Posted by Tim Jackson on March 5, 2009, 10:34 pm
Jim Wilkins wrote:
>> Presumably a supplier with a US retail presence like Batteries Plus will
>> have a bit better quality control since they have a reputation to
>> maintain.
>
> Possibly. Apparently Exide makes the Werker brand.
>
> A new battery for my cell phone would cost more in Radio Shack than
> another phone, so I checked it in Batteries Plus. It was almost as
> expensive there. The 2 year old phone battery is fine, actually.
>
> I recently treated myself to a laptop for my birthday, a $0 Compaq
> from 1999 with almost an hour of capacity still left on probably the
> original Li-ion battery. 500 MHz and Win2000 is enough for most
> applications.
>
> I reformatted it FAT32 and rigged it to dual-boot Win2000 or the DOS
> from Win98SE, which gives QBasic full unhindered access to the
> parallel port for hardware tinkering. I've already logged the on and
> off times for my electric water heater with it.
>
> Before you Unix 'shippers chime in, the datalogging voltmeter has only
> DOS and Win display software, although I wrote a faster driver in QB.
>
> Jim Wilkins
<very quietly>
Your logging software would probably run OK on Linux under Wine or
Dosemu. Should you want to.
</very quietly>
A lot of your battery issue is I think really that battery technology
has moved on, and new batteries get a lot more bang for your buck, so it
may well be cheaper to replace the whole instrument than to replace an
obsolescent battery.
Tim Jackson
Posted by Jim Wilkins on March 6, 2009, 12:05 am
> <very quietly>
> Your logging software would probably run OK on Linux under Wine or
> Dosemu. Should you want to.
> </very quietly>
I might want to more if I didn't have so much unsupported hardware,
like WinModems, or which need proprietary Unix drivers that cost more
than I paid for the hardware. Open Source has its limits when buying
cheap surplus office equipment. I do use Knoppix to explore the hidden
partitions etc. A few minutes ago I found that my ATSC tuner is not
supported for MythTV.
Posted by Ignoramus28258 on March 6, 2009, 7:53 pm
>>
>> <very quietly>
>> Your logging software would probably run OK on Linux under Wine or
>> Dosemu. ?Should you want to.
>> </very quietly>
> I might want to more if I didn't have so much unsupported hardware,
> like WinModems, or which need proprietary Unix drivers that cost more
> than I paid for the hardware. Open Source has its limits when buying
> cheap surplus office equipment. I do use Knoppix to explore the hidden
> partitions etc. A few minutes ago I found that my ATSC tuner is not
> supported for MythTV.
What tuner do you have?
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Posted by Jim Wilkins on March 6, 2009, 10:09 pm
On Mar 6, 2:53pm, Ignoramus28258 <ignoramus28...@NOSPAM.
28258.invalid> wrote:
> What tuner do you have?
WinTV-HVR 950, an external USB tuner, in a PC that barely meets the
minimum requirements. It does work as long as the picture is in a
relatively small window. Almost every part of my low-buck HDTV system
is marginal starting with the home-made UHF antenna and I've been
improving it a little at a time. Rumor has it that MythTV and an
internal PCI tuner might work better, but that isn't a priority now.
Jim Wilkins
Posted by Neon John on March 7, 2009, 5:20 pm
On Thu, 5 Mar 2009 16:05:48 -0800 (PST), Jim Wilkins
>I might want to more if I didn't have so much unsupported hardware,
>like WinModems, or which need proprietary Unix drivers that cost more
>than I paid for the hardware. Open Source has its limits when buying
>cheap surplus office equipment. I do use Knoppix to explore the hidden
>partitions etc. A few minutes ago I found that my ATSC tuner is not
>supported for MythTV.
The solution to that is not Wine but VMware. VMware lets windows,
genuine loaded-from-the-distro-disk windows run as a task under Linux.
(or vice versa but why would anyone want to do that?) I run my
proprietary instrumentation and other software in a VMware window or
two and have all the benefits of Linux elsewhere. In fact, I can run
two incompatible programs in separate windows instances, something
that is impossible to do with native windows. If you take a look at
my blog for the last few days you can see how to use VMware's free
products to set up a virtual machine environment and avoid the about
$000/seat charge that VMware normally costs.
BTW, most winmodems are now supported. check linmodem.org.
I'm not a Linux fanboy. Lord knows it has its own set of problems.
But! At least those problems are fixable. I converted to Linux a few
months ago because the bastards at MS gave me no choice. I will not
suffer the Vista experience and I will not participate in their new
rental model that is coming soon. That's where you'll not own the
software but will pay a yearly rental to use it. Shades of IBM in the
70s. Linux is the only real alternative to proprietary software.
BTW, this machine, an Acer Aspire, is about 2 years old. I picked it
up used about 3 weeks ago for $00 after the magic blue smoke leaked
out of my 7 year old Dell. I bought from a used computer dealer which
means that I probably could have done better. I was off the net and
hand only the yellow pages to shop with so I bought what I could find.
That's an indicator of the low value of used laptops. You can get a
multi-ghz processor, a gig of memory and a fast bus for practically
pocket change.
Oh, and I'm writing this using Forte Agent running under Wine. Best
of both worlds. Excellent windows software and excellent Linux OS.
John
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>> have a bit better quality control since they have a reputation to
>> maintain.
>
> Possibly. Apparently Exide makes the Werker brand.
>
> A new battery for my cell phone would cost more in Radio Shack than
> another phone, so I checked it in Batteries Plus. It was almost as
> expensive there. The 2 year old phone battery is fine, actually.
>
> I recently treated myself to a laptop for my birthday, a $0 Compaq
> from 1999 with almost an hour of capacity still left on probably the
> original Li-ion battery. 500 MHz and Win2000 is enough for most
> applications.
>
> I reformatted it FAT32 and rigged it to dual-boot Win2000 or the DOS
> from Win98SE, which gives QBasic full unhindered access to the
> parallel port for hardware tinkering. I've already logged the on and
> off times for my electric water heater with it.
>
> Before you Unix 'shippers chime in, the datalogging voltmeter has only
> DOS and Win display software, although I wrote a faster driver in QB.
>
> Jim Wilkins