set up we can work on reading the tapes and transferring those too; we already did most of the paper tape.
About 30 years back, an educational institution not too far from here and dispensing knowledge pertaining to agriculture had quite a bunch of VAXes, MicroVAXes and VAXstations, which, at some point, were ripe for an OS upgrade. So they ordered the upgrade sets, one per system as one would, or rather had to in lieu of licenses, back then.
The upgrades arrived in a large van, as the order numbers referred to the upgrade media plus documentation.
NO SCROLL BARS which makes them generally useless,
Someone authorative in the W10 UI design team at Microsoft has apparently taken offence with scroll bars, and decreed that they should be hidden unless hovering over the three nanopixel wide area where one might expect to find them. Or the two nanopixel wide area quite somewhere else without any visual reference that this might be such an scrollbar-revealing area. Where the scrollbar as revealed doesn't offer any indication of the currently displayed area vis-a-vis the entire length of the available lack of information.
Although there appears to be a setting, even accessible via the control panel instead of one that you have to fiddle the registry for, keeping the scrollbars visible. If the fscking program you're running honours that setting of course.
I fear that rectally applying my work laptop to that W10 UI designer would be frowned upon. In which case I'll gladly substitute a 4U rackmount Itanic for it, even though that one doesn't run Windows.
and lots of stock photos of models posing as happy, smiling students (there's no way those people are actual students)
A decade or so back The Inquirer had taken to spotting one particular young woman who appeared to have been enrolled in at least a dozen universities at once, while doing promotion for at least another dozen or so, and also for numerous commercial companies. They tried to get her a Wackypedia page as "Everywhere Girl", but it was deleted as being for someone not famous enough.
Her German counterpart is 'Emma' who is (or was; I rarely see her any more) holding oodles of jobs as helpdesk telephone operator. Probably got replaced by AI[0] chatbots.
[0] Absurdly Inane.
The carriers have dreams of driving fiber service and even Wifi out of existence with 5G
Hahaha. Why would I let data take such a roundabout way with systems just decalinguini apart? Never mind that the majority of those systems don't even know about wireless in whatever form it presents, and that I prefer to keep an eye on what data gets out.
"Your correspondent is a bit of a fan of devices like this (this piece was typed on a 1991 IBM Model M; accept no substitute) – but no such brash, commonplace kit features on the album"
The Model F is the closest (and it's very close), the 5140 and P70 keyboards probably less so, but they're not to be sniffed at anyway. We've got a P70 in the museum[0]; the keyboard itself works OK and typing is indeed nice, but its cable is succumbing to Outer Sleeve Rot.
Daily keyboard is an Unicomp; at the office[1] it's a Cherry.
[0] unfortunately stored in two shipping containers at the moment.
[1] Not been there since March last year.
Oooh, posh.
Just a single sink, overflowing with a vigorously replicating community of fungi way beyond Mr. Pasteur's wildest nightmares, that would probably yield a few plates, pots and pans if someone would be brave enough to dress up in a hazmat suit and attack the pulsating mound with, oh, probably something featuring in "Things I Won't Work With".
They did this as far back as WW2 already; Lucille Ball tried to expose that plan in 1974 when the batteries had finally run down and she wasn't affected any more (they were microbots, fitted in a dental filling as miniaturisation hadn't progressed to them being small enough to float in your bloodstream as well as feed on radio waves), but she was only laughed at.
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