Re: I want a tail,
Y'all are some weird people. I admire that.
Posts by W4YBO
308 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jan 2016
Watch this nanochip reprogram cells to fix damaged body tissue
Parents claim Disney gobbled up kids' info through mobile games
'Real' people want govts to spy on them, argues UK Home Secretary
Wednesday 2nd August 2017 17:08 GMT
Re: Ask her this
"I didnt say a built up public area where blanketing would be noticed also I also would love to know how when it's a unit the size of a belkin router with a huge antenna rigged up to a car battery you'd ever be found using it. After all how exactly would you propose you trace a signal thats stated goal is - Signal JAMMING?"
Radio Direction Finding. Because your instruction "Stop at three miles" doesn't really work with radio waves.
GPS III satellites and ground station projects get even later as costs gently spiral
Monday 31st July 2017 16:06 GMT
Re: Do you have any idea how GPS works?
"where it must be on the planet (it's called triangulation, people...)"
Perfect explanation of how GPS operates! But my inner pedant won't let "triangulation" pass. "Trilateration" is the three-dimensional geometric equivalent to two-dimensional geometry's triangulation.
Apollo center fundraiser: That's one small check from man, one giant leap for our peace of mind
Tuesday 25th July 2017 12:40 GMT
Re: Quote
"And most historians now agree it was "One small step for 'a' man..." and that one tiny syllable was muffled/garbled by the connection. But people will assume what they already know -- what EVERYbody knows -- is the real history..."
Listen to the audio and the pacing of his speech. I think he was excited, and dropped the "a". Personally, I'm pretty impressed that his quote isn't "Holy shit! I'm stepping onto the moon!"
Sweden leaked every car owners' details last year, then tried to hush it up
Brits must now register virtually all new drones and undergo safety tests
Monday 24th July 2017 14:58 GMT
Re: Chicken gun
"Mythbusters did it with a frozen chicken. They may as well have fired a cannonball. It made a proper mess."
But, to be fair, MythBusters also neglected to use "bird strike resistant" windscreens for their experiment. Wouldn't have made any difference with the frozen chickens, but it would've with the thawed ones. Part of the reason I watched them less frequently in the later seasons; less science, more Hollywood.
FUKE NEWS: Robot snaps inside drowned Fukushima nuke plant
User filed fake trouble tickets to take helpful sysadmin to lunches
Air, sea drones put through their paces on Solent testing range
Tuesday 18th July 2017 15:11 GMT
"At least one flying drone was lost overboard from a civilian testbed ship after its operator made a mistake during takeoff and accidentally commanded it to backflip into the icy waters of the Minch, off Scotland's Atlantic coast."
When I do that, it just hits the basement floor, and I might have to replace a prop.
What did OVH learn from 24-hour outage? Water and servers do not mix
Thursday 13th July 2017 14:44 GMT
Pure water isn't so bad...
Pure water isn't so bad for electronics. It won't conduct electricity at all. I recommend a distilled water dunking for equipment that's been exposed to soda, fruit juice, or tea. I've even washed mouse pee off a motherboard, and rescued a ocean-water dipped cellphone. Both lived.
The problem with water-cooling occurs when you mix conductive pump lubricant and antifreeze with the water coolant.
Broadcasters, advocacy groups and nonprofits weigh in on Microsoft's magical broadband
Blue Cross? Blue crass: Health insurer thought it would be a great idea to mail plans on USB sticks
Sysadmin bloodied by icicle that overheated airport data centre
Friday 7th July 2017 13:49 GMT
Power outages for miles around...
...our transmitter site at the end of a nine mile trip up a snow covered 4000 foot mountain, so the power company wasn't too anxious to send fuse replacement crews up there. Besides, everybody up there has a backup generator. Until we didn't.
Temperatures close to zero for more than a week had gelled the diesel fuel in the brand, spankin' new above-ground armored fuel tank. Once the generator had run through the contents of its day-tank, it was lights out. A thousand gallons of fuel, which never needed anti-gel when it was located underground, obviously did now. Two UHF TV stations, three FMs, and four AM stations (utilized SAP from one of the TV stations for programming) were all off the air.
The company that had installed the new fuel tank was summoned, and promised that they would not only get liquid fuel to our site, but the fuel would be in the day-tank of a trailered generator that they would connect to our transfer panel that very afternoon. That very afternoon arrived, but the generator didn't. Slid off of the aforementioned nine mile long, snow covered road about two-hundred yards from our transmitter site.
