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- Shoutouts
- Thanks to Mitch (@mitpatterson) for linking to us from his site!
- Alexander linked here too and asked about what to do when family and friends might not be interested in hearing about your latest project.
- Octopart now indexes Digikey as well!
- Electronics porn! Hi res photos of an old Microchip part.
- Light can get into lots of parts and mess them up, not just the ones that are supposed to get erased.
- WOTW
- Discussion
- Stories of audiofools: Green pens to “increase the audio fidelity” of CDs? Ha!
- Jeff from Mighty Ohm posted some awesome pictures of the computer museum down in Austin
- Chris and Jeri Ellsworth started a 555 design contest! Check out the contest site for more details and be sure to start your designs! The deadline is March 1st.
- Zombie magazines! Is Popular Electronics coming back to life? Many veterans remember it fondly, Dave included!
The green pen hoax reminded me of a funny xkcd: http://xkcd.com/670/
That’s a classic, now with the digital volume controllers they use whatever number is available: 1-16 1-32 or just weird stuff, the old dB is gone 🙁
In “defence” of the audiophile crowd: good speaker placement is the king, even with fairly priced amps and speakers, everything else is bullshit or a con, just mind the watts, hertz (you CAN’T hear beyond 20kHz mates, I can’t beyond ~16kHz and I allegedly have “golden ears”) and dB.
One reason recording studios use motorised pots is so the mixing engineer can see what the levels are. Proper 3D slider knobs are so much better to read quickly than farty LED/LCD blobs. It also means they can just take the slider and move it whenever they want and the computer will remember it. In some cases they aren’t really analogue slider pots, just a human friendly I/O device that sets the digital parameter level. I hate pressing binary up/down buttons when trying to set an analogue value. Bring back volume knobs on TVs!
You actually walk over to your TV and adjust the volume?
Knobs on remote controls, now that’s an idea…
Dave I think I’ve noticed quite a ramp up in the amount of ads on eevblog. Any comments on what kind of range is it ($$,$$$, more?) per month? Also do the web advertiser partners care how many ads you already have on a page?
The number of ads have been stable for quite a few months now. It’s $$$. The advertisers don’t really seem to care too much about the other ads, but they do seem to care where they get placed in the list. I’m not sure why, because stats show the position doesn’t really make a difference in the number of clicks.
I’m still using windowed eprom microcontrollers when i have to. We still have some products that we don’t really want to redevelop the hardware for but we keep getting firmware change requests for them.The products use Freescale (motorola) HC05 OTPs. Some of the eprom uCs take a lot of encouraging to erase these days. I have an ICE for the uC but having a collection of windowed eprom versions helps with insitu testing.
I was on holidays in Warsaw Poland last year. (Polish heriatge see) I went to the technology museum in the Cultural Palace in the centre of Warsaw. Its pretty disorganised, but they have a whole section on old computer stuff. I saw a Cray as well as some Apples. I uess they would have been decommissioned only recently (just joking).
I don’t think younger computer people realise how far compuyting has come in a few decades. Anyone remember 8 inch single sided floppy disks? Wang?
I used to work in the old Wang HQ building here in Sydney after they went bust, a real blast from the past!
I did my first programming assignments in Algol and programs were stored on paper tape. Back then we could read the tape as the program printout (as typed in) could be perfect but the tape was posibbly “misspelled” – the punch sometimes got stuck and didn’t punch a hole or two… A while later I volunteered to look at some bug fixes in Fortran program, the program was given to me in a shoe box full of perforated cards… 8 inch floppy would be heaven then!
Now I’m writing this on my Asus netbook sitting outside on the deck, sipping vodka on hot Queensland evening, my netbook is WiFi connected to my router which has wireless internet connection to the nearest mobile tower. People around the world will be able to read it in a few minutes… We have come a long way in last 40 years in computing, only vodka still tastes the same. You’ve might have guessed I’m polish heritage too.
That’s an awesome bit of perspective Tom! Only one tip for you though (from one Polish descendant to another): Don’t drink and type! 🙂
Off topic???
I just saw the adafruit/ladyada designed bedazzler-their attempt at a nonlethal weapon.
It occurred to me that while it may not be an effective deterrent to crime. It could be useful for home self defense.
You could use it to distract someone who broke into your house long enough to aim your 357 at them and stop them once and for all.
By the way, “Schmutz” is German for “dirt”.
dave seemed a bit short at the end. “jonesin” to head to the can or something? shortest amp hour ending ever.