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Refurb Log:

Items are typically very easy or impossibly difficult to
refurb, and there often is a very fine line between the
two. Sometimes a little patience and rethinking that is
combined with a very unusual tool or two can salvage
any marginals. Plus bunches of blind luck.

Ferinstance, I got this otoscope medical device that had
its threaded locking ring epoxy seal break away from
its battery case. And some epsilon minus apparently
cross threaded the ring while attempting a fix.

Stripped threads are often bad news, especially if
brass and large diameter fine threads. But by reversing
the ring and using the good "exit" threads and some light oil,
the ring was first gotten to work properly backwards, and then
even frontwards. Much of this was a combination of patience
and blind luck. And using just the right amount of force.

To reassemble the device, a special spanner wrench is
usually used that lets you twist two holes in a ring that
are spaced an inch apart at the bottom of a six inch
deep case. Such a tool normally costs a lot more than the
otoscope itself. But an ordinary stainless steel dinner fork
can be destructively bent into a tool that is just barely enough
to get the job done.

More on related topics in our Refurb Log.

Got one of the usual late night phone calls from an
individual who just invented a new way of marketing and
wanted to run out and get a patent on it to "protect" their
invention. The individual, of course, had never really
marketed anything themselves.

For openers, a patent in no manner prevents anyone from
stealing your ideas. All a patent does is give you a right to
sue someone should your idea in fact get stolen. As the
typical enforcement cost of patent litigation is in the
$300,000 range (yearly litigation insurance alone normally
costs more than $90,000), the cost of a getting a patent is
pocket change that simply does not enter into the economics.

There is, of course, not one patent in one thousand that cannot
be busted outright by a diligent enough search for prior art in
obscure enouth places. Nor does more than one patent in
five hundred ever return a net positive cash flow.

I may have mentioned this a time or two before, but any
involvement whatsoever by an individual or small scale
startup with the patent system is VIRTUALLY CERTAIN
to result is a HUGE net loss of time, energy, money, and
sanity.

Much more on these topics in our Patent Help library.
especially our Collected Patent Tutorial Reprints, and
specific files on When to Patent, The Idea Mortality
Curve, How to Bust a $650 Patent, and, of, course, our
classic Case Against Patents that started it all.

Here's some of the major Data Sheet Sites, courtesy of
the Sci.Electronics.Design newsgroup...

http://www.datasheets.org.uk (5.20 Million)
http://datasheetarchive.com   (2-3 Million)
http://www.alldatasheets.com (1.07 Million)
http://www.chipdocs.com (701,010)
http://datasheets4u.com (523,031)
http://www.datasheetcatalog.com (280,758)
http://chipcatalog.com (253,733)

And, of course...

https://www.tinaja.com/glib/numschip.pdf    (1)

Some eBay sellers seem obsessed with having as high a
sellthru rate as they can, attempting to sell everything
every time on its first listing.

In reality, there probably is no correllation whatsoever
with fast sellthru and optimal eBay profits. In fact, if
things are selling too fast, you are probably charging far
too little.

My own feeling is that if it takes a few weeks or even a
few months to sell something, the chances are you can
get a much higher price for it. And that your total return
even after the extra fees should be significantly higher.

Especially since your first relisting is free.

At least to me, a twenty one day cashout and a fifteen
month hang time appears about right for industrial items
acquired in quantity. Especially if a 30:1 sell/buy ratio
goal is in fact acheived.

More on our Auction Help page.

I've been doing more study into image pixel interpolation.
This is an utterly fascinating subject with some amazing
potential. Several very interesting links appear here,

It still turns out that your "best" image interpolation scheme
for minor size changes often remains the High Resolution
Cubic Spline Basis Function. Such as we are using in our
Universal Bitmap Manipulator and as we looked at back
here.

But if you are reducing an image, another problem rears its
ugly head. You might get Moire sampling artifacts or dropouts
of fine detail. The workaround is to combine a low pass filtering
(such as a Gaussian correllation) with your downsizing to
prevent missed lines or added artifacts.

When highly magnifying, there are newer and fancier techniques
that go beyond what you can do with high resolution cubic
splines. Many of these are based on Lanczos techniques, while
the present top dog just may involve a process called LAD
Deconvolulation.

Beyond these techniques are whole other worlds of content specific
and nonlinear transformations. A content specific image processor
might deal with a picket fence area differently from a blue sky area.
And nonlinear techniques can solve particular problems. For instance
an algorithm of "Replace each pixel with an average of its nine nearest
neighbors" dramatically reduces artifacts in a noisy image. But also
introduces very bad problems of its own.

Another consideration is that the fancier techniques often involve
great heaping bunches of computer horsepower and may not be suitable
for real time or even near real time uses.

Refurb Log:

Sometimes you can guess at a schematic simply by
noting which integrated circuits are apparently used
how. I was refurbing a Heath 4804 byte analyzer that
seemed to be behaving erratically. Docs appeared to
be unavailable anywhere. On closer checking, though
operation ended up pretty much as they intended.

We'll first note that you can read the date code on any
IC to get an age estimate. Chances are the unit was
sold about a year later. A typical date code might be
1389 which would be the thirteenth week of 1989. The
IC package style, its SMT vs thruhole mounting, and
its complexity can also give you major clues as to what
you are dealing with.

In the case of the 4804, the inputs obviously went to
a pair of 4-bit transparent latches whose true outputs
indicated their current or held logic state. This was
followed by a plain old 8-input NAND gate that allowed
"1" "0",, or "don't care" adress trapping for fancier
uses. The choice of chips and their position made it
obvious how the unit was supposed to work.

Their hassle (and a really dumb mistake) was that any
ungrounded inputs could easily pick up the power line
or a radio station via body coupling. If you did not know
that All unused inputs MUST be grounded, you would
easily get erratic and confusing results.

If I were keeping the unit, I'd add eight 100K resistors
from each input to ground to discourage noise source
inputs. But I kept the unit as is on eBay, just in case
anyone wanted an authentic collectible.

Naturally, if any item has a use quirk, you should very
conspicuously point it out ahead of time.

More on related topics in our Refurb Log.

Someone had asked when the eBay spring slowdown starts.
This is nothing to worry about, because it is simply that little
dip between the winter slack period and the summer slump.

The fancier features of a Universal Bitmap Manipulator
demand a high quality true X-Y pixel interpolator. For
such utilities as a precision rotator, a true keystone
corrector, a general distortion remapper, or a scanner
"reperspector".

The "best" interpolation often involves High Resolution
Cubic Spline Basis Functions. As they involve a 4x4=16
correllation at every pixel in a megapixel image space,
these can easily get excessively time intensive. Most
especially when using raw PostScript to create corrected
.BMP images. The big question is what corners, if any
can be cut for faster performance.

The full 4x4 interpolation looks like this...

p03(b0y)(b3x) + p13(b1y)(b3x) + p23(b2y)(b3x) + p33(b3y)(b3x) +
p02(b0y)(b2x) + p12(b1y)(b2x) + p22(b2y)(b2x) + p32(b3y)(b2x) +
               evaluated pixel -----> X <----- is positioned here
p01(b0y)(b1x) + p11(b1y)(b1x) + p21(b2y)(b1x) + p31(b3y)(b1x) +
p00(b0y)(b0x) + p10(b1y)(b0x) + p20(b2y)(b0x) + p30(b3y)(b0x)

You can get this result by starting with four X interpolations that
are followed by one Y interpolation, or vice versa. Either way ends
up with the same result shown above. Twenty lookup-multiply-adds
would seem to be needed at first glance.

But terms like (b0y)(b3x) can be combined into a single table
lookup. Ferinstance 10X the x residue plus 100X the y residue
could give you a 100 entry lookup for each of sixteen tables.
Thus reducing you to Sixteen lookup-multiply-adds per pixel.

Further, as this plot shows, those four "corner" tables do not
do all that much. They only add two percent worst case and add
very little noticable in most other positions. (red on the plot is
a one percent or higher weight; green is two percent or higher.)

So it would seem tempting to bundle the corner table weights
with those of their diagonal neighbors. And getting us down to
Twelve lookup-multiply-adds per pixel.

A second corner cutting opportunity involves dealing with the
rare underflows. As this anaylsis shows, underflows can occur
just under two percent of the time at an average of a five percent
darkening of the blackest blacks.

Naturally, the underflows have to be trapped out somehow. The
obvious dup 0 lt {pop 0} if might be approximated by a simple abs.
This would incorrectly lighten a few of the lowest energy blackest
of blacks. While eliminating a time intensitive test on a centermost
processing loop.

I'll try to work up these concepts further.
Consulting services available.

Optimum bid strategy very much depends upon the
auction venue. As we've seein in EBAYBUY.PDF,
your best eBay bid strategy is to always proxy bid
your max once very late in the auction, doing so in
oddball penny amounts just above a currency
resistance threshold.

This may also seem best at a live auction on a big
ticket item that you really want, but I have found
compelling advantages to consistently offering
the auctioneer loball floor opening bids, especially
if you are subtle about it. The auctioneer is more
likely to notice you and accept your bids and may
even give you a fast hammer every now and then.
More in AUCTSCNE.PDF.

The situation with Government Liquidation auctions
is much more complex. I've cut back on my bidding
here because end-user bidders have gotten way too
competitive, because of an unaceptably high $50
minimum bid opening, their maddeningly infuriating
auto bid extensions, and problems with site access
and site manager customer treatment.

