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Government Liquidation apparently dropped their one
dollar minimum bidding as a December-only promotion.
Many of their items are simply not worth gambling on
a $35 opening bid.

Wal-Mart is in the process of moving one of their
buildings a few hundred feet. In the process, they
are utterly demolishing the economies of TWO
Arizona communities. Naturally, there was a
K-Mart between the two sites that will have to be
torn down.

Several alt.marketing.online.ebay posters have asked
about Bruno.

Bruno is the AMOE attitude relateralization facilitator.
One of his specialties is reconfiguring top posters. In a
related endeavor, Bruno is also a product durability
tester for a major baseball bat manufacturer.

Bruno also does trucking for Norfolk & Waay. Who,
in a Kilgore Trout sort of way are NOT me and NOT
my website. I have no idea who their webmaster is.

I was surprised how much the value of tv repair shop
inventory has recently dropped. Photofacts sell only
marginally on eBay at four cents each, and full tube
caddies seem to be not doing very well at $30 or less.

The fact that old tv's even needed repair was telling.
As was their lack of cable and video inputs, their huge
size and weight, their pitiful pre-comb color separation,
their lack of regulation that left you with a tiny midscreen
image and everything else wrapped around, and the need
to re-converge your color alignment in a very painful
process if you so much as moved the tv a few feet. Plus
pitifully bad sound.

More on my earlier tv repair experiences can be found
in WAYWERE.PDF

There is an easy way to spot an extroverted engineer: They stare
at your shoes rather than their own.

Latest GuruGram #41 is on Enhancing your eBay Tactical and
Strategic Skills. You can also find the sourcecode here. And
similar resources on our Auction Help and Custom Auction
Resources library pages.

A reminder that Bee and I will be hosting the ARA winter
regional here at TFD on January 22nd, and that anyone with
an interest in caves is welcome to attend these free seminars.
Check the ARA Website for ongoing details.

Added a new third party paper on Bezier Circular Arc
Approximation to our Cubic Spline Library.

We have sold out of our Agilent multi port multiplexers,
the machine vision illuminators, triac optocouplers, the
Athena temperature controls, Thompson sliders, and the
ice cube relays. And are down to our very last Astronomy
table. A few of our superb Adept linear sliders remain,
mostly in the large and extra rugged one meter length size.

I've got bunches of new stuff to list on our eBay store,
especially high end HP manuals, and premium GR and
Leeds/Northrup cal lab instruments. email me for details.

The little nickel and dime stuff can eat you alive in any
business venture. While obsessive micromanagement is
usually NOT a good idea, it may pay to label the costs on
such items as Ziplock bags, Bubble-wrap rolls, and strapping
tape.

All of which raises a larger issue of decades of technology
that may end up "lost", just because they were barely
pre word processor. Again, it is not obvious who would
fund such activities and why they would do so.

An obvious first candidate would be all of the Tektronix
manuals, which have now been released to the public
domain. Once a Tek archive is set up, H-P and others
might be willing to follow suit. As might the Photofacts.

I'd also like to create a definitive website for the Mount
Graham Aerial Tramway, but the time and effort and risk
involved in processing the hundreds of photographs would
be enormous.

In answer to several recent email and helpline questions,
The ISMM Incredible Secret Money Machine is pretty
much in limbo. Outrageously expensive copies can be
found at Amazon Books, while the intro remains available
here. But I have started rework as a background project.

I'd like to offer all of my earlier books and articles as free
ebooks on my website, but it is not clear who would fund
this how. The ISMM was pre-computer, so a total rework
would be needed for decent file sizes and artwork quality.
There is also the dilemma as to who would read it why, since
so much has changed in so many different ways.

Update: The ISMM is now freely available online.
As are most of our books and papers.

Apparently http://geoheat.oit.edu/bulletin/bull23-1/art1.pdf
have done a major rework of the earlier NOAA hot spring
and hot well directories for DOE. There are now nearly
12,000 entries, mostly in Arizona and Oregon and Idaho
and other western states. Cost on CD in three formats is
$10 per state or $25 for them all.

There's a new toned down video version of "Debbie Does
Dallas" out. It is titled "Doris Does Des-Moines".

Just really, really pissed off a telephone salesman
with my old scam trap. Very simply, you NEVER
answer the question "How are you today?" For the
rule is that  the next person to speak - - - - -> loses!

Friends or family or any legit calls will go on talking
if you do not answer. Without missing a beat. Only a
salesman following a script has to wait for their totally
unexpected disaster to strike. Loads of fun.

And is 100 percent devastatingly effective. Try it.

"Keep trying weird stuff till something works" can be a
useful strategy when finding web answers starts to get
ugly. Ferinstance, I was looking at an aerial photo of the
grade school I had attended and noticed that the play
areas were now a large parking lot. Could something
have actually happened there since Patti Winterhalter
and I ate library paste together in the cloak closet of
Miss Lockhardt's second grade class?

Just entering the school name into Google produced
no (!) results at all, except for a totally empty data base
listing in a historical building register. And the school
district website made no (!) mention of the property.

Emailing them might have worked, but a bureaucratic
mind is a wonderful thing to waste. Likely results would
have been no answer at all or a security alarm or some
pedophile alert involving the men in black. Best to
leave as few tracks as possible in any cyberspace visit.

Trying the guess the street address through Maps On Us
produced the usual problem of their numbers being off by
just barely enough to end up useless. And Googleing the
street address without the number had the minor problem
that this street was a 95 mile long endless succession of
slurbs that produced 32,641 hits.

The key turned out to be the tax rolls. The township
zoning office had an outstanding web page that let you
click and expand any property. Which promptly gave
you the name of a commercial developer and the correct
address. While there was no developer website, punching
the real address back into Google then produced a short
list of assorted second tier financial planners, drug testing
services, radio broadcast advert tracking software, and
realtors.

The web bits and pieces strongly suggested that the three
story structures ended up as ADA compliance nightmares
that were quietly swept under the rug and then Dilbertized.
The only two reasons that Dilbertizing made any sense at
all was an utter dearth of commercial property space and a
major new thruway literally to their front door.

All of which begs the larger question: Is it just my
imagination or does library paste not taste nearly
as good as it used to? I suspect one lost secret is
serving it with a steel edged maple ruler.

My kind of technological breakthrough: It turns out
that plain old house wire makes an excellent Mystery
Band TeraHertz waveguide or antenna! Through a
new process called a surface plasmon polariton.
Per EE Times for Nov 29, 2004, page 49.

Updated and corrected some links on our Home Page.
Especially our upcoming ARA Arizona Regional
Association seminar and O'Reilly's new Make mag.

Latest GuruGram #39 is on Fun With Fields. You can
also find the sourcecode here, the PostScript field
plotting code here, and the .PDF field image here.

                                ( See newer archives for continuing updates )

For years, I've been creating what, for a better name,
we might call Lancasterisms. These are intentional but
apparent typographical errors intended to reveal a
higher or a greater truth.

Such as a groundswill of popular demand. Or what
those French Veterinarians call a "four paw". Or being
overly enameled on some idea. Or being a few bricks
shy of a full deck. Frosting the lily or gilding the cake.
Or not being able to hit the barn side of a broad. Or
sources close to an associate of the barber of a usually
reliable spokesperson. Many of the web perpetual
motion schemes and those electrolysis fantasies involve
electrocity.

All in one swell foop. Provided there's no oint in the flyment.

These are somehow related to the Stengleisms of others,
such as "Nobody goes there because it is too crowded",
"Deja Vu all over again", or "Let's keep the Status Quo
right where it is. Or "When you come to a fork in the road,
take it".

Or Ed Abbey's classic "Androgynous Ammonia".

I have a hollow feeling I've lost some of the better ones
of these somewhere along the way. As you go through
some of my older books and stories, please report any
that may be missing in action.

Because Opporknockity tunes but once.

Would whoever emailed me the alternate derivation
of a Bezier approximation to a circular arc please
email me another copy? It was lost during an email
mixup.

Government Liquidation has apparently gotten rid
of their $35 minimum bid replacing it with a one dollar
bid. Now, if they only would get rid of their maddeningly
infuriating auto extensions.....

To really win at an auction, it should be an obscure
one that takes a lot of digging to find. Problems with
"yard" or "barn" or auction "house" auctions include
heavy promotion and attendance, stuff having been
highgraded before it gets there, competitors scheduling
their lives around known dates, the possibility of
shlling, and various access problems.

I've found the best to be obscure industrial and dot bomb
auctions where "contents of shelves" and "contents of
rooms" happen late in the auction. Much more on our
Auction Help pages.

The original Pittsburgh Streetcars site is apparently
back up and  includes even more photos and some
annotation. They are now definitely way on up into
the "adequate supply" area.

WARNING: Attempting to view all photos at once
will result in yinz guys sayin "In regards to this matter"
in every centunce.

Fortunately, a desert rat like me is immune. Skooze me
while I redd up the website.

