OT.... but I need help

[Gene E. Bloch]

I've been looking for a use for that moon phase display.
I thought it might come in useful if I ever become a Moslem or a Jew,
when it would indicate approaching Ramadan or Passover. But I had a
near-death experience some years back, and no religious awakening at all
in my narrow little life.
Maybe now, however, when the skies have been so cloud-covered for months
that it's nice to know what would be visible without them.


Ed

I thought my comment about vacuum tubes might have been enough to out
the fear of god into you

The reason there are no atheists in fox holes is that they all left.

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

The differences between our languages bring much enjoyment to me (as
well as occasional frustration)! Can't think of anything
computer-specific, other than perhaps remembering as a child chanting "a
million million is a billion, a million billion is a trillion"; we
adopted the American billion somewhere around 1980.

I remember being startled when I started hearing BBC announcers and
other British people saying billion for 10**9. Soon enough, it became
clear that Britain had transitioned to the right way (joke).

Though I still regret the US's aborting the shift to the metric
system...

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

Well, people like you and me notice it, so they aren't really getting
away with it

By "get away with it", I mean they aren't punished (fined) by whatever
agency keeps an eye on advertising. (In the UK, it's the ASA -
advertising standards authority - who are worthless; their main sanction
seems to be to tell the advertiser that the ad. must not appear in that
form again, which delights the advertisers: they just say "sorry
teacher, won't do it again", and go on to write similarly misleading
copy for a different product. Such as a recent one I saw for a portable
TV described as "high resolution", which had a vertical pixel count of
less than 500 pixels - even stated in the same ad.!; see if you can spot
their excuse for getting away with that one.)

[Yes, I know about "caveat emptor" (let the buyer beware), but where
technical matters are concerned at the very least, I do think the less
knowledgeable should be protected.]

I was really being ironic, not serious...

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

I thought my comment about vacuum tubes might have been enough to out
the fear of god into you

I do know that spell checkers don't understand grammar, but I forgot to
double check the above.

"out" is meant to be "put".

 

[choro]

The last time I looked inside a quartz watch, I couldn't find a trimmer,
to my (mild) annoyance.

It was a Timex, if that is in any way relevant.

What do you need a trimmer for IF it has been set properly at the
factory. --
choro
*****

 

[Fokke Nauta]

Native speakers make that error 90% of the time, so you needn't question
your English. You might even have learned the terms by hearing the way
most English speakers use them, including those of us who claim to know
the difference (I am guilty as charged).

BTW, your posts generally don't show much sign of the difficulties you
feel. You are doing well...

Thanks!
My English has got a bit rusty though. I used to live in the UK for 5
years and in that time it improved tremendously. But technical English
was never a problem, it's when talking about social issues or
complicated matter, I felt I was lacking. Also understanding jokes and
expressions. That's what makes a foreign languague difficult, even
English. But it's also a challenge!

But since I'm back in The Netherlands, I don't practise it anymore ...

Fokke

 

[charlie]

I remember being startled when I started hearing BBC announcers and
other British people saying billion for 10**9. Soon enough, it became
clear that Britain had transitioned to the right way (joke).

Though I still regret the US's aborting the shift to the metric
system...

"Though I still regret the US's aborting the shift to the metric system"

Metric vs English in the US is an abortion of itself!

Domestic cars often have mixtures of both, with slow progress to all
metric sizes.
Food packaging lists both, but the package size, including bottles, now
favors smaller metric sizes. I'll know that things are getting serious
when the common road markers and speed limit signs start listing
distance in Metric and English units.

B+ batteries - as a ten year old, I remember portable radios that used
sub-miniature tubes and B+ Batteries, as well as the early pocket
transistor AM radios. The cells inside the B+ batteries were referred to
as "button cells", due to the round shape and size.
There were two or even three different types of batteries used for
filaments, plates, and bias.

In the later 60's I was a Navy electronics tech. One of the shipboard
"black boxes" ("grey box" in the navy) had over a hundred of the little
sub-miniature tubes. At that time, transistorized portable TVs also
existed, as did MIL Spec. early integrated circuits.

Vacuum tubes are still used in some "Hi-Fi" audio equipment. The "smooth
sound" is due to the way tubes handle harmonics, with a smooth roll off,
as opposed to the rather sharp cutoff of transistors.

One of the more interesting amplifier tubes still in use can be compared
to a laser, due to the way it works. (Traveling Wave Tube or TWT) Seems
as light in a laser, the RF signal bounces back and forth inside the
tube, and is amplified with each bounce. These tubes are used most often
for amplification of microwave frequencies in the GHZ range.

