Few activities demonstrate the shallowness of the Internet more than trying to find specific, detailed knowledge. Lack of a moderator is the reason I quit reading encyclopedias so long ago. They all contained the same trite information, “a giraffe has a long neck”. The few advanced articles were incomprehensible to the casual reader. Today, I tried to find a repair video on my toilet fill valve, shown here brand Hunter Siphon. Nowhere on the Internet does this particular device exist where I can find it. I will replace the entire unit with something more familiar.
Some technical trivia. When you read an electronic number, say one that displays 543.21, the meter isn’t really showing the value of five hundred forty three dot two one. Turns out the LED displays don’t know from numbers. The display is not a value, just a collection of lights, and it could be changed to display anything the programmer wants. That’s because the lights are controlled by an IC. Some ICs can count, but again, the display isn’t caused by a value, just a set of transistors. So how do numeric displays work at all?
It’s called modular arithmetic*. Using persistence of vision (POV), the chip isolates the digits of the real number, say the 3, and displays it on the middle LED. Your eye sees all the LEDs flashing so fast your mind says you are seeing a steady number. This principle isolates the underlying value from the displayed value, and that is the premise of my drum machine. What is displayed does not have to be related to what is happening.
Aside to electronic neophytes: when you see LoL on electronics, it doesn’t mean the same as on the chat lines. LoL means a matrix of light emitting diodes, that is, “Lots of Lites”. And adafruit is pronounced “AID-uh-froot”. The Maker site now features several robots identical to designs I independently imagined eight months ago, but never had the money to build. Even basic robots cost a lot of money. But at least I had the ideas before the money people did!
Here’s a Plymouth with a nice paint job but a terrible restoral job. I still like old cars. They had a better feel to them and most have functional back seats. My guess is this is a ’48 or ’49, but styles didn’t change much in the 40s so you tell me. This unit has the barest of interiors, including no radio, which was an option. My first car was a new 1974 Ford Maverick. Long trips for the next ten years were the only time I listened to any radio at all.Let me look back on my records for the longest solo car trip (overnight sleep only) in my life. I made six trips from Sedro Wooley, WA to Long Beach, CA, the longest was 1,250 miles because of a small side trip to Shasta. Nope, the longest trip was from Pt. Roberts, WA, to Miami, FL, with one major stop. That trip was 3,866 miles in one week in a fully equipped Cadillac. If I could drive, I’d do it again in a wink.
Flying nonstop, my longest flight was eastbound from Don Muang to Oakland, a leg of 8,002 miles. I believe we were in the air 19 hours, diverted from SeaTac due to weather. You can have San Francisco, I really don’t care for that place. I see there are no longer direct flights to Thailand from the US west coast. Pity, that. In my day, the fare was around $900 - $1100 return.
Now, the question on everybody’s lips. How did the second guitar practice go? Fine, it went fine. The guy is dedicated, showing up after a 12 hour shift at his office. We covered music theory and applied it to practice with instant results, which proves he's a worker, not a wise guy. He’s smarter than your average bear like reporting “These Boots” is fun to play. Yes, it is. Some music turns out that way if you are doing it right.
*[Author's note: there is a little more to this than just modular arithmetic. Calling it that implies that the number you see is somehow the result of the operation. No. The modular formula is used to extract the positionof the letter. If I perform a modulus 10, 100, 1000 etc. on the same number, in each case, I will get a different result. This process is similar to that used to create secure computer transmission codes. And, as I've always wanted to say, is "far beyond the scope of this work"
There! I finally said it.]
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