Don Lancaster's What's New?       2000 Archive Blog

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Hopefully, we will soon be going to a new and far more
modern server that gives us lots of opportunities to correct
previous problems and add new features. In the works are
improved search and stats, dynamic html, greatly expanded
tech coverage, .asp files that dramatically improve site
management, includes, banner rotations, secure site sales,
and great heaping bunches more. Stay tuned.

Improved & expanded the JavaScript Magic Sinewave
Calculator. This one looks best with NetScape's continuous
updates rather than Internet Exploder's "update only after
function complete" style.

Here's a link to an "adequate supply" of Pittsburgh
Streetcar Photos

WARNING: Attempting to view all of these in one
session will result in yunz guys pronouncing "beer"
as "airn". Or making a mill outta a chopaam sammitch
and Olde Frothingslosh Pale Stale Ale in Sliberty.

Fortunately, in regards to this matter, a desert rat
like me is immune.

Skooze me while I redd up the website.

Just uploaded an interactive JavaScript Magic
Sinewave Calculator.

Many thanks to Kevin Kelly and others in the Winter
2000 edition of the latest Whole Earth Catalog. See
our mentions on pages 43 and 44.

Yumpin Yimminy. Try viewing our PDF files in Adobe'
new and free eBook Reader. You can ( sort of ) have them
read out loud to you if you are fluent in Sweedish. Also
gives you two pages at once if your montor and display
support is big enough. Also greatly improves laptop
readibility.

Please welcome Timeline as our newest Guru's Lair
Banner Advertiser. Timeline offers a wide variety of
LCD bargains, GPS options, and other experimental
tech goodies.

Have started work on a major website upgrade with a
number of new features. Please pardon any temporary
inconveniences. Yes we are working on the search
bug, the banner rotator, more buttons, more links,
and several other new features.

Just picked up great heaping bunches of Category 5
networking cable. email me if you want to get in
ahead of the hoarders.

A reminder that our Tech Musings and Blatant
Opportunist columns continue as ezines on my Guru's
Lair website. The Resource Bin is now a private
consulting service that you can personally participate
in by using our InfoPack Service.

Just picked up a surplus professional Ultralight Hand
and Foot uv phototherapy unit that's now available at
a bargain price. If you are a properly licenced medical
professional,  please email me for further details.
This is also the world's largest EPROM eraser!

Took the Cheby to the Leby with this definitive new
tutorial on Magic Sinewaves.

Oops. It turns out our dual turbine thermocouples are
really type K rather than type J. Sorry about that. But
this makes them even better, especially for kilns.

Just got a new load of mint 0-5 PSI fully conditioned
differential pressure sensors. Also have superbly rugged
adjustable companion pressure switches. You can email
me for details.

Have finally found the holy grail of steplocked magic
sinewaves. Turned out to be astoundingly and elegantly
simple.

Sorry about the "no subdirectory" glitch in our search
engine. The ISP is working on it, along with several
enhancements. Hope to do a major revamping shortly.

The Oxbridge Media Finder is finally back in gear again.
Use the OXBRDG button on my Home Page.

USGS Topo maps on the web have sure gotten better
lately. Check out www.topozone.com

Also note the secret gotcha in accessing 7.5 minute
topos on the Terra Server (our AERIAL button) site:
These only click in at 4 meter and finer resolution.

Just got some beautiful low pressure sensor switches
1.5 to 8 PSI. The feds paid over $400 each for these
all stainless, high current, differential adjustable.
Sealed and as new. Available in huge quantities. You
can email me for details.

Here's a neat trick to get wire off of large reels: Put a
big Lazy Susan on top of the axis-vertical reel. Then
recoil the wire directly onto the Lazy Susan or into a
box or wrapping jig of some sort. Be sure you rewrap
in the same direction. The Lazy Susan alternately
spins in either direction, exactly absorbing as many
radians of phase as needed to keep the wire untwisted.

Note that Lazy Susans for printers or monitors will
usually have an easily removed stop that prevents a
continuous rotation.