True Fact: Apparently "In regards to this matter" is
so deeply ingrained into the Pittsburgh collective psyche
that fire calls and EMS responses do not receive a 10-22
or are canceled. They are instead "Disregarded".

Picked up some "zero air" air cleaning units that provide
calibration air for various air pollution instruments. Please
email me for details on complete units and separate parts.

Added some new files to our Its A Gas hydrogen page
and our Cubic Splines library.

There seems to be a viability threshold to any technology
that determines when and where you can profit from it.
As ancient examples, miniature audio recorders went
nowhere before the C-30 cassette standard. And video
recording stumbled around till helical scans made it all
happen. The two megapixel sensor let digital cameras
completely and instantly obsolete all of  traditional
photography.

What are the thresholds likely to soon be crossed?
Obviously the $97 and 24 inch thin LED display. Which
should completely eliminate both television sets and
network broadcasts. The ten watt, one dollar white LED
with better-than-fluorescent efficiency is another. The
watchable eBook display which will instantly make
virtually all books into a quaint anachronism. I'd expect
all of book publishing to soon be blindsided by a student
revolt against backpacks.

Similarly, conventional silicon pv solar is clearly doomed
because of its inherent inefficiency and intractability that
guarantees it will never become a net energy source when
fully burdened at the system level. Additional dollars thrown
into this rathole are clearly dollars lost. But waiting in the
wings are multiple and spread workfunction technology,
MEMS nano antenna arrays, photonics, and metalloradicals.

Printers have long since gone direct-to-plate and
newspapers have been all digital for decades now, so
there seems to be no market whatsoever for litho
cameras these days. Even when you strip them for
lenses, vacuum pumps, light boxes, and timers the
whole operation seems kinda marginal. At least for me.

Rule: NEVER pay more that $7.50 for a mint late
model litho camera. And never move it more than a
few hundred feet.

There are several SAE and IJHE papers that suggest
a modest ( perhaps 5% hydrogen injection into a
conventional gas or diesel engine significantly can
improve both mileage and emissions.

But it has yet to be shown whether any net gain can
economically result. And whether such injection can be
made compatible with ongoing vehicle improvements.

The most likely route would be fuel reformation driven
by heat from the exhaust stream. I have had several
people wanting to use electrolysis instead contact me
who clearly have not even begun to look at any of the
fundamental numbers. Which appear really, really
grim to me.

Fer instance, an 18 wheeler might want to do a 5%
injection into a 300 Horsepower engine, or 15 net
horsepower of hydrogen.  Water is one ninth hydrogen.
At five percent injection, the water tank alone would
have to be 9/20ths the fuel tank size and thus not a
minor consideration.

15 horsepower of hydrogen would be 11,190 watts. Or,
over an hour, 11,190 watthours. Electrolysized water
produces 3 watt hours per liter, so 3730 liters per hour
or 62 liters of hydrogen per minute would be required.
With the finest of platinized platinum electrodes, your
electrolysis could possibly approach 50% efficiency
before amortization. Cheaper electrodes ( such as an
abysmally poor choice of stainless steel ) would likely
leave efficiency down in the 25% range.

And most auto alternators aren't all that efficient, so
something like 60 horsepower at the belt might end up
needed. A trucker might not be totally overjoyed at
taking a one-fifth hit on fuel costs and available power.

Further, at 12 volts, 60 horsepower would require a 3730
amp alternator, considerably larger than anything that is
commercially available for the automotive market. Worse
yet, a typical V-belt is rated around five horsepower, so
TWELVE belts might be needed between the engine and
the alternator!

More in our Energy Fundamentals and Electrolysis
Fundamentals tutorials.

We'll be hosting the ARA winter paper regional at
TFD on January 22nd, 2005. Anyone with an interest
in caves is more than welcome to attend. You can click
on the ARA Website or my mirror for more details.
No charge for attendance. But an  optional catered
lunch is $7.50.

A tip on viewing auction websites: Many of the photos
provided may have considerably higher resolution. Try
right clicking to  save the image, then bring it on up in
ImageView32 where you are likely to be able to magnify
it bunches. As well as bringing out shadow detail. If
right click does not work, try VIEW SOURCE and see
if you can directly download the actual photo url.

Case in point: A room full of tons of apparently worthless
old documents revealed the subtle and tiny red stripe on
hundreds of original HP test equipment manuals. Which
we now have up on eBay. More on our Auction Help and
Custom Auction Finder web pages.

One of the more obscure electronic backwaters is
the Inductive Voltage Divider. These are quite useful
for standards measurement and might make a nice
student paper. An inductive voltage divider is simply
a tapped autotransformer. At a given frequency, any
measured or connected impedances reflect as the
square of the turns ratio. And it apparently turns ratios
are tens to hundreds of times more stable than the best
resistive dividers, especially over a wider temperature
range.

I was about to say we have one of these in our eBay
store, but it BIN sold the instant it was listed.

I continue to be amazed by the vehemence with which
net energy analysis is attacked, especially among those
who are thermodynamically clueless. An fine tutorial
can be found here, which I'll be adding to our Its A Gas
library.

If in a net metering state, a power company says "I
will sell you a kilowatt hour of electricity for a dime
and I will buy a kilowatt hour of electricity from you
for a dime", then all of the dimes involved at that time
in that transaction clearly  have a value of one kilowatt
hour. This, of course, includes the dimes you spent on
amortization.

Thus if your pv solar system generates a dimes worth
of electricity per day at an amortization cost of two
dimes a day, you have a net energy sink and are simply
destroying gasoline. The longer you run the panel, the
more energy it destroys.

Any silicon pv solar panel has a two position switch on
it: Position "A" destroys a lot of gasoline. Position "B"
destroys even more gasoline and energy equivalents.

More in our Energy Fundamentals tutorial.

A reminder that many digital cameras now have video
outputs which ridiculously simplify your composition
through big screen viewing. Apple IIe color monitors
are perfect for this, and can be picked up at auction for
a dollar each.

It would be better if you could watch on the monitor
without  running the high current LCD display. Other
features I really could use is a joystick positionable
"focus here" arrow, a special "maximize depth of
field" option, and full wireless links for both the video
output and the picture downloads.

Photo tutorials appear on our Auction Help page.

Sometimes competing bidders at an auction will be after your
items of interest for wildly different reasons. So it pays to note
who outbid you for later possible deals. Ferinstance, someone
might be after a relay rack, while you are after only one or two
items the heavy and difficult to ship rack contains. A mountain
of obsolete docs I was bidding on to get some test equipment
manuals was also being bid on by someone who only wanted to
empty the notebooks for his office supply store. Or --arrggggh --
I was being outbid on some classic power utility electrics because
the other bidder was going to unwind the wire from the relays.

Added and updated some links to our Auction Help page.
Expanded our Search Engine access on our Home Page.

Just picked up a bunch of rare high end Hewlett Packard
manuals from an ATE bankruptcy. Along with some
Agilent Multi-port Test Sets, machine vision illuminators,
and bunches of premium ultra-dense connectors. We'll
quickly get these up on eBay, but you can also email me
for more details.

I love researching truly bizarre puzzles. Some of the
Pittsburgh Streetcars photos do show four mystery
structures in their background that look like giant
incinerators, perhaps twenty feet square by two
hundred high. After a serendipitous search that involved
everything from books about West View Park to long
shadows on aerial photographs, these turned out to be
the ventilator shafts for the Liberty Tubes.

Which, in regards to this matter, are about as uniquely
Pittsburgh as makin a mill outta a chopaam sammich an
Airn in Sliberty.

I still do not know what happened to the original photo
sources, so we can only offer limited access through the
Wayback Machine. Do any of you know the current story
on these?

Hint for those of you not up on Pittsburgheese: "Beer" is
pronounced "Airn". Unless it is Olde Frothingslosh Pale
State Ale.

Most web auction finder services could not find a pig
in a dishpan. Here's a simple test you can run to find
out how good our Arizona Auction Resources and
Custom Auction Finder Services are: At any time,
there are about 65 auctions upcoming in Arizona.

See how many you can find in thirty hours without
using my tools or in three minutes using them.

Google has just added a Google Scholar service which
should ease getting abstracts of scientific papers. So
far it only has 29 of my 1800+ publications on it, so they
do have a way to go. I'll consider it useful when it finds
my ASU master's thesis.

It is rare for a General Radio product to be klutzy
or rinky dink, but their 1412B-C decade capacitor
standard knobs are an exception. These have long
and fragile shafts on them similar to the channel
knobs on very old tv sets. The shafts break easily
if dropped. The long shafts are apparently needed
to allow above ground safety isolation.

Here is a workable repair procedure: Drill or mill
off the entire plastic shaft till you get down to an
aluminum bushing. Then drill out the plastic inside
the bushing and somewhat deeper working up to a
3/8 inch drill. Get a 1-1/4 by 3/8 nylon spacer.

