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So am I. And surprisingly, I haven't had to replace the caps-yet. In a bit of irony though I came very close to bricking the M/B while flashing the BIOS. We had two tornadoes touch down in NYC on 9/16-one in Brooklyn, the other in Flushing. About a minute or two after I flashed the BIOS...

Well, I purchased the 2TB Samsung I linked to earlier. It turns out Newegg packed it well, and it works fine. I had to update the BIOS in my M/B to keep the system from hanging while it was trying to detect the drive ( see description of the procedure here ). Also, to partition the drive I...

Just storage. I'm nearly out of space on my 200 GB drive. I'll leave the 200 GB for the boot drive for now. Down the road, maybe next year, I plan to buy an SSD, and will image the old OS install to boot from it.

I have a similar question as Doug. I'm thinking of ordering this 2 TB Samsung now that Newegg hopefully fixed the packaging issues. Sweet deal at $99.99 shipped with the promotion code. Only possible issue is it's using 4K sectors with 512 byte emulation. Would this cause any performance or...

Great news to me! At least they finally acknowledged the problem.

In NYC technically you're not even allowed to do electrical work unless you're licensed electrician. That even includes stuff like changing an outlet or a fixture. In practice it doesn't matter so long as it's done to code. Generally when you sell a house it will require inspection, including...

If you didn't have dimming requirements I would suggest flush mount T8 fixtures. Tubes are cheap, readily available in all color temperatures, available in high-CRI, and very efficient. The light distribution is uniform without the harseness of cans. The only downside is dimming in not...

If it's like the Romison I have, then the driver board is soldered to the heat sink and fairly easily removed for examination. If you can get the board out without too much trouble, then attempt a repair. In all likelyhood the bad part is either a MOSFET or Schottky diode. Don't spend too...

This is interesting although truth is from reading between the lines it may be a long time before any drives based on this technology, or any other new technology, reach the market. Another problem we're already seeing from ever higher areal densities is lower reliability. It seems the failure...

The driver on some of those early Romisons was flaky. They used components which IMO weren't up to the task. What probably happened is one of the parts went, most likely either the Schottky diode or the MOSFET. End result would be the light either doesn't work at all, or comes on dim. The...

I would hook a VCR to a TV card using the A/V inputs. That should avoid the signal degradation issues you mentioned. No idea of what TV card to get. I'll probably start a thread on that when I'm ready to buy. I'm really looking for something which has YPbPr as well as A/V inputs so it can...

While on the subject of buying drives from Newegg, is there any good reason for me not to consider the Seagate Barracuda ST315005N4A1AS-RK 1.5TB? It's been ages since I've purchased a hard drive. 1.5TB seems like the sweet spot right now in terms of price per GB ( and also in line with how...

The only possible modes of failure are loss of vacuum in the tube, or loss of magnetic field. Both are exceedingly unlikely. In fact, given the volume of the tube, it would take literally hours or longer to lose the vacuum even from a large leak, so plenty of time to get to the next station...

It's under much higher pressures than LPG, and also needs to be kept at close to absolute zero. Like I said, using it in vehicles just makes no sense at all. Current electric vehicles have sufficient range for 99% of trips. If there's ever enough demand for it, you'll see fast recharge...

All I can think to say for now is WOW! Seriously, I knew this concept was the future, but I honestly didn't expect to see a system built for at least another 50 years. If China can pull off a successful demo, then this idea can pretty much obsolete air travel. I'm obviously going to be...

Here on earth hydrogen isn't a naturally-occurring fuel. It's a very volatile element which instantly combines with other elements. It's simply an energy storage medium which uses about 3 times the energy to produce it as is returned when using it in a fuel cell ( and I'm not counting the...

Join the club. I've found every time I've done anything at home it takes twice as long as I anticipated. Usually it's because something ends up being short or long by an inch or less. Three years ago I put a new ceiling in the finished basement and also added a bunch of outlets plus several...

Don't overlook the possibility that the metal enclosure could be acting as a speaker. I actually had that problem while trying to quiet down a PC. Everything was isolated, but the sound waves propagating through the air caused the case to vibrate. A thin sheet of polyurethane foam glued to...

Yeah, that's not overly uncommon here in NYC, either, especially on rainy days. Totally disgusting, even when temps are in the 50s or 60s F. 100% RH and 80+F, ugh. Might as well be in a sauna.

I'm dying right now in NYC. About three weeks so far of unrelenting heat and humidity. It's really the humidity which makes these kinds of temperatures unbearable, and it doesn't get much better at night. I just came back from an 80 minute ride soaking wet. :x

Regarding R134A retrofits, it's interesting to note that even R134A is scheduled to be phased out in the EU, and the US will likely follow suit. IMO then if you keep your car long enough, you'll be running into the same problems with an R134A retrofit as you're already running into with R12...

You'll hate NYC summers then, Lunar. The RH rarely seems to get under 50%, with 70% and over being normal. That makes things sticky and uncomfortable even if temperatures are only 20°C, which they rarely are in the summers. We hit 102°F ( 39°C ) last Tuesday. I think RH was around 40%...

I feel sorry for whoever is moving into the building your company vacated. Sorting out that mess of cables sure sounds like fun!

I used to go through brake pads like crazy until I started riding more defensively. Now I can pretty much anticipate the situation. I can often roll up to red lights just as they flip to green, for example, without hitting the brake. Or plan a path around obstacles a block or two in advance...

The only time I've ever been able to slide the front tire is on glare ice. I guess it would slide on very deep sand also, but I've never encountered much more than a sprinkling of sand. The main danger with the front brake might be if you hit it hard enough to cause the rear wheel to lift...

