I've done the water thing - well, if it's the water thing I'm thinking about.

A long-lost post from some group on usenet told of how the ABC radio jocks would play vinyl: mix up a litre of 50/50 water and alcohol, add ONE drop of dishwashing liquid, and apply to the surface of the vinyl - not dripping-off-the-edges wet, just enough to make the surface thinly covered. Now play the record. Make sure you dry it before putting it away, of course.

I tried it, and it works - it's not perfect, but it seems to eliminate or at least reduce lots of the usual unwanted noises. Probably reduces wear from friction, too.

But who plays vinyl these days? I get nostalgic about once a year and trawl the collection, maybe listen to one or two albums before going back to CDs or streaming.

Tweak firefox with:

new tab, type "about:config" into the address bar.

find "network.http.pipelining" and set it to "true"
find "network.http.pipelining.max-optimistic-requests" and set it to 8
find "network.http.pipelining.max.requests" and set it to 32 if it isn't that already. Don't take this one too high.

Perhaps he should seek Kay Sievers' input.

Hint: it's a GENERAL PURPOSE operating system. It has to be broadly appealing, and that means a range of applications - calculator, CD/DVD playback, basic word processor (Wordpad), and so on.

Have a look at the top 3 linux distributions on Distrowatch - they've all got lots of application software included, and they've all got their own instabilities.

I appreciate the concern (really), but it's been working for >20 years now without any fires, and as I gradually replace the incandescent and halogen bulbs with much lower wattage LEDs, the load and risk reduces accordingly.

The house was dual wired with domestic 3-core 240 VAC 10amp cable - live, neutral and earth. Cable leading to light switches and sockets was powered from the DC bus, i.e. directly from the batteries, and only used 2 of the 3 wires, for positive and negative. Cables leading to conventional GPO sockets was powered by the AC bus, i.e. from the inverter, and was wired up according to code - live, neutral and earth.

There are many more DC cable runs than you would otherwise expect, because each run was designed to carry only up to 10 amps, which would have been no more than 4 x 60-watt bulbs (24 VDC nominal). I was able to replace some of the conventional bulbs with lower-wattage-for-the-same-light-output halogen items, and reduce the amperage load further, and now that drop-in LEDs are available, there's bugger-all load on some of the circuits.

In practice, the DC circuit voltage is lowest (24 to 24.2 volts) when there's little load on the lighting circuit (about 10pm to 7am), and highest in the middle of the day, up to 30 volts until the batteries reach float, where they stay at 27.4 volts until late afternoon when the sun goes down, dropping rapidly to about 25 volts, then slowly over the evening falling to about 24.2. So the higher practical voltages of the circuit mean even lower amperage for a given load in watts, and this also compensates somewhat for the voltage drop at the far end of some of the circuits.

240 watts will run a LOT of LED lights. I'm typing this by the light of a 14 watt drop-in LED - so I could run 17 of those off a single cable run and not exceed the cable's load rating.

It's not about replacing every AC item with a DC equivalent, it's more to do with replacing low-load AC items such as lights, phone and laptop chargers, etc with DC, where there's less conversion losses.

Sounds good. I thought our system would be compromised by high trees in the west, but an audit showed otherwise. The auditor used a special data logger - place it face up on the center of the panel array, it logs lat and long, then uses a small fisheye lens to take a picture of the sky from the panels' perspective. It then processes the data in the picture to calculate an efficiency rating. I think it considers blue sky and cloud as a plus, and anything dark, such as a tree, to be a minus. It also takes into account that daily insolation forms a bell-curve or sine-wave shape due to the changing angle of the sun's rays across the flat plane of the panels, so that an obstruction near the eastern or western horizons isn't nearly as important as an obstruction in the northern horizon (that's for the southern hemisphere - if you live in the northern hemisphere you'd be wanting to remove obstructions in the southern skyline). Our situation was given a 94% efficiency rating.

BTW, what sort of compressors are in your fridges/freezers? The Danfoss 24VDC compressors are great.

