Dave.

This was done 20 years ago with magnetic loop antennas for mining, there is nothing particularly revolutionary here.

You mean

LI

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That’s a good price for demons, I’d get a few.

Well, antennas are pretty simple physical devices so a close visual inspection is the next step, looking for damage to insulators and spacers, etc

Eggbeater antennas also usually have a bit of phasing coax that by necessity sits out in the weather between the connections to the two elements, probably best to eyeball that too.

Repositioning the taskbar is one of the top asks we’ve heard from you. We are introducing the ability to reposition it to the top or sides of…

Not introducing, RE - introducing, just like how you could before. Alllllll the way back to Windows95, UNTIL YOU MESSED WITH IT.

Basically the whole post is “blah blah blah we screwed around with things so much blah blah blah we messed up file explorer blah blah blah we’re working at putting some minor things back and walking back forced updates a little and cramming AI into everything because that’s what we really want to do.”

laughs in country with public healthcare

Yeah you guys should really sort that out.

Oh, you know, only about 80 billion.

Could have given 10 bucks to everyone on earth, would’ve had more impact.

My department just gives them a PDF explaining with cool graphics how Linux can save more money, how more secure it is, how we can avoid the constant force fed bug filled updates that MSFT pushes, how we can customize it exactly to our and users needs, we can actually own our own keys… The goes on and on.

No, because there is no simple point and click group policy/active directory equivalent in Linux that allows a group of 5 IT techs to manage 2000 desktops. And if you get your shit together and actually use the tools that Microsoft provides, you don’t get surprise updates, you can image PCs via a gui over network booting, you get bitlocker keys backed up in your domain etc etc etc etc etc.

All the things that allow a business to manage hardware and software with the minimum amount of expensive employees, Microsoft provides it, for money of course. That money is offset by the reduction in IT guys needed to look after everything.

It’s that simple. CorporateLand won’t touch Linux on the workstation until that’s possible.

I’m not sure, but if cake is being served, count me in.

Anyone completely switching off windows needs a bulletproof system

A solid 90 percent of home users just need a browser, email, and access to some kind of app store or repository where they can click on the big colourful icon and get a program they want.

Any modern distro can provide that, it doesn’t have to be the particular one that you’ve got an obsession about.

Very slow frequency modulation. Slow enough you could hear the tone change slightly as it shifted modulation every few seconds.

Frequency Shift Keying is the more accurate term for this, as it’s not a continuous shift up and down of the frequency like you’d get with FM radio, it’s stepped.

If you imagine a higher tone being decoded a “1” and a lower tone being a “0”, basically it was something like that. Listen long enough and you’d get enough 1s and 0s to build up a message.

That part’s easy, you just mine a tunnel, and then you mine a parallel tunnel 500m away from the first one. Ta-da , 500 metres of solid rock now exists between the two.

Note: mining a tunnel through solid rock can be somewhat difficult if you don’t have the right equipment, YMMV.

But seriously, the amount of dicking around maintaining the loop and the limited abilities of VLF meant that you would quite quickly have to run leaky feeder and bidirectional amps for two way radio, or you’d build a network using fiber and use Wi-Fi. We primarily used the system for remote blasting, and then once technology progressed a bit the initiators were connected via the network instead.

You could normally blame your GSM phone for that, it would be woken up by a cell tower to do a bit of high powered chatter before actually ringing or receiving a SMS.

“dude, where’d you get 500 meters of solid rock?”

The stuff’s everywhere, it’s actually pretty hard to get away from it haha.

Yep, mining.

It ran throughout the mine and the mine layout was such that it was basically a vertical loop that was pinched in the middle with two lobes either side. Basically it ran up in the top corner of tunnels, and just hung vertically in ventilation shafts and boreholes when needed.

Gauge was about 6 or 8 mm2 edit: 10mm2 (8 AWG), from memory the overall loop resistance was about 20 ohms.

Plenty of splices due to damage from heavy equipment, and there were a few spots where we could break the loop and test which part was shorted or open.

You could use just standard electrical wire connections like BPs as it wasn’t particularly high voltage or current and there was no attempt to make it radiate “nicely”, plenty of spots where we used twin core cabling to extend the loop to some section and basically the opposing currents would cancel the field on that length of twin.

Used for underground messaging and blasting. If you search for " MST PED system" you might find some info, it’s pretty obsolete now that most places use Wi-Fi and vhf uhf radio on leaky feeder underground.

I maintained a VLF through the earth transmitter for a while, it was a 15 km loop running at 470Hz and it could go about 500 metres through solid rock to a receiver about the size of a small lunchbox that had a ferrite coil tuned to match.

Loop ran at about 5 to 6 amps at 250 volts (~1200 watts) and was extended now and then, so there was a rack drawer full of matching circuitry to help get it to resonate nicely.

Used FSK at +/- a couple of Hz to very slowly encode text messages, used to take a minute to encode 16 characters, but there were a few “standard messages” for emergencies that could be sent in just a few seconds of coding.

The 470Hz tone got coupled into everything - you could hear it on phone lines, audio on network cameras, anything with a microphone and amp within a hundred meters of the loop would pick it up and you could hear the FSK shifting to a different tone every second or so.

The loop had quite a bit of capacitance. When there were loop faults you’d disconnect the amp and matching circuit and test the loop with a megger at 500 volts. It would take a few seconds to charge and stabilise the reading compared to near instant readings when meggering normal electrical circuits.

When there were no ground faults it would store that charge and give you quite the belt for some time afterwards if you didn’t drain it. So after the first couple of times you learned to short the loop after testing!

Flying toasters need to make a comeback I reckon.

Lithium ion batteries have a sweet spot of around 60 to 80 percent charge where very little wear takes place to charge or discharge. If you could keep it to just that 20-30 percent usage in that range it would pretty much last ten thousand cycles.

Charging to 100 or discharging below 50-60 percent accelerates the wear on the battery, but it is still much better than the wear rate on lead acid batteries that are cycled in a similar manner.

I’m sure we did a cycle of network booting thin clients and windows terminal services about 10 or 15 years ago. 🤔

There’s slack time in people’s daily work hours. You work an 8 hour day, possibly you’re only actually productive for 4 to 6 hours.

Take that into account and suddenly that thing that claims it can cut an hour or two here and there gets a lot more interesting.