Sorry about the outages. Our ISP just added several
new drives. Apparently we were getting so many hits
the log files and the Webtrends files were eating
the drives alive. These are now separate from the
main drives.

Just uploaded Tech Musings #149 on touch screens,
transmission line transformers, PostScript proc diversion,
and lots of other goodies.

A reminder that the depth and frequency of future
Muse and Blat columns depends on your participation
as Banner Advertisers.

Just uploaded the source code for Tech Musings #149.
If you want to see how I do all the sneaky stuff in my
columns. Like HTML-style buttons, active web
links, correct gray tinting, semi-animated PDF, and
bunches more.

A reminder that this source code needs our Gonzo
Utilities disk file accessible.

The glitch in the free Levy-Latham NSN's seems to be
corrected. To access  any NSN, go to any Levy-Lantam
auction, and click on any ALL NUMBERS NSN in any
lot. After access, substitute your NSN in the url, then
reenter.

I'll try to work up a tutorial on other NSN sources in a
future Tech Musings.

Please note that we do ~NOT~ offer foreign sales or
support in any way, shape or form. One of the many
thoroughly time-tested reasons is that certain of our
mil surplus products require our contractually signing
end user agreements. On certain of our items for sale,
it conceivably could be a felony to transship these items
to foreign nationals. As would shipping them to a US
address used by a foreign national.

Because of my time constraints, foreign mail is returned
unopened and foreign email is ignored. Foreign eBay
bidders are automatically disqualified.

Just got a medical grade 1/3 hp 1 SCFM @ 50 PSI
compressor and a great heaping bunch of Variacs
(some real, some fake), and some mint 155 mm
Howitzer and M1 tank nameplates. Email me if you
want to get in ahead of the hoarders on these unusual
and hard-to-find items.

A sneaky trick called Showpage Diversion lets you take
existing PostScript or Acrobat PDF files and provide
watermarks, undercolor, standardized borders, or
renumber , etc.... Here's the new Sourcecode and a
Demo. Read the sourcecode in a WP or editor, then
send to Distiller.

Added a Fitness Quiz, some medical community comments,
and an Aerobic Rate Chart to our DONTSICK.PDF tuitorial
in the Blatant Opportunist Library.

Summer storms have been giving our ISP fits, so the
Webtrends reports may be out of date or inaccurate
for a while. We are averaging a thousand unique views
per day and around 400,000 hits per month. You are
welcome to participate in our success by becoming a
banner advertiser. Check out this free tutorial.

Found a new synthesis algorithm for Delta Friendly
Magic Sinewaves.

Steplock limits appear to be set by "one edge controls
one harmonic". For instance, a normal steplock-24
would have 6 pulses and 12 transitions. Indirectly,
these 12 transitions can control harmonics 1, 3, 5, 7, 9,
11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, and 23.

A delta steplock-32 would have 8 pulses and 16 transitions.
Eight of the transitions are used to force delta friendliness
and control harmonics 3, 9, 15, 21, 27... The remaining
eight transitions can control harmonics 1, 5, 7, 11, 13,
17, 19, 23.

Just got great heaping bunches of new sensors in.
Honeywell solid state units in 0-1 PSI differential
and 0-30 PSI absolute. Mint Penn A/C overpressure
units. Even minter low pressure all-stainless switches
perfect for tank controls. Also gauges that sense a
breath of air. You can email me for further details.

A reminder about our InfoPack service that gives
you instant consulting answers.

Latest Blatant Opportunist #61 is a tutorial on
Steplocked Magic Sinewaves.

Here's how to scam the ~complete~ NSN info on many
fed items: Click on  my LEVYLATH button. Then select
auctions and pick an auction. Try items at random till
you find one with an all-numerals NSN. Click on it. Now
replace the NSN in your url box with the one you want
and reclick.

Compared to using DRMO3, you get the complete
buying history, costs, etc...

Completed this phase of the magic sinewave catalogs.
This should give you a useful sampler of normal, power,
enhanced, and delta friendly variations.

Additional catalogs will get uploaded when and as funded
by Banner Advertisers or Associate Partners.