Nobody's really suggesting that DC could replace AC completely, but you can run lighting,laptops, and even refrigeration off DC, and it doesn't have to be expensive. You have to run more copper, but with your example, you could install an additional run of #14, or even two or three additional runs per room, to supply 24 VDC lights. Standard domestic AC cable is so cheap, you wouldn't even consider special DC cable. Just make sure that no DC circuit carries more load than the cable is rated for. That shouldn't be a problem if you're only using it for lighting and other small loads like phone and laptop chargers. And if you've got lighting and refrigeration on a supply that can be isolated from the grid, i.e. supplied by a battery, won't it be nice to have that lighting and refrigeration when the grid goes down?

Retro-fitting a house would be expensive, but new houses wouldn't cost a great deal extra. My place was dual-wired with the same cabling (see post above). It's the design that's important - don't let any DC circuit carry more current than the cable is rated for, i.e. 10 amps. Sure, you've got to run more circuits, perhaps a single circuit can't service more than 3 lights, but standard AC cabling is CHEAP, vs. dedicated low voltage cable.

The low voltage circuit isn't regulated, so it varies throughout the day from 24 - 30 volts, but halogen and LED lights are pretty tolerant, and the fridge doesn't seem to care - it's been running on variable voltage for >20 years. I *could* install some gear to regulate the circuit to ~25 volts, but I don't think it's necessary.

It's not hooey. I've got 2 circuits - one for 240VAC, and another for 24VDC. The cabling is identical, i.e. normal 240VAC live + neutral + earth, 10-amp. The low voltage circuit uses the same cable, but doesn't use the earth wire, and the individual circuits were designed to make sure no more than 10 amps were possible on any outlet. The low voltage system is used for lighting (although 24 volt light bulbs are rare and expensive), and a couple of 24 volt power outlets, one of which is used for refrigeration - a normal fridge converted to use a Danfoss 24 volt compressor.

There are more drop-in DC LED lights these days, and they can take 8-30 volt input, so I'm gradually replacing the halogens with LEDs.

There's a good reason to use 240VAC cabling on a 24VDC circuit - even though you have to install 3-4 x runs, 240 cabling is cheap, and 24 volt cabling is not cheap.

Conversion losses are an issue - the inverter runs about 85 - 95% (better at higher loads), and the batteries (lead-acid) are also about 90% efficient, i.e. you need to put about 10% more back in than you take out - so you just up the PV numbers to account for that.

Zis vas ze trondheim hammer dance, vich is heard every tventy-five minutes in ze town of Trondheim in Norway, in vich ze old ladies are struck about ze head vith round sticks, or klugels (click)

Feed it to a chicken.

Yeah, then there's all that BSE nonsense that we in Oz are mercifully free of. We don't want anyone else's beef, we have enough. Trade should NEVER override biosecurity concerns.

A report on the ABC news (www.abc.net.au) yesterday tells of the carrot and stick approach taken by the US - "let us export our beef to you or you won't get access to our domestic sugar market".

Our situation requires very careful consideration - we have a reputation for disease-free agricultural produce. Just about every country that wants access to our markets promises that none of the diseases affecting their own products will ever make it into the wild in Australia because reasons. We don't want NZ apples, we don't want asian seafood or bananas, and we don't want US beef - although some of those things are already here.

It's true that protectionism isn't healthy long-term, but there are valid reasons to ban the import of some items. We don't want to face the consequences of the (for example) banana industry being devastated by imported disease.

Milestone might be the wrong word, but this result stands out. The citizens stood up to the catholic church, and reminded the clergy about the principle of separation of church and state.

The church's arrogance has come back to bite it, as people now see through the hypocrisy.

Well done, my (distant) Irish relatives.

I used to think that about Westnet, at least. A few years ago, you'd call tech support, tell them what sort of internet connection you had (ADSL, Cable, satellite, etc), and you'd get switched to a call centre located in Australia staffed by people who didn't have difficult-to-understand accents.

Westnet was very popular with remote/rural users because their satellite was good, and the satellite tech support was good - outstanding, actually.

My most recent tech support call to westnet gave the usual "we are experiencing a high volume of calls, we'll get to you in approximately" .....wait for it... "forty-six minutes"

Get fucked, westnet. I know Telstra/bigpond are the big bad guys, but I've never waited longer than 20 minutes on the queue, and it's usually about 5 minutes or less.

P.S. I agree about dodo.