Why do circuit breakers go up for on and down for off?...

[Commander Kinsey]

On Sat, 18 Feb 2023 20:21:34 -0000, Carlos E.R. <robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:

On 2023-02-18 19:59, Mark Lloyd wrote:
On 2/17/23 16:21, Carlos E.R. wrote:

[snip]

It is now a legal and recognised sign to following drivers, on a fast
road, such as a motorway or dual-carriageway, that you are
approaching standing traffic and slowing quickly to a stop. As such
it needs to be activated quickly and without having to take your eyes
off the road.

I think that the legal way to do it here is touch the brake lightly
several times to make the red lights blink.

\"touch the brake lightly\" when you need to do it hard?

Well, hopefully you are alert and keeping distances and you see the
danger with ample time :-D

Keeping distances is boring.

And actually if you sit 6 inches behind someone, you\'re effectively the same vehicle, the impact speed between you won\'t be very great.

You can hit the brakes hard, but intermittently - very uncomfortable on
passengers.

 

[Commander Kinsey]

On Sun, 19 Feb 2023 12:24:52 -0000, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid..invalid> wrote:

On 18/02/2023 20:21, Carlos E.R. wrote:
Well, hopefully you are alert and keeping distances and you see the
danger with ample time 😂

Completely impractical if the danger is hidden until you get there.
Children

Should know better. You couldn\'t have stopped. Remove them form the gene pool.

> and animals dashing across the road.

I did once do an emergency stop for a dog. The girl chasing after it was very thankful.

wheel smashing potholes
full of water that the council can\'t afford to fix because they spent
the budget on speed cameras sleeping policemen and totally unnecessary
traffic lights.

Potholes have the same effect as speedbumps, why not combine the two ideas?

Old truck brake drums dropped from pedestrian bridges by
bored teenagers.

At the school I worked at, someone dropped a small rock in front of a truck from a bridge. The driver got out, chased them, dragged them to the school, and made them pay for the windscreen.

The list of \'stuff that you can hit that wasn\'t there last time you
looked\' is endless.

I once came across a fork in the road. No, an actual fork. A garden fork. I of course stopped and gave it a good home!

Maintaining idealised safe distances is an idea only people who don\'t
really do much driving believe in.

It\'s the morons that join these silly OCD clubs like the Institute of Advanced Motoring. They actually believe you should always go exactly at the speed limit.

 

[Commander Kinsey]

On Sun, 19 Feb 2023 13:09:16 -0000, Carlos E.R. <robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:

On 2023-02-19 13:24, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 18/02/2023 20:21, Carlos E.R. wrote:
Well, hopefully you are alert and keeping distances and you see the
danger with ample time 😂

Completely impractical if the danger is hidden until you get there.
Children and animals dashing across the road. wheel smashing potholes
full of water that the council can\'t afford to fix because they spent
the budget on speed cameras sleeping policemen and totally unnecessary
traffic lights. Old truck brake drums dropped from pedestrian bridges by
bored teenagers.

In that case, I won\'t be able to hit the blinkers, either.

I never do, I leave it up to the guy behind me to see the problem. The back of my car is stronger then the front of his.

I was once in the middle of a set of three cars on a country road. The woman in front decided to brake suddenly and turn right without indicating. I had ABS and stopped rather abruptly. The person behind had an old car without ABS and skidded, making a very loud screeching noise. The woman in front got out and had a go at me for driving too close. I said \"I stopped, he\'s the one that skidded, and see that orange light on the corner of your car, use it. If women are to drive motor vehicles, they should learn how to operate one correctly.\" The last part I quoted from Harry Enfield, she didn\'t get it.

The list of \'stuff that you can hit that wasn\'t there last time you
looked\' is endless.

Maintaining idealised safe distances is an idea only people who don\'t
really do much driving believe in.

Tell that to the regulators.

Regulators of what? I\'ve never been done for driving at the wrong distance. That would be far too difficult for the thicko pigs to work out.

 

[Commander Kinsey]

On Sun, 19 Feb 2023 21:02:08 -0000, Ian Jackson <ianREMOVETHISjackson@g3ohx.co.uk> wrote:

In message <n5sIL.643002$gGD7.496073@fx11.iad>, Scott Lurndal
scott@slp53.sl.home> writes
micky <NONONOmisc07@fmguy.com> writes:
In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 18 Feb 2023 00:30:30 -0000, \"Commander
Kinsey\" <CK1@nospam.com> wrote:

On Wed, 15 Feb 2023 07:01:02 -0000, micky <NONONOmisc07@fmguy.com> wrote:

In alt.home.repair, on Wed, 15 Feb 2023 01:57:40 -0500, Clare Snyder
clare@snyder.on.ca> wrote:


Mine has no output jacks or cords. Just a small nice wooden cabinet
with no holes, no jacks, maybe one 12\" wire as a transmitting antenna (I
have to go look again. Not sure if there\'s a wire.)

