Early Risers.

[polybear]

3 minutes ago, New Haven Neil said:

 

Absolutely, having battled with ours on several occasions - horrid thing, but I want our money's worth out of it!  NHN, ex-MIMarE. Oh and MCIPD but I keep that quiet given the love for HR on here! Oops. 

 

Oh dear....

Sadly the former is totally neutralised by the latter.  Go to jail, don't pass go, don't collect two hundred smackers....

[PupCam]

21 minutes ago, New Haven Neil said:

Oh and MCIPD but I keep that quiet given the love for HR on here! Oops. 

 

Oh, and he seemed like such a nice boy

 

19 minutes ago, polybear said:

** ISTR that Puppers happened to work in one of those buildings.....

 

Nothing to do with me.     

 

Actually, you used the words "work" and "Puppers" in the same sentence.    Silly boy 

[JohnDMJ]

 

Just one observation:

 

1 hour ago, Barry O said:

And the Big Boss man is, apparently a Fellow of some Engineering Society..  glad I am not in that Society but in a proper Engineering Institute!

 

BAz

 

 

Institute or Institution? The IMechE, IMarE, IEE, ICE, etc. are all Institutions as distinct from Institutes!

[grandadbob]

7 hours ago, New Haven Neil said:

First time we visited Amberley (for a miniature traction engine rally, admittedly a 'few' years ago)

 

 

Now there's a coincidence as when we went there was a miniature traction engine rally.  Some really lovely stuff on display.   I remember it because one of the engines lost a front wheel and caused a bit of a traffic jam for a while!

[grandadbob]

I have over many years bought 3 of Mr Dyson's devices.. All of them have developed a fault just after the warranty ran out so that's a bit clever of him.  I now know better and after unsuccessfully trying to fix the last one bought a Shark instead.  It's not bad and is not perfect but will do for now.  I think next time I'll splash out on a Miele.

[simontaylor484]

On The Tonight programme on ITV they are on about the lack of repairabilty of domestic appliances it has taken most of the programme for some one to mention the fact you can't get in them for the anti tamper screws. It was a mobile phone repair guy that said about I phones that you need a special screwdriver that Apple dont want you to have.

[PupCam]

 

2 hours ago, Barry O said:

beautiful design - designed to fail resulting in users paying out more spondulicks to repair the carp design.

 

9 minutes ago, grandadbob said:

All of them have developed a fault just after the warranty ran out so that's a bit clever of him. 

 

2 hours ago, PupCam said:

So the question is;     Is  this a Smart Design or Stupid (bound to fail) Design?

 

Well the answer has to be its a very Smart design, that's why JD is worth £16B give or take a bit ........................................................ and I'm not.      

 

Or, for the philosophers amongst us, maybe it's actually a Schrödinger Design? 

[Barry O]

1 hour ago, JohnDMJ said:

 

Just one observation:

 

 

Institute or Institution? The IMechE, IMarE, IEE, ICE, etc. are all Institutions as distinct from Institutes!

IET .. there is no longer an IEE.. 

 

and they may be called Institutions but they are a bit like an Institute..

 

Baz

[Ozexpatriate]

40 minutes ago, simontaylor484 said:

On The Tonight programme on ITV they are on about the lack of repairabilty of domestic appliances it has taken most of the programme for some one to mention the fact you can't get in them for the anti tamper screws. It was a mobile phone repair guy that said about I phones that you need a special screwdriver that Apple dont want you to have.

There is a burgeoning "right to repair" movement. 

 

It's a meaningful discussion regarding things like one-way screws but it's more complicated when to achieve smaller form factors disassembly is difficult to almost impossible - like in mobile telephones.

 

Relative to products containing semiconductors I believe this is misguided.

 

Semiconductors are not intentionally designed with so-called "planned obsolescence". It pretty much comes included whether the manufacturer wants it or not with what are called "aging effects" - which are a natural degradation of transistor performance over time. Any individual failure point is worse with newer, smaller geometries and higher transistor counts.

 

For Mil-spec applications an enormous amount of extra work has to go in to make sure that the aging effects do not cause device failures over the intended lifetime of the device. This of course isn't done for commercial products. It is expensive.

[Ozexpatriate]

7 hours ago, J. S. Bach said:

I sure hope that is a ferry that you are sitting on.

Indeed it was. I had to wait for one full ferry load ahead of me (which made the ferry route ultimately longer than the over-packed highway) but I got to be right up front for the crossing. 

 

Rather than fuming in heavy traffic, even while stopped waiting, it was pleasant to sit, radio on, by the river watching the ferry cross back and forth. 

