That being said, I found a blog devoted entirely to showing interesting jury-rigged fixes to everyday problems.
(A big thanks to Eric the Viking)
A laser source is received from a customer for repair, wrapped in a note that says "Toggle switch on top panel of unit is broken off. Can't turn on unit power."Today, our Repair Guy received an irate phone call from the same customer, demanding to know why his laser source wasn't repaired.
The problem was immediately apparent to our faithful Repair Guy.
The toggle switch was indeed gone...because the unit in question never had one.
The power switch on the unit in question is on the front, a red circle with a vertical line in the center. The user's manual even shows a diagram of where the switch is located and what it looks like.
"The previous model DWLS2, discontinued over 7 years ago, did use a toggle switch on the top panel to turn on the power to the unit and select the laser wavelength."Then the customer actually pushed the power button, turning on the laser...
"The present DWLS2 does not incorporate a toggle switch. Instead, there is a keypad on the front panel. The round red button on the lower left corner of the keypad is the power switch. Press and hold the button for 2 seconds until the indicator LEDs turn on. Press and hold the button again for 2 seconds to turn the unit off."
"For further information please Read The Fine Manual, enclosed."
I would have posted this next Tuesday, but it was too good to wait until then. So I bring you two more tales from the files of Tech Support.
The first tale of tech support woe came to my attention earlier today when I received a request to look into a customer complaint about two red laser sources that apparently failed after the customer had used them for about a week. Two laser sources were being returned because there was no visible output even though both of the indicator LEDs were on...one of them being the Low Battery indicator.
This indicator lets the customer know the batteries need to be replaced. If the customer had actually read the instruction manual he would have known that when the Low Battery LED is on, the red laser is disabled. So the customer sent his two red laser sources all the way back to our factory from overseas to have the AA alkaline batteries changed.
The second tale is related to the first.
While talking to our Repair Guy about the first incident, he mentioned that it isn't all that unusual for him to receive units for repair that required only a change of batteries to set them to rights. For certain pieces of equipment about 25% of the returns required only new batteries to 'fix' them. Some of this equipment still had the original batteries shipped with them many years ago.
These two tales prove what we've known for a long time: Customers don't read the user manuals. And as long as this is true we will continue to see 'broken' units that aren't really broken and only need new batteries.
Over 1,300 survey respondents were asked the open ended question, "What features are desired on your next phone?" The top three responses were better connectivity, better audio and simplicity.I know there are times when I am not pleased with the quality of the connection and audio on my cell phone. It isn't a problem with drop outs that I find the most vexing, but the poor quality of the transmit and receive audio. It would be nice to have what is called toll-quality audio when I'm using my cell phone rather than the variable and consistently poor quality I deal with now.
In many cases vendors have been so focused on making complex camera phones, music phones or mobile Internet devices, they have lost sight of the fact that phone functionality is mediocre at best. How often have we seen someone with a finger in one ear and a cellphone pressed to the other ear, desperately trying to hear a conversation? Our survey responses suggest that there is an opportunity for vendors to develop phones with great audio quality, robust connectivity and antenna features that are simply easy to use.
The turbines sit idly in Anoka, North St. Paul, Chaska, Shakopee, Buffalo and six other cities, all members of the Minnesota Municipal Power Agency (MMPA). The refurbished, 115-foot towers had operated on a California wind farm, where they didn't have to worry about cold hydraulic fluid turning to gel and oil lubricants getting too sluggish.Fluids and lubricants that worked well in California didn't work at all in below freezing temperatures, gumming up the works and bringing the turbines to a halt until spring. That turned them into expensive monuments to facts overlooked.
Some technically savvy people know that light can be used as a tool for eavesdropping: if a beam from one arm of an optical interferometer is reflected off a window, the interferometer can sense sounds--including human voices--that make the window vibrate. But not only is it hard to separate voices from other sounds sensed by the interferometer; the setup must also be very precise, and in many cases there is no window conveniently nearby.Unlike the development system described in the article, future systems won't need to use a visible laser beam to perform their magic. Instead they will use an infrared laser, invisible to the eye (but not the camera).