Ok, that\'s way more sophisticated, and more modern.
I\'ve never seen one like that.


Maybe 14 or 16\" square and 5\" high.

It might be from the 30\'s after my mother got married in 1929.

input of the radio, which was actually the audio amplifier section.

The radio could have a switch to disable the radio section or not, in
which case you would have to \"tune out\" the stations.

I have been lucky enough that there was no strong station at the
frequency. I left a note inside so I or the next owner doesn\'t have to
hunt for it.

The transmitter should be tunable.

...
Many were not, short of trimming the length of the antenna!!

Would that change the frequency?!

I didn\'t read carefully. I thought he said trimming the capacitor
that\'s in one of the tuned circuits.

No, trimming the length of the antenna would likely just decrease
transmission range.

That depends on the transmission frequency wavelength; e.g. if
the antenna was shorted from 1/2 wave to 1/4 wave, it will likely
not substantially change the transmission range (depending on
the frequency).

In the 1930s, any record player with a built-in transmitter would
certainly be illegal in the UK. [USA rules might well have allowed it,
as (I believe) they still do.] The transmitter would almost certainly be
on the medium wave, and would be intended for short-range reception
around the house. The aerial, and best, would probably only have been a
couple of feet of wire, and there would have been no question of it
being anything like a quarterwave or halfwave long!

If it doesn\'t leave the house, why would it be illegal, and why would anyone find out?

Anyway your neighbour may well appreciate free music. Obviously you\'d not transmit on an in use frequency, since then you wouldn\'t be able to hear your own record.

 

[Commander Kinsey]

On Sun, 19 Feb 2023 21:18:37 -0000, micky <NONONOmisc07@fmguy.com> wrote:

In alt.home.repair, on Thu, 16 Feb 2023 14:27:08 -0000, \"Commander
Kinsey\" <CK1@nospam.com> wrote:

On Mon, 13 Feb 2023 13:32:14 -0000, NY <me@privacy.invalid> wrote:

\"Carlos E.R.\" <robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote in message
news:kufpbjxm4u.ln2@Telcontar.valinor...
Essentially a stalled motor is a damn great inductor.

One of these...

https://www.meccanospares.com/E15R-BK-O.html


Found mine.

https://images.app.goo.gl/F9SPtFogTbukss1L8

When I was little I used to play with my dad\'s Meccano from when he was a
boy. That had a single-speed motor. The frame of the motor used heavier-duty
versions of the flat plates with holes in that were used elsewhere in
Meccano. He kept all his parts in a big wooden box with wooden drawers with
compartments: probably made by my Grandpa.

Sadly my dad lent all the Meccano to a work colleague for his son to play
with, and when he came to ask for it back some year later the colleague said
\"Oh, I thought you\'d *given* it to me, not lent it to me. When [son] grew
too old for it, we took it to the tip.\" Grrrrrr. Old Meccano from the
1940s/50s would probably be worth a bit nowadays.

People who throw out usable stuff should be shot. Have they not heard of Gumtree, Ebay, Freecycle? The government could make it a law against the environment or something.

I thought about that too. Even if he had been *given* it, why not give
it to someone else when you\'re done with it, or offer it back.

Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.

When I bought my house I told the owner he didn\'t have to empty it. That
anything he left behind I would keep and use, give to Goodwill (a
thrift, second-hand shop, a charity, profit goes to training the
handicapped), or take to the dump if it truly couldn\'t be used.

He left lots of good stuff. It was great. Books on gardening, garden
tools, a sledge hammer (I never thought I\'d own a sledge hammer but I\'ve
used it for several things), other stuff. I wanted almost all of it,
and the rest I took to Goodwill. He didn\'t leave any trash behind.

How can anyone not own a sledgehammer?

 

[Max Demian]

On 27/02/2023 20:55, NY wrote:

\"Commander Kinsey\" <CK1@nospam.com> wrote in message
newsp.101j6ficmvhs6z@ryzen.home...

So they couldn\'t explain the difference in colour of a lettuce and the
sky?  WTF?

Exactly. It\'s weird that they survived for so long without words to
differentiate colours which most of use see as being different. The
various colours at the blue end of the rainbow (blue, indigo, violet)
are not as easy to differentiate, and I can understand *those* being
thought of as various shades of blue, but red, orange, yellow, green,
blue are all colours that are fairly distinct and deserve individual names.