If your hardware store does not have them this long,
try McMaster- Carr. Drill one end of the spacer out
to .252 or so. Cross drill a #16 hole to clear one of the
8-32 Allen setscrews. Epoxy the spacer to the knob
after carefully checking it for length.

Use the existing brass shaft coupler if still present,
having a long setscrew go thru the spacer and a
short one securing it. Should the coupler be missing,
take a 3/8 inch steel jam nut and drill it out to .378
or so. Then cross drill #28 and tap 8-32. Do not omit
the large felt washers as they can protect the back
silk screening of the knob. Check for a double space
indent before the "X" and "0" during final knob
alignment.

Not sure what the extra O ring and C washer are
all about. Probably splash resistance. I just left them off.

Our last of these is now up on eBay.

Just had some items "mysterously disappear" during
an auction load out. Some defenses: Always load your
best and highest value stuff first, keeping a continuous
eye on items. Always complete loading of all items you
want before offering anything else to other bidders.

Always double check and then recheck the final printout
of lot numbers against the items you actually loaded. On
any side deals, make sure everything is completely and
unambiguously spelled out. One or more "staging areas"
where you move all of your items into one big pile can
be of help. Try to load out immediately rather than doing
a second or later day loading. Keep most of your bids in
the pocket change area. And, of course, always respect the
property of others.

An excellent third party exergy tutorial appears here
It nicely expands and complements my papers on
Energy Fundamentals.

It is becoming MORE difficult to pick up classic research
papers than ever before. Besides shooting themselves
in the foot, I can see traditional scholarly pubs utterly
doing in high quality peer reviewed research.

Because anything and everything else appears instantly
on the web for free.

If quality research is to survive at all, it must (A) Have
all abstracts instantly available free of charge without
even so much a restriction as a registration, and (B) have
full text of all papers over five years old readily available
free for, say, five or less requests per month.

Otherwise, they have simply priced themselves out of the
market.

Those solar powered vehicle contests are great for
encouraging student engineering projects, but they
seem to be sending exactly the wrong message to
everybody else.

The fully amortized operating costs of these bicycle
sized and powered vehicles are between tens and
hundreds of dollars per mile. They, of course, thus
consume the  equivalent of MUCH MORE gasoline
than the largest of  full size SUV's.

If you plaster solar cells on a real personal vehicle,
you MIGHT generate enough energy to be able to
run your power mirrors. Uh, that's assuming you do
not adjust them too often. And, of course, offset by
the ridiculously higher air conditioning losses, the
extra weight, and the reduced aerodynamic cv.

It makes absolutely no sense to put solar cells where
they have to move around or be in the shade or pointed
in the wrong direction most of the time.

More in our Energy Fundamentals tutorial.

Picked up two nice sets of mailboxes at a local comm
college auction. These have 63 slots including locks
and are perfect for schools, apartments, etc...

email me if you want to get in ahead of the hoarders
on these. Premium quality, full PO approval. Brushed
aluminum opaque fronts.

Amazon.com has added a new a9 search engine that
eventually will be able to excerpt any portion of any
book anytime. I've added a link to this and several
additional search engines on our home page.

As we have seen here and here, thermodynamic
fundamentals absolutely and positively guarantee
electrolysis from high value smaller pv or grid
sources for hydrogen energy use flat out ain't
gonna happen. Because of the staggering loss of
exergy.

The utter absurdity of electrolysis can also be
attacked on purely economic grounds. Assume you
can steal an electrolysizer for the bargain basement
price of $50,000.00. What is the MINIMUM
sized pv array needed to guarantee the electrolysis
process does not add any more than ten cents per
kilowatt hour to the conversion?

Assume a free pv array, zero interest, zero labor,
zero monthly replatinization costs, zero land costs,
no taxes, and free electricity.

An amortization of three cents per hundred dollars
would apply to anything between a zero interest ten
year payback or a ten percent interest infinite
mortgage.  Thus amortization on a $50,000.00 system
would thus be $16.67 per day. At ten cents per kilowatt
hour, 167 kilowatt hours would need processed per day.

Which would translate to a ONE MEGAWATT pea
power solar installation in the Arizona desert, or about
THREE MEGAWATTS of peak power for an average
US installation.

At a ten percent conversion efficiency and 1000 watts
per meter incoming, about 33,000 square meters of
active panel area would be needed.

If you have this large a pv array, you sure as hell are
not going to piss around throwing most of your output
value away on hydrogen conversion.

Absentee bids at an auction are usually bad news.
You are infinitely better off attending live where you can
instantly react to the current prices and what the
auctioneer is up to. Some examples:

A $900 per skid absentee bid was left for some
computers at a comm college auction. The auctioneer
generously opened his bid at $150. Which did not
sound bad except that the previous few identical skids
went for $7.50 each.

A similar $1050 bid was left at a cal auction for a
small piece of a standards rack. Other higher value
components in the rack averaged
$35 each.

A lowball absentee bid at a cable auction got ignored
since the auctioneer bought the item for themselves for
pennies more.

One combined online-live auction had a big fancy room
with lots of laptops and techies and servers in it. That was
connected to the actual auctioneer with a flaky cell phone
that seldom worked and was even less monitored.

At the same cal lab auction above, the auctioneer
panicked over time remaining and shifted to a fixed
minimum, variable lot strategy. Thus you had to bid
$100 but could wait until there were enough lots
included to make it worthwhile.

More tutorial info on our Auction Help page.

Added some new links to our Auction Help page.
Especially to our Arizona Auction Resources. A
reminder that details on creating your own eBay
secret local insider supply list appears here.

TheThe Hype About Hydrogen by Joseph J. Romm
is a very useful  new book that helps in shattering some
"not even wrong" myths. A link is found on our Its a
Gas library page.

Picked up a huge collection of Gen Radio and Leeds &
Northrop standards at the Belden Cal Lab Auction. All
in superb condition and  many with full NIST traceability
specs. Visit our eBay store or email me with your needs
on these.

Make is a new online O'Reilly's technical ezine that might
-- just might-- be able to recapture the golden era of
Popular Electronics. Be sure to check this one out.

Their is an optimum rate at which you can sell repeat
items on eBay. This rate is MUCH SLOWER than
most people would imagine. There are only so many
buyers available and selling too fast will trash your
market and reduce your return.

It is useful to define both the HANG TIME and the
CASHOUT TIME for any quantity eBay offering.
Cashout time is the time when you receive 100 percent
of your original cost back. A reasonable cashout time
is 21 days. With a 30:1 sell/buy ratio, this typically
means you would want to sell three percent of your
inventory  over this time interval. The remainder can
then be carried at a zero cost except for storage charges.

The hang time is the interval you need to sell all your
remaining inventory at a constant rate if you get no
"I'll take them all" orders. I feel 15 months is often
a reasonable hang time. Ferinstance, if you have
75 identical items, selling one every six days on eBay
might be optimum. Naturally, you raise or lower your
price to change your hang time. With the obvious goal
of maximizing return.

Typically, you will sell out on an off eBay sale well
before the time ends. More info on our Auction Help
library page.

There's several reasons why I feel that online bidding
is a sucker bet at combined online and live auctions.
Firstoff is the latency in your bid and the audio you are
receiving. Second are the inefficiencies when your bid
gets entered. Third is a possible online premium of
several percent. Fourth is the possibility of having
your bid entered at a higher price than you thought you
did. Fifth are the outrageous hoops you may have to
jump through to  qualify as an online bidder, such as
predeposited cashier's  checks.

But the real biggie is that you cannot instantly respond
and interact with the auctioneer. Ferinstance, you cannot
split or lowball a bid. And if several lots are combined,
you really have to be there to decide whether you are
offered a real bargain or a poisoned lot whose bulk and
weight is utterly unacceptable.

I don't seem able to do all that well with national
auction houses, such as Dove Bid, Michael Fox, or
M.J.Auctions. The first and most obviously problem
is that these are aggressively promoted nationally,
so there are more bidders. Prices tend to open a lot
higher with higher increments. Hard-to-web-search
display ads are used instead of classifieds.

Effective online bidding adds to your competition. And
many are "theater style" auctions where you cannot
simultaneously see the auctioneer and the context of
the items being offered. Nor quickly react to any sudden
opportunities. And it is easy to get utterly overwhelmed
in a four day, 8000 lot auction.

Previewing, of course, is an absolute must. You normally
will NOT be permitted to preview during the auction.
You can gain an edge by focusing on "contents of cabinet"
or the "contents of room" offers that the online bidders
may not have the faintest clue over their value. Another
key is to tightly focus on only a few dozen items and
ignore everything else.

More on our Auction Help library page.

I've cut sharply back on our Government Liquidation
purchases.

First and foremost, because of their maddeningly
infuriating auto auction extensions that fail to respect
a buyer's time. Second because of the rudeness,
inconsideration, and arrogance of some site managers
that has now gone well beyond legendary. Third because
selling prices have gone sharply upward, especially for
test equipment. And fourth because base security
apparently makes it impossible to make a telephone
call that travels a distance of 175 feet.