I did get stronger compared to 2 months ago, but generally after riding a lot for about two months I reach a plateau. After that, any further increases in strength are relatively small, and over a longer period of time. I was at roughly the same point 3 years ago, riding about 300 miles a...

Eww! Nasty! :puke-r: :errr: :puke-l:

The tires started out about 2 mph slower than air tires. Within I'd say the first 100 miles this quickly improved to the point where they were only about 1-1.5 mph slower. Ever since it's getting slightly better, to the point where now I'd say the difference is practically unmeasureable ( 1/2...

I wrote all about airless tires on CPF. Here's the thread. If you want to skip to the part where I actually did an evaluation, here is the post. It may or may not make sense for you to get them. It ultimately depends upon how much you'll be riding, and also how many flats you get. For me...

12 miles is actually pretty decent considering the weather and the fact that you just started riding. When it's like this, if I do 20 miles it's a lot. A lot of my rides this past week have been in the 15 mile range although I do try to ride almost every day ( I've done over 700 miles since...

Sorry to hear that. :( Honestly, the more I read about the state of things the more scared I get. Too many well-qualified, educated people I've known have hit the unemployment lines. Well, I hope you find something else reasonably soon.

The majority of my "rounding" was indeed done at home, much to the chagrin of my teachers. It seemed to annoy them no end that I really didn't have much interest in the "extracurricular" activities at school. To them, this meant I wasn't well rounded. Colleges basically had the same attitude...

If you use heat pipes for the mast, then your sail/mast idea would work very well. Heat pipes conduct heat hundreds of times better than copper. They would get the heat from the LED source to the sail with minimal temperature rise. Once up in the attic, the sail could be arbitrarily large to...

For longest life you should aim for a junction temperature of 60°C or less. How hot the heat sink should be to maintain that depends upon which LEDs you use, and what current you run them at. For example, the XM LED has a junction-to-case thermal resistance of 2°C/W. If you run them at 2...

What I might do in that case is mount the LED on a piece of aluminium plate, mount the aluminium plate flush with the ceiling, and then paint it to match. The paint probably wouldn't act as much of an insulator. The problem would be getting paint to stick well to the aluminium. Another...

You could run wiring to 120VAC code and just use it for low voltage by connecting to a transformer or power supply. Romex will work just fine for that actually. Not hard at all. I have a driver that can do it with about 8 parts ( and a few more if you want a dimming control ). Actually, what...

Cree will be releasing the XM LED this fall. Assuming that it's priced similar to their other emitters, it should drastically reduce the number of emitters ( and cost ) needed for a given output. Driven at 2 amps, about a dozen of these could light an average-sized room well. It also bears...

Interesting. The way I think SSD is eventually heading is towards dedicated M/B slots similar to RAM. In fact, I mentioned as much on storagereview.com years ago ( too lazy to look for the post ). This development seems to support that. And I'm having trouble even wrapping my head around 600...

Well, you're probably right that she was too young to do this, although I'm honestly of two minds here. On the one hand, yes, parents should protect their children against adult things which they are incapable of dealing with. On the other hand, children must be allowed to make mistakes, and...

Here's how I look at it. There is a very small subset of the population willing and able to engage in the sort of things which like this which might require an extensive rescue effort. In the grand scheme of things, on a per person basis, sending needed help isn't bankrupting anyone. Besides...

If I were in the same situation as Merc was, it would have taken all my self-control to not to use that kid for a little bonus lesson. "Hey class, we're going to have an impromptu physics demonstration on the concepts of acceleration and momentum. First we accelerate Mr. Wiseguy up to a good...

The bottom line in the USA is no insurance, no medical care. Those who are poor are covered by Medicaid, those who are old are covered by Medicare. Some are covered through their jobs. The rest buy insurance on their own if they can ( last I heard that cost anywhere from $800 to $2000 per...

How long you can sustain a given g-force depends upon orientation. You can sustain 14g for a while with full immersion. The chart plots g-force versus g minutes. It looks like it's possible to accelerate at 14 g while immersed just long enough to reach orbital velocity ( 17,500 mph ). That...

We need oil for now BUT the part which annoys me is our needs may have been WAY less had we started systematically getting off the stuff after the first oil crisis in the 1970s. Cars got more efficient for a while which was good. And GM made an attempt at an electric car in the early 1990s (...

I agree. The more I read about this the madder I get. Sadly, in the end BP will likely end up paying for a fraction of the damage they caused, the area around the Gulf of Mexico will be messed up for generations, and then we'll all wait until the next screw-up occurs. Only next time it might...

No, like I said, absolutely no money to travel. Going into Manhattan is about all I can manage as far as trips these days. Also, no time for it. I'm not one for flying ( uncomfortable, risky, basically a totally uncivilized way of traveling ), so a trip to the Far East would mean three days...

Yep. That would be what BP calls a "junk shot". :mrgrn:

Nope, never been there at all. I just don't have the money or desire to travel. What you say is certainly true, but I have heard of company heads and politicians offing themselves in the past. Those times are probably mostly past though. Nowadays from what I've read Japan is getting to be...

I'm anti anything which isn't sustainable for the long haul. The very idea that everyone, including the lower income brackets, should own a home is what created both the real estate bubble ( and the subsequent crash ) and a lot of exurban sprawl. If enough people living in suburbs are willing...

In theory you may be right except for the fact this doesn't work in practice due to the strange way many suburbs are zoned. You'll have a residential area, and the nearest commercial area might be 3 miles away, despite the fact that there is nothing but empty land in between the residential and...