[Tony_S]

59 minutes ago, simontaylor484 said:

It was a mobile phone repair guy that said about I phones that you need a special screwdriver

Or the repair guy doesn’t want potential customers know is available as part of part of a repair set from Amazon for just over £10

[simontaylor484]

13 minutes ago, Tony_S said:

Or the repair guy doesn’t want potential customers know is available as part of part of a repair set from Amazon for just over £10

Yes thats probably right, to be honest he never said how he had got the screwdriver that is unavailable either. 

 

 

[polybear]

1 hour ago, simontaylor484 said:

On The Tonight programme on ITV they are on about the lack of repairabilty of domestic appliances it has taken most of the programme for some one to mention the fact you can't get in them for the anti tamper screws. It was a mobile phone repair guy that said about I phones that you need a special screwdriver that Apple dont want you to have.

 

Sets of security bits for many applications are easily available cheaply, e,g,:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/283909115018?hash=item421a4d4c8a:g:OIEAAOSwJ41daN6L

 

However, I have come across situations where a security screw was buried deep inside a hole, so the bit holder wouldn't fit down the hole....

 

As for repairability, many companies either don't make many of the spares available - or if they are then they are often so expensive it just isn't worth it.  Or there's the dirty tricks brigade - Bosch will sell you a new circuit board, which then needs programming by a service engineer once installed   Why not sell it already programmed? 

 

As for James Dyson, I wonder how those in Malmesbury who helped him make his fortune feel after so much work went to Malaysia....

 

In other news:

For those with such gadgets the following may be worth noting:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-58911296

[Winslow Boy]

 

3 minutes ago, polybear said:

 

Sets of security bits for many applications are easily available cheaply, e,g,:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/283909115018?hash=item421a4d4c8a:g:OIEAAOSwJ41daN6L

 

However, I have come across situations where a security screw was buried deep inside a hole, so the bit holder wouldn't fit down the hole....

 

As for repairability, many companies either don't make many of the spares available - or if they are then they are often so expensive it just isn't worth it.  Or there's the dirty tricks brigade - Bosch will sell you a new circuit board, which then needs programming by a service engineer once installed   Why not sell it already programmed? 

 

As for James Dyson, I wonder how those in Malmesbury who helped him make his fortune feel after so much work went to Malaysia....

 

In other news:

For those with such gadgets the following may be worth noting:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-58911296

 

Yes I saw this. Leaving aside that the chap will probably lose his house what astounded me was the relatively low numbers of people with them. I would have thought it would have been much more. It just goes to show that everything isn't what Amazon wants you to believe.

[simontaylor484]

I feel sorry for the guy in this case he was only trying to protect his property from tea leaves.

It does open up a can of worms for folk who protect their  property with cctv 

This part of the judgement got me

 

alarmed and appalled" to notice that he had a camera mounted on his shed and that footage from it was sent to his smartphone.

What's the problem with that

[Compound2632]

The problem was that his cctv was set up to view his neighbours' property as well as his own and to pick up private conversations at some considerable distance from his own front door. In other words, an invasion of his neighbours' privacy.

[figworthy]

12 hours ago, Tony_S said:

We had a communication from BT that they are planning to replace our phone line with “Digital Home”. The main landline phone will need be plugged into the router and any other landline phone or fax extensions plugged into a wireless adapter. Unlike the existing system the phone won’t work if there is a domestic power cut. Sounds fun.

 

If it is the set up that I think it is, then there should be the option of connecting a form of UPS to it, which should allow existing phones to work if the power goes off, least wise until the UPS runs out (which for most power outages it shouldn't).

 

Adrian

[Coombe Barton]

... first we've heard from Chris Whitty for a while ...

 

https://johncolby.wordpress.com/2021/10/14/hospital-pressure/

[Ozexpatriate]

14 minutes ago, figworthy said:

... there should be the option of connecting a form of UPS to it

These products are being advertised heavily on television here right now.

 

No messing around with refueling them, almost 'instant' on. Automatic transfer of power. My neighbour has something very similar. When I lost power for a couple of hours some weeks back, he was undisrupted.

 

After my experience during February's ice storm, I'd consider one but I don't have a convenient space outside my switchboard. I think my neighbour had planned for it from the outset.

[Ozexpatriate]

1 hour ago, Winslow Boy said:

... what astounded me was the relatively low numbers of people with them. I would have thought it would have been much more.

Increasing every day in the US. The number of 'newsworthy' events captured on doorbell cameras is increasing greatly.

 

In the US recently there was a meteor that few, besides the camera, witnessed and yesterday a plane crash in a suburb.

 

58 minutes ago, simontaylor484 said:

It does open up a can of worms for folk who protect their  property with cctv 

With the UK's love of ubiquitous CCTV, this judgement feels a bit like surveillance is OK for "authorities", but not for individuals.

