Comment Re:MFM (Score 1) 498
Mod this up! Insightful.
Mod this up! Insightful.
Last year I got given a QIC-150 tape written in 1995 to see if I could recover someone's old email archives. First I had to locate a QIC drive but a bit of hunting on the local Freecycle group got me an external SCSI unit weighing about 40 pounds with a tape drive and a full-height 500MB hard drive included. The tape drive didn't work, in that it talked SCSI-II all right to the BSD box's controller and the motor went round and round but no data came out.
The first inkling of bad news was realising that someone else had been into the tape drive mechanism before me when I saw the chewed-up screws holding the covers on. The really bad news was seeing the capstan roller on the drive -- or rather the motor shaft where the capstan roller used to be. It had gone missing sometime in the past and the bodger who had been in before me figured that a bunch of rubber bands would make a suitable replacement for the roller. This was some time back, judging by the condition of the rubber bands which were now a sticky mess of perished semi-liquid rubber.
I rummaged in my junkbox and pulled out an old lump of solid rubber, a platen roller from a daisywheel printed I had junked decades ago. I measured up the motor shaft, made some educated guesses and machined a replacement roller on the workshop lathe. After degunking the motor shaft with a scalpel and needle files the new capstan roller was driven into place and after that the data came pouring off the tape like it had been written yesterday as good old-fashioned CSV-delimited tarball archives. The owner of the tape got back the first emails he ever exchanged with the lady who he had since married and there was much rejoicing.
Nice job!!
Ah yes... WP5.1, the best of all word processors!
I need to search the basement for my old backup floppies and a machine that supports floppy drives and see about recovering a few of the files that have important info on them from my i286 16-bit DOS days.
Isn't there a new Palm version about to be released? I believe it uses WebOS.
Maybe the Android users are a bit more choosy than the iPhone users. Or maybe more committed to their relationship(s).
I wonder who is buying all this information...
I wonder if anyone has explained to that cop that he places himself in danger by waving that pistol around before having identified himself. He could have been mistaken for a motorcycle thief!
The long, loud whistle noise would annoy the neighbors?
The gas involved here is from the sewer system, not "gas lines". Access to the sewer system is through the passageways for electric, water, etc., which are above.
ah its 10 % more expensive.
That's big money in a road project!
Wasn't NOx one of the major pollutant problems in the early 1960s? IIRC the culprits were detergents that ended up in waterways causing algae blooms that used up oxygen and prevented light penetration, thus being very detrimental to aquatic life.
If this is the case it might not be good to have it running into the canals and rivers and into the North Sea.
Anyone who has worked with steel knows that most alloys will bend more easily with a relatively modest application of heat.
With a lot of weight above bent structural members structural failure is guaranteed!
First priority: Install one above every street light so we can get our lovely speckled black skies back.
I certainly agree! Recover the light that is otherwise polluting our environment.
Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle. -- Steinbach