Trap #1 is any GL auction is that your optimal
bidding time is precisely 42 minutes into the last
hour of the bid offer. Anything less telegraphs
your intent, and anything later trips the ludicrous
bid extensions and really invites competition.

Trap #2 is that oddball penny amounts will immediately
tell the competition that you have just proxy bid your
max should you become high bidder. Thus one or two
even bid increments above a currency threshold may
in fact be your best bet.

O.K. Heres some more details on our "Use both
a camera and a scanner" ploy from two days back.

The basic idea is covered in EBAYFOTO.PDF. I'll
first take an ordinary picture using a Nikon Coolpix
5000 at full native resolution. The next step would
usually be going through our Swings and Tilts utility
to force Architect's Perspective. But this particular
item is squat enough that the persepective can
be forced by background knockout alone.

While I've got a new Fast Background Knockout
utility available, this time, I used our plain old
KNOCKOUT.BMP with a simple cut and paste.

As we've recently seen, fitting background to a
diagonal line can be greatly sped up by using the
lasso tool with a matching diagonal closure. The
rest of the image is post processed using my
usual tricks.

At this point, the space for the label gets carefully
measured. Label width is 561 pixels, its left height
is 120 pixels, its right height is 118 pixels, and its
right offset climb is 233 pixels.

The side label is than scanned. Any retouch or
lettering improvements are best done before
perspective distortion using our newly revised
Bitmap Typewriter tools.

Now for the tricky part. The image is resized to
120 x 561 pixels and rotated vertically. It is then
copied into the center of the top half of a new Paint
page of exactly double height or 1122 pixels. The
reason being that we want to keep the original left
side of the label the size it was, while progressively
applying climb and shrink correction to the rest of
the label.

Some playing around with NUTILT01.PSL is needed
to find the magic values that give you exactly the right
amount of climb and shrink. In these examples, setting
the tiltaxis to -1.15 and the howmuchtilt to 0.1 gave a
quire good fit.

The newly "perspected" label is then rotated back to
its normal position and cropped to size. The "white"
background may no longer be a pure white, so the
lasso tool is used to crop out all but the active label.

Merge time. The scanned and corrected label is then
pasted on top of the camera image of the rest of the
module. Some minor edge cleanup and treatment may
be needed to make the patch completely invisible.

One minor gotcha: The lettering across the label will
be uniformly spaced rather than perspectively spaced
where the distant letters are compressed. You are very
unlikely to notice this discepency at all. The problem
can be fixed at the cost of computation time.

We have pretty much decided to strongly discourage
premium shipping services. The day we use one is the
day the UPS relief driver forgets to stop or the day our
shipping help uses their flextime for dog dentistry.

More often than not, someone will piss around negotiating
for a month or two and then demand instant shipping. It
makes little sense to double or even triple their costs for
little apparent benefit.

Plain old UPS brown is surprisingly fast for most people
most of the time. And most of our eBay feedback praises
our fast shipping using this service. And the disruptions do
not in any way seem to justify the benefits.

The obvious answer to whether you should use
a digital camera or a scanner for your eBay
photography is to use both at once...

Note the infinite depth of field along the lettering
plane! Plus the total absence of any flash flare on
the label. Combined with our usual pixel locked 2-1/2 D
"Architects Perspective" and our normal shadowless
photography with JPG edge artifact reduction.

What you do is scan the label, resize and retouch as
needed, and then use my Swings and Tilts backwards
to distort it into the correct trapezodial shape. Then
cut and paste and retouch the borders a tad.

You can click expand the above image to get it up to
the normal eBay JPG size. The full size, full res
bimap image can be made available on request.
The latest Swings and Tilts version is found here.

I hope to expand our Universal Bitmap Manipulator
routines to simplify converting flat text into a
perspective paste. More on PostScript here.

We have the finest photos on eBay, bar none. Yes,
Consulting and Seminar services are available.

Refurb Log:

I can't emphasise strongly enough how important
careful inspection of auction items and continuous
inventory control is. Here's some recent examples
that have caused me grief...

   ~ A pricey community college instrument needed
      an outrageously expensive replacement part.

   ~ What I thought was a complete scanner turned
       out to be only the slidemaking attachment.

   ~ Most of a stack of large electronic breadboards
      was missing crucial inserts.

    ~ A pallet full of slot machine mechanisms turned
       out to be pulls needing extensive refurb.

   ~ Apparently new-in-original-packaging drafting
       table covers turned out to be the old covers
       stashed in new boxes.

   ~ Repairs to an oscilloscope plug-in were so
      awkward they could not justify resale price.

   ~ What appeared to be a real bagain was really
      a mix of useless halves of two wildly different
      Items.

    ~ An attempt at humor in an instrument description
      caused widly wrong assumptions by naive buyers.

   ~ A lab oven turned out to be a much lower value
      lower temperature incubator. Also flood damaged.

Much more in our ongoing Refurb Log and on our
Auction Help library pages.

If you divide the number of lots in a live auction by the number
of bidders, you can approximate an average number of lots that
each bidder will win. One way to do this is to keep track of the
first and last bidder registrations issued. But some auction houses
may purposely shuffle their numbers or preassign out-of-range
numbers to regular customers.

In reality, the usual 80-20 rule will apply in which twenty percent
of the bidders will likely end up with eighty percent of the lots.
And since your particular items will be a small subset of the total
offered, what really matters is how many specific interest bidders
are competing against you.

Ideally, of course, you want zero competition. Especially regulars
who are known to bid for spite just to prevent others from scoring
a lot. Such pissing contests, of course, should be studiously avoided.

Much more on our Auction Help library page.

I'll try and get our Sunraise thermography machine checked
out and up on eBay shortly. Thermography is a fascinating
process applied to traditional printing that gives a raised
lettering effect. Often for business cards and wedding
announcements Typical machines are $1800 new.

Normally, a special powder is sprinkled onto still wet ink.
When heated, the powder intumesces and swells, creating
the raised effect. There are several grinds of powder
for varying lettering sizes. Thermography works best if
all of the lettering is nearly the same size.

Fortunately, when using standard rubber base inks, the
thermography process can still be used up to three hours
after printing. This greatly simplifies things.

Sadly, thermography does not work with toner or laser
printing. One approximation is a spray product called
Laser Buddy. Another older route is called Bakerizing.
In which you place a sheet of mylar in contact with your
toner and run it through a heat and pressure machine.
Thus creating a shiny black calendaring effect.

There seems to be an unwritten rule of "No Christmas Auctions"
There are typically 65 to 130 auctions scheduled in Arizona at any
given time. This seems to consistently drop to less than one-sixth
at year end.

More on the Arizona Auction Scene in This Tutorial.
And more on live auctions in general are found here.

Your own custom regional auction finder can be created for
you per these guidelines.

A reminder that I have a pair of very rare 1908
commercial silent movie projectors available.
They are presently disassembled, so they would
easily be UPS shippable. They seem to be nearly
complete and should be eminently restorable.

Please email me if you have any interest in this unique
opportunity. Inspection welcome. We will shortly
be dramatically be expanding our refurb activities, so
I very much need the shop space back.

I've sharplly reduced prices on some of our older eBay
items to clear them out for some exciting new offers.
This is sort of a one time sale, so when these are gone,
they are gone.

Several prices on our unique collectibles have been
sharply increased, because I got tired of giving away
items that I am the the world's sole source supplier for.

Apparently Government Liquidation has just raised their
minimum bid to $50. I consider this really, really dumb
because many of their items clearly were not worth their
previous $35 minimum opening price.

I've personally cut way back on my GL involvement,
first and foremost because their recent prices are way
too high, caused by far too many competitive bidders.
Problems with site managers, site access, and all their
maddeningly infuriating auction extensions also remain.

The "whipsocket effect" appears to be alive and well in
the digital camera arena. In which several decades of
automobiles continued to provide whip sockets.

We seem to have a cuious mix of outstanding improvements
in resolution, performance, noise, power, algorithms, and cost
with a dogged continuance of previous camera features that
now are clearly utterly worthless.

A digital camera can be any shape and form. Where the
"two cassettes, a film plane and a chunk of glass" clearly
and exactly defined what a 35 mm traditional camera had
to look like.

"Single Lens Reflex" cameras solved a parallax problem
that simply does not exist on a digital camera! It is
ludicrously absurd to offer a SLR digital. Especially if
the SLR no longer offers interchangable lenses.

The lenses themselves are far less critical than they used
to be. As you get up into the 10 and 15 megapixel arena,
digital zoom can replace most traditional lens needs. And
waiting in the wings are liquid lenses and a stunning new
breakthrough called "negative indicies of refraction" that
totally blows away traditional optic laws.

For studio photography, even the viewfinder makes no
sense whatsoever. Your composition should be done at
the same size as the final image or print! Preferably through
a wireless link to a 17 inch interactive monitor. One that
lets you pinpoint the focus distance and view depth of field.

What I'd really like to see for my eBay photography is a
crane-like camera in which you can remotely position your
image sensor over a wide three dimensional area. With total
interactive control of everything. All at final full size.

Chances are overwhelming that such a system would not
look at all like a whip socket. And might be a perfect
candidate for a hexapod solution.