Who decide what are distinct colours anyway? To my way of thinking,
there are six /distinct/ colours in the spectrum, red, orange, yellow,
green, blue and violet.

Indigo was added by Newton to make it up to seven, which he regarded as
a magic number.

Blue and violet are distinct, as are red and orange. But reddy orange?
There\'s a colour there, but I don\'t think of it as having a special
quality of \"reddy-orangy-ness\". To a lot of extent it\'s a matter of
whether there is a name for the colour.

Perhaps an artist or clothes designer would, and perhaps they have a lot
of other colour names to help them.

--
Max Demian

 

[Max Demian]

On 28/02/2023 11:38, Commander Kinsey wrote:

On Sun, 19 Feb 2023 12:47:36 -0000, Max Demian <max_demian@bigfoot.com
wrote:
On 18/02/2023 21:48, NY wrote:
On 18/02/2023 12:43, Max Demian wrote:
On 18/02/2023 00:29, Commander Kinsey wrote:
Mains was always AC wasn\'t it?

If course it wasn\'t (in the UK). Mains was AC or DC, and 120V (or so)
to 250V (or so).

I knew that mains was sometimes DC, but I didn\'t know that it was
sometimes as low as 120 V. I that, AC or DC, it was always around 240 V
(actual for DC, or RMS for AC).

Old mains radios had a switch at the back to set the voltage. Easier
with AC than DC as it just switched the tap on the mains transformer.
For DC there was a dropper resistor. If it had to work on 120V AC/DC the
set was designed for the lower voltage and had to dissipate the extra
power in a resistor, often built into the mains lead.

What no buck convertors?

I don\'t suppose they had been invented. Anyway, they need transistors.

--
Max Demian

 

[Max Demian]

On 28/02/2023 11:37, Commander Kinsey wrote:

On Sat, 18 Feb 2023 21:57:43 -0000, Carlos E.R.
robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:

I remember reading an ancient book on building your own radio, and they
mentioned regenerative receivers with only a single valve. Some would
emit back on the receiving antena, so they said don\'t do this, it is
illegal and nasty on your neighbours. Better use two valves, isolating
the oscillator from the antena.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regenerative_circuit

Sounds like a good way to annoy a neighbour you hate and prevent them
listening to the radio station you don\'t like.

People got used to hearing squeals in the early evening when people were
tuning their radios in. Just as, later, people listening on long wave
got used to the whistling interference from 405 line TVs.

By WW2 most radios were superhets so the problem went away. Regenerative
circuits were only used by hobbyists and in cheap radio kits.

--
Max Demian

 

[Max Demian]

On 27/02/2023 18:42, Commander Kinsey wrote:

On Sat, 18 Feb 2023 22:01:27 -0000, Carlos E.R.
robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
On 2023-02-18 01:27, Commander Kinsey wrote:

I prefer the Garrard turntable my grandfather built into a big wooden
box with big amplifiers.  Auto stop, cushioned lowering of the stylus
etc.  Very smooth everything, the turntable had a lot of inertia in it,
must have been a big heavy flywheel underneath for smooth rotation.

The plate itself is the flywheel. Good ones were heavy.

Good point, it did look like a nice thick steel plate.

Not my quartz lock direct drive turntable. The platter is aluminium and
has what looks like a tape head inside which reads off a ferrite coating
inside the rim. Presumably there are two tracks of signals recorded on
it, one for 33 and the other for 45 RPM.

--
Max Demian

 

[Cindy Hamilton]

On 2023-02-28, Max Demian <max_demian@bigfoot.com> wrote:

On 27/02/2023 20:55, NY wrote:
\"Commander Kinsey\" <CK1@nospam.com> wrote in message
newsp.101j6ficmvhs6z@ryzen.home...

So they couldn\'t explain the difference in colour of a lettuce and the
sky?  WTF?

Exactly. It\'s weird that they survived for so long without words to
differentiate colours which most of use see as being different. The
various colours at the blue end of the rainbow (blue, indigo, violet)
are not as easy to differentiate, and I can understand *those* being
thought of as various shades of blue, but red, orange, yellow, green,
blue are all colours that are fairly distinct and deserve individual names.

Who decide what are distinct colours anyway? To my way of thinking,
there are six /distinct/ colours in the spectrum, red, orange, yellow,
green, blue and violet.

Indigo was added by Newton to make it up to seven, which he regarded as
a magic number.