 

[Paul]

What do you need a trimmer for IF it has been set properly at the
factory. --
choro
*****

A trimmer can be used to correct for quartz aging, on a digital watch.

Even if a watch is "perfect" when it leaves the factory, it won't
be perfect any more in ten years time.

Paul

 

[Paul]

A trimmer can be used to correct for quartz aging, on a digital watch.

Even if a watch is "perfect" when it leaves the factory, it won't
be perfect any more in ten years time.

Paul

Even the old analog watches needed adjustment.

We had a gadget at work (a government lab), for tuning wind up
watch mechanisms. They were used on chart recorders left outdoors.
(You'd wind the mainspring, and the chart recorder would run
for a week at a constant speed.) But, the same tuning machine,
could also be used to tune watches, and I suspect the machine
was used for as many employee watches, as it was used for field
chart recorders.

It had chart paper output, and the line drawn on the paper would drift
left or right, if your watch was off.

I couldn't find a picture of one.

I see now, there's an electronic version. So no more chart
paper as proof of adjustment. This takes all the fun out of it.

http://www.witschi.com/e/produkte/?sub=1&cat=&id=239

Paul

 

[Fokke Nauta]

"Though I still regret the US's aborting the shift to the metric system"

Metric vs English in the US is an abortion of itself!

Domestic cars often have mixtures of both, with slow progress to all
metric sizes.
Food packaging lists both, but the package size, including bottles, now
favors smaller metric sizes. I'll know that things are getting serious
when the common road markers and speed limit signs start listing
distance in Metric and English units.

B+ batteries - as a ten year old, I remember portable radios that used
sub-miniature tubes and B+ Batteries, as well as the early pocket
transistor AM radios. The cells inside the B+ batteries were referred to
as "button cells", due to the round shape and size.
There were two or even three different types of batteries used for
filaments, plates, and bias.

In the later 60's I was a Navy electronics tech. One of the shipboard
"black boxes" ("grey box" in the navy) had over a hundred of the little
sub-miniature tubes. At that time, transistorized portable TVs also
existed, as did MIL Spec. early integrated circuits.

Vacuum tubes are still used in some "Hi-Fi" audio equipment. The "smooth
sound" is due to the way tubes handle harmonics, with a smooth roll off,
as opposed to the rather sharp cutoff of transistors.

One of the more interesting amplifier tubes still in use can be compared
to a laser, due to the way it works. (Traveling Wave Tube or TWT) Seems
as light in a laser, the RF signal bounces back and forth inside the
tube, and is amplified with each bounce. These tubes are used most often
for amplification of microwave frequencies in the GHZ range.

Interesting stuff!

Vacuum tubes are still very common in music equipment, such as guitar
amplifiers. Most guitarists insist on using vacuum tubes, indeed due by
the tube characteristics when in overdrive mode. They create a good
sound. Transistorized amps can't match tube amps.

Fokke

 

[choro]

Even the old analog watches needed adjustment.

We had a gadget at work (a government lab), for tuning wind up
watch mechanisms. They were used on chart recorders left outdoors.
(You'd wind the mainspring, and the chart recorder would run
for a week at a constant speed.) But, the same tuning machine,
could also be used to tune watches, and I suspect the machine
was used for as many employee watches, as it was used for field
chart recorders.

It had chart paper output, and the line drawn on the paper would drift
left or right, if your watch was off.

I couldn't find a picture of one.

I see now, there's an electronic version. So no more chart
paper as proof of adjustment. This takes all the fun out of it.

http://www.witschi.com/e/produkte/?sub=1&cat=&id=239

Paul

You are perfectly right on this score, of course, but not many people
keep their quartz watches that long these days, with the exception of
course of extremely expensive models. Watches are so cheap these days
that it is cheaper to buy a new quartz watch than to have one, quartz
*or* mechanical, serviced. --
choro
*****

 

[J. P. Gilliver (John)]

I remember being startled when I started hearing BBC announcers and
other British people saying billion for 10**9. Soon enough, it became
clear that Britain had transitioned to the right way (joke).

Though I still regret the US's aborting the shift to the metric
system...

Ditto for UK! Actually, we _have_ adopted the metric system for legal
purposes (except the dispensing of beer in pubs!), but large segments of
the public, and most labelling, still use the old (Imperial, not US)
units. (In the case of labels, both units.) It could be understandable
if it was just those who grew up with them, but the efforts to make
things easy for them has kept us using both systems in parallel for
rather longer than IMO is good for us. We _have_ stopped in a _few_
places - fuel is in litres only, and weather is in C (with the _vocal_
giving of F on the wane).

