Forgot your password?

typodupeerror

Comment: Re:The Great Ethanol Scam (Score 1) 556

by lgftsa (#38718288) Attached to: Is E85 Dead Now?

I can confirm this. I bought a secondhand 2004 Commodore VZ a few years ago and tested it on both regular petrol and e85. The economy was absolutely horrible on e85 - 15% to 20% worse with only a 1.5% price saving.

The real surprise was when the engine started running rough and fuel economy dropped a further 30%.It turned out that the deposits on the fuel lines (aka varnish) had been partially dissolved and flakes and chunks had started breaking loose, blocking several injectors. That wouldn't have been too bad, but it took some time to track down the actual fault(electrical? manifold? ECU? plugs? coils?) and a couple of the injectors were blocked open, with fuel making it's way through the engine unburnt and destroying the oxygen sensors. In the end it cost over $2k to find and fix it, including labor and parts.

With the tiny price differential between regular unleaded and e85 and my rate of use, it would take roughly 1000 years to make back the cost saving of the fuel for the repair bill, and I'd still have worse economy and no horsepower.

Comment: Re:Here's an idea (Score 1) 312

by lgftsa (#37197856) Attached to: What HP's TouchPad Fire Sale Teaches iPad Rivals

Not the same spec.
When it was first announced, I was delighted. The detachable keyboard made it the perfect combination of tablet and netbook for me.
When it went on sale, there was no mention of it's mobile capabilities. Dual band, quad band, locked? No problem I thought, I'll go down to the local JB store and have a fondle, the spec will be on the box.
No, it wasn't. This wonderful device, thoughtfully designed to fit ALL my needs is WiFi only.
So, after I confirmed there was no 3G model coming, I bought a Xoom, and I've been perfectly happy with it.

Comment: Re:Crayon Physics (Score 1) 158

by lgftsa (#36902194) Attached to: The Humble Indie Bundle 3 Released

Yes, I was running ./crayon in the correct directory. The issue is that they included several libraries in the lib32 directory but relied on most of the libraries being loaded from the host system. Run "ldd crayon" and "ldd launcher" to see that.

Unfortunately, they only included *some* of the libraries. For the most part it's not a problem, as things like libm and libcurl are fairly standalone. When they included Qt libraries, however, they didn't include *all* the Qt libraries, and the ones they included have a different version to the ones in most other systems, including mine. Qt is smart enough to detect this and complain because it's likely that the two libraries will be slightly incompatible.

This problem is due to the developer making assumptions about the target host system or not doing basic testing. Compiling a static binary is a possible solution but is sometimes not practical or technically possible.

In the end, the fix was (for me) simple and now one person has worked it out it's simple for everyone with the same problem.

Comment: Re:Linux users the least cheap? (Score 3, Informative) 158

by lgftsa (#36890368) Attached to: The Humble Indie Bundle 3 Released

I paid US$30 (AU$28.xx), twice as much as I paid for HB2 as I intend to play all of these games - the FPS in HB2 don't interest me.

BTW, Crayon Physics fails on Debian Squeeze. My fix was to move the bundled lib32 directory to lib32.o and apt-get the standard system packages for the few libraries it then complains are missing, which are mostly SDL related. All that was left was an incompatible system libstdc++, so I re-created lib32 and copied the old version from lib32.o back. So far, it runs fine and is great fun.

Comment: Re:Gah, Mixed Units! (Score 2) 167

by lgftsa (#35850262) Attached to: A 9V Battery To Your Brain Can Improve Your Gaming

No assumptions necessary. 9V is not enough to pass through skin, so the headline is obviously a throwaway line added later.

We know the power: 1/500 of 100W is 0.2W

We know the current: 0.002A

The voltage can be calculated as E = P/I = 0.2/0.002 = 100V

100V is enough to pass through some skin, especially that of the scalp.

You can't carve your way to success without cutting remarks.

Working...