At this point, power had been off in the building for more than eight hours. The temperature inside the transmitter building was hovering in the mid-thirties F, and the sun was going down soon. The high power UHF klystron tubes were cooled by distilled water boiling in the base of the tube, the steam being condensed back to water by an enormous radiator system (3 - 8x12 foot radiators). That would all freeze as we dropped below 32 F. As darkness set in, we started to light our field expedient smudge pots (metal garbage cans with ventilated lids containing old t-shirts and thawed diesel fuel) to keep the radiators from freezing solid when, eureka!, the power came back on. I can't imagine how much soot would've coated everything in that building if it hadn't. As it was, five broadcast engineers and three generator mechanics spent more than three days in eighteen inches of snow, with the resultant wet clothes, bad attitudes, and imaginative cursing.
Two lessons learned...
1. Don't cheap out and save twenty bucks just because the fuel hasn't needed anti-gel before.
2. Have an "extraordinary circumstances" clause in your contract, so you'll be properly compensated by the company that decides to cheap out on the anti-gel.
In touching tribute to Samsung Note 7, fidget spinners burst in flames
Blunder down under: self-driving Aussie cars still being thwarted by kangaroos
Wednesday 28th June 2017 22:14 GMT
Way off topic...
Chipmunks. I was told by a friend thirty years ago that you could run over chipmunks all day, but never hit one. I called BS on the story, and have been watching for a roadkill chipmunk ever since. Finally saw a flat one (awwwwww) about a month ago. I called my friend at once to inform him, and also retract the call of BS.
Now I feel better that it has been documented on The Register.
Concorde without the cacophony: NASA thinks it's cracked quiet supersonic flight
Tuesday 27th June 2017 16:16 GMT
Re: Next, apply the technology to ...
I practice in my back yard with subsonic .22s, and .45ACP. However, nearly all ammunition is supersonic unless specifically loaded as subsonic. Even using Remington Subsonic ammo (1050 fps), fired from a 24 inch barrel, you'll hear the supersonic (1100+ fps) crack on occasion.
Canadian sniper makes kill shot at distance of 3.5 KILOMETRES
Friday 23rd June 2017 00:25 GMT
"...and consequently be unlikely to hold still in an exposed location for nearly 10 seconds?"
A sniper has a spotter sitting beside him with a high power spotting scope. The projectile would've been subsonic by the time it reached the target, so doubtful that the target would've noticed just another projectile, 0.2" bigger than the other ones being fired at them.
"extreme long range small arms ballistics is a bit of a hit-or-miss affair (ho ho)"
Visit Camp Perry for the National Rifle Matches, and then say that.
Good article! Thanks, Gareth!
Homeland Security: Putin’s hackers tried to crack electoral networks in 21 US states
OnePlus accused of installing cheat codes for benchmarks with new handset
Microsoft's new Surface laptop defeats teardown – with glue
Monday 19th June 2017 17:11 GMT
Re: Add it to the pile of coal.
"...desire of the car manufacturers to make their engine compartments as compact as possible..."
In 1979, I actually had to ask my little sister for assistance getting out of my car. A 1962 Chevrolet Bel Air that had enough room in the engine compartment for me to crawl in to work on it. Enough room even to put my right foot on the pavement, essentially standing in the engine compartment. Getting back out, however...
Fancy buying our aircraft carrier satnav, Raytheon asks UK
Report estimates cost of disruption to GPS in UK would be £1bn per day
Swedish school pumps up volume to ease toilet trauma
Pizza proffer punctures privacy protection, prompts pals' perfidy
Infosec guru Schneier: Govts will intervene to regulate Internet of Sh!t
Thursday 8th June 2017 14:16 GMT
Let's be honest about this...
"Regulation is coming and is coming in a big way. There is a lot of worry that regulation will stifle innovation, but if you look at history that is not the case."
If you look at history, that statement is untrue. Until the (US) National Firearms Act of 1934, nearly all firearms were designed by individual private citizens. One particularly notable instance was "Carbine" Williams, who invented the short stroke, gas operated, floating chamber action while incarcerated in a North Carolina prison for the murder of a deputy sheriff. Firearms since NFA have all been designed by corporate interests.