 

[Ed Cryer]

This thread struck my 'funny bone'. Many decades ago I was introduced
to 'valves' by the Brits. If you think about it it is very logical as
the function of a tube is as a 'valve', an electron variable valve. My
introduction to Electronics was with tubes, i.e. before transistors.
Brought back memories.

We called them "thermionic valves" if anybody ever asked us what a
"valve" was.
When I started as a computer programmer one of the women in the office
told us how she programmed first-generation machines; and she used to
"hide from her boss in the memory cupboard".
I should think it was quite hot in there.

Ed

 

[J. P. Gilliver (John)]

In message <[email protected]>, Ed Cryer

We called them "thermionic valves" if anybody ever asked us what a
"valve" was.
When I started as a computer programmer one of the women in the office
told us how she programmed first-generation machines; and she used to
"hide from her boss in the memory cupboard".
I should think it was quite hot in there.

Ed

Depends; if it was core storage, maybe not ...

 

[Ed Cryer]

In message <[email protected]>, Ed Cryer


Depends; if it was core storage, maybe not ...

No, valves.
I started on ICL machines with ferrite-core rings as memory bits; second
generation mainframes.

Ed

 

[Ken Blake]

choro wrote:

A trimmer can be used to correct for quartz aging, on a digital watch.

Even if a watch is "perfect" when it leaves the factory, it won't
be perfect any more in ten years time.

So how far from perfect is it likely to be after ten years?

 

[Ken Blake]

Though I still regret the US's aborting the shift to the metric
system...

Me too, although it was never even started sensibly. Changing a speed
limit from 55 mph to 88 kph made no sense, as far as I'm concerned; it
should have been changed to 60 kph.

And selling things like milk in .9463 liter bottles instead of 1 liter
bottles made no sense either.

These kinds of things (and there were many others) weren't really
changing to the metric system.

We should change to the metric system primarily because our
measurement system should be the same as the rest of the world's, and
secondarily because the metric system is much easier to do arithmetic
in.

As far as I know, the only thing that we use the metric system for is
wine and liquor bottles.

And we should also change to using Celsius for temperatures, because
the rest of the world does. Most people seem to think that's part of
the metric system, but I don't.

 

[Robin Bignall]

So how far from perfect is it likely to be after ten years?

I bought my quartz watch (an Omega) in 1977 and it keeps perfect time.
It has been regularly serviced, of course.

 

[Paul]

So how far from perfect is it likely to be after ten years?

Mine is off by 5-6 minutes per month, which makes it
bad when timing store closings at the mall. I guess that
is about 12 seconds per day. 12/86400 is about 139 ppm.
I think that's a pretty significant error. My car
quartz clock keeps much better time. And looking on the web
at 32768 crystals, they seem to quote a tighter
initial tolerance than that (15 to 30ppm perhaps).
Aging is quoted as 3ppm in the first year. Mine is out
by a mile.

To tune that, I need three things...

1) Trimmer cap. Yup, it's got one.

2) Must located the buffered output signal from the clock
chip. You can't tap into the quartz crystal directly,
even with FET probes, because that would throw it off.
You even have to keep your hands away from near the watch
when taking a reading.

I built a digital watch once, from a kit, and that one
had a buffered output for instrumentation. There should
be a copper pad on the PCB of the watch, intended for
that purpose (monitoring). When you connect an instrument
to the buffered output, it doesn't affect the resonant
frequency.

3) Need a good frequency counter. Don't have one.
A good frequency counter comes with a 10MHz aux input.
Connecting that to a GPS disciplined clock source, is how
you get decent results (real accurate measurements). Just
using the frequency counter by itself, suffers from the same
problem the watch has got in the first place. (The frequency
counter needs to be calibrated yearly.)

Paul

 

[James Silverton]

Me too, although it was never even started sensibly. Changing a speed
limit from 55 mph to 88 kph made no sense, as far as I'm concerned; it
should have been changed to 60 kph.

And selling things like milk in .9463 liter bottles instead of 1 liter
bottles made no sense either.

These kinds of things (and there were many others) weren't really
changing to the metric system.

We should change to the metric system primarily because our
measurement system should be the same as the rest of the world's, and
secondarily because the metric system is much easier to do arithmetic
in.

As far as I know, the only thing that we use the metric system for is
wine and liquor bottles.

And we should also change to using Celsius for temperatures, because
the rest of the world does. Most people seem to think that's part of
the metric system, but I don't.

Soda is also sold in liter sizes tho' there are a bewildering variety of
soda cans: 300ml, 330ml, 12 fl. oz etc.