OK, here is the full solution to the "Bezier problem" in
which you want to relate the x0-x3 control points to the
A-D cubic equation coefficients. And their y equivalents.

Create some cubic basis functions by starting with an
obvious 1 = 1 and morphing it into a bizarre but highly
useful (1-t) + t = 1. Cube this expression to get...

         (1-t)^3 + 3t(1-t)^2 + 3t^2(1-t)  +  t^3  = 1
 
    Call each of these left four terms a basis function..

            B0(t) + B1(t) + B2(t) + B3(t) = 1.

x (and separately, y) are now related to our cubic t by...

       x(t) = x0(B0(t)) + x1(B1(t)) + x2(B2(t)) + x3(B3(t))

x(t) will also equal our cubic spline equation...

                  x(t) = At^3 + Bt^2 + Ct + D

Since t has to be allowed to vary from 0 to 1, the only
way these two equations can be equal is if the t coefficients
match for each power. Expand the terms...

    x0(1-t)^3             =    x0 - 3x0t  + 3x0t^2   -   x0t^3
    x1(3t (1 - t)^2)    =           3x1t  -  6x1t^2 +  3x1t^3
    x2( 3t^2(1-t))      =                        3x2t^2  -  3x2t^3
    x3t^3                  =                                           x3t^3

Now, think vertically upwards and regroup to get...

                      A =   x3 - 3x2 + 3x1 - x0
                      B = 3x2 - 6x1 + 3x0
                      C = 3x1 - 3x0
                      D =  x0  

You can easily show that the control points behave in
the expected manner. At t=0, only B0(t) is active and
thus x0,y0 defines the starting point of the curve. At
t=1, only B3(t) is active and thus x3,y3 defines the
ending point of the curve.

The initial x versus t slope is 3(x1 - x0) and the initial
y versus t slope is 3(y1 - y0). The initial xy slope is thus
(y1 - y0)/(x1-x0) and thus the x1y1 control point sets
the initial slope. Similarly, the final xy slope can be shown
to be (y3 - y2)/(x3 - x2) and thus the x2y2 control point
sets the final slope.

Finally, note that the x1,y1 point has its strongest
influence precisely and always at t=1/3. And similarly,
the x2,y2 point has its strongest influence precisely
and always at t=2/3. The "tension" or "enthuasiasn"
of the Bezier curve is thus determined by how much
change has to happen in x and y between t=1/3 and
t=2/3.

Q.E.D. Or something like that there.

Magic Sinewaves are a newly discovered class of math
functions that dramatically can raise the efficiency and
improve the quality of induction motor controls, solar panels,
electric vehicles, telecom, inverters, and aerospace apps.

An intro tutorial appears here.

The key Magic Sinewave features are that any number of
low harmonics can be forced to extremely low values while
using the absolute minimum number of efficiency-robbing
switching transitions to do so. Yes, three phase variations
are also available.

As are demo chips and sourcecode.

Several readers have asked about the frequency limits to
magic sinewaves. These are primarily for 60 Hertz use but
might be extendable to 400 Hertz aerospace apps.

The reason for the low frequency limitiations is that as many
as 45,000 instruction cycles might be needed to properly
generate one magic sinewave cycle. This translates to a
10 MHz clock for a PIC generating ordinary 60 Hz. power
waveforms.

Consulting, Training, and Development programs available.

We seem to have a coastal fog this morning. Perhaps
it is time to set out the lobster pots.

Those Basis Functions are really neat when you start digging
deeper into Cubic Splines. What they really do is decide how
much contribution each control point gives you anywhere along
the t curve from 0 to 1.

Ferinstance, at t=0, x0 (and y0) completely dominate and give
you 100 percent control of position. At t = 1/3, x1 dominates
and also sets the initial slope of the x versus t (or y versus t)
curve. At t=1/3, the scaled contribution of the four control points
is 8/27ths, 12/27ths, 6/27ths, and 1/27th respectively.

At t = 1/2, each end point contributes 1/8th and each influence
point contributes 3/8. With symmetrical results for t=2/3 and
for t= 1. Other t values are similarly proportioned.

Additional plots are found here.

Org. My first clue that today's live auction was not going to
go my way was when the first lot of pop rivets sold for $2200.00.

Larger industrial auctions may be either the usual "walk
around" or the theater-style "sit down". It is super important
to know which is which ahead of time since previewing may
be difficult or even forbidden during a sit-down auction.

Sitdowns may be used because of the enormity of the site,
climate, or security. A walk-around auction is overwhelmingly
more in your favor since it is a lot rougher on the other bidders,
and because quick lot mergings or choices are likely to occur on
the fly at the auctioneer's whim.

If you must participate in a sitdown auction, be absolutely certain
that you carefully preview the "contents of cabinet" and "contents
of room" lots and have fairly approased their value to you. For
their hidden value may give you opportunities others miss.

Online bidders may have a slight edge on the sitdown auctions as
their bids may end up being entered faster and more reliably. But
there is rarely a time when "being there" is not overwhelmingly to
your advantage.

Much more on our Auction Help library page.
Custom Consulting also available.

Some more background on the "smoke and mirrors"
behind Bezier cubic splines...

Any cubic spline relates x to t or y to t using a formula
of x(t) = At3 + Bt2 + Ct + D. t is a parameter that goes
from zero to one. The trick is to introduce methods to
externally and conveniently control the shape of the
curve.

A Bezeir Cubic Spline uses four x control points, two
at the ends of the curve and two that set the initial
and final slope and the enthuasiasm of slope travel
of the desired curve. Four similar y control points are
separately and independently involved.

How do you get from the control points to the A thru
D spline values? Bezier understanding can use the
following trick involving Basis Functions that center
on Bernstein Polynonials...

Start with an obvious 1 = 1. Morph this into a bizarre
but highly useful t + (1-t) = 1. Cube this expression to
get...

           t^3 + 3t^2(1-t) + 3t(1-t)^2 + (1-t)^3 = 1
 
    Call each of these left four terms a basis function..

            B0(t) + B1(t) + B2(t) + B3(t) = 1.

x (and separately, y) are now related to our cubic t by...

         x(t) = x0(B0(t) + x1(B1(t) + x2(B2(t) + x3(B3)t

from which the A thru D values as a function of x0 thru
x3 are eaily calculated by expanding and regrouping.

Two of the really neat features of basis functions are
that their peaks occur at the spline control points and
that any t value is the sum of the four basis functions
evaluated at (t) scaled by their control point values.

Further B1(t) and B2(t) always peak exactly at t=1/3
and t=2/3 respectively. Setting initial and final slopes
of the x versus t curve at 3x1 - 3x0 and 3x3 - 3x2
respectively.

Basis function plots appear here.

Expanded and updated the Arizona Auction Resources on
 our Auction Help library page.

Your own custom regional auction finder can be created
for you per these guidelines.

Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem
smarter when they come at you rapidly

As previously noted, I picked up a bunch of linear position
sensors at the Rubbermaid auction. Some of these are huge,
being as much as five or six feet long.

There are two basic styles, the Waters Longfellow type,
which is a linear resistive potentiometer; and the Tempsonic
style which is a much more sophisticated and accurate device
that uses magnetostriction along a rod for super precise
contactless measurement.

I'll be placing these up on eBay in the next few days.
Condition varies from new to refurbed and guaranteed
usable, and costs of these superb robotics and automation
devices are a fraction of new.

email me if you have any special needs in these areas.
Note that a longer slider can be used for shorter strokes.

Thought I'd once again start a list of live auction strategy
and tactics...

   ~ Agressively know about all regional auctions.

    ~ Seek out auctions where your items of interest are
       only a small portion of the total lots offered.

   ~ If more than five percent of your bids win, you
      are bidding way too high.

    ~ Bring extra copies of your tax certificate and your
       business cards. Be sure you know the acceptable
       payment terms and bid deposit requirements.

    ~ Make sure the auction is in fact being held before
       committing to a long trip. Always ask about preexisting
       bulk bids.

   ~ One simple way of dealing with "certified funds only"
       is to get a pile of certified checks made out to yourself
       in $100 - $200 - $400 - $800 denominations

    ~ Always seek out a sell/buy ratio of 30:1 or higher.
       Avoid ever paying more than a fraction of a cent
       on the dollar.

    ~ Focus on your areas of expertise where you see
       value that others do not.

   ~ Do not let the size of your vehicle determine your
      bids. But do not let a single trash item force you
      into a larger truck or trailer or other expense.

   ~ At larger auctions, tightly center on a few to a few
      dozen items only.

    ~ NEVER get into a pissing contest with another bidder!
       ALWAYS stick to your predetermined max price.

   ~ Best deals often happen very late in the auction,
       so be very patient.

    ~ Assume that items will look a lot worse when you
       get them home, compared to "heat of the moment"

    ~ Best deals often involve "contents of shelf",
       "by the multiple pallet" or "contents of room".

    ~ Continually split your bid increment in half by
        waving your hand palm down across your chest.

    ~ Never gloat or show ANY emotion over any
       spectacular win. Keep a poker face at all times.

    ~ Always carefully preview all items. Preferably
        at least three times and once in reverse sequence.

    ~ If you do not make at least a $25 mistake, you are
       not being aggressive enough.

    ~ Avoid speaking to other bidders, but listen carefully.

    ~ On-site auctions are overwhelmingly more productive
       than Auction House or Auction Barn events.