Present thinking is that the best opportunities for
eBay sources are "contents of room" and "contents
of cabinet" at dot bomb auctions. In the cases where
an auction is both web and live, onsite personal
inspection and bidding can make a huge difference.
The secret, of course, is to tightly focus on items in
which you see huge value that others miss.

I can create a local auction resource finder for you.

Signs of the times: The latest Swiss Army Knife
includes an internal hard drive. Flash memory,
actually.

We've had numerous requests for linear actuators
longer than the one meter max on our Adept Inventory
page. I've managed to pick up three additional sliders
that are a whopping two meters (!) long. These are
Parker/Hauser belt drive, two with motors, one without.
They are used and have been removed from moderate
duty service. They apparently are just barely UPS
shippable after professional packing. email me for
further details. 100 mm square size.

We have some very unusual remote New Mexico
property for sale. It is directly on the East Fork of
the Gila River and is literally surrounded by the
Gila Wilderness. Access is by foot or horse only
by way of Forest Service trails.

This is one of the finest survivalist/isolationist
properties available anyplace ever, and the scenery
is beyond beyond. Perfect for total escape. Size is
approximately 4.7 acres total at $7850 per acre. Yes,
we will carry. Taxes are (brace yourself for the sticker
shock) $3.27 per year.

Legal is S11 13S R13W PT NH 4.7 AC.
3 074 074 248 118 District-02N.

You can email me for more info.

There sure seem to be a lot of low "delta T" energy
schemes kicking around. Ocean thermal and bunches
of others. Uh, it turns out that there are some very
fundamental thermodynamic and engineering laws
that guarantee these flat out ain't gonna happen.

First, Carnot efficiency is limited to [1 - (Tlow/Thigh) ]
in absolute degrees. A 20 degree Fahrenheit difference
at its very best can only approach a theoretical FOUR 
PERCENT or so best efficiency. And, of course, the
real world never gets anywhere near Carnot.

Secondoff, low efficiencies have to move a lot more
heat than than they can convert. At four percent
efficiency, TWENTY FIVE times the heat has to be
moved from source to sink.

Thirdoff, it is very difficult to get heat exchangers with
very low Delta-T's across them. A heat exchanger, of
course, MUST have a Delta-T across it to transfer any
heat at all. You can easily end up with ALL of the Delta-T
across the source and sink exchangers leaving you with
NOTHING for the process to work with. Further trashing
a dismal efficiency.

Ferinstance, it is trivially easy to build a Peltier "cooler"
that has twenty degrees of cooling across the device and
forthly degrees of heating across its heatsink. For net
heating rather than cooling.

The need to move many times more heat than recoverable
energy at low Delta-T's very much magnifies this problem.
To which such realities as imperfect insulation on long pipe
compounds the problem.

More in our Energy Fundamentals tutorial.

Added some new links to our Arizona Auction Resources .

Always keep track of the bidder numbers being issued
at any auction. This will give you a gross check on how
many potential competitors you will have. Usually you
can see the next available number on the stack. Or watch
bidders as they leave the table. More on our Auction Help
page.

Picked up great heaping bunches of SUV cargo nets at a
business failure auction. These are absolutely mint, and we
also have the bulk netting by the foot for custom uses. Full
details in our eBay store.

There seems to be a lot of emerging interest in six cycle
gasoline engines. These offer efficiency and cleanliness
and cooling advantages over a four cycle at the expense
of higher speeds and needing electric valves or similar.

After the usual suck-squeeze-pop-phooey, fuel-free air
gets sucked in on a downstroke and then exhausted on
the next upstroke. The cylinder is thus further purged
and cooled between successive power strokes.

A muffled intermittent yowling inside a laser printer can
sometimes be fixed by opening the lid and letting the cat out.

We are closing out our Fore Systems stuff. The larger
systems have been broken up into component parts and
now appear on eBay. Includes some really great Lucent
48 volt telecom 1KW power supplies.

Just picked up some really nice flow switches at a contractor
auction. McDonnel & Miller FS4-3. email me if you want to
get in ahead of the hoarders on this one. 1 inch NPT but
intended for use sideways in really big pipes.

Added city and county links to our Auction Help page.
You can now add your own custom region here. This
is your best source for eBay items for resale.

Added and updated some links on our Home Page.

Found a cute electrically releasable epoxy (!) that has
all sorts of interesting possible uses. Holds like regular
epoxy but lets go when a DC current is applied. With
no apparent surface damage.

Added the missing HACK73.PDF and HACK74.PDF files
to our Hardware Hacker Archive IV. This includes the
sonoluminescence tutorial and resources.

Added more college and university links to our Auction Help
page. Some schools offer outstanding auction bargains,
while others never or seldom do so. Some will hold their
own auctions, while others will use a commercial auction
service. Some have auctions bimonthly, while most are
one or more times a year.

Promotion and advertising are generally poor, so you'll have
to do bunches of digging to find the best ones.

I've personally found remote rural community colleges to
be my best choice. High schools tend to have abject trash,
while Universities tend to get highgraded by insiders.

A reminder about the Wayback Machine. This lets you find
websites the way they were. Two uses that I've found handy:
(1) Extending the life of an otherwise dead or gone link, and
(2) Capturing the closed website of an upcoming bankruptcy.

Created a new Custom Auction Resources library page
that lets you create access to your own regional sources
of supply for eBay.

Added some new links to our Auction Help page.

A new best efficiency 28 Magic Sinewave sequence
is nearing completion with the sourcecode now in the
final simulation stage. This one offers an extremely
fast update option with average latencies way on down
in the three degree range. Harmonics 2-28 are zero! in
theory and well below -65 db in practice. Before any
filtering,

Evaluation chips should be available shortly. email me
for availability.

Whoosh. Our eBay theater spotlights, outdoor SportLights,
and voting booths and rare military tube testers flew on outta
here. Gone. History. Bye bye.

Still have a few superb buys on Lehigh theater dimmer panels
and precision Adept robotic sliders. Plus some great GR gear.

I still get occasional emails over the "shaft encoder"
problem. It takes two channels of incremental
encoding if you need both direction and speed.

The two channels are spaced half a pulse apart and
are called the Inphase and Quadrature outputs.

Consider these typical waveforms:

                   0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 0    I      Forward
                   1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0   Q

                   0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 0    I      Reverse
                   0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1   Q

To extract the speed, simply use the I output leading
edges. Now for the tricky part: To extract the direction,
EXCLUSIVE OR the present I with the previous Q.

And that's all there is to it!

The alt.marketing.online.ebay newsgroup is very useful
for both eBay buyers and sellers. But sure enough, once
every week or so, some epsilon minus newbie fails to
proxy bid their max late in the auction and compounds
their stupidity by wrongly assuming they were outbid
by pocket change. They then get the brilliant idea that
eBay needs auction extensions. Instead of recognizing
their own cluelessness in not bidding high enough.

In reality (A) eBay ain't broke, (B) the desirability of
automatic extensions lies somewhere between Herpes
and AIDS, (C) eBay with proxy sniping is game theory
optimal for both buyers and sellers by Vickrey Auction
Theory, (D) Many earlier auction sites with extensions
either have failed miserably or the extensions are never  
used by sellers, and (E) The sites (such as GL) that still
insist on extensions are maddeningly infuriating and
fail to value a bidder's time and convenience.

A slightly improved optimal eBay bidding strategy:

Proxy bid your max ONCE very late in the auction.
Set your proxy to an odd penny amount just above
a currency denomination threshold.

More eBay buying secrets on our Auction Help page.
Especially EBAYBUY.PDF.

Placed some outstanding theater spotlight bargains
on eBay.

Here's some more of my live auction insider secrets...

Always dress down to the point of almost appearing
shabby. Listen to everything; volunteer nothing. Wear
a hat or shirt or whatever that is VERY distinctive.
Always set your max bid to JUST ABOVE a currency
denomination threshold and NEVER go over it.

If you would like to try and steal an item, get out in
front of everybody else but not quite in the auctioneer's
face. Their entire field of view should be one-quarter
you. While the item IS STILL BEING DESCRIBED,
hold your bidder card against your chest with one hand
and do a Churchill V for Victory with your other hand,
against your chest. Be sure that ONLY the auctioneer
can see you. You are giving the auctioneer a message
of "Here is a $2.50 floor bid if and when you care to
accept it."

If you really, really want an item that is unlikely to
have much competition, do the above, but continually
rock your bidder's card back and forth after the first
counterbid.

If you suspect the bidding will be highly competitive,
WAIT till just under your max and bid ONCE on the
second going of going going gone.

NEVER get tired, or lazy, or in a hurry. The really best
deals usually happen very late in an auction. Ideally,
the temperature should be above 120 degrees except for
the hail, and the rabid bats should not be succeeding at
driving the rattlesnakes away.