Hush-a-Phone - a "a voice silencer designed for confidential conversation, clear transmission and office quiet. Not a permanent attachment. Slips right on and off the mouthpiece of any phone" (from their advertisement). AT&T repairmen in the late forties began telling subscribers that they risked disconnection if they didn't remove their Hush-a-Phone, and were backed by regulation.
Remember acoustic modem couplers? Because Ma Bell didn't want you to connect your electronics directly to theirs, and had the FCC to enforce their position.
Like your cell phone? The best we'd have in the US is trunking systems if not for telephone deregulation and the Bell System breakup.
So, yes, regulation does stifle innovation and competition, and is often used to that end.
Cuffed: Govt contractor 'used work PC to leak' evidence of Russia's US election hacking
'My PC needs to lose weight' says user with FAT filesystem
ViaSat lofts world's most powerful communications satellite into orbit
Trident nuke subs are hackable, thunders Wikipedia-based report
NASA Sun probe named for solar wind boffin Eugene Parker
I'll take the sandtrooper in white: Meet the rebel scum making Star Wars armour sets for a living
Tuesday 30th May 2017 15:25 GMT
Coincidentally...
I started 3d printing a multipart, wearable Stormtrooper helmet from Thingiverse last Friday. Must have been all the fortieth anniversary hullabaloo that precipitated it. I'm figuring that it'll take around 120 hours of printing time plus 10 - 20 hours finishing. Might even have to build in an amp with the output frequency limited to 500-2500 Hz, for that Stormtrooper sound.
I have no idea what I'll do with it when it's finished. Maybe that Mozart bust in my basement needs headgear?
Life is... pushing all the right buttons on the wrong remote control
Monday 29th May 2017 13:08 GMT
Multiple remotes
My grandfather, the original W4YBO, had a unique way of dealing five different remotes. He hot-glued them all to a 8" x 10" Masonite board. When the batteries died, he'd peel the dead remote up, swap batteries, and re-glue it back down. It looks weird, but it's tough to misplace almost a square foot of remote controls.
Train station's giant screens showed web smut at peak hour
SpaceX settles $3.9m shift pattern class action lawsuit
Drugs, vodka, Volvo: The Scandinavian answer to Britain's future new border
Thursday 11th May 2017 16:22 GMT
Re: Probably won't work
"These camera's are usually triggered by induction loops in the road surface..."
An electromagnet being switched on (used to) work wonders with "trip switch" traffic lights. I always hated working a late night (read: early morning) when I was riding my motorcycle. I'd have to plot a course home using mostly right turns because the lights wouldn't change for my ferrous-lite scooter. The only other cars on the streets at the time were cops waiting for me to run a red light that wouldn't change. So I wound what seemed like a mile of itty, bitty gauge magnet wire around a steel core, suspended the gizmo from the frame around eight inches above the pavement, and mounted a switch on my speedometer console. Worked great except for that one time I hit the switch, and all five road's lights stopped working. Dark. I don't know if I killed the lights, or if it was coincidence.
If I had the same problem today, I'd just try a couple of supermagnets.
What is this bullsh*t, Google? Nexus phones starved of security fixes after just three years
Amid all the fanfare and cheerleading, Amazon's AWS growth is slowing
Waiter? There's a mouse in my motherboard and this server is greasy!
Friday 28th April 2017 13:25 GMT
Re: I'll get me coat...
What a terrible pun! I really enjoyed that. Makes me miss Dad.
For those horrified by what you may find cohabiting the food storage, never read what the US Department of Agriculture (or your own local flavor thereof) allows into peanut butter, farmed fish, or bread. Gag a maggot!
New satellites could cause catastrophic space junk collisions
Tuesday 18th April 2017 16:23 GMT
Just a quick perusal of CelesTrak...
3964 instances of DEB (debris large enough to be tracked), 94 R/B (rocket bodies), more than a thousand chunks of Cosmos 2251 (smacked Iridium 33) debris, and more than twice as many from Fengyun 1C (2007 Chinese ASAT test). Probably need a great big Kevlar catcher's mitt to slow any of that stuff down enough to deorbit it.
Wow! Have cubesats ever become popular! Nearly three-hundred of 'em. It'd be tough to deorbit those little bits. Maybe incorporate a gas-charged ballute or streamers to increase drag on LEOs.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