Blue and violet are distinct, as are red and orange. But reddy orange?
There\'s a colour there, but I don\'t think of it as having a special
quality of \"reddy-orangy-ness\". To a lot of extent it\'s a matter of
whether there is a name for the colour.

Have you ever purchased paint?

Perhaps an artist or clothes designer would, and perhaps they have a lot
of other colour names to help them.

To get around the need to name every color, color numbering systems
have been devised. One extremely popular one is the Pantone Matching
System:

https://www.pantone.com/color-systems/pantone-color-systems-explained

And, lately, the RGB value:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RGB_color_model

--
Cindy Hamilton

 

[Peeler]

On Tue, 28 Feb 2023 13:46:56 +0000, Mad Dumbian, the REAL dumb, notorious,
troll-feeding senile idiot, blathered again:


> I don\'t suppose they had been invented. Anyway, they need transistors.

Completely unable to resist ANY idiotic bait set out for you by the unwashed
Scottish wanker, Mad Dumbian? <BG>

--
Max Dumb having another senile moment:
\"It\'s the consistency of the shit that counts. Sometimes I don\'t need to
wipe, but I have to do so to tell. Also humans have buttocks to get
smeared due to our bipedalism.\"
Message-ID: <6vydnWiYDoV1VUrDnZ2dnUU78QednZ2d@brightview.co.uk>

 

[Peeler]

On Tue, 28 Feb 2023 13:53:01 +0000, Mad Dumbian, the REAL dumb, notorious,
troll-feeding senile idiot, blathered again:

People got used to hearing squeals in the early evening when people were
tuning their radios in. Just as, later, people listening on long wave
got used to the whistling interference from 405 line TVs.

By WW2 most radios were superhets so the problem went away. Regenerative
circuits were only used by hobbyists and in cheap radio kits.

Another idiotic bait by the Scottish sociopath that you can\'t resist, Max
Dumbian, you senile troll-feeding asshole? LOL

--
Max Dumb having another senile moment:
\"It\'s the consistency of the shit that counts. Sometimes I don\'t need to
wipe, but I have to do so to tell. Also humans have buttocks to get
smeared due to our bipedalism.\"
Message-ID: <6vydnWiYDoV1VUrDnZ2dnUU78QednZ2d@brightview.co.uk>

 

[Peeler]

On Tue, 28 Feb 2023 13:57:31 +0000, Mad Dumbian, the REAL dumb, notorious,
troll-feeding senile idiot, blathered again:

Good point, it did look like a nice thick steel plate.

Not my quartz lock direct drive turntable. The platter is aluminium and

That reminds me of something: Do they still use metal plates for the heads
of brain damaged idiots like the two of you?

 

[John Larkin]

On Tue, 28 Feb 2023 13:39:53 +0000, Max Demian
<max_demian@bigfoot.com> wrote:

On 27/02/2023 20:55, NY wrote:
\"Commander Kinsey\" <CK1@nospam.com> wrote in message
newsp.101j6ficmvhs6z@ryzen.home...

So they couldn\'t explain the difference in colour of a lettuce and the
sky?  WTF?

Exactly. It\'s weird that they survived for so long without words to
differentiate colours which most of use see as being different. The
various colours at the blue end of the rainbow (blue, indigo, violet)
are not as easy to differentiate, and I can understand *those* being
thought of as various shades of blue, but red, orange, yellow, green,
blue are all colours that are fairly distinct and deserve individual names.

Who decide what are distinct colours anyway? To my way of thinking,
there are six /distinct/ colours in the spectrum, red, orange, yellow,
green, blue and violet.

Indigo was added by Newton to make it up to seven, which he regarded as
a magic number.

Human cone cells come in three wavelengths, roughly r-g-b, so if we
name more colors it\'s arbitrary.

Retinas vary a lot between individuals too, especially males.

 

[rbowman]

On Tue, 28 Feb 2023 13:57:31 +0000, Max Demian wrote:

Not my quartz lock direct drive turntable. The platter is aluminium and
has what looks like a tape head inside which reads off a ferrite coating
inside the rim. Presumably there are two tracks of signals recorded on
it,
one for 33 and the other for 45 RPM.

I had a turntable that had a plastic stroboscopic disk mounted on it to
dial in the speed. It was strictly 33 rpm though. iirc the platter was
aluminum but it was quite heavy.

 

[The Natural Philosopher]

On 28/02/2023 16:39, rbowman wrote:

On Tue, 28 Feb 2023 13:57:31 +0000, Max Demian wrote:


Not my quartz lock direct drive turntable. The platter is aluminium and
has what looks like a tape head inside which reads off a ferrite coating
inside the rim. Presumably there are two tracks of signals recorded on
it,
one for 33 and the other for 45 RPM.