Abject trash tends to poison a lot, and you can usually
give anything you do not want to another bidder. Bid on
the value of what you want and ignore everything you
will have to flush anyway.

Much more on our auction help page. And AUCTSCNE.PDF.

Some notes on some of the quirkier PIC instructions....

SUBLW subtracts W from a literal, not the often more
useful literal from W. The easiest way to subtract a
count in unsigned binary is to ADDLW 0xFF.

RETLW is the standard way of returning a table
lookup value to the accumulator. Indexed lookups
are done by modifying the program counter before.
Be sure to use RETURN instead when you do not
want your W register modified.

The PCLATH register decides where the program
counter is going to go on any PC addition or subtraction.
This register is not altered by anything short of a reset
and must be preset to the correct page ahead of time.

The rule on INSTRUCTION CYCLES is this: All will
execute in one cycle except for a program counter
modification that executes in two. PC mods happen with
"skip if zero" commands or direct addition or subtraction
of the PC. Note that the PC auto post increments. Note
that a dding 0x00 to PC moves to the next instruction.

The DECFSZ and INCFSZ instructions appear somewhat
counterintuitive. They never skip the next instruction in
a loop unless zero.

More PIC Programming Guidelines in our GuruGram
library and on our Pic Library page.

Added some new links to our Auction Help page. These
include Haynie Auctions and the Arizona Revised Statutes.

Our Arizona and Eastern Pennsylvania auction tool
resources are now by far the best and most complete on
the web. To compare, note there are typically 60 Arizona
auctions at any time. Most of the finder services locate
ZERO of these and thus could not find a pig in a dishpan.

I'd very much like to make this into a map-clickable
national resource. email me if you wish to sponsor a
state or a regional area.

Just posted some great buys on birch plywood panels
to eBay.

Discovered that you can get sandblast attachments or
power washers cheaply from such sources as Northern
Tool for $19. This makes much more sense than going
the dry sandblast cabinet route. It apparently works just
as good or better, needs no compressor, and appears to
be a lot safer and less messy.

Now have the delay and amplitude patterns available
for our Best Efficiency 28 and Delta 44 new Magic
Sinewaves. These have been "shake optimized" and
spot Sigview verified. You can email me for details.

Yet another outrageously overpriced Book on very
Demand  machine is available from BookMachine. One
interesting thing they are doing is covered by Patent
6,142,721. In which they are using ultrasonic energy
to soften and then immediately harden the binding glue.
For very fast cycle times.

I'm wondering if a "pop it in the microwave" solution
might be better as a low cost home BOD binding route.
Some BOD books are found here.

Two recent auctions have now strongly verified my
"currency threshold" theory in which people will avoid
crossing thresholds equal to dollar bill demonations In
one case, a house was argued over for pennies before
selling at a $29,950 steal. When $30,015 clearly would
have taken it. In another, nobody but nobody EVER
crossed a $20 or a $50 barrier in an entire city surplus
auction. Except me, of course.

The message is that you should always be willing to
bid JUST ABOVE any currency threshold. So long
as you are dealing with amateurs, you should win
every time. More on our Auction Help page.

Just picked up a bunch of refurbable water meters.
May wait on this till I decide whether I can really
justify a sandblaster cabinet. For some reason,
nobody locally has one. email me if you are interested.

The correct title of the goat that ate the election is
"The Pet Goat", not "My Pet Goat". It appears on
page 153 of Reading Mastery II, Storybook 1, by
Siegfried Engelmann and Elaine Bruner ISBN
0574101284 Publisher SRA/MacMillan/McGraw Hill.

Um, apparently they did an upgrade of SigView that
changed their definition of their ASCII files. This
makes our earlier demo file and GuruGram wrong.
But you can still use the file by loading it as a 16 bit
unsigned binary file instead. The amplitude changes,
but the Magic Sinewave spectrum remains the same.

Our newer FFT files will be done as 8 bit unsigned binary.

Things are mostly grim on Mount Graham. The entire
top of the mountain is burning. Telescopes will probably
be saved. Heliograph electronics has been damaged but
towers are intact. Same for  Heliograph fire lookout.
Summer homes remain in serious doubt. The squirrels
are obviously in even deeper trouble.

My tram towers are between the two fires. They are
wooden and have been drying in the sun for 82 years.
They are also in the most dense brush on the entire
mountain. Survival depends on the rains getting to
them before the fire does. Seems unlikely at this time.

I just completed the preliminary data scan for a
Delta-44 Magic Sinewave. This one should prove
optimal for many uses.

Here's the process involved in creating a new device...

    1. Decide on Best Efficiency or Delta Friendly.
        Delta only needs half the storage but zeros
        out only 3n/4 + 1 harmonics.

    2. Use the calculators to find the raw amplitude
        solutions. Improved faster and auto-exporting
        calculators are now available to Synergetics
        Partners.

    3. "Shake the box" by exploring the nearest
        75,000 or so  solutions to find the best one, by
         using these guidelines. Software info on request.

    4. Model the best solutions using Sigview to verify
         they do  in fact zero out the intended harmonics.

    5. Write your PIC sourcecode using this tutorial.
        Custom assistance and training are available.

    6. Burn and bench verify and then characterize
        your chips.

You can email me for the latest info on off-the-shelf evaluation
chip availability.

Just burned our first MS28D-05X Magic Sinewave
chips. These offer greatly improved input flexibility,
are delta friendly, and  nearly zero out the first 22
harmonics. Chips are $19.63 each. Full sourcecode
plus one hour's consulting is $89 extra.

You can order here. Some bench checks remain to
be done.

Latest GuruGram #40 is on designing PIC sourcecode
for use with Magic Sinewaves.

Latest GuruGram #38 is on an improved and upgraded
Magic Sinewave evaluation chip.

Will the movie being released today decide who the
presidential candidates will be next November? If any?

My prediction is that Fahrenheit 9/11 by itself will not
be all that big a deal. But that the shoot-yourself-in-the-
foot irrational overreactions to it will end up to be both
hilarious and utterly devastating.

Another prediction: Many people will now discover that
there is a second "h" in "Fahrenheit".

Picked up ten really nice Hubbell Sportlite 1500 watt
HID arena lights. email me if you want to get in ahead
of the hoarders on this one.

Many digital cameras these days include a direct
video output. This can be incredibly useful for any
composition. Sadly, the video may go away when
the display goes off and the video may be lower
resolution. Apple IIe color monitors can typically
be picked up for a dollar or two at auctions and
are a perfect match.

Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture book is an excellent
review of why the RIAA is suing three legged kittens
and converting most of their customers into criminals
in a ludicrous attempt to preserve an outdated business
model that no longer serves any viable purpose.

Subtitled "How big media uses technology and the law
to lock down culture and control creativity." You can
preview or order the book here.

And find lots of other great books here.

Found a rare stash of SYM-1 microprocessor trainers!
Enhanced versions in fancy cases with companion tape
recorders even. You can email me for details. These
are early 6502 classics.

Avoid comparing PostScript reals! Or worse, a real
against an integer. Even the slightest roundoff or
computation error may give an unexpected result.
I was battling a complex waveform in GuruGram #38
that mysterously would look fine in certain page
positions and terrible in others. Turns out that a missed
cvi after a currentpoint caused all of the grief.

More on PostScript here.

Your optimum eBay Buying Strategy is to proxy bid
your max ONCE very late in the auction. This means
you have to be at a certain place at a certain time, or
have to use sniping software that demands continuous
web access, or have to use a third party sniping service
that demands sensitive information.

It sure would be nice if eBay would offer an AutoSnipe
service for a quarter more. Your otherwise invisible
bid gets entered only at auction end. High bidder wins,
paying the lesser of their bid or the SECOND highest
bid plus the current increment. In case of a monetary
tie, the earliest bidder wins.

More on our Auction Help or the alt.marketing.online.ebay
newsgroup.

We are rapidly selling out of certain items. We no
longer have any fiber optic cable in stock, and the
2-1/2 inch Igus links are now gone. Only a few of
the three inchers remain. All of the Zydacron video
cards are also sold. We are down to a very few
voting booths, voting machines, and astronomy tables.
And the Adept Robotic Sliders are selling more rapidly
and at much higher prices than we expected. Less than
half remain.

The new Froogle marketing opportunity seems to
have a curious gotcha: To qualify for their super
important data feed status, you must already have
some "for sale" pages in place. But Froogle does
NOT recognize a page as having items for sale
if the prices are in a DIFFERENT cell in a table!

We are in the process of trying to dramatically
upgrade all of our inventory pages, adding a long
overdue direct shopping cart, and getting our so
far disallowed feeds into Froogle.

An eBay auction with sniping is more properly called
a Vickrey Second Price auction. And is optimal for
several reasons. A very good review of Vickrey
auction theory appears here.

