When I picked up a camper van in Auckland and started driving around New Zealand (and once I'd gotten over my initial terror at driving on the wrong side of the road) I found it was really easy to adapt. I made a game of it for an hour or so, trying to pick an object in the distance when I thought it was 1 km away and watching the odometer to see how close I was.

The only time it nearly caused a problem was one evening when I came to a turn that was marked <<<< 45 <<<< and I instinctively slowed down to about 50. 50 mph, that is.

So if you need a rule of thumb for metric speeds, remember that 45 kph is the speed at which you can negotiate a sharp bend on a wet road in a top-heavy camper van without crapping your pants.

That's great, but a VM Ethernet switch still doesn't offer the same gut satisfaction when it comes to shutting someone down.

Back when I worked for the Air Force and the base I worked at was making the transition from a bunch of random little networks strung together with a 10 mbit CATV coax backbone and a single T1 line to a real campus with a fiber and a firewall, we had a Major in charge of our group (one of the few with real technical knowledge to ever hold that post) who's favorite policy enforcement tool was a pair of wire cutters.

Yeah, it could have been done less dramatically, but sometimes a little showmanship is called for.

"Without the Loran our sneaky ways will have to be changed"

Come up with a list of 100 words. Danish, Esperanto, Klingon, or whatever. Assign numbers from 00 to 99. Read off your GPS coordinates using one word for every two digits. Save time by pre-defining large grids with special names to avoid having to read off more digits than necessary.

I've got notes around here somewhere on a more sophisticated version of that I was playing with for search and rescue use - not to conceal anything, but to be more efficient and accurate than reading strings of numbers. The words were simple, of a consistent number of syllables, phonetically distinct (long Hamming distance) and with multiple lists you can make it tolerant of transposition of words. The idea was for the encoding to be done on a GPS receiver - you wouldn't need to do it manually.

What history of modems completely skips the Telebit Trailblazer? Roughly 18 kbps in 1985 - many years before 14.4k modems became common. Expensive enough to be out of reach of most BBS'ers, though. But worth the money if you were doing UUCP over a long distance call every night.

I'm self-employed, you insensitive clod! They're ALL work hours!

Or more accurately, I have hours when things are getting done, and hours when work is piling up. I can theoretically allocate them any way I want. As long as I get in at least 170 hours a week of productive work, I won't fall any further behind.

I don't work much with Atmel chips, but I've dealt with FAT before on 8-bit MCUs. That part of it I'd be happy to work on, but I'm not an analog guy. If someone can do the front end, I can do firmware and handle fabrication of samples. Don't think I'd want to sell them as a regular product (too many regulatory issues), but like you say it'd be great to have a good design out there in the wild, and having some built reference units for those who want to work with the design would be helpful.

The snap leads are exactly what I was talking about. The electrodes themselves are cheap and readily available, but the wires are the issue. I'd think silicone insulated cables would be best for flexibility and comfort, but it's been a long time since I wore a Holter monitor and I don't remember what's in common use.

If the 4mm snaps are common in ESD straps (I never even thought to check there) then it's certainly possible that I could get some leads made with no resistor - or perhaps a 0-ohm resistor to avoid tooling changes. I've had a fair amount of luck with getting that sort of thing from manufacturers (particularly in China) when the quantities are sufficient.

scott@n1vg.net

I'd started designing a similar Holter monitor myself (my cardiologist says I'm perfectly fine, but a persistent arrhythmia and the fact that my resting pulse rate is about 48-50 when it has no business being that low worried me) but I've had too many other projects going to spend any time on it.

Are you using a FAT filesystem, or just writing raw data to the SD cards? I wound up talking to a cardiologist about making an open source design available for developing countries, and it sounds like writing straight to a standard format on a standard filesystem would be a very desirable feature. Incidentally, lack of trained personnel to review the data is apparently a bigger problem than lack of hardware, but it should still be worth doing.

Also, what sort of leads are you using? Most of the hobby designs I've seen have improvised leads that wouldn't cut it for real world use.

Email me at scott@ the domain in my Slashdot URL. I'd be happy to help develop this into something that would be of use to more people if you're interested.

Only in Western tradition. In China, there were five - Fire, Earth, Water, Metal, and Wood. They're also associated with points of the compass, which in theory ought to make it easier to navigate the gigantic Elements mall in Hong Kong, but in my experience you just wind up wandering in circles, wondering how the hell you wound up back in the 'Metal' section yet again when all you want is a coffee at Starbucks.

Apparently 'you are here' marks on maps are not a part of Eastern tradition.

I just happened to be reading about the Hillsborough Disaster yesterday - it seems particularly relevant here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough_disaster

96 people died, not because of rioting hooligans, but because of lack of effective crowd control. The stadium was under capacity, but people were crushed to death because no one was properly directing the rush of fans.