Researchers from Bar-Ilan University (Ramat-Gan, Israel) and the Universitat de València (Burjassot, Spain) have developed a different way to sense sound remotely--one that doesn't rely on either an interferometer or a window. Instead, a single laser beam is shone on the object to be monitored (for example, a human or a cellphone) and the speckles that appear in an out-of-focus image of the object are tracked, producing information from which a spectrogram or temporal sound signal can be constructed.
They don't produce enough heat to melt the snow which can block the traffic signal's red, yellow, and green lights.Oops.
"We had a snow storm here [in Utah] that got piled into some of the exterior traffic light shields. These lights use LEDs. Not long ago, the traffic lights used 60-W incandescent lamps that gave off enough heat to melt any snow that blocked the colored lenses. I guess the LEDs just don't generate enough heat. An unintended consequence of using LEDs, at least in areas that get snow."
You're watching a show you like, but at times the dialog has very low volume. You can barely hear a word anyone is saying. You turn up the volume on the TV so you can hear the dialog. Then a scene changes or a commercial break comes up and suddenly IT'S THIS LOUD!!That battle has not ended, meaning we spend more time turning the volume up and down to keep it at a reasonable level than we do actually watching the show.
You scramble to turn the volume down to a dull roar. The action scene or commercial break ends and now you can't hear the dialog...again. It's a never ending cycle.
For me it's worse in the late evening when BeezleBub or Deb are trying to get to sleep. I have to stay right on top of the remote to chop back the volume every time it comes booming out of the speakers. It becomes tiresome.
I have a couple of questions for the various TV and cable networks: Why the hell do you jerks do this? Do you really think it makes your shows that much more watchable or your sponsor's commercials more likely to sell their product?
Let me clue you in - It doesn't. All it does is piss us off.
With the state of the art what it is when it comes to sound engineering you'd think the TV and movie folks would be able to keep the difference between the softest and loudest sounds a bit narrower than they do now (that's what's called dynamic range).
Loud commercials have always been an annoyance to TV viewers, but this is the first time a concerted industry effort has led to a positive outcome.In effect, that means that commercials will no longer be a lot louder than the TV shows the merchants are sponsoring, but only if the bill laying out these requirements, H.R 1084, actually passes in the House. If it passes we won't have to constantly adjust the volume to keep from going deaf!
The work of the experts has been published as "ATSC Recommended Practice A/85: Techniques for Establishing and Maintaining Audio Loudness for Digital Television." You can download this document for free at www.atsc.org.
In concept, it's simple. Measure the loudness of a typical segment of dialogue in a program and assign that value as the dialnorm of the program. Measure the average loudness across an entire commercial and assign that as the dialnorm value of the commercial. When you insert the commercial (which is now a digital file) into the program, if the dialnorm value of the commercial is not equal to the dialnorm of the program, apply an overall gain correction to modify the commercial's dialnorm value to make it equal to that of the program.
So is this material "waste"? Absolutely not. Ninety-five percent of a spent fuel rod is plain old U-238, the nonfissionable variety that exists in granite tabletops, stone buildings and the coal burned in coal plants to generate electricity. Uranium-238 is 1% of the earth's crust. It could be put right back in the ground where it came from.So why aren't we doing likewise?
Of the remaining 5% of a rod, one-fifth is fissionable U-235 -- which can be recycled as fuel. Another one-fifth is plutonium, also recyclable as fuel. Much of the remaining three-fifths has important uses as medical and industrial isotopes. Forty percent of all medical diagnostic procedures in this country now involve some form of radioactive isotope, and nuclear medicine is a $4 billion business. Unfortunately, we must import all our tracer material from Canada, because all of our isotopes have been headed for Yucca Mountain.