The best of all possible auctions for buyers whose
time and whose convenience is important would seem
to be a Sealed Bid Second Price auction. These would
also appear seller optimal as a bidder is MUCH more
likely to bid if the odds are high that they will get the
item for far less than their max proxy bid price.

While sniping eBay approaches this ideal, Sealed
Bid  Second Price Auctions seem to be nonexistent
elsewhere. Yet they should be the best for everybody.
And are Vickrey optimal.

I have left some really old and out of date bargain
item offers up on the website as a demo for our older
Galley Slave software.

A random Google search may still wrongly take you
directly to these pages. Please see our main Bargain
Page for current availability. Or email me.

There's a number of "scamming the Nigerian scamsters"
sites on the web. These have now gone waaaay beyond
simply having the scamster pose while balancing a loaf
of bread on their head and holding up a large dead fish.

Start with http://www.419eater.com/html/kothapalli_rao.htm
and http://www.ebolamonkeyman.com/ for openers.

"I never knew an auctioneer to lie, unless it was
absolutely convenient."

From "The Mule" by Josh Billings aka Henry
Wheeler Shaw. Sometimes wrongly attributed to
Mark Twain.

Latest GuruGram #37 is a tutorial on the Precision
Fonts found in our new Bitmap Font library.

Sourcecode is here and a simplified Bitmap Typewriter
here.

Got an interesting label and magnet catalog from
Stouse. Their Velvet Textured Polycarbonate is an
interesting but pricey solution to custom dialplates
and such where "locked in" lettering is needed.

You can probably fake the same thing by starting
with a cheaper rigid vinyl plastic for thickness, inkjet
printing onto a clear self- stick, and overlaying that
with a clear matte polyester sheet.

Had a friend who runs a rural Bed and Breakfast
really get done in by a "free" web hosting service.
What the service does is a redirect to their website,
first downloading and running a JavaScript routine
that repeatedly presents obnoxious to offensive
popup ads and porno and worse. Add six inches to
your mortgage.

The JavaScript keeps running even after you move
on to another website! Even worse, that same script
redirects your home page to an obscene ad server.
Naturally, the kind and gentle B&B people got blamed
for all of this.

SpySweeper is a combination of free software and
a subscription service that lets you find out how much
sneaky stuff has been stashed on your computer
without your permission. Adware, spyware, unasked
for cookies, keystroke monitors, and worse.

You'll get a real blast out of this one. Just placed a
Hercules "plunger style" blasting machine on eBay.
In above average condition and should be capable
of being brought up to museum quality restoration
with a little cabinet work.

Picked up a fairly unusual carbide lamp at an Arizona
Ranch auction and placed it on eBay. It's a larger "shift"
sized nickel plated Dewar ITP and appears eminently
restorable.

Dewar had the rep for being the "best" and most
durable and most reliable lamp, especially among
Western hard rock miners. And just about any
carbide lamp that is not brass colored, is oversize,
and does not say "Justrite" on it should appreciate
long term.

Ask any older caver for the "Bustright" plastic lamp
tale of woe.

Google has just introduced their new Froogle service.
Which promises to be an online catalog of everything
for sale from everybody! You can ( at least temporarily )
gain a tremendous selling edge by using their free Data
Feed service.

Added more fonts to our Precision Bitmap Library.
A GuruGram tutorial on these is in the works and
should go up shortly.

Updated some links on our Home Page.

Posted This Link  the UCC Uniform Commercial
Code to our Auction Help library.

There's only a few paragraphs in the UCC that concern
auctions. But two interesting rules are that any high bid
cancellation does NOT revert to any previous bidder.
And that, unless specifically allowed, a shill bid is invalid
and the bid price drops to the previous highest good faith
offer.

Latest GuruGram #36 is on adding Monthly Report
Extensions to our earlier custom Log File Reporters.

Expanded our PostScript and Webmastering library pages.

While we are usually happy to answer simpler US
technical questions at no charge, we will NOT jump
through any spam email re-qualifying hoops to do so.
If an email bounces, we usually will stop right there.

This particular question involved whether you can
leave CMOS inputs floating. As our CMOS Cookbook
clearly shows you, this is a big time no-no. Floating
inputs can respond to noise, hum,  or even your favorite
AM radio station. They also can very much increase
the supply current the chip draws.

Made some additions and improvements to our
Auction Help and our Site Stats library pages.

Added a new "GIF friendly" font to our Fonts & Images
library. This one is halfway between a bitmap and the full
antialiasing of our Precision Fonts Repository. Only two
colors!

Have placed a great hot tub buy on eBay. Older deck
style holds eight adults or twenty four cavers. View
image here.

Updated and improved our Fonts & Images library page.

Added a brand new Precision Bitmap Font Repository
library page that includes dozens of ultra precise and
amazingly legible fonts for such limited resolution
uses as retouching eBay photos, improving .GIF
banners, or exploring eBook readers.

Such as this example.

Updated and improved our Master Library and Site
Map pages.

Updated and improved our Banner Advertising library
page. Regional auction resource sponsorships are newly
available.

Please welcome the Fuel Cell Store as our newest
Banner Advertiser. Additional fuel cell resources
appear in our It's A Gas hydrogen library.

Picked up a large pile of General Electric D-72 Pulse
Initiators which I've put up on eBay. These take an
ordinary older kilowatt hour "power" meter and give
you an isolated digital pulse output (!) for use with
computer control, remote viewing, data logging, or
energy monitoring & conservation. Fits most GE
meters, possibly others.

Added a new Eastern Pennsylvania Auction Resources
to our Auction Help page.

Sponsorships for your own custom auction resource area
remain available for a one time fee of $89. This includes a
long term link to a website or homepage of your choice.
To get started, just email me and tell me which region you
are interested in.

Apparently the "don't go there" pricing at any auction
has a very simple explanation: These seem to match
the US dollar bill denominations! "Breaking a twenty"
has profound and ingrained negative vibes. This fact
is easily used to your advantage.

A reminder that low density polyethylene rods can be
used with an ordinary glue gun. Which is one way to
quickly build up a custom connector, tack a wire to a
pc board, fix a bezel, or make a small light use part.

Picked up some really nice huge 225 watt 100 Ohm
Ohmite wirewound rheostat potentiometers and put
them in our eBay Store. Five inch diameter, 3/8 shaft.

For some hilarious revenge against Nigerian Letter
scamsters, check out this www.ebolamonkeyman.com link .

I've long been fascinated by ultra efficient Class D audio
amplifiers, having published one of the first tutorials on
them back in the February 1966 issue of Electronics World.

Maxim has introduced a new MAX9700 1.2 watt amplifier
that eliminates the need for output filters and has other
advantages. The key secret is a new form of differential
PWM that applies zero load energy in absence of audio.

Turns out those strange-looking connectors on our
Adept Sliders are apparently plain old distributor
stock AMP style CPC, Series 1, Size 17, and readily
available at Digi-Key and  similar sources.

One tiny gotcha: The "15" pin connector is really a
sixteen pin one having one pin purposely omitted.

Found out a little more about the mystery observatory.
It appears on the topos as "China Peak Observatory"
and apparently was used for geomagnetic rather than
astronomical work. The location seems well away from
power lines and similar magnetic artifacts.

The private airstrip does show up on the usual airnav
resources. It is sometimes mentioned as a waypoint
for soaring competitions.

The principal researcher was a highly regarded and
well published U of A geomagnetic specialist. Who
also had many geodetic dome structure patents. And
who apparently died in a 1993 plane crash.

As we covered here and here, a successful long term
eBay venture DEMANDS sell/buy ratios that are
ridiculously higher than most people would first suspect.
I strongly recommend always seeking out minimum
sell/buy ratios of 30:1 or higher.

The sources I've found best for these margins include
privatized military surplus, community college auctions,
dot bomb failures, inventory overstocks, and industrial
bankruptcies. My top secret insider supply sources
appear here.

I'd like to expand this to other states and regions, but
sponsors are needed. The one-time $89 cost gets you
all your local secret supply sources and gives you an
exclusive link on our Auction Help website. You can
email me for further details.

Rearranged and improved our Auction Help library page.

There are all sorts of opportunities in Southern Arizona
for amateur astronomers or other interested individuals
to gain personal access time on "real" telescopes.

Simplest is to join the Desert Skygazers which gives
you access to a fully professional twenty inch telescope
at Discovery Park. You can also become a Discovery
Park docent which can give you unlimited access and
scope control. Sadly, this particular instrument is
education oriented and has a lot of light pollution.

The second biggie is the Skywatcher's Inn bed and
breakfast in Benson, Arizona. Where you can rent
smaller to fairly large scopes on an overnight basis.

The Tenegra Site near Mount Hopkins offers even more
exciting possibilities. These are fully remote control 24
and 32 inch telescopes that you can buy time on for $150
per hour. These scopes were the first to verify Sedna, our
newest and tenth planet.

Sedna, of course, is the patron saint of barnacles.

