How about some good old griping today? Of course, this is constructive griping. Let’s start with Internet monitoring. The big boys are about to track piracy and start slowing down those connections. In reality, they will track everybody, not just the bad guys, but that was their real purpose. As for measure and countermeasure, remember to use only VPN, a proxy server, and generally stay off-line when you are finished downloading (called “leeching”). Capping your upload rate will also keep you under the lawsuit threshold. For now.What’s this? Parts of a race car in Daytona injured 30 people. I’m like, so what? Things like that happen when you get too many idiots standing around wasting time. Besides, anyone who would pay to watch cars drive in circles was seriously injured before they arrived. Equating danger to excitement is exclusively a low IQ undertaking.
Another recurring monotonous prediction joins the magazine ranks along with blimps, underwater cities, and flying cars. Now we have tourist trips to the moon and planets. How frigging original can these people get? Note: those who want to visit real underwater cities should visit California. Unlike Florida, they count foreclosure completions, not foreclosure starts.
What do I see in Radio Shack? Meccano sets, this time with remote controls and all the goodies not available back when. I loved my Meccano set even if the school is still sore about the grass fire. The boxes (largest seen has 250 pc) are not the over-priced collectors items on eBay, but new manufacture. I will definitely get one for the club. I’m glad these have reappeared, but avoid the kit-style “themed” boxes that build only one thing. Building should require imagination. One other thing hasn’t changed--you still cannot build the structure on the cover with only the pieces inside.
Medical costs. Time [magazine] has finally devoted an issue to the topic addressed here long ago. The cost escalation caused by the presence of insurance. The CT scan on my shoulder is going to set my insurance back $8,000 while I know I could get the same procedure for $600 if they would just give me the money directly. My guess is two-thirds of the clinics in Florida exist to take advantage of insurance payouts. Most have but one ad in the yellow pages since they don’t really want any walk-in business.
Finally, I finish “Numbered Account”. I have to give it a thumbs-down because no way it gets a thumbs-up. The book goes on at length about the evil and double-crossing that goes on in any corporate framework, meaning I found nothing shocking or mildly surprising in the book’s most dramatic passages. There is some small-scale action toward the end which is presented with minimal descriptions, which is nice. If made into an accurate movie, there would be long passages of boring dialogue over who is the real spy. Thus, I say no, it isn’t worth the hours needed to finish it.
Newest US scam that is getting people all contested? Charging extra for something people don’t want. It’s emerging all over. Prime examples seem to be drinks with no ice, or burgers with no cheese. They want money for that. Two examples given on jimmyr (a headline amalgamation site) are the $20 restaurant fee to uncork any wine you bring yourself, and a Seattle theater that surcharges $3 because the movie has no “annoying commercials”. I smell more of this on the way as Generation Z hits the marketplace. There are no legitimate career paths left, so they’ll resort to the Capone formula and make a living finding new ways to steal from each other.
ADDENDUM
Aha, electronics was again predictable. If only learning it was that way also. What I mean is once I got a flip-flop circuit to work, then lots of sites covering this once mysterious procedure were found. Note: the recent failure was NOT getting the circuit to work, it was soldering the circuit in a working fashion onto a circuit board that failed because I lack design skills. The circuit on a breadboard has been working for almost three months. I finally wired up several flip-flops on more breadboards, tested them, and found my own answers.
After I had re-invented this wheel, I knew how to word the searches, and found many sites on the topic. That topic was as follows: once I have some flip-flops what do I do with them? How did I connect them into working and hopefully useful circuits? No amount of searching answered these simple questions.
I’ve learned there are three primary uses: 1) to count, 2) to store data (called a “register”), and 3) to store a program (called “RAM”). I’m getting some place, but once again, that someplace is way ahead of where I am physically able to construct these circuits. I recognize this process of “covering the ground without cultivating it” as a fundamental wrong that has become an unfortunate part of the learning system. I could easily pass the exam right now. But that is not good enough for our purposes here.
This next part gets a little technical, but if you follow it, you’ll know as much as I do about this part of electronics. The thrust of this lesson is that the timing of input signals has to be very exact. You can’t just randomly flip switches. To do anything advanced, you need clocking, and the only way I can fake clocking is with our good old 555 chips, which I now have in abundance.
I still cannot find a good explanation of how to wire up a clocking circuit and make it work. I understand clocking, the situation where electronic signals only take effect at a predetermined part of each clock cycle. I’m investigating this, since I know once I get my flip-flops to count or latch, I’ll need to clock them. Here is simulated 555 timer circuit, which makes little sense to newbie. Ignore what’s in the red box, look only at the Input “1” and the Output “2”. Along the bottom is a matching “1” and “2” timing chart, and you will notice I tried three possibilities, all of which could happen in real life.
If this doesn’t make easy sense, don’t worry. It simply shows when I “pulse” the input signal, the output changes for a fixed time, then goes back to where it was. If you look at the numbers in the white circles, you can see
1. Where I pulsed the input very rapidly
2. I pulsed the input for a short moment
3. I held the pulse down for longer than the fixed output time
In each case, the output remained on for the same interval after each pulse. Obviously, the designer of this circuit took pains to ensure that it was fool-proof. There are other possibilities, but I’m going to let you test yourself to see what I did in the graph below. What was I testing for and what did I find?
What makes electronics study extra slow is that there is no logical flow of what to do at each stage. The available study material depends more on the author’s mood than any progression toward understanding. What could I compare it to? It’s a lot like studying to build a car by learning how each component works on paper, but without knowing how they all fit together. At the same time, it makes for fascinating study because you just know there are so many out there who glossed over this important and basic material. Not all, but enough that it is no wonder nothing new has been discovered in decades.That is correct. If you go through all the texts for the last 30 years, there is nothing new. We’ve discussed this before. Microcontrollers are new, but that is a separate topic. I mean with discrete components. Each book recovers the same worn out projects. The water level detector, the traffic light, the flashing LED, the op-amp, the siren sound, the light sensor. Because they don’t know enough in depth to create. In my opinion that is because so much of the understanding was “glossed over” in the first place. It must get hard to invent what is not understood. I’m working the opposite tack, I won’t go much beyond what I can understand at any stage. Yes, it is slow and uphill all the way.