See also:

Luzhniki Disaster
Ibrox Disaster
Ellis Park Stadium Disaster
The 2009 Birmingham Millennium Point stampede

I'm pretty sure someone here has this sig:

"A person is smart; people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it."

I also worked for one of the first (maybe the first?) companies to develop such a system and use it in the US - they'd already build a similar system overseas. I didn't work directly on that project to any real degree, but I was there in the early days and at that time migrant field workers were their ONLY users.

Not that the companies ever had any trouble paying the illegal aliens with checks. This system just meant less work distributing checks, no issuing replacements for lost checks, and lower fees for the workers who didn't have to go to a check cashing outfit.

Was the company you worked for by any chance founded by a red-haired guy with a 4-letter last name?

"...and how long the executive should serve."

Senators serve six-year terms. If he wants to stay in longer than that, he'll need to run for re-election. Haven't you figured out how this works yet?

Hey, didn't I meet you at Burning Man?

The black gadget at the top of the picture appears to be one of my OpenTracker+ kits - I see that Geoff ordered a couple back in May. So I'm going to take this opportunity for a brief shameless plug:

http://www.argentdata.com/products/otplus.html

His main payload computer looks to be wholly custom-built, but the OpenTracker+ (that handles taking data from the GPS receiver and transmitting it over the radio) is an off-the-shelf kit that takes maybe an hour to build, if you don't want to pay an extra few bucks for a pre-assembled unit.

It's based on the Freescale MC908JL16 microcontroller, the full source code is available under the BSD license, and it'll compile with the free version of the Codewarrior IDE. It's got a serial bootloader, so there's no need for a device programmer. If you're comfortable with C programming, it's a very cheap way to build a simple, customizable tracking and telemetry system. Or just run the regular firmware and it'll do a whole bunch of stuff without modification.

Its larger cousin, the Tracker2, does a whole lot more and the code is released under GPLv3, but unfortunately you can't compile it with the free version of the IDE. It does include a simple scripting engine, though - written mostly so balloon builders would stop bugging me with minor ad hoc changes for their particular setup.

Scott
N1VG

I'm a clean cut white guy, born in the US, a business owner with no criminal record and a (now expired) security clearance, and I still get treated like a criminal by US customs, more often than not. I guess you can consider that a victory for equal rights - they treat everyone like crap, regardless. I've been treated worse by customs in Los Angeles than anywhere else in the world. From China to Bosnia, no other country has ever hassled me. Had some confusion with Thai customs when they misread a Chinese receipt, but at least they were polite.

I did discover a little trick on my last return from Asia, though. After passing through most of the customs crap, I had an agent approach me and start their 'casual' secondary questioning. Turns out the key to ending that quickly is to immediately launch into excessive, tedious detail about all of the trade shows you visited, vendors you met with, and so on.

That only goes so far with the guy at the desk who's got a list of questions he needs answered, but a little extra detail does seem to shift them from 'interrogate' mode to 'let's just hurry up and get rid of this guy.' Sure, they might not need to be declared, but since he asked I'll tell him about the toy helicopter I got for my son in Shenzhen, and the Lego knock-off set I got for my daughter, and the cute cat figurine I got for my girlfriend during the stopover in Narita.

"As you can see from the picture above of my Radeon HD5870 sitting on my HD4890, the end plate is more than capable of being held on without wood screws."

Anyone care to explain what the heck we're looking at in this picture? I see what looks like a poor video capture of a couple of video cards, but I can't make out anything relevant.

Maybe this guy has a point, but it's damn hard to see what he's talking about from the pictures. The only one that I agree looks bogus is the one where the board is cut flush with the edge of the housing. It does indeed look like it was cut straight through some things that shouldn't have been cut.

This guy also ignores the fact that surface mount connectors have been commonplace for many years now. The fact that there are no pins protruding through the board means nothing. I agree that it's unlikely that's the case here, but except for that last one, his pictures do a very poor job of backing up his claims. The DVI connector looks fine to me, unless there's a higher resolution version out there I'm not seeing.

I've certainly built working prototypes that looked considerably worse than this. I've got one on my bench now with an SOIC hot-glued to the board and connected by 30 AWG fly wires. I've soldered SMT connectors onto through-hole pads, put SOD-123 diodes on an SMB footprint, drilled extra holes in boards, bent gull-wing parts to fit J-lead footprints, and all sorts of other nasty kludges.

The alternative is wasting days or weeks waiting for new boards or the right parts that could be spent testing the hardware and debugging firmware.

Yes, this is probably a mock-up. Yes, they probably over-hyped and misrepresented it. Is anyone surprised? And does it make any real difference?