What remains after all this material has been extracted from spent fuel rods are some isotopes for which no important uses have yet been found, but which can be stored for future retrieval. France, which completely reprocesses its recyclable material, stores all the unused remains -- from 30 years of generating 75% of its electricity from nuclear energy -- beneath the floor of a single room at La Hague.
In September 2008, when Nielsen Mobile announced that teenagers with cellphones each sent and received, on average, 1,742 text messages a month, the number sounded high, but just a few months later Nielsen raised the tally to 2,272. A year earlier, the National School Boards Association estimated that middle- and high-school students devoted an average of nine hours to social networking each week. Add email, blogging, IM, tweets and other digital customs and you realize what kind of hurried, 24/7 communications system young people experience today.How many times have we seen teens sitting off to one side during a family social gathering, busily tapping away at the keypads of the cell phones, texting friends rather than interacting with people in the same room. It isn't necessarily that the teens are being rude. Instead it's because they really don't know how to interact without that electronic crutch as an interface, be it a cell phone, computer, or Blackberry.
Unfortunately, nearly all of their communication tools involve the exchange of written words alone. At least phones, cellular and otherwise, allow the transmission of tone of voice, pauses and the like. But even these clues are absent in the text-dependent world. Users insert smiley-faces into emails, but they don't see each others' actual faces. They read comments on Facebook, but they don't "read" each others' posture, hand gestures, eye movements, shifts in personal space and other nonverbal--and expressive--behaviors.
With the latest installment of the Star Trek franchise packing theaters, researchers are again speculating about the feasibility of building a faster-than-light "warp drive" similar to the one powering Star Trek's "Enterprise" star ship.To quote Glenn Reynolds (and no pun intended). "Faster, please."
Researchers at Baylor University (Waco, Texas) claim that dark energy--the force causing the universe to expand--could power a warp drive by expanding the fabric of space behind the ship while simultaneously contracting space ahead of it. The scheme could theoretically enable a ship to traverse light years in distance without violating Einstein's prohibition on faster-than-light travel.
This space-warping mechanism for faster-than-light travel (without actually exceeding the speed of light) was first proposed in 1994 by the Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre. At that time, there was no known mechanism to explain how the effect could be realized. Thanks to string theory, the Baylor scientists claim that dark energy could theoretically be harnessed to realize a warp drive.
U.S. Navy researchers claimed to have experimentally confirmed cold fusion in a presentation at the American Chemical Society's annual meeting.In case you're wondering what CR-39 is, it's no special super-secret formulation. It's quite common. In fact, if you wear glasses made with plastic lenses, those lenses are likely made from CR-39.
"We have compelling evidence that fusion reactions are occurring" at room temperature, said Pamela Mosier-Boss, a scientist with the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (San Diego). The results are "the first scientific report of highly energetic neutrons from low-energy nuclear reactions," she added.
...the Naval researchers claim that the problem was instrumentation, which was not up to the task of detecting such small numbers of neutrons. To sense such small quantities, Mosier-Boss used a special plastic detector called CR-39. Using co-deposition with nickel and gold wire electrodes, which were inserted into a mixture of palladium chloride and deuterium, the detector was able to capture and track the high-energy neutrons.
Vapor Fuel Technologies (Beavercreek, Ore.) claims it accomplishes this by vaporizing fuel and mixing it with super-hot air, enabling modified electronic control circuitry to coax the same horsepower out of engines while burning less fuel and cutting emissions.Being able to vaporize the fuel of a gasoline engine means the engine can extract more energy form the fuel than today's fuel injected engines. Even the best fuel injection engine doesn't burn the gas in its cylinders completely because the atomized fuel is still in droplet form (in a very fine mist), leaving the fuel in the center of the droplet only partially consumed. It exits the cylinder during the exhaust stroke before it can burn completely, wasting energy. The remaining fuel burns in the exhaust manifold, exhaust pipe, or in the catalytic converter.
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