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33301

General Discussion Area / Re: Good old Miggy

« on: 22 January 2008, 18:29:39 »

Fortunately I don't go "around town" too much - and I certainly don't look at the MID when I do

It all depends how you drive it, to an even greater extent with urban driving. If you give it a good squirt whenever you pull away it'll certainly be sub-20. Driven carefully you might better 20 MPG, I'd say. As mentined, this is when autos are a bit more thirsty, but they are a lot less aggro in traffic so worth it IMHO.

Kevin

33302

General Discussion Area / Re: Mobile danger?

« on: 22 January 2008, 18:39:17 »

Yes, Nokia had issues with exploding SONY batteries, and most laptop manufacturers had problems with SONY batteries.  I can see a pattern here

But any email that says forward to everyone should be discarded.

Hmm. (looks at the logo on the laptop sitting on his lap)

SONY  

Kevin

33303

General Discussion Area / Re: Mobile danger?

« on: 21 January 2008, 13:30:24 »

electricity flowed into the cell phone unrestrained

Hmm. Smells iffy to me. I wouldn't be too worried.

I have come across phones that do silly things when charging but it's normally due to software issues. Have yet to receive a charred ear!  

Kevin

33304

General Discussion Area / Re: Aldi Offers

« on: 17 January 2008, 12:44:49 »

IME, anything cheap that contains a lead acid gel battery will be rubbish. I don't know if it's because they use cheap batteries in the first place, store them for too long without maintenance charging, or a combination of the above but several times I have bought such items and ended up paying more than I did for the item for a new, decent quality battery to go in it.

If it's cheap enough to buy on the expectation that you'll have to change the battery then go for it. Otherwise, don't bother.

Kevin

33305

General Discussion Area / Re: Is there

« on: 22 January 2008, 16:31:40 »

Problem is, things are moving fast enough that the car will outlast any entertainment technology by a long way, so it has to be designed for upgrades. My 2002 car has a slot for a cassette FFS! I can't remember when I last listened to one. In fact, I've only recently realised that I lent my cassette deck to mrs. KW's uncle about 2 years ago!

but.. I guess car manufacturers only have to impress the guy who drives the car for its' first 2 or 3 years and it's likely to be a company car, so he won't want to mess about with it.


Kevin

33306

General Discussion Area / Re: Is there

« on: 22 January 2008, 12:38:16 »

Sounds a bit like the unit I had in my meeg before I put the factory unit back in. 20 gig hard disk, use it to store MP3/WMA files, does all the catalogue stuff -- sort by genre/folder etc. It also had an SD card slot, you can play the files directly from that or copy them to the HD. And as if that wasn't enough it has a DVD-ROM drive which can also be used to play MP3s. As an added bonus, it has Europe-wide navigation (maps stored on the HD so no faffing around with CDs/DVDs) and with the addition of an external screen can play DVD movies with full 6 channel Dolby Digital and DTS decoding.

All that in a single DIN unit Makes you wonder why car manufacturers seem so desperate to go to double DIN yet most of them still put out bottom of the barrell junk that has barely moved on since 1990 .

I've always wondered why car manufacturers bother with their own branded head units. As you say, most of them are rubbish and they get more and more integrated so it's more and more difficult to change them for something else. Why don't they just fit an industry standard hole with an industry standard connector in it, lob a 100 quid Kenwood CD tuner in there and let the customer upgrade it easily when he inevitably gets fed up with it.  

Kevin

33307

General Discussion Area / Re: Is there

« on: 22 January 2008, 11:22:00 »

What I'd really like is an in-car MP3 player to which I can connect a great big hard drive full of all my MP3s and then browse them.

Anybody tried this? I guess a MP3 head unit with a usb disk connector might work, but can they cope with cataloguing 10's of gigs of data?

One of the old Dension units would fit the bill nicely but they don't make them any more. :-/

I know you can go this with an IPod + adaptor kit but I have no other use for an IPod and it's an expensive way of buying a hard disk.

Kevin

33308

General Discussion Area / Re: Is there

« on: 22 January 2008, 09:53:34 »

.. or burn them onto a DVD?

What are we walking about - music or data?

If it's data, compression may help as cem said.

If it's music, some newer CD players can play MP3 files from CD, so if you ripped the music, compressed it to MP3 and then burnt the MP3 files back to CD it might help - if your CD player can play MP3 :-/

Kevin

33309

General Discussion Area / Re: Carlsberg don't do bunny boilers

« on: 22 January 2008, 14:43:20 »

She sounds scary

Amanda Monti, 24, flew into a rage when Geoffrey Jones, 37, rejected her advances at the end of a house party, Liverpool Crown Court heard.

Should have just let her use him and then ran like opps!

 

Kevin

33310

General Discussion Area / Re: Whats the time

« on: 22 January 2008, 09:27:59 »

You forgot the rubber gloves for when you switch it on, Pete

Kevin

33311

General Discussion Area / Re: Whats the time

« on: 21 January 2008, 23:17:52 »

Plenty of kits around to build these if you fancy having a go. Just need a soldering iron.

http://search.ebay.co.uk/search/search.dll?from=R40&_trksid=m37&satitle=nixie+clock+kit

Kevin

33312

General Discussion Area / Re: Whats the time

« on: 21 January 2008, 23:04:34 »

I like that.

Want to share??

Certainly...

It uses Nixie tubes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixie_tubes. A totally obsolete display device from the days before LCDs, LEDs, etc. About the only thing I can remember them being used in is petrol pumps when I first started driving.

Mrs. KW saw one a couple of years ago and took a shine to it so I bought some tubes and they've been languishing in my junk box for a while. Anyway, you can get the tubes and kits to build clocks on ebay but I decided to roll my own circuitry to drive them.

Worst part was soldering up all the connecting wires. 10 individual segments in each tube to wire up, one for each digit 0-9 Started to wish I'd just bought a kit with a printed circuit board. Because they are effectively little neon bulbs they need a supply of 185v dc so there's a little converter to knock up the 12 volts from a mains adaptor to power them and there's a microcontroller in there to keep the time and drive the displays.

Kevin

33313

General Discussion Area / Re: Whats the time

« on: 21 January 2008, 22:36:51 »

Whats the time

Funny you should say that...

I've just finished a little project. Yes, it might have been more constructive to have been LPGing my Omega or something but I fancied picking up the soldering iron, so I made myself a little clock...



Kevin

33314

General Discussion Area / Re: one the subject of phones...

« on: 21 January 2008, 23:45:32 »

Left one in the pub one night though, still there the next day, no one 'picked it up'

They were probably off to machine mart for an engine hoist

33315

General Discussion Area / Re: one the subject of phones...

« on: 21 January 2008, 22:01:56 »

I've got one of these in the loft:

http://www.storno.co.uk/storno_cqm600.htm

Kevin

We used to use that kit day and daily and we thought we were the bees knees at the time!!  

Well, you certainly wouldn't break one in a hurry.

[anorak]
I tweaked my one to work on the 2m amateur radio band and it gave me what amounted to a very slow internet connection at home via packet radio - in 1986.
[/anorak]

Kevin