There's also that super mysterious and ultra secret
observatory in the Galuiros just east of Rattlesnake
Canyon. Extremely hard to access except by air.
Nobody, but nobody talks about this one.

Newly uploaded GuruGram #35 as The Saga of the
Dripping Stalactite. This celebrates the beauty of
applied mathematics, especially long strings of funny
numbers. It also summarizes the timeline of our Magic
Sinewave research. Sourcecode is here.

We MAY have low cost drivers available for our
precision Adept Robotic Sliders. Here is the story:
Correct (and pricey) drivers are available directly
from Adept. But we also have a pile of Allen Bradley
motor controllers on eBay and our eBay store that
apparently MIGHT be able to drive the brushless
servo motors in use.

These drivers came from the next skid over at the
same bankruptcy that we got the sliders from. That
same skid also had various other Adept items on it.
Exactly how you would use a personal computer, a
Basic Stamp, or a DSP chip to interface the encoder
and handle your servo positioning dynamics would
be up to you.

While we cannot guarantee compatibility, it sure looks
like these will work just fine with a little development
effort. Use at your own risk. Fifteen day inspection
privilege. Buyer pays all shipping.

Linear Technology just came out with several chips
that will interface beautifully with our Magic Sinewave
Demo Hardware. Their LTC1799 is a resistor-to-
frequency converter, while their LTC6903 and 6904
are serial data to frequency converters. Any of these
can conveniently be used to provide the 10 MHz =
60 Hz clock needed by the demo chips.

Here's some interface info for our CCD video cameras
we have on eBay and our eBay store: On those units
with a mini-DIN 8 connector, view the connector at the
male pins with the two indents horizontal and low.

Power ground will be the leftmost center pin. Power
+4.5 to +7 volts will be the adjacent pin slightly to the
left of center. NTSC video out will be the upper left pin.
Video ground will be the rightmost center pin. The
video and power grounds are apparently separate to
minimize hum loops.

On those units with a wall wart connector, these match
the Radio Shack ADAPTAPLUG "B", and measure
4 mm od and 1.7 mm id. Negative ground.

Only the shell and the center pin of the stereo phone
plug are used by the microphone. These are "electret
plus fet" style microphones that DEMAND a positive
bias of 3 volts through a 2.2K resistor to the center pin.
Be sure your intended use provides this bias. Two AA
cells and a series resistor can be used for testing.
Actual audio should be capacitor coupled.

I've got most of our new videoconferencing stuff up
on eBay now. We have bunches of very nice Sharp
CCD cameras, Zydacron Z353 videoconferencing
codecs, and older PictureTel cards that should be
eminently hackable for all sorts of video digitizing and
voice over IP uses. Yes, free drivers apparently
remain available.

Several styles of CCD camera pinouts are offered,
including RCA phono video, Mini-Din4 female, Mini-Din8
male, and DB15. These are superb general purpose true
NTSC cams suitable for security, videoconferencing,
babysitting, surveillance, or even as a child's first
television studio.

Made a dozen minor changes and corrections to our
Home Page.

The Wayback Machine at http://web.archive.org can
be exceptionally useful for finding info on any "dark"
websites. It also lets you find specs on out-of-date
equipment that is no longer supported.

One of the more useful things at your nearby Radio
Shack store is a collection of wall wart plugs. You keep
trying these till you find out which one fits. One source
of super cheap wall warts is found at http://www.73.com

Expanded the coverage in our Refurb Log. Be sure
to keep checking this file for further expansion and
updates.

Made minor improvements and expansions on our
Bargain, Library, GuruGram, What's New, Map,
and Synergetics pages.

Just picked up great heaping bunches of Sharp color
CCD cameras and ISDN PictureTel cards from the
iPhysician bankruptcy. email me if you want to get in
ahead of the hoarders on these.

It is interesting to compare an eBay Selling Sell-Buy
ratio against the equivalent Consignment Fee for the
same amount of placement
effort. The formulas are...

      SBR = 100/(100 - COM) and  COM = 100 - (100/SBR)

Thus a 50 percent commission equals an unacceptably
low 2:1 sell/buy ratio. A 20 percent commission equals
a laughingly absurd 1.25:1 SBR.

Managed to fully refurb and inventory our remaining
Dimpled Chad. We have five full Votomatic Voting
Booths available, three in blue plastic and two in
aluminum. Side privacy panels are intact but may be
quite brittle and MUST be handled with extreme care.

We have thirteen Votomatic Voting Machines only
remaining that are in quite good condition and include
the candidate overlay. A fourteenth machine-only is
available without the candidate overlay.

We have fourteen refurbed aluminum case desks
remaining that should be ideal for amateur astronomer
or other field data gathering uses. Nearly all of these
include fully working 15 watt fluorescent lamps.

See our eBay Auctions or eBay store for details.

In a stunning new technological breakthrough, the
symbol "@" has been added to the Morse Code.
This is the first code change since 1926 and consists
of superimposed a and C.

As in dot dash dash dot dash dot.

For years, I've been meaning to create an open
ended and continuing Refurb Log. I'm not quite
sure exactly where we are going with this, but
I've just started one as GuruGram #34. It also
now has its own home page link.

Unlike other GuruGrams, the intent is to keep
adding new content "blog style" to the end as
new refurb secrets evolve. So, be sure to recheck
this new feature from time to time.

We recently opened an eBay store and revamped our
main Bargain Page accordingly. I've left many of our
second- and third-level Bargain Pages intact as part
of a demo of our Galley Slave software.

Please note that the content of these older pages are
probably no longer current, but may still be linked by
older files. You may also hit them directly on a search.

Added a fourth and smallest "Zipper Style" IGUS
cable carrier links to our eBay Auctions and eBay
stores. We are nearly sold out of the largest three
inch size.

Please note that the majority of Guru's Lair content
is not available to WebTV users because of its PDF
format. Please note further that ~any~ translation of
our PDF files into a different format is a violation
of international copyright law that WILL be enforced.

Added new links to our GuruGram Library and our Home Page.

We now offer the Votomatic Voting Machines as well
as their full booths. These are a lot smaller, lower in
cost, and display better. These collectibles are in
superbly good condition.

Further expanded and improved our Onsite Links.

Reluctantly added some Patent books to our Book
Access page.

Just completed a major overhaul and upgrade of our
Patent Avoidance library page.

I finally managed to get our Adept Robotic Slider
Actuator inventory posted. We have five styles
remaining: A single rail 330 mm model, two dual
rails in 350 and 950 mm active lengths, and two
dual rail heavier duty wider sliders in 800 and
1000 mm active lengths.

More details in our Bargain Pages or our brand
new eBay store,  or at our ongoing eBay Auctions.

Stephen Wolfram's "Theory of Everything" book is
now available as a free eBook download. I'm not sure
I have an opinion on this one.

Just uploaded GuruGram #34 which is on Viewing
Magic Sinewaves with SigView. The sourcecode
appears here and additional Magsine info here, here,
here, here, and here.

Expanded, overhauled, and updated our Synergetics
Library page.

The SigView shareware is turning into a VERY interesting
tool to evaluate Magic Sinewaves. Here's how to get started:

1. Download https://www.tinaja.com/glib/FULL60-1.ASC
2. Open Signal in SigView while viewing "all files".
3. Input sample rate as 2499840.
4. Set Spectral Defaults to Hanning and DB-Max.
5. Do the FFT. Takes half a minute or so.
6. Edit Zoom FirstPow2 to 4096.

You should get a classic "spectrum analyzer" display that has
harmonics 2 through 22 at least 75 decibels down.

A reminder that Magic Sinewave Evaluation Chips are now
available.

Did a major expansion and upgrade on our Onsite
Links on our Home Page. There's now dozens of
new files and new or revised library pages to reach.
Yeah, there's still some really old pages that need
updated, which I'll eventually do as background tasks.

I am really impressed with the SigView shareware.
Its "brick wall" filters quickly validated our Magic
Sinewave stuff. Sure enough, low pass filtering the
first 22 harmonics looks ~exactly~ the same as
the fundamental. And higher harmonics enter
textbook perfect.

I'm still exploring their FFT feature and do not yet
know how good it ultimately will be. But it already
gives me a big hole where all of the low harmonics
are not supposed to be. You can start off with this
"almost" real world quantized and unfiltered magic
sinewave, a sample rate of 41,664 and FFT
expansion of 256 or 512.

Once again, Magic Sinewave Evaluation Chips are
now in stock.

Note that a typical sound card samples a 60 Hertz
Magic Sinewave only around 400 times per cycle,
which is uselessly low. When working with our new
Magic Sinewave demo chips, be sure your measurement
scheme is actually measuring the Magsin characteristics
and not its own sampling or windowing artifacts.

More on this in our latest GuruGram #33.

We are in the process of moving our Bargain Pages
over to our  brand new eBay store. This should give
you faster access, accurate up-to-date info, easy
VISA/MC or Paypal payments, 24/7 fixed price
guaranteed sales, and some buyer protection features.