The complete catalog also can be made available in CD
ROM form, along with full generation source code. You
can . email me for details.

Got some unusual surplus scientific instruments. Including
a cloud height  clinomenter (doubles as a hobby horse), a
premium Smar brand 2300 PSI all stainless pressure
transmitter, and a beautiful and huge Wallace & Tiernman
0.01% (!) absolute pressure gauge. You can email me for
more details.

Fixed (I hope) the Tech Musings library page so all older
files can be accessed. The missing recent files should get
uploaded shortly.

And two more magic sinewave catalogs. The first gives
you one hundred constant power increments with zero
harmonics through the 22nd. The  second demos carrier
suppression that also zeros the usually strong 23rd ( and,
of course, the 24th ) harmonics.

As usual, source code and consulting services are
availible if you email me.

Added another amazing step locked Magic Sinewave
catalog. This one has ZERO harmonic energy from 2
through 22! email me for support details.

Just got a surplus pair of Gigatronics 610's. Please
email me if you have any interest in these outstanding
instruments for a fraction of the usual $10K asking
price. Also have some new accellerometers, mass
flowmeters, and bunches of thermocouples of all sizes
and types. Plus another like-new complete Kepro
printed circuit plate -thru lab.

Upgraded and improved the tentative catalog of Step-
Locked Magic Sinewaves. Managed to eliminate an
apparently "unneeded" pulse in the three phase friendly
sequences for even better efficiency. Several more big
time "breakthrough" sequences should follow shortly.
More help is available through our InfoPack and Magic
Sinewaves programs.

Netscape users may have been experiencing blank
screens on our eBay buttons. This was apparently
caused by eBay changing their internal links. I fixed
the home page and will get the others shortly.

Curiously, my first eBay email was apparently
competently answered. The clueless followup
thanked me for having fixed a problem that still
existed.

Uploaded a tentative catalog of Step-Locked  Magic
Sinewaves. There's still some fine points to be resolved
(especially with yet unposted larger amplitudes), so
your comments and testing are welcome.

These offer ZERO amplitude to the first TWENTY
TWO harmonics! They are also "delta friendly"
and easily drive three phase loads.

Several of you have asked about our eBay photos.
These are usually a high resolution scan of the actual
item being offered. The scan is then watermarked and
such enhancements as clarifying lettering and shadow
adjustment are sometimes made. Details are found in
IMAGIMAG.PDF

Custom photo prep work is available. Email me for
details.

As I mentioned before, my print columns have been
discontinued because of low pay or slow pay by magazines
in severe (and likely terminal) financial difficulties. Not
paying attention to the wants and needs of their readers
has apparently finally come home to roost.

The Blatant Opportunist and Tech Musings will definitely
continue online in greatly enhanced and improved formats.

Resource Bin has been taken private and is now
available to you on a custom and individual basis. You
can email me or visit our InfoPack Library Page for
further details.

A reminder that new banner advertisers are welcome so
long as I can honestly endorse them and genuinely
believe in their products. We are in the process of upgrading
the banner system and hope to have full autorotation and
detailed stats in place very shortly.

May have just found the holy grail of Magic Sinewaves.
Am checking out an ( apparently ) brand new synthesis
proceedure that lets you force any number (!) of low
harmonics to precisely zero while still being three phase
friendly. A full catalog will shortly be uploaded. You can
email me for advance details. Development partners are
currently being sought.

Levy Latham is apparently taking over most of the
military auctions. Two of their latest website additions
are online auctions and incredibly detailed NSN info.
The latter lets you find out how much the feds paid
for something, WHEN (!) they bought it, and who they
bought it from, and commercial part numbers. All
sorts of great hidden info here.

Just got a whole load of high tech swizzle sticks.
Otherwise known as NDT eddy current probes.
You can email me for more details.

Wonder of wonders, the feds will be permanently
turning OFF the GPS selective availability as of May
1! This means that cheap GPS receivers will now be
ten times more accurate. The expensive ones, of
course,  knew how to beat SA for years.