    ~ Be willing to return with nothing. Never bid just
       because you are there.

    ~ If heavily crowded, stay by your upcoming item and
       let the auctioneer and crowd come to you

    ~ Bring a dolly or a cart with you.

    ~ Become ultra aggressive if the auction clearly
       starts going overwhelmingly your way.

    ~ Be in the auctioneer's face when bidding and
      totally invisible otherwise.

   ~ Watch for "poisioned" or combined lots. These
       can be a superb deal if hidden value remains.

   ~ Keep lowball "floor" bids subtle and seen only
       by you and the auctioneer.

    ~ Suppress your ego at all times!

   ~ Never give any ambiguious signal or bid.

~ Avoid theft by loading your highest value items as
       quickly as possible.

   ~ Dress down to the point of being shabby but
       always wear a distinctive hat or whatever.

    ~ Stick to your bid strategy. I prefer continual lowball
       openings to single max bids. Have the auctioneer
       return to you when momentum lags.

    ~ Unwanted items can usually be given away after
        the auction, but carefully spell out who gets what.

     ~ NEVER piss off the auctioneer!

   ~ Pay particular attention to lots that are outside,
      in obscure rooms, or transition areas.

    ~ Always emphatically overstate your body language.

   ~ Have a pocket full of five and ten dollar bills for
      quick help and side deals.

   ~ Bring tools to split larger or heavier items into more
       managible pieces.

   ~ Personally thank the auctioneer after the event.

Much more on our Auction Help library page.
Custom Consulting also available.

We are down to our last two Adept Linear Sliders. And
are unlikely to find any more any time soon. Remaining are
a pair of 950 mm linear acutators with encoders that are
repositionable to a tiny fraction of a mil.

email me if you need any further details. I expect these to
be gone in a week or two, judging by how fast the previous
fifty sold.

The key secret to becoming a cubic spline expert is to
understand how you get from graph space to equation
space. Per this tutorial or these summary results.

You can think of a cubic spline as a "snake in a box"
that lies in x-y-t space. Parameter "t" (almost) always
goes from 0 at the beginning to 1 at the end. Although
x and y are cubic functions of t, they are independent
of each other. Letting you build fancy curves, cusps,
and even loops where you precisely control the entry
and exit positions and slopes.

In graph space, x0 sets your initial position and x1
the slope and "enthuasiasm" with which your spline
leaves your entry point. Similarly, x3 sets your final
position while x2 sets the exit slope. Ditto for y.

In equation space, the cubic equation is, of all things,
a cubic equation of x = At^3 + Bt^2 + Ct + D. Now, to
become a cubic spline epert, all you have to do is
relate x0 through x3 to A through D.

What gets tricky is understanding where all those
wierd formulas come from. The simplest way is to
take these equations on faith...

   A = x3 - 3x2 + 3x1 - xo    E = y3 - 3y2 + 3y1 - y0
   B = 3x2 - 6x1 + 3x0         F = 3y2 - 6y1 + 3y0
   C = 3x1 - 3x0                   G = 3y1 - 3y0
   D = x0                              H = y0

   x0 = D                              y0 = H
   x1 = D + C/3                   y1 = H + G/3
   x2 = D + 2C/3 + B/3        y2 = H + 2G/3 + F/3
   x3 = D + C + B + A         y3 + H + G + F + E 

You can simply use plain old algebra  to prove that
the equation space formulas are inverses of the graph
space formulas. And easily use PostScript to prove that
the equations are in fact valid and perform as stated.

But, if you must know where these came from, recognize
that a Bezier curve is a very specific type of cubic spline
that is definied by...

    x(t) = x0(1 - t)^3 + 3x1t(1-t)^2 + 3x2t^2(1-t) + x3t^3
    y(t) = y0(1 - t)^3 + 3y1t(1-t)^2 + 3y2t^2(1-t) + y3t^3. 

Expand all these terms and regroup them, and all those
funny "3" and "6" coefficients in the equation space will
pop right out.

Those strange (1-t) expressions involve Basis Functions,
more on which you will find here. Curiously, the influence
points always have their strongest action at t = 1/3 and
t = 2/3. Which is where the "threes" in the slope equations
come from.

Just picked up a Sunraise tabletop thermography machine
at a public utility auction. It seems to be in real clean used
condition and is perfect for making raised print business cards
or fancy premium grade letterheads. email me if you want to
get in ahead of the hoarders on this one.

Latest GuruGram #57 is on Curve Fitting Cubic Splines to
Circles and Ellipses. It turns out you can do better than
some previously published web results. And that the math
can end up very much simplified and more obvious.

Sourcecode can be found here. More in our Cubic Spline
and PostScript libraries. Consulting Services available.

I continue to be utterly amazed at the lack of plain old
common sense on many alternate energy projects. Along
with the failure to ask fundamental questions.

Ferinstance, a recent post to the Sci.Energy.Hydrogen
newsgroup had a building they were adding a 150 kW
wind plant to. Since there was 100 kW of excess
electricity "going to waste", they wanted to know which
brand of electrolysizer to use for hydrogen storage.

Were the following issues even addressed...?

   ~ A building in a very windy area is likely to be
       very little in demand by tenants.

   ~ Building in a windy area dramatically increases
      heating and cooling costs. Wouldn't earth berming
     and planting trees save a lot more energy a lot
     cheaper than can be recovered?

   ~ Living inside a windmill would probably be an utter
      disaster because of continual noise, vibration, and
      subliminal stress issues. Kawhoosh kawoosh kawoosh.

   ~ The nameplate rating of a wind generator has nothing
       whatsoever to do with the amount of electricity that
       can be produced. The latter is determined by long term
       wind stats. Wind energy is also highly nonlinear with
       lower velocities. I'd predict something like twenty kWH
       per day geninely and actually long term recoverable as
       "excess" electricity from the proposed system. Electricity
      worth two dollars per day.

~ The recovered energy must significantly exceed the recovery
      costs, or the project makes no sense whatsoever. Two dollars
      per day of electricity would get totally consumed by a ten
      year, ten percent $4500 investment. Which wouldn't be even
      enough for union bribes and permit payoffs.

    ~ Because both electrical kilowatt hours and the dimes that
       pay for them are both fungible and interchangible commodities,
       there is absolutely no known energy storage sytem that is
       even remotely comparable to grid buyback for simplicity,
       economy, safety, and reliability. Not by a country mile.

    ~ A utility may elect three or more types of buyback. Net
       Metering, of course, is an outright ripoff as it severely taxes
       other utility users while obscenely undervaluing storage
       services. With Avoided Cost buyback, the utility pays you
       the same as they do everybody else. And any differential
       between what you buy and what you sell is more than
       justified by the additional storage services provided.

    ~ Finally, the utility may elect zero buyback because the
       project makes no economic sense to them. Which also
       suggests that if the utility cannot profit from the fiasco,
       then nobody else is likely to either.

   ~ Electrolysis to hydrogen, of course, is one of the worst
      possible energy storage schemes because of its instant
      destruction of exergy.  A kilowatt hour of electrical
      energy is ridiculously more valuable than a kilowatt hour
      of unstored hydrogen gas. Because its thermodynamically
      reversible recovery is insanely higher. And that is all
      before any amortization or storage or safety issues.

More in our Energy Fundamentals and Electrolysis tutorials.

The Onion reports major problems with the Panda
exhibit at the Chicago Aquarium. Apparently there
are issues with the masks and the regulators.

If you are making more than four or so newsgroup
posts per day, you probably should cut back and place
your comments in your own blog instead.

Newsgroup posts have about a seventeen hour attention
lifespan, while your blogs can run forever. You can edit
and rethink your blogs. Ad Hominem attacks and thread
hijaking cannot happen. Plus your posts are likely to be
more well thought out and focused.

Spend the time and energy where it will do the most good.

A reminder that we now have a RSS feed up. Included are
these sort-of-a-blog What's New pages and quick access
to our more popular tutorials.

The errors in a four spline circle approximation can be
dramatically reduced by going to a six spline one. I don't
have the exact error reduction figure yet, but I suspect it
is at least ten times lower as it seems completely invisible
at the highest Acrobat magnification.

My current prediction: eight splines is probably good enough
for most normal machine shop use, and m might be overkill.

I hope to have a GuruGram on Circle and Ellipse approximation
with Cubic Splines up on this shortly.

I find it more than annoying to be in a caving area or a
wilderness and have continuous and loud aircraft noise.
And was wondering why this is not a problem where I
live here in the Greater Bonita-Eden-Sanchez metropolitan
area.

Apparently this is one of the very few areas in the country
where commercial overflights are extremely rare. If you
go to Google Maps and magnify till you only get a few states
and plot the obvious city-to-city commercial routes, most of
them seem to miss the Gila Valley by at least thirty miles.

The quiet sure is welcome, though.

There's a lively discussion over on Slashdot on how the
new and highly-in-demand X-boxes routinely blow up. The
cause is apparently bad thermal design of the external
third party power supply.

Simply getting the supply off of the floor and providing some
circulating air seems to help bunches. Various "pieces of
string" suspension solutions have also been proposed.

Deep pile carpets (especially those where you cannot see the
dog) are very much a no-no.

I had a similar problem with a Cisco cable modem that was
partially my fault and partially theirs. Although they deny
there is a serious thermal design issue on the BEFCMU10.