The difference between an eBay Auction and an eBay
Store is that auctions are competitively bid for a week
or 10 days, while stores offer continuous and fixed price
immediate sales. Auction prices often may end up lower.

We continue to offer our VISA/MC merchant account,
and direct sales via don@tinaja.com or (928) 428-4073
are often a day or two faster. Many of our eBay store
items are stocked in large quantities  that may be much
cheaper by the lot. email us for details.

I've kept our Galley Slave demo up on our Bargain Page.
Note this is a demo only and does ~not~ offer any of our
current inventory.

Magic Sinewave eval chips are now available! $19.63
for a three phase Delta-28 that zeros the first TWENTY 
TWO harmonics and does so at the highest possible
efficiency. Sourcecode plus an hour of personal Magsin
consulting is $89 extra. A Data Sheet is found here and
you can order here. Seminars and training here.

We'll have these on eBay as well.

Just uploaded GuruGram #33 which is on Magic
Sinewave Demo Hardware. The sourcecode appears
here and additional Magsine info here, here, here,
and here.

Traditional journal publishers still don't seem to be
getting it: Abstracts of ALL papers WILL be freely
available on the web without any charges or any
registration. With few exceptions, ALL papers
over five years old WILL also be similarly available.

It seems to be getting a lot HARDER to pick up classic
papers. Most libraries have long ago dropped their
interlibrary loan services, and The Information Store
seems to have folded. Which leaves UMI and Global
Engineering Documents plus possibly Dialog or Inspec.

Naturally, you should try Google or Questia first. More
obscure stuff can also be found through our InfoPacks.

Updated and expanded our Auction Help page.

Found at least a temporary stash for the dark Pittsburgh
Streetcars site. Only some of the images seem to still be
available. Home page link has been updated.

A reminder about our PostScript Powerpoint Emulation
that gives you all sorts of speed, quality, file size, and
web distribution gains.

A four channel oscilloscope has newly been added to
the Oshonsoft PIC Assembler and Simulator. Speed
seems less than glacial, but it certainly is a highly
useful addition.

We finally have LIVE SILICON on our Magic
Sinewave chips! They seem to be working just fine,
but there's a few debug details and some crucial
measurements remaining to be done.

First commercial unit will be a three phase delta 28.

I've expanded and improved the eBay descriptions
and photos of our superb robotic sliders. These offer
incredible precision for very heavy loads and are
outstanding bargains.

Only 38 remain available from the original lot.

Maxim has published a Cute Variation on the display
multiplexing we looked at in MUSE152.PDF. In which
they drive EIGHT seven-segment LED displays using
only NINE port lines and NINE interconnects.

The saga of the useless PIC Programmers continues.
Note that there is a big time major difference between
a 16F628 and a 16F628A. Specifically that the memory
protection config bits are in a wildly different place and
follow totally different rules.

The Pocket Programmer II does not yet seem to know
the difference. I can finally at least OTP some flash
PIC's now.

A reminder about our recently updated Using Distiller
as a General Purpose PostScript Interpreter. This has
been greatly expanded and improved. And shows you
how easy and convenient it is to use PostScript for
general computing today.

Expanded and updated our Acrobat, PostScript, and
Webmastering library pages.

Please welcome John Bright's Winford Engineering
as our newest banner advertiser. John offers some
interesting and useful DB9 and DB25 breadboarding
adapters along with other fine products.

Closed out the 2003 Archive. Started this 2004 What's New?.

Just uploaded GuruGram #32 which is a tutorial on
Heap Sorts in general and PostScript Heap sorts in
particular. The sourcecode appears here and your
ready-to-run demo utility here.

Updated, verified, and expanded our GuruGram library.

I am saddened by alternate energy enthusiasts who
continue to delude themselves. A recent "breakeven
in fifteen years!" grid-tie project COMPLETELY 
IGNORED interest rates and tapped FOUR very
outrageous subsidies. One of the subsidies alone
would have been enough to pay their power bills for
the entire time. Without even pissing around with all
that ugly junk in their back yard.

In NO WAY was this project even remotely renewable
or sustainable. It was simply a clever but useless scam
to rip off tax dollars for no apparent benefit to anyone.
The fifteen year breakeven claim was an  outrageous
misinterpretation of real world economics.

Note that the highly touted NET METERING is really
a transfer tax subsidy in disguise. The other utility
users pay through the nose for the avoided differential.

More in our Energy Fundamentals tutorial.

Just had a publisher who should know better send me
some forms which basically said "We are going to steal
your intellectual property. Sign and return this form so
we can do so. If we do not hear from you in thirty days,
we are STILL going to steal your intellectual property."

With, of course, NO WAY WHATSOEVER to provide
a negative response. Not even a specific email address
from the sender!

I Just received great heaping bunches of medical books
from a military library. Of, by, and for doctors. We'll be
putting these up on eBay one volume at a time, but
please email me if you are interested in an outstanding
buy on the lot.

Combined our Magic Fill and Vignette routines into a
single NUBKG01.PSL that is faster and a lot more
convenient to use.

Combined our Swings and Tilts and our No White
routines into a single NUTILT01.PSL that is faster
and more convenient to use.

Just discovered a programming construct called a
HEAP. While a truly wondrous way to efficiently
stash data as a binary tree, its manipulation and
overhead seems daunting for everyday use.

A heap is a binary tree of expandable size that fills
from the top down and left to right. Any parent entry
is larger than either of its two children. The largest
item is always on the top of the heap. The heap gets
maintained by continual swapping to force this rule.

Our PostScript Sorts of December 21st can have
their speed further increased for large n by a factor
of six to ten! To do this, insertion presort into 128x26
bins based on the first TWO string characters. Since
the earlier speed is way more than good enough, such
added complexity only creates low n and resource
problems for most users. Detailed code on request.

This borders on an ancient CONTENT ADDRESSABLE 
MEMORY technique that has largely fallen by the wayside.

Picked up some vintage Casio PB-700 calculators
with unusual FIN/CAL financial firmware added to
them. Now up on eBay.

Here's the latest PostScript sort routines: This one is
a speed optimized bubble sort:

/alphabubblesort2 { /curmat1 exch store curmat1
length 1 sub -1 1 { curmat1 0 get exch 1 exch 1 exch
{ /posn exch store curmat1 posn get 2 copy lt {exch} if
curmat1 exch posn 1 sub exch put } for curmat1 exch
posn exch put } for curmat1 } bind store

And here's a bin presorter that gives an extra 12x speedup:

/presort1 {/matmat mark 128 {[]} repeat ] store
stddat { dup 0 get /curint exch store mark exch
matmat curint get aload pop ] matmat exch curint
exch put } forall mark matmat { dup length 1 ge { dup
length 2 ge { alphabubblesort2{ }forall} if }{pop} ifelse}
forall ] } bind store

Presently alpha sorts 300 strings in 12 milliseconds! More details
are found in GuruGram #31.

Latest GuruGram #31 is on Fast & Efficient PostScript
Sorting Utilities. Sourcecode is found here. And actual
testfiles here.

I have a real buy on a school surplus large Xerox 5680
copier. First $699 takes it. FOB Thatcher, AZ. Original
cost: $39,000.00 Believed fully functional; guaranteed
serviceable. Quite clean. Up to 11x17 input, 8-1/2 x 14
output, duplex, staple, resize, etc... 1030 pounds. Liftgate
truck or ramped 5x9 U-Haul recommended.

email me for viewing. Or call (928) 428-4073.

Discovered the secret to making a bubble sort blindingly
fast: Presorting int K bins can speed you up by up to a
factor of K!

Here's a minor adjustment to our sort of December
11th. It gets down into the quarter second range for
400 strings by eliminating a variable and binding.
But making things a tad more obscure...

/alphabubblesort2 { /curmat1 exch store curmat1
length 1 sub -1 1 {curmat1 0 get exch 1 exch 1 exch
{ /posn exch store curmat1 posn get 2 copy lt {exch}
if curmat1 exch posn 1 sub exch put} for curmat1
exch posn exch put } for curmat1 } bind store 

While this seems amazingly fast, it is a n^2 type of
thingy and will slow down dramatically for large n. A
Review of Sorts is found here. The "better" sorts I
looked at had enough overhead that they did not seem
competitive below several thousand entries. They also
are often highly content sensitive.

Speaking of which, presorting the above into two piles
A-K and L-Z can approach a 4X speedup. As could
splitting out all the popularity 1's from eBay reports .
Possibly the 2's as well.

eBay may have made some internal changes that
trashed some of their older links. As a result, many
of our PDF files may have incorrect links. We have
fixed the website pages, though.

Try This Link if you get an eBay link error message.

The hidden message here, of course, is to think twice
about trashing old website links. For you might be causing
untold grief to hundreds or even thousands of other
websites and documents that are trying to link you.

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