Of all the dozens (hundreds?) of videos of Indian passenger trains I've seen (there seem to be a lot of railfans in India) on YouTube, none use head-end power (HEP) generated by the locomotive--even if it's an electric unit (as far as I can tell, locomotive-borne HEP just isn't a thing in India). There is almost always a diesel generator car at one end (usually both) of the passenger consist.

(example)

This is most likely due to the sheer length of these trains--it isn't even unusual for premium services to have well in excess of 15 coaches. Trains with non-air-conditioned classes (basically anything with bars on the windows instead of glass) can easily hit 18-20 cars and up. There is a limit to how many cars can be powered off a single generator car (or HEP-equipped locomotive), usually about 15 or so cars max.

---PCJ

There are a number of people who have designed mods for the 2600 (as well as other consoles) that allow it to output composite or S-Video. A number of these are discussed/demonstrated on YouTube.

Here is one of them: Atari 2600 AV + pause drop in pcb mod for 6 + 4 switchers composite stereo s-vid

Be sure to read through the comments, the poster lists his web store in the last thread. If he doesn't have them, a look through the related videos may give you some leads

---PCJ

What we're looking at here is Apple slowly phasing out the last remnants of sales to old devices. It has been impossible for over a year to release new software targeted at people with old devices through the App Store, and it is about to become impossible to sell them new copies of software that was previously released.

This is what gets me about the Apple model (I'm an iPad Mini user -- non-retina) -- the walled garden does an awful lot to preserve the security of the device, but they then brick us old users up in a tiny corner when us and the devices we bought are of no interest to them. If they want to rent us iPads, rent us them. Don't sell them to us then make them useless when the hardware is still working perfectly well.

Obligatory Transformers clip

---PCJ

My LG 47VL5500, from about 4 years ago works like this:
--hit the Input button on the remote. List of inputs comes up. (usually it's on HDMI1)
--Either hit the Input button twice to select HDMI 3 or tap the D-pad twice
--Hit OK.

Maybe the UI changed between your model year and mine? I could do it via the menu system like you describe, but this just seems to work.

---PCJ

If you're running a phone's GPS then *that* in particular will chew through batteries like nobody's business. I had a Galaxy Note 4 completely drain a 10,000MaH battery-based phone charger running GPS for about 7 hours (was watching my progress in a navigation app during a bus trip) At my destination, the phone was at almost full charge, the charger it was hooked to was almost completely flatlined.

---PCJ

Probably too late to offer this, but...

I seem to recall that you had to hit the branches under the leaf cluster with the canopy of the parachute. The game would then pull the player-character diagonally down the tree trunk and into the hole.

Then you had to avoid touching the "thieves" running back and forth across the next screen as you made your way to your objective on the bottom.

---PCJ

SP2 owner here.

When I got my recall notice (via Amazon, where I bought it), my first thought was "good thing I don't keep mine plugged in all the time" (it sees very light usage, and the battery holds up nicely for weeks on end while powered down)

Then I clicked on the actual notice and was puzzled for a bit. The charger pictured in the notice didn't look anything like the one that came with my Surface. Mine was a compact wall wart with folding prongs. More searching led me to a listing for a Surface 24-watt charger that looked just like the one packed with my SP2, and taking another look at the logo on mine, it says "Surface RT". I'd been using the thing on-and-off for almost a year and never noticed. Turns out the RT and Pro could use each other's chargers.

Anyone else get an RT charger bundled with their Surface Pro 2 or 3?

---PCJ

Up to SP2 are Wacom digitizers. SP3 and up are from Ntrig, a company MS acquired specifically for their digitizer tech

Found this out while evaluating SP2/SP3 models as a "cheaper than a Cintiq" method of getting into all-digital drawing.

---PCJ.

I typically use Inkscape for vector drawings, but I did install an old copy of Flash 4 for the purpose of playing with (Newgrounds-esque) animation. I wasn't expecting it to run under Win7, but it did...after complaining that it couldn't update the Registry, but ran without incident after that.

I wonder if using the compatibility options on the EXE will fix the error dialog, but I'll live with it for now
(unless someone does something completely off-the wall bonkers and grafts an animation module onto Inkscape, or creates a Flash work-alike with Inkscape's drawing tools*)

---PCJ

*(because while Vectorian Giotto intends to be a Flash work-alike and will output SWF, you need acute masochistic tendencies to actually get to the point of making an animation with it)

You're thinking of the Aleutian Trench. That's a long ways from the Bering Strait. Any plate-boundary crossing would occur on land in NE Russia and be across a strike-slip fault much like the San Andreas, not a subduction zone.

(aside) Last time I heard of this scheme, it was to be a tunnel, proposed to run under the Strait between the Diomede Islands, and it was to be exclusively for rail (conventional--not high-speed).

Need to send vehicles across? Put 'em on the train. No sense building gas stations out in the middle of nowhere, and a tunnel is both less maintenance-intensive and less prone to severe weather.

As always, the hard part isn't building the actual link--it's connecting it to the nearest railheads on both sides, and conjuring up a business rationale for doing so.

---PCJ

Well, they could try getting the "fuel tank" to actually separate the next time around...

And then actually glide the RR to a controlled landing. That would really blow everyone's mind.

---PCJ

Coincidentally, I had been taking a close look at Krita on and off (the last "on" being a week or so ago) after hearing that someone is working on adding frame-by-frame animation functionality to the application.

I ran across P&C while scoping out the application's capabilities (in part via your YouTube channel) and now I'm tempted to try out this application before the animation capabilities are added in. And now it gets spotlighted in /.

Now if I only knew how to color well enough to actually take advantage of Krita's capabilities :D...

As for doing artwork with OSS, I've used Inkscape for digital inking for a couple of years now, and have given MyPaint enough playtime to produce one of my few completely digital pics (cell-shaded w/o backdrop), which is more than I can say for the apps I actually paid for (Sketchbook Pro 2011 and Clip Studio Paint 5), for some inexplicable reason.

---PCJ

Those cars as pictured do not run on the Northeast Corridor. Maximum allowable height on the NEC is 14'6" (4.4m) due to the Baltimore and Hudson River tunnels, and that's only if the top corners of the carbody are angled.

---PCJ

No they aren't. Amtrak outlined a plan for a new Northeast Corridor that could support what everyone else in the world would term "high speed rail".

It amounts to a formal plan to have on hand, just in case monkeys flew out all our collective butts, causing the money to actually do this to miraculously materialize out of hot air.

In reality, at best Amtrak is more concerned with wrangling the funding to replace it's Acela trainsets before they completely wear out, and assuming they pull that off, finding funding to replace all the close-to 40-year-old passenger cars and the not-much-younger diesel locomotives that they've been running the wheels off of just to keep their network running.

Relevant link: Why America Can't Have Great Trains

---PCJ

That would fall under the Dilbert Principle

---PCJ