Their vent holes are obviously too small. I compounded the
problem by putting a router on top that both blocked the
vents and actually forced heat into them. But when this DUH
was fixed, there still was an infuriating intermittent that
neither I nor the cable company could find despite repeated
testing.

The problem has long gone away. Simpy by placing the cable
modem on a 45 degree angle so the bottom vents also had
reasonable access to the ambient air. But larger holes makes
a lot more sense. You can easily feel the difference.

Always be very careful with humor on any eBay listing!

If someone does not get the joke, you will be out a refund
and its associated bad vibes. We had been selling these ultra
sophisticated earthquake simulation machines to qualified
researchers who needed their proof mass actuator, LVDT,
and super performance accellerometer pairs for shaker table
testing.

Two remain available.

Trying to add humor led to wildly wrong conclusions that these
were superaudio kickers or subwoofers, which they are not.

The rule is to be suspect if any inquiry doesn't get it. And to
flush the humor entirely on a second problem of any sort.

More on auction techniques on our Auction Help page.

Here's some more info on a recent solar cell paper that might
prove quite interesting:

Light enters via a glass substrate with a transparent tin oxide
conductive coating on it. An ultrathin layer of Cadmium Telluride
nanorods is spin cast in place. These are single crystals rougly 8
nanometers in diameter by thirty long. A second similar layer of
Cadmum Sulfide nanorods are overcast. A final aluminization
provides the back contact and an optical reflector.

Unlike a conventional doped p-n junction, a diffussion assisted
heterojunction is formed between the two layers. Carefully
controlled bandgaps between the two crystal matrials determine
the rectification and the photocurrent.

The materials are much more stable than oganic semiconductors
and actually improve with aging. The cells are exceptionally thin
and apparently lend themselves to simple manufacturer. They
apparently lend themselves to spincasting and possibly inkjet
technologies.

The efficiency of the demo cells is unacceptably low in the three
percent range. The paper does not address what the physical
theoretical limits of the technology are. But with heterojunctions,
choices in bandgraps should make multilayer and spread energy
devices possible. Some sort of alignment or orienteering should
be able to improve the fill factors as well.

This appears to be a genuine breakthrough development. It
seems to me that conventional silicon pv will NEVER be able to
acheive sustainability and renewability due to its intractability
and its single workfunction efficiency barrier. This new development
just may be the right horse to bet on

The original paper plus additional source materials that discuss
materials prep and such are available from Science.

A curious property of the PostScript arc and arcn operators:
These work as expected for smaller angles but are only a four
spline approximation for full circles.

Regardless of the circle size or the chosen Distiller quality
level!

The error is only one part in a thousand worst case. This is trivial
for most graphics, but this could easily cause problems in
CAD/CAM and other PostScript as Language applications.

Ferinstance, this error would be unacceptble in machining a
three inch cylinder for an engine.

The workaround is to build your circle from at least six arc or
arcn spline calls. This should get you well within acceptable
tolerances for normal machine shop use. Virtually all of the
observable error disappears when you go from four spline
circles to six spline circles.

A GuruGram is in the works and should be available shortly.

There's some lively discussion going on in the newsgroups
over a new "trucker's hydrogen injection system" based on
electrolysis via an alternator. To me, the numbers simply
do not add up. Not by a country mile. Time will tell how much
of this is a scam, how much is the placebo effect, and how much
is real.

First, there definitely is credible peer reveiwed research that
shows that a modest (typically 5%) hydrogen injection can
improve combustion to significantly raise fuel economy. It
is also possible that lower hydrogen injection levels can reduce
carbon and other deposits. The latter has yet to be convincingly
shown.

Two key questions are whether any new mechanical load needed
to produce the hydrogen is greater or less than the benefits
derived; and whether the fully burdened cost amortization will
ever let the system pay for itself.

Few people realize how ludicrously inefficient a conventional
alternator driven electrolysizer would be. The odds are utterly
overwhelming that there is no way in hell that the benefits
could remotely approach the input loading penalty.

First, the fanbelt itself may be limited to the three the five
horsepower range. Its efficiency is probably around 97
percent, caused by flexing and air turbulence. Car alternators
are a lot less efficient than most people suspect, typically
being in the 70 percent range. While the largest losses are in
the rectifier diodes, the wider air gap, less-than-optimal regulator,
cheaper magnetic materials, and field losses all make car
alternator efficiency a secondary consideration. A typical 100 amp
12 volt car alternator is also only a 1-1/2 horsepower device.

For decent efficiency, you cannot simply connect an electrolysizer
to the output of an alternator. Because the alternator is a somewhat
constant voltage device, and an efficient electrolysizer demands a
carefully controlled current. The fancy switchmode electronics
required to do this would probably end up in the 80 percent efficiency
range. Analog control circuits or direct connection, of course, would be
much worse.

While an electrolysizer can theoretically be fairly efficient (neglecting
the staggering exergy hit, of course), most will operate well into their
exothermic range for decent gas volumes.

This introduces at least another 70 percent efficiency drop. Further,
most add-on manufacturers might tend to cheat and use stainless
steel or nickel rather than the platinized platinum required for decent
efficiency. this can add up to another 60 percent efficiency hit due to the
hydrogen overvoltages involved. Details in any electrochem book.

Finally, the engine itself is probably only 35 percent efficient at
converting fuel to shaft horsepower. Let's see. If we start with
1000 watts at the crankshaft, we get 970 watts at the alternator
input and 679 watts at the alternator output. And 543 watts at
the switchmode regulator. And 380 watts for the exothermic
drop. The stainless overvoltage puts us down to 228 watts. And
the engine efficiency finally delivers a mere 87 watts of mechanical
power!

The dilemma is this: The amount of hydrogen producible with one
fan belt and an unmodified alternator seems uselessly low and is in the
"homeopathic dose" range. While significant hydrogen production
seems to me to demand multiple fanbelts, custom heavier and much
more efficient alternators, and other complex modifications.

While other means of hydrogen injection (such as exhaust gas
reformation or a refillable on-board tank) might eventually be
shown to be useful, I strongly feel that the insane efficiency losses
in onboard alternator electrolysis absolutely guarantee that this
flat out ain't gonna happen. And that's BEFORE amortization.

In short, both the engineering economics and the thermodynamics
suck. More in our Electrolysis and Energy Fundamentals tutorials.

Approximating circles or ellipses with four cubic splines
is apparently not that big a deal. Go through all the hairy
math and a magic constant of 0.55228475 pops out. Also
known as four thirds of one less than the square root of two.

This magic number is how far you go on your influence points,
normalized to unity. And times unity for circles and directly
scaled for the minor axis on an ellipse.

The results give fractional pixel accuracy for larger than full
screen circles and ellipses, so should be more than useful
for most people most of the time. Smaller is, of course,
better.

Actually, the "best" magic number is something like 0.00044
lower. The original one gives a perfect fit every 45 degrees
but has an always positive error. The minumum rms error
is 24% lower with mixed positive and negative errors. And
gives three perfect fits per quadrant rather than just two.

I'll save exact details as an exercise for the serious student.
The difference is utterly negligible for most users.

I'll try to work up a GuruGram on this.

That big HSL font may not exist at all since it probably
has a "sign painter" history rather than a "hot lead"
one.

At any rate, a very useful font finder appears here.
It does lead to a Miehle Condensed font that gets
the "S" and the "H" right, but misses badly on the
"N" and on not being a fixed stroke width. Its 1905
design frame also sounds contemporary.

If one were serious about a historical restoration, it
would not be that big a deal to write the proper
font from scratch. The fixed with lets you just stroke
and then patch in seriffs. Which is probably the
"paintbrush" method originally used.

We can do this for you as a consulting service.

Sold two of our five remaining Adept Linear Sliders.
We are unlikely to find any more beyond these.

I took the HSL logo found in the 1915 Pittsburgh
Directory and cleaned it up a bit with Paint...

Yeah, that wrong spelling of Pittsburgh was theirs,
not mine. I also was not sure of the color, so I used
sort of a maroonish Tuscan for everything.

But this item clearly cries to be done right using
fancy mid-level PostScript procs. New stuff needed
might include a spline-to-ellipse converter and some
updated variations on a banner nonlinear transform
and an elliptical path nonlinear transform. All but two
characters seem fairly easy to do. These last two can
be curvetraced or built directly from splines.

Finding a perfect fit for the large font may be tricky
as the H centers are high and the S transition is very
much sloped. Seriffs are emphasized. The N slope is
also truncated.

More on this whenever. Please email me if you know
of a good candidate font. Can the project be done in
less than 999 total file characters?

At one time, Stanley was a decent tool brand. But the
latest tool set I bought from them at Wal-Mart quickly
started peeling chrome and one screwdriver promptly
turned into a corkscrew. Apparently Chinese garbage.

A reminder that Wal-Mart does hold bunches of auctions
where they flush fixtures and such from their older stores.
I'm told that most lots are quite large, so you really have
to want to participate in a big way. Here's one auctioneer.

Many similar resources and tutorials on our Auction Help
library page. Your own custom regional auction finder can
be created for you per these guidelines.

The latest issue of Science magazine has a very interesting
solar cell paper in it. This totally new approach involves
nanotechnology and inorganics simply placed on a glass
substrate. Efficiency is not yet all that great, but production
economics appear extremely interesting.