Added Adobe's PDF Search Engine to our home page
"mauve" links. Since virtually everything technical is
in PDF format, this is an incredibly powerful way to
pick up what most other engines miss.

Latest Tech Musings 148 is on new algae hydrogen
sources, Taylor Series, surplus updates, lithium
polyumer batteries, and understanding nonlinearity.

Urgent: If you live near Sacramento, CA and can do
some McClellan DRMO triage for me for a reasonable
fee, please email me immediately.

The "next big thing" on the web is certain to be SVG,
short for Scalable Vector Graphics. Get the fundamentals
from www.w3.org and brand new and free beta browser
plugins from Adobe Systems.

Latest Blatant Opportunist #60 is on eBay insider
selling secrets.

Repaired and expanded the Webmaster Library page.

I'm getting these strange couldn't-find-a-pig-in-a-dishpan
emails looking for the Digimatic PIC source code. It is
linked here and found here. Sadly, the original author is
deceased.

Here's how to get from a Levy-Latham NSN to the feds
NSN without paying the thousand dollar per year access
bounty: Click on my DRMS4 button. Enter 6630 as the
NSN prefix. Click on NORTHEAST. Get a list of items.
Click on any blue item. Erase the last nine digits and
either copy or type in your desired NSN.

Apparently the NSN and the rest of the stock number
are unreleated. Let me know if you find a cleaner or
more convenient solution.

Poptronix has just told me they do not want to run the
Tech Musings column any more. These and newer
columns will most definitely continue here in ezine
format. The columns have recently been improved
with more links, color, and images. Additional
Banner Advertisers are welcomed.

Latest Tech Musings #147 is on pendulum accelerometers, servo
& feedback concepts 404 log file error extraction, listening in on the
bats in your belfry and using synchros and selsyns.

Added some Servo and Feedback books to our Book Access Page.
Also USB Complete and State of the World 2000.

Just got a whole load of PMI 1/3 horsepower (!) pancake servo motors.
Also some premium Barnes GC-like SAE AA hydraulic pumps. These do
need some refurb, so let me know if you are interested in a lot buy as is.

Uploaded Tech Musings #144 on thermocouples, thermometry,
gambler's ruin, and favicon.ico.

Just got a very few MINT kiss-your-ass-goodbye nuclear radioactivity
circular slide rule collectibles (also handy for dealing with pesky
neighbors), and some nice ceiling fan lighting kits.

Let me know if you have any interest in these.

Latest Tech Musings #146 is on pulse electrolysis myths, sneaky
capacitor switching techniques, Acrobat url extraction, electrochem
books, and more.

Archived the 1999 What's New files as WHTNU99.sHTML

Please welcome Diversified Engineering as our latest Banner
Advertiser. They offer a variety of superb PIC related development
and educational boards.

Expanded the "mauve" search engine listings on the home page.
Added a web discovery of the week feaature. This is usually some
exciting new site I have found that eventually will get linked.

Here's a secret way to find at least some of the DRMO to Levy-Latham
inventory transfers: Click on the DRMS4 button on my Guru's Lair home
page. Sort on bid number then date. Set output format to **NOT** print
the site name. (!) This seems handy for finding otherwise unavailable
acquisition costs. The transfers are usually sale 99005.

Some Electrochemistry Books have been added to our Book Access links.

Just added some Thermoelectric Power Generators and highly collectible
Circular Slide Rules to our Live Auction page.

Oops. The Contactless Charger components we covered in Muse 142 were
really TDK parts, rather than Toko. More details at www.component.tdk.com.
Panasonic also has a PHS charger system at www.panasonic.com.

Latest Tech Musings #145 is on four point Bezier curve fitting, PIC Digimatic
interfaces, Magnetorheology demos, and bunches of other goodies. The
print version of this column supposedly is now in Poptronix magazine.

Pick your blog year...
1997	1998	1999	2000	2001
2002	2003	2004	2005	2006
2007	2008	2009	2010	2011
2012	2013	2014	2015	2016
2017	2018	2019	2020	-----

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