 

And yes, he should have been more careful about how much of his neighbour's back yard was visible and ignorance of the law is no excuse, etc.

[J. S. Bach]

3 minutes ago, Ozexpatriate said:

These products are being advertised heavily on television here right now.

 

No messing around with refueling them, almost 'instant' on. Automatic transfer of power. My neighbour has something very similar. When I lost power for a couple of hours some weeks back, he was undisrupted.

 

After my experience during February's ice storm, I'd consider one but I don't have a convenient space outside my switchboard. I think my neighbour had planned for it from the outset.

Mine is propane-fueled 14KW Generac. There is a thirty second delay before start-up to prevent starting during a blip in the power. Here it is during installation maybe the unloaded test run:

 

[Ozexpatriate]

1 minute ago, J. S. Bach said:

Mine is propane-fueled 14KW Generac.

You get a lot more thunderstorms than I do (and I suspect are in a slightly less populated area). How many times has it kicked in since you installed it and for how long?

[tigerburnie]

G'night all

[PupCam]

1 hour ago, Ozexpatriate said:

There is a burgeoning "right to repair" movement.

 

And quite rightly so.    There should also be a movement by the manufacturers to "Design for Repair as well as Design for Manufacture.   They won't want to do this obviously as they want to sell more and more new product, in fact it is not in their interest to Design for Repair so they need to be forced to do it - if only to reduce waste and save the planet ignoring the rights of the consumer.

 

I really like this chap who, it has to be said, appears not to be keen on Apple's business model.

 

 

 

1 hour ago, Ozexpatriate said:

Relative to products containing semiconductors I believe this is misguided.

 

Can't say I agree with  that as a general statement.        There are many types of semiconductor based products and devices where it is perfectly acceptable and possible and even desirable for suitably skilled and knowledgable people, professional or amateur, to repair those devices rather than chuck them away and replace with something else.

 

1 hour ago, Ozexpatriate said:

Semiconductors are not intentionally designed with so-called "planned obsolescence". It pretty much comes included whether the manufacturer wants it or not with what are called "aging effects" - which are a natural degradation of transistor performance over time. Any individual failure point is worse with newer, smaller geometries and higher transistor counts.

 

Aging effects are probably a minor consideration in the overall scheme of things I would have thought.   The major source of obsolescence in semiconductor based devices, planned or otherwise, is the actual availability of replacement key complex and particularly programmed devices.     For example;  I foresee a sharp cut-off in the number of  cars from say the 1980s when electronics started to takeover so many functions in vehicles kept going to form the subsequent generations of classics.   Many of course will say that's a good thing as  it helps rid the world of environmentally unfriendly vehicles although I don't subscribe to that simplistic view!       "Technology Insertion" is a key technique to overcome this sort of obsolescence but it's really only viable for large markets due to the development costs of the technology to be inserted.

 

1 hour ago, Ozexpatriate said:

For Mil-spec applications an enormous amount of extra work has to go in to make sure that the aging effects do not cause device failures over the intended lifetime of the device. This of course isn't done for commercial products. It is expensive.

 

And even that doesn't guarantee  long-term reliability of military equipment - go speak to the Army, Navy and Air Force!    

 

55 minutes ago, polybear said:

As for repairability, many companies either don't make many of the spares available - or if they are then they are often so expensive it just isn't worth it.  Or there's the dirty tricks brigade - Bosch will sell you a new circuit board, which then needs programming by a service engineer once installed  

 

I think I've already told the story of my repair to my old Bosch dishwasher to overcome the "this track isn't large enough for the current it has to carry so it turns into a fuse"  problem.    Bosch solution - replace with a new but equally flawed board, my solution - replace the burnt track with a bit of tin copper wire that is up to the current that has to be carried.

 

Alan

 

 

[JohnDMJ]

 

1 hour ago, Barry O said:

IET .. there is no longer an IEE.. 

 

and they may be called Institutions but they are a bit like an Institute..

 

Baz

 

I have deleted your joker and quote:

 

"The Institution of Engineering and Technology is a multidisciplinary professional engineering institution. The IET was formed in 2006 from two separate institutions: the Institution of Electrical Engineers, dating back to 1871, and the Institution of Incorporated Engineers dating back to 1884."

 

They are professional bodies of academically qualified members.

 

For example, the Institute of Advanced Motorists  is an amateur organisation.

 

I will also point out for reference (and will go no further on this soap box) that in all cases above, the word 'Engineer' is capitalised. Heating, refrigeration, plumbing and electrical (et alia) ""engineers"" who present to fix your household appliances are excluded! Hence the 'need' for salutations like 'Dipl Ing' and (IIRC) Eur Ing which have been introduced to trump CEng to reflect the academic status.

 

Only in america was Casey Jones an engineer!