If you are running an eBay store, it is super easy to bury
yourself in worthless trash that consumes more and more
costly storage space. Ideally, everything in storage should
be listed and producing long term income with a well defined
(usually 15 month) sellout date.

At least once a year, I feel it is more than a good idea to
reevaluate everything in storage and do a total bailout.
Sort of a "reset to zero" going out of business sale.

Let's start a new list of possible bailout guidelines...

~ If you touch it, you list it or you get rid of it.

~ Focus on completely clearing any problem area,
    one entire shelf, tote, or similar region at a time.

~ Have and agressively use secondary disposal
    methods, such as wholesaling out to another
    eBay seller via the Alvin Pile.

~ Dramatically slash prices over anything not moving
    at all. Give them one final chance before flushing.

~ Always favor keeping new stuff over old, high value
    items over low, light items over heavy, clean over
    dirty, working over needing refurb, popular sellers
    over unknowns, items within your expertise over
    questionables, packaged over loose, compact over
    bulky, quantity over onsies, and small items over
    larger ones.

~ Carefully research current eBay prices. Chances are
    they have dropped dramatically. Avoid ever listing
    anything for less than a $19.63 opening price.

~ Group oddball low value items into like assortment lots
    or flush them entirely.

~ Links to manufacturer's listings can sometimes be used
   to replace the need for a custom photo. This can simplify
   and speed up low value item disposal. But avoid any
   listings without a photo or a photo-like link.

~ Know exactly what you have in inventory, where it is,
   its value, and its disposal plan.

~ The key tests: Would you buy this now? For how much?

~ Tag and schedule all items to be refurbed. Prioritize
    them in order of bang for the buck effort. Attack the
    big lumps first.

~ Try to use production line techniques where you shoot
   and process many photos at once. And try to maximize
   how many items are listed per work session.

~ Alternate listing big ticket items with nuisance onces.
   Mix and match "easy" and "difficult" listings.

~ Try to list at least four hundred new items during a bailout.

~ Don't agonize over individual decisions. If it is not a clear
   winner that you are genuinely excited about, flush it.

~ Always ask why some item has been neglected or unattended
   to. Chances are if it wasn't worth it then, it won't ever be.

~ Never sell anything you do not feel good about. 

There are apparently two different satellite resolutions
offered by Google Maps. The "brown" areas seem to
be around one meter resolution, while the "green" areas
are uselessly crude, probably around ten meters or so.

I'd expect browns to replace greens as they become more
availalble. Ultimately, what would be nice is full stereo at
0.1 meter resolution in five overlapping spectra. With
blendable streets and other geographic overlays.

At any rate, using Google Maps to trace the Harmony
Short Line north of Warrendale gets tricky because the
maps are in the green. Instead, you can start with a
Station List and the "Old Railroad Grade" you'll find on
the Topozone map southwest of Callery to reconstruct
much of the remaining route.

It has been decades since I have been in the area, but
I suspect some HSL related structures still remain. A
Power plant is presumably on Babcock Blvd, and a
Catering Deli is supposedly in the Wexford ticket station.
Bridge abutments likely remain near Pine Creek Road and
Pine Creek itself, but the Cemetary Lane bridge probably
has been done in by development.

Corrected and expanded the links to some of our early
construction projects on our Guru Archive Reprints page.

Newly added are both parts of the Universal Frequency
Counter and a photo of the Apple I with my keyboard on it.

eBay viewers do not like to even look at items that do
not have pictures. And, while links to manufacturer's data
sheets and websites are permitted, these seldom are in
the .JPG format needed for an eBay picture image.

Here are a pair of workarounds that can improve your
industrial eBay listings: First, the old way to cause
the "camera" icon to show without a main picture was
to create a one pixel white .JPG file.

But you can also newly check the "Description contains
a photo" box to get a simpler result.

Second. here is the HTML code to provide a picture and
a link at the same time...

<a href=""http://www.yourlinkhere.com">
<img src="http://www.yourmessagehere.jpg" >
</a>

In this case, your "picture" will usually be a message
that says something like "CLICK FOR IMAGE AND
TECH DATA". And your link will be to the needed
info. Note that the link can be in most any file format.

Here's some additional info on our recurring "history
can be almost as obsessive as engineering" topics.

We've long seen that an "adequate supply" of Pittsburgh
streetcar photos appears at davesrailpix.com. And that
attempting to view all of these at once may kauz yins guys
to make a mill outta a chopamm sammich and Olde
Frothingslosh Pale Stale Ale in Sliberty.

Fortunately, as a desert rat, I am at long last immune to such
goings on. Skooze me while I redd up the website.

In regards to this matter, the Rege Cordic website has newly
moved. And bunches of other Pittsburgh Streetcar images
can be newly found here. The most bizarre of which (and
quite possibly the most racist) was the Herron Hill Carhouse
which held exactly one streetcar! And apparently used until
1951. A list of carhouses and their history appears here.

Even more interesting is this 1915 PittsburghCity Guide that
details all of the early streetcar routes. Amazingly, there were
few changes over the years, with the conspicuous exceptions of
Crosstown, the Flying Fraction, and latter day route merges
and abandonments.

This directory also includes actual schedules of the Harmony
Shortline Interurban. Whose other fascinating links appear in
What's New for 2005 for February 24th.

Finally, Google Maps in their new Hybrid mode sure makes
tracing the Harmony Shortline easy. Starting here, you can
follow north through Warrendale or south across the Highland
trestle to McKnight Road and Babcock Blvd.

Further south, A publisher of streetcar videos has the route
following the Blue Belt, aka Evergreen Road up and over to
East Street where it joined the Pittsburgh Streetcars. There's
an Ivory Avenue stop shown on the route map that supports
this path. Yet this source tells a slightly different story.

Some interesting alternate energy math:

A 2500 watt synchronous inverter is purchased and
installed for $2500 for a home solar pv system. It is
financed for ten years at ten percent interest. What
percentage of the generated electricity is needed to
pay for the inverter at a utility buyback rate of nine
cents per kilowatt hour?

Assume the solar pv system generates 2000 watts for
seven hours per day for 300 sunshine days per year.
$1.05 per day will be available for purchase by the
utility if zero energy is locally used.

Amortizing $2500 for ten years at ten percent consumes
$1.10 per day of the electricity value generated. Thus,
in this example, the synchronous inverter by itself will
consume ALL of the value of the generated power and
then some.

More in our Energy Fundamentals tutorial.

Something else to worry about: Public utility power
system stability largely depends upon customer loads
behaving as expected. But a new tightly switchmode
regulated and power factor corrected load (such as
a computer power supply) might actually present a
negative resistance to the grid!

A load whose current goes up when the voltage goes
down and vice versa.

Such nonlinear and/or negative resistance loads will
become more and more common as power quality
regs start to be enforced and load efficiency becomes
much more in demand. Clearly destabilizing the grid.

At present, such loads are a tiny faction of a percent.
But when and if they ever get up in the twenty percent
range, things just might get ineresting in a big hurry.

November 6, 2005

One of the more subtle auction opportunities is the poisioned
lot. Which happens when (a) a bunch of junk is piled on top of
the good stuff, or (b) when the auctioneer decides to take an
unsellable turkey and "put it with the next lot".

Either way, the poisioned lot often goes for a pittance. The only
trap is to decide how much hassle it will be for you to flush
the trash and keep the goodies.

Depending on the auctioneer's impatience, a poisioned lot may
even be combined with a fast hammer, for an even better
opportunity.

More on our Auction Help page.

But the emperor has no clothes!

How good is the energy density of those brand new Farad
sized supercaps? Well, any capacitor obeys a law of
CV*V/2 and, at present the supercaps are strictly limited
to very low voltages.

Thus a one Farad supercap at two volts has an energy
storage capacity of two Watt-Seconds or Joules.

A plain old computer grade electrolytic cap might have
a rating of 4700 microfarads at 450 volts for a motor
control. Its energy storage capacity is about 476 Watt
Seconds. Even allowing for the larger volume, this is
clearly denser energy storage.

A liter of gasoline has energy storage of 32,400,000
watt seconds.

More in our Energy Fundamentals tutorial.

As several newsgroup posters are conclusively proving,
rectocranial inversion can clearly be both chronic and
acute at the same time.

A reminder that we have our new RSS Feed up at
https://www.tinaja.com/whtnu.xml. This continually links
our What's New page and also gives you instant access
to a few of our more popular tutorials.

Updates are often daily.

To participate, you will need a news aggregator such as
NewsGator. And copy the above link to them.

Please report any problems. Some aggregators and
Google's Blog Search do not seem to be updating for us.
Yet we pass this validator just fine. While we get hundreds
of RSS Feed hits per day, the traffic on the linked web
pages does not seem to be changing all that much.

Are you able to use our RSS feeds properly? Please
email me with your feedback.

One of the more useful and impressive image post processing
tasks is background knockout. Sadly, commercial knockout
programs are less than useless in that they fail where they are
needed most in deep shadows and ambiguous areas.

Knocking out an image background can dramatically improve
appearance and edge sharpness, especially for eBay product
images. I've got a number of free tools of varying complexity
available that makes knockout fast and simple.

Many hundreds of post processed examples appear here.

With the fanciest tools, you first use my NUTILT01.PSL to
both correct perspective or keystone distortion and block
all true whites in the image to prevent any possible punchthru.
You then trace a continuous white outline around the item
and use my KNOCKBACK.PSL to convert most (and possibly
all) of your background to pure white.

Note that you must not change the image size or brightness or
contrast or gamma in mid process! Otherwise you gain or lose
whites. Once you get the "live" portion of your image the way
you want it to appear, you can use my NUBKG01.PSL to slide
a random patterned background "under" your live image. You
can do this with or without an automatic vingetting. The process
also dramatically reduces .JPG edge artifacts as well.

Naturally, you do all of this in .BMP Format. Once you have
a final image and background, you crop, resize, alter contrast
gamma, and brightness, sharpen (a little goes a long way), and
do your out-the-door .JPG conversion for web upload.

If you prefer simpler "manual" knockout tools, you can select
a ready-to-go patterned background from KNOCKOUT.BMP
and paste progressively larger blocks into your background.

Here's a newly discovered (DUH!) trick to speed out knocking
out to a subject diagonal line: Use the "star" tool in paint to
sample a "C" shaped area in the background. Make the two
UNCLOSED ends of the "C" have a SLOPE nearly equal to the
diagonal! Copy and then paste using white=transparent. Most
(and possibly all) of the edge should have a perfect fit. If not, the
few pixels remaining can easily be retouched. Keep repeating
for the length of the diagonal.

Many more details on these tricks appear in our GuruGram and
Auction Help tutorials. Custom Consulting and training seperately
available.

Tell me a tale and I'll spin you a yarn...

Many moons ago, I had this legendary New York editor come out
and visit a time or two. Who apparently had never strayed very far
from Lawn Guileand and was not, um, aware of the ways of the West.

At a famous Nogales restaurant, he repeatedly asked the waiter
if the Chicken Bombay was hot. Finally the exasperated waiter said
"Would you like this served Mexican Style, Senior?". Which was
enthuasiastically accepted. Naturally, the only purpose of the chicken
in Mexican style Chicken Bombay is to protect the plate.

Later, after nearly washing his car away in a flash flood, he ended up
adding creosote bush to our mesquite hot dog fire and just had to
"pet" that cute and cuddly fuzzy cholla cactus.

On a seperate Texas trip, he managed to get close up to a sheep for
the first time and wondered why the sheep was so greasy. We told
him about Lanolin, and he wondered why we grease the sheep. We
explained that this was natural and that nobody would ever do
anything as ridiculous as greasing a sheep.

A few minutes later, of course, we walked past the cow oiler.

At present, most of our sales are directly through eBay
auctions or our eBay store. Our Bargain Page also leads
you to our Adept Slider and Medical Inventory web pages.

Our Automation Inventory page has not been done yet,
nor any of the other pages we expect to list through
Froogle. Nor is our Paypal based shopping card quite
ready, so our website sales remain VISA/MC or Paypal.

I also still have a demo up of our older Bargain Gallery
system to display website items for sale. Note that this
is a demo only! As stated on our Bargain Page, most of
the items listed are no longer available or may be priced
differently!

You may inadvertently reach some of these older example
demo offerings through a deep Google search. Sorry if this
causes you any problems.

A Galley Slave tutorial appears here.

OK, here is "just enough" HTML to let you improve
your eBay listings....

HTML commands may be inserted into your eBay
descriptions. They typically consist of an opening carat,
the command, and a closing carat. Closing commands
will have a "/" as their first character after the opening
carat.

Here is how you add white space betwen paragraphs...

             <p>Your paragraph goes here.</p>

Here is how to make one or more words bold...

            Words <b>to be bolded</b> go here.

Here is how to indent one or more paragraphs...

            <ul>
            Stuff to be indented goes here.
             </ul>

Here is how to print more than one space in a row...

            Use &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;for extra spaces.

Here is how to force a linefeed...

            Your first line is here.<br>
            Your second line is here.<br>
            Your third line is here.
           
            Note that the <br> command is one of the
            very few that does not need a closing </br>

Here is how to provide a web link...

             The Guru's Lair Website</a> for more
             info.
 
            Note that the link title appears before
            the ending </a>. Ordinary text resunmes
            after the </a>. Fancier links can include
            images and expanded images.

Here is how to add a second image...

            <IMG "your pix filename">

            Note that the link must start with http://... if
            local hosting is used. Fancier images can
            include size, position, and other info.

An image and a clickable link can be combined...

<a href=""http://www.yourlinkhere.com">
<img src="http://www.yourmessagehere.jpg" >
</a>

Normally, the image would be a message
such as "CLICK FOR IMAGE AND TECH
DATA". This allows "image" access to a
non-JPEG file such as a manufacturer's data
sheet.

Naturally, you should NEVER use HTML in any eBay
listing to add sound, animation, glitz, or garish color.

Additional tutorials on our Auction Help library page.

I am in the process of adding both third party links and actual
reprints to many of my older articles to our Guru Archive
Reprints library page. I seem to be having trouble getting
scanned pages of my original Hardware Hacker series that
first appeared early in Modern Electronics magazine.

The Modern Electronics series ran for 1986 to 1989? and
predated the Radio Electronics series, most of which are
now available on our Hardware Hacker library page. Note
that the defunct Modern Electronics was a Long Island
mag, and is not the same title as a more recent British one.

Can any of you provide me with scanned reprints of these
columns? Or loan me the magazines themselves?

Some of the more unusual fire incidents here at Thatcher Fire
Department involve cotton module fires. These modules can
easily self-destruct without any air whatsoever in a wondrously
bizarre fire science process related to exothermic pyrolysis.

A cottom picker machine will make multiple trips to a compactor
which hydraulically compresses it into a 8x8x28 foot block that may
sit around for a day or more before a special vehicle can haul it
to the gin. A typical module may be worth $6500, and many dozens
may be present in a field at once.

Cotton is an outstanding insulator. That is why we have it in the
first place. A deep seated fire can be blamed on "sparking
rocks" but also caused by smoking, a disgruntled employee,
parking a muffler or exhaust tailpipe too close, kids, or whatever.

The cotton insulation retains the heat and the strange process begins.

Heat applied to cottonseed oil refines the oil and liberates
oxygen! The cotton then burns in the oxygen producing more
heat. Left alone, the entire module will self-destruct. Without
any help from wind or oxygen in air! Fortunately, the process
is slow starting. It may take several hours to get in gear and
it may take several days to destroy the entire module.

Firefighting is extremely labor intensive. A plucker crew must
pull out every piece of black or discolored cotton. While the
chucker crew moves the damaged cotton to a safe area. The
only saving grace is that the reward is several hundred dollars
of value savings per fireman hour. The process is very similar
to a dentist removing decay from a giant tooth. Miss anything
and the whole process may have to start over again at 3 AM.

Sometimes the module fires can be smelled without any smoke
at all. Our new infrared imaging camera works surperbly well
in zeroing in on the seat of the problem. And not missing stuff.

Added http://www.publicsurplus.com to our Arizona Auction
Resouces section of our Auction Help library page. Apparently
the City of Tucson and others will be using this site forall their
vehicle and other auctions.

Your own custom regional auction finder can be created for
you per these details. Our Arizona example is the best
available anywhere, bar none.

I'm often asked why my .PDF Acrobat files load ridiculously
faster and are much shorter than anybody else's.

The glib answer is that they load ridiculously faster because they
are much shorter. A properly done Acrobat page with text and
illustrations should be around 10K maximum.

First, it is super important that your ISP provides a feature known
as Byte Range Retrieval or page-at-a-time delivery. Either allows
early pages to be viewed while the latter ones invisibly download in
the background. Most ISP's routinely provide this these days.

Second, if web distribution is your primary delivery, be sure to
optimize it with Acrobat 7. Per these guidelines.

Third is to use PostScript and Acrobat to do the things they
are best at -- delivering text and stroked graphics. Use of
scanned bitmaps is guaranteed to make your files excessively
long besides introducing other severe problems. And preventing
the stuff that Acrobat is really good at, such as magnifying and
searching and Cooltype LCD resolution enhancement.

When and where practical, text should be captured from bitmaps
and converted. Besides improving legibility and searching, this
will dramatically reduce your file sizes and delivery times.

Also when and where practical, stroked graphics should be captured
from bitmaps. Again, ridiculously improving quality and reducing
file sizes. Any essential remaining bitmaps should be reduced in
size and resolution to the bare minimum needed for your delivery
objectives.

Popular applications programs also tend to grossly bloat PostScript
code. Especially with unneeded "handle everything" headers.

My own approach is to write all of my material using text and
stroked graphics written in raw PostScript using my free Gonzo
Utilities. Various .PSL (Postscript-Lancaster) files on my website
give you many detailed examples. Here are some recent ones.

There are also lots of detailed examples in our PostScript Beginner
Projects series. Additional PostScript speedup secrets appear here.

We can offer you a .PDF file size reduction service
and training services on a custom basis.

How to spot an extroverted engineer: They stare at your
shoes rather than their own.

Concluding possible updates to my Energy Fundamentals...

~ I should have mentioned super capacitors somewhere
   along the way. While their power density is now
   becoming interesting, their energy density remains
   abysmal. Measured in CV*V /2 watt seconds rather
   than needed watt hours or kilowatt hours. Other issues
   include very low voltages and poor regulation.

~ Methane Hydrates should also have been covered.
   There are more methane hydrates buried in tundra
   and the ocean than all the known petroleum and gas
   reserves. But these are extremely unstable. It has
   yet to be shown if and how and when any net energy
   can be extraced from them. These also raise the
   spectre of unprecented environmental disaster. I've
   added some new links to our Its A Gas hydrogen
   resources library page where you can go for details..

~ By far the best possible thing that the federal
    government can do with alternate energy anything
    is to get and stay out of the way. Virtually all
    attempts at government meddling in alternate
    energy to date have ranged from hilariously
    worthless to outright ripoff scams. The next time
    some epsilon minus calls for a government alternate
    energy funding using your dollars, ask them which
    type of subsidy they prefer...

The CALIFORNIA model in which virtually
all of the paybacks went into boiler shop
scams that set pv back by many decades.

The ARIZONA model in which you were given
a free large SUV in exchange for an unconnected
and empty one gallon storage tank.

The MIDWEST model where a monumental
ethanol energy sink was cleverly disguised as a
twelve billion dollar vote buying scam.

The SOUTH CAROLINA model where they
added a five ton evaporative cooler to get
their 3 ton but nonworking solar adsorption
cooler to look good.

The BARSTOW model where a highly touted
solar energy farm could not produce enough
power to run the air conditioning in its own
instrumentation building.

The DETROIT model where their bus demos
are trucking their hydrogen in from Pittsburgh,

The CANADIAN model where they coasted
their nonworking hydrogen bus to the media
who marveled at how quiet it was.

The ICELAND model in which outsiders with
hidden agendas are attempting to trash one of
the very few "ain't broke" world economies .

And, of course....

The BRAZIL model that nearly bankrupted the
entire country over monumental ethanol stupidity.

~ So what and where are the genuine alternate energy
     opportunities today? I strongly feel that conventional
     silicon pv will never reach net energy breakeven or
     any renewability or sustainability status. But that
     emerging alternatives involving spread or multiple
     workfunctions, quantum dots, and photonic lattices
     are starting to look very promising. As are newly
     practical MEMS nanoantennas and direct conversion.
     While exergy clearly guarantees that electrolysis
     will remain utterly useless, it is obvious to me that
     solar driven processes that bond hydrogen to carbon
     for high energy density room temperature liquids will
     emerge as alternate fuel solutions. A blend of heptane
     and isooctane seems particularly interesting, Carbon
     neutral makes a more sense to me than carbon free. And
     most likely will strongly involve metalloradicals.

Finally, the clear winners will likely involve negawatts or savings through
conservation. Especially improved LED lighting, various schemes from
the Rocky Mountain Institute, and my own Magic Sinewaves.

Continuing possible updates to my Energy Fundamentals...

~ My claim that not one net watthour of silicon
   solar pv has ever been generated remains prima
   facie obvious. For nobody anywhere is yet offering
   unsubsidized eight cent per kwh solar pv. Claims of
   "panel energy payback" in a few years are clearly
   wildly bogus as they involve subsidies, net metering
   ripoffs, and fail to take into account the full burden
   amortization of a complete synchronous grid buyback
   system. As of this writing, the price of an approved
   and properly installed home scale synchronous
   inverter alone is enough to guarantee that any pv
   system remains a net energy sink.

~ Even if the magic "fifty cents per peak watt" and
   "eight cents per fully burdened kwh" were achieved,
   you still would not be in any manner renewable or
   sustainable! All you have is a complex smoke and
   mirrors energy transfer scam in which traditional
   energy sources are "painted green" by converting
   them to dimes, and then letting the sun shine on the
   dimes. For pv solar to ever become a net energy
   source, it will have to provide fully burdened cost
   advantages over conventional sources. Such cost
   advantages would likely set in somewhere around
   twenty cents per fully burdened peak watt.

~ I should have included mention of avoided opportunity
   costs. Even if you pay cash for a system, there still
   will be the equivalent of amortization because of other
   investments the capital could have been used for.
   Individuals who feel that "economics does not apply
   to them" or "dimes are different than kilowatt hours"
   are clearly deluding themselves.

~ There is no known means of solar energy storage that
    is even remotely cost, convenience, simplicity, and
    safety comparable to synchronous grid buyback.
    Thus renewable and sustainable solar pv will most
    likely come from tightly grid linked users. And that
    pv solar will largely increase rather than decrease
    grid interdependence.

~ The amortization clock runs continuously, so any home
    alternate fuel scheme that is only run a hour a day will
    have fixed costs 24 times higher than a system that is
    run continuously. Such a system is unlikely to ever
    be cost competitive.

                                    ( to be continued... )

I must be doing something right, judging from the outrageous Ad
Hominum attacks my Energy Fundamentals instantly generates.
Response is so fast that it is clear that the unhousebroken ones
do not even read the story, let alone study it before they attack.

This tutorial, of course, has long ago been peer reviewed ( and
lavishly praised ) by credible alternate energy insiders. The few
initial errors have long since been corrected, and no serious
challenge to any of the content has since been validly raised.

I guess if I were working on a revision, I might change it to my
GuruGram web format expand on a few points though...

~ More time should have been spent developing
     and explaining exergy, since this little known
     thermodynamic fundamental guarantees such
     things as why hydrogen from pv electrolysis flat
     out ain't gonna happen. Exergy is a mesaure of
     energy quality. The round trip of electricity
     to hydrogen to electricity is so intrinsically and
     inherently wasteful that there always will be
     more intelligent things to do with grid or solar
     pv sources than instantly destroy most of their
     quality and value.

~  Yes, the ratio of dollars to energy equivalents
    can vary with time, with exergy, and  with ongoing
    tech developments. But when you contract with
    a net metering utility at a dime per kilowatt hour,
    that ratio gets cast in stone. And every dime in the
    transaction at that time is a voucher for and exactly
    equivalent to a kilowatt hour of electrical energy. If
    your pv system generates two dimes worth of energy
    a day and has three dimes worth of amortization, you
    are destroying gasoline ( or other conventional net
    energy sources ), plain and simple.

~   One reader loudly continues to object to my treating
     a gasoline kilowatt hour and an electrical kilowatt
     hour the same in the introductory chart on energy
     density. Doing so remains a valid basis of comparison
     and will not be changed. Any differences are properly
     dealt with in the exergy section later in the paper. And
     electricity can be used for room heat or gasoline likely
     can eventually be used in fuel cells. In any tutorial, a
     choice has to be made of exactly what level of detail
     at what point is appropriate to be able to understand
     and comprehend the basics.

~ "The longer you run a pv system whose amortization
   exceeds its produced energy value, the more gasoline
   you destroy" is obviously correct. But most likely
   should have been qualified by explaining that you have
   this two position switch on any pv panel to date. In
   switch position "A", you destroy a lot of gasoline. And,
   of course, in switch position "B", you destroy even more.

                                    ( to be continued... )

Photographing "big coiled thingies" such as a large immersion heater
or an endoscope or whatever for eBay listing can get sticky in a hurry.

One trick that works well for me is to tape the item to a door. This
gives you very careful control of coil spacing and smoothness and
is much easier than attempting vertical photography.
 
More on eBay image prep at https://www.tinaja.com/auct01.shtml

Some stock background knockouts appear here. Besides dramatically
improving object sharpness and visibility, they very much reduce any
JPEG edge artifacts as well.

One of the consequences of posting objective and rational engineering
info to a newsgroup is that you are immediately accused of being in the
employ of an oil company. Especially when you are telling people things
that they definitely do not want to hear.

Such as the little known but easily verifiable fundamental thermodynamic
principle called exergy that absolutely and positively guarantees that
conventional silicon pv solar to bulk hydrogen energy generation by way
of electrolysis flat out ain't gonna happen.

Well, if the posting is in fact objective and rational, it should stand on
its own merits and should not matter in the least what its source is.

Anyone who knows me at all would immediately recognize the ludicrous
absurdity of my being an Exxon PR flack. More on me here.

But what really amazes me is there is no outrage whatsoever over the oil
companies secretly demolishing all of the drive in theaters to prevent
their being converted into solar energy farms.

When you sign up for an email service with your ISP, you usually have
a choice of "accept all" or "acept specific". With accept specific, only
the exact email names you list will receive messages. With accept all,
any prefix will automatically be forwarded.

The "accept all" presents a dilemma. In exchange for mountains of
trash and scam email, legit customers may guess at an orders@tinaja.com
or a sales@tinaja.com or engineering@tinaja.com, or whatever. Or some
other prefix that you'd never guess yourself. And thus may very much
increase your sales, exposure, and customer satisfaction.

Your call.

The Arizona auction season seems to peak this time of year, with many
hundreds of offerings state wide. You'll find a nearly complete listing
here. Which is the best available anywhere, bar none. And is part of
our Auction Help library page.

A review of the main players in the Arizona auction scene can be found
here. A curtom regional auction finder for your area can be completed
for you per these guidelines.

October 18, 2005

As any geologist can tell you, there are three kinds of rocks: Ingenious,
Metaphoric, and Sedentary.

We are nearly sold out of our Adept Robotic Precision Sliders.
Only five remain and have been listed on our eBay store. It is
unlikely we will be able to find any more anytime soon.

Four are 950 mm medium duty, while the last is 1000 mm heavy
duty. Repeatability is a tiny fraction of a mil!

Another place that digital beats analog bits down is in
"distortionless" filters. Any analog filter must introduce
time delays, because it cannot output before it