I had a turntable that had a plastic stroboscopic disk mounted on it to
dial in the speed. It was strictly 33 rpm though. iirc the platter was
aluminum but it was quite heavy.

I\'ve got a direct drive quartz controlled turntable that can be set to
exactly 33.33 +- a bit if you dial it in.

Still prefer CDs tho


--
\"Corbyn talks about equality, justice, opportunity, health care, peace,
community, compassion, investment, security, housing....\"
\"What kind of person is not interested in those things?\"

\"Jeremy Corbyn?\"

 

[Max Demian]

On 28/02/2023 15:55, John Larkin wrote:

On Tue, 28 Feb 2023 13:39:53 +0000, Max Demian
max_demian@bigfoot.com> wrote:

On 27/02/2023 20:55, NY wrote:
\"Commander Kinsey\" <CK1@nospam.com> wrote in message
newsp.101j6ficmvhs6z@ryzen.home...

So they couldn\'t explain the difference in colour of a lettuce and the
sky?  WTF?

Exactly. It\'s weird that they survived for so long without words to
differentiate colours which most of use see as being different. The
various colours at the blue end of the rainbow (blue, indigo, violet)
are not as easy to differentiate, and I can understand *those* being
thought of as various shades of blue, but red, orange, yellow, green,
blue are all colours that are fairly distinct and deserve individual names.

Who decide what are distinct colours anyway? To my way of thinking,
there are six /distinct/ colours in the spectrum, red, orange, yellow,
green, blue and violet.

Indigo was added by Newton to make it up to seven, which he regarded as
a magic number.

Human cone cells come in three wavelengths, roughly r-g-b, so if we
name more colors it\'s arbitrary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_cell

From the diagram on the right, it\'s more like blue, greeny-yellow and
yellow if you measure the sensitivities at different frequencies.

We can perceive a lot more colours by comparing the relative signals
from the different cones.

How we name them is up to us, according to how important they are.

> Retinas vary a lot between individuals too, especially males.

Many (mostly male) humans have only two kinds of cones: blue and yellow,
which is what most mammals have.

Males with just the two kinds of cones (referred to a red/green
colour-blind) can see about three distinct colours in the spectrum
instead of six.

--
Max Demian

 

[Max Demian]

On 28/02/2023 17:04, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 28/02/2023 16:39, rbowman wrote:
On Tue, 28 Feb 2023 13:57:31 +0000, Max Demian wrote:


Not my quartz lock direct drive turntable. The platter is aluminium and
has what looks like a tape head inside which reads off a ferrite coating
inside the rim. Presumably there are two tracks of signals recorded on
it,
one for 33 and the other for 45 RPM.


I had a turntable that had a plastic stroboscopic disk mounted on it to
dial in the speed. It was strictly 33 rpm though. iirc the platter was
aluminum but it was quite heavy.

I\'ve got a direct drive quartz controlled turntable that can be set to
exactly 33.33 +- a bit if you dial it in.

Not thirty-three and a third?

--
Max Demian

 

[Peeler]

On 28 Feb 2023 16:39:26 GMT, lowbrowwoman, the endlessly driveling,
troll-feeding, senile idiot, blabbered again:

I had a turntable that had a plastic stroboscopic disk mounted on it to
dial in the speed. It was strictly 33 rpm though. iirc the platter was
aluminum but it was quite heavy.

I was impatient to learn what kind of turntable YOU had, senile gossip. But
I KNEW you\'d not make me (and everyone else) wait for long. LOL

--
Yet more of the so very interesting senile blather by lowbrowwoman:
\"My family loaded me into a \'51 Chevy and drove from NY to Seattle and
back in \'52. I\'m alive. The Chevy had a painted steel dashboard with two
little hand prints worn down to the primer because I liked to stand up
and lean on it to see where we were going.\"
MID: <j2kuc1F3ejsU1@mid.individual.net>

 

[Mark Lloyd]

On 2/28/23 11:04, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

[snip]

I had a turntable that had a plastic stroboscopic disk mounted on it to
dial in the speed. It was strictly 33 rpm though. iirc the platter was
aluminum but it was quite heavy.

I\'ve got a direct drive quartz controlled turntable that can be set to
exactly 33.33 +- a bit if you dial it in.

The old turntable my father had had 4 speeds: 78, 45, 33-1/3, 16-2/3. He
said that last one was used for educational materials.

[snip]

--
Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.us/

\"A good rule for interpretation is: \'If the literal sense makes good
sense, seek no other sense lest you come up with nonsense\'\" [Anonymous]