Nuke

ive read that if you leave nimh batteries together for too long, that one of the batteries will actually go negative and be permanently destroyed in the process. i have in fact found negative batteries in my junk boxes while going through and seeing whats still usable.

this is actually his second crash, he also crashed a helicopter a few years back.

cats are equipped well for zero g, their tail is pretty much a cmg. claws can be used to connect to surfaces. i have a feeling once they are used to the situation they would soon become masters of the environment. i think the hardest thing would be how to deal with animal waste. how do you litterbox in space? you might be able to train dogs to use weewee pads. but then how do they deal with unintended thrust. monkeys can just wear diapers, i suppose other pets as well, but those are expensive consumables. for cats and dogs pet hair would be a concern, clogging up life support equipment.

so its settled, the white spot is a giant funnel cake!

its probibly an endianness thing. avr is big endian, intel is little endian, and arm is both. confused? you should be. ive read articles that say its dumb to worry about endianness but they are usually for coders writing only for one platform. when you shove bits down a serial line between two dissimilar architectures and expect to use the same code at both ends to convert a stream of bytes into a structure and vise versa, you are going to have problems. i usually make a union between a byte array and a structure, then use it as a class member, then add a member function to perform byteswaps on a member by member basis. then you can use the same code at both ends, calling byteswap() at one end if the endiannes is different (obviously at the end with the faster cpu). i usually have the server query the client about its endianness at the start of a session so it knows whether or not it needs to perform a byteswap. that is of course assuming you are moving structures and not text. if you are using an at command set, then you really dont need to worry about endianness at all, but really that is going to be a slow down on 8 bit micros without a lot of memory. i did one once to configure an r/c receiver i built. i had to use every scrap of flash and some of the eeprom to store strings. it was rather tedius. i eventually replaced it with a bytecode interpreter.

i like to format the hard drive immediately after a laptop purchase. get the instal iso from ms (not the factory restore disc) and setup a usb boot stick, and write down that os license key. last time i bought a laptop the preinstalled bloatware was intolerable.

before we used circuit boards or the cordwood arrangement (its still technically a pcb but it exchanges serviceability for compact arrangement), we just crammed all the components into a box with a ratsnest of wires (usually solid wire for rigidity). sometimes peg board or particle board with custom holes were used to make things neater and allow more durable wire runs and also gave you a good sturdy piece of material to mount your tube sockets. then you have classic breadboarding which was used for the hobby end of things, literally you used a board for bread (the kind you eat). you would get an old one (or any old piece of wood) and some nails and run all your traces between them with wire wrap (the term breadboard is now used for those plastic prototyping boards that are quire nifty). you also had a lot of terminal blocks and wire wrap busses (i took apart a 1970s stereo and was amazed how much wire wrap it used, the only chip used was a large sip amplifier ic). you could have also done totally awesome stuff like this. pcbs came around long before chips did, so i dont know how you would deal with those without the invention of pcbs. i figure those packages would be build for either wire wrap or soldering or possibly extending the tube sockets that were used at the time. i think the invention of the pcb was just a logical progression of technology. you had all these components and you simply needed a way to make sense out of the mess of point to point construction. after trying a hodgepodge of methods we finally decided that pcb was the one that made the most sense.

what i like to do is union my structure with a byte array, so that anything you put in there is instantly serialized for you. the library for either protocol (serial too, software or otherwise) will provide functions to allow you to transmit or receive any byte array, usually with just a pointer and a size. you might have endianness issues if going between an avr and a pc though (so on one end or the other you will need to do a lot of shifting oring and masking). also now there are a number of very cheap wireless modules such as ESP8266 (wifi), and nrf24l01+ (ism) you can also use. former is serial and latter is spi. great little devices and you can get them under $5 each. also skip the mega and get the due, its faster (80 mhz), and also 32 bit. i haven't used mine yet but it has an impressive spec sheet. 8 bit micros are going out soon.

probibly mid to late 90s. it was a rather lame dial up connection. things like google and wikipedia weren't around back then, and frankly idk how i got by without them.

i have a feeling that no 2 nervous systems develop in exactly the same way. its like when you make network cables. you generally expect the cable to be wired in a certain way at both ends, if its not it simply wont work or worse cause damage to the hardware. brain is adaptive and so you could train it over an extended period of time to accept the new 'pinout', but i have a feeling this would be prohibitively expensive. figure out how to fix existing cases of of severed spinal cords before you go playing around with whole head transplants. if you could figure out how to repair even the worst spinal cord damage with 100% recovery then swapping heads should be fairly straightforward. at least make it work in animals first.

bo or beau (we argue over the spelling) hes currently 11. hes a cuddle bunny. see that belly, he will let you rub it and wont even try to bite your hand off. this is moms cat angel, she has had a series of strokes and now goes by zombie kitty. shes now mostly blind and has trouble getting around and eating hard food. shes 14ish. and this is lizzy, i got her as an xmas presant from my sister about a year ago, she is a total brat. shes a klepto kitty, she will steal anything she gets her claws into and is even known to pirate beverages when you are not looking. she is a very destructive force in our house, peeling paint everywhere she can find a small hole to get started she is also known to gnaw through wires in one chomp. she has all kinds of wierd quirks (for example she has a thing for ice cubes but hates snow) that make her adorable. her and bo are partners in crime.

i personally have no problem with them living in my house if they pay rent. but they dont so i get the raid. some of the more exotic species make interesting pets. it might help your phobia to handle some of the pet grade specimens. very few roaches here though, its too cold and wet for them i suppose. ive seen dead ones but not live ones, so at some point this building was infested with the german variety, i suppose the unit was unocupied for an extended period and there were just not any food sources available and no heat so they all died out. i have found a few bed bugs but thats nothing you cant fix with a hand full of spiders. they are slow, lumbering, and hide in very predictable areas and you can kill them with a simple hair drier or a well placed finger (and make a pleasing popping sound). if they pay rent and food they can stay, but again they dont. the real pests around here are the skeeters (or as we call them the alaska state bird, aka giant blood sucking helicopters) and gnats.

i guess one of the modules has a fume evacuation system. some of the pics also looked like they were working in a plastic glove box of sorts.

1: boom 2: chaos, 1 and counting 3: how much time and money do you got? 4: yes

i dont think exposing a chip resistor or ceramic capacitor to vacuum will destroy it immediately especially components not currently in operation. electrolytic caps are probibly gonna die though. inductors are going to be fairly usable. still it would probibly be most viable to use ewaste. im sure basic station maintenance produces a lot of this. i suppose you could theoretically desolder in the cabin. an smd rework station could probibly be operated with both the astronaut and the board restrained. the application of hot air will allow some of the parts to be removed with tweezers (i have one of these and they are quite nifty). for through hole parts you could use a desoldering gun, a hollow tipped iron with a suction system. gonna read that article on reassembly. for an experiment though a few poorly soldered joints are probibly sufficient. e: some of those joints look ok considering the gas bubbles forming in the solder. its probibly not a deal breaker. i didnt see any attempts to solder 2 things together though.

i was thinking the other day about the feasibility of constructing some of these reactionless engines with hardware already found on board the iss (in apollo 13 co2 scrubber fashion). so that you could simply put it out the airlock and watch what happens. the easiest type of drive to build would probibly be one of those woodward drives. the drive consists of a mechanical oscillator and a capacitor running off of rf power. so what are things to be found on the iss. certainly there are a lot of laptops and other personal electronics. between official nasa hardware and personal devices, there should be considerable ewaste aboard the iss which can be salvaged for components. laptop mobos are literally littered with switching supply components, oscilators, and other useful parts (also speakers would provide excellent mechanical oscilators) with which to build the rf supplies. you could probibly desolder the parts by simply taking the mobo outside and pointing it at the sun, wait an appropriate amount of time, then have an astronaut/robot tap the back of it and eject the parts into a container. they have a 3d printer, so could build whatever test/assembly jigs they need and surely they have a tube of epoxy/super glue/bondo floating around up there, and if not there is always duct tape which we all know they have in abundance. not sure if soldering is even possible in microgravity, however nothing prevents you from doing something old skool like wire wrap (of course limited to through hole components). obviously we need a device that can be built and tested on the ground first with parts available on the iss. i also doubt if nasa would offitially sanction such an experiment, but you might be able to convince an astronaut to build the device in his spare time.

blatant nihilism here. the question does not have an answer and therefore the question itself is meaningless.

its kind of an important species to exterminate in masse. but they are enough of a health concern to justify extermination in ones home. my personal favorite is boric acid. last apartment i was in had mice. they are more of a nucince/health concern than roaches, because they can chew their way into food containers and leave little presants behind. their other favorite pass time was getting into the toilet paper and shredding it. this kind of infestation can be delt with by a couple of cats. they were still around but more limited in their movement, because if they tried to get in the kitchen they would get eaten. and unlike a roach, a mouse is kind of cute.

there is only one thing you need to know about lobsters: boil alive in seawater for best results.

being scratch resistant is completely different from being scratch proof (which is as far as i know impossible). abuse the device enough and it will scratch.

i seem to recall reading about another capacitive based reactionless engine (operating off of the Woodward effect) where the dielectric within a capacitor would undergo mass fluctuations, and by syncing this up with a mechanical oscillation you could produce thrust. that big hunk of plastic could be operating as a dielectric in a capacitor (especially with all that copper around it).

i "upgraded" my ipod video's (5th gen) firmware to rockbox many years ago, to this day i credit its battery longevity to the fact that apple's battery management code has been replaced by something cobbled together by hackers.

i dont think they make rom anymore, certainly not the write once and if there are bugs in your firmware then deal with it kind. or those cool eproms with the little window in the chip where you had to erase it with uv light. modern eeproms are pretty good, i sometimes wonder why they arent used instead of flash. i know working with arduino that you can overwrite the eeprom about 10x as often as the flash before it degrades. its probably a density thing. most of the modern eeproms ive used have a serial interface, and so would be somewhat slower than a typical storage device. older mobos used to have those removable eeprom/flash chips with a parallel interface, but a fairly recent mobo had a socketed 8-pin dip spi eeprom, which i thought looked out of place on a modern mobo. then again you really dont need to run much code off of it. just enough to get start a bootloader. once the computer is up and running it relies little on the bios. in the old days the computer was dependent on a lot of bios code but i think those dependencies have been solved in other ways.

where i live its a nice and toasty 39f. thanks for stealing all our cold.

there is not enough room in this one to be a psychopath. i think id wreck the big ship, then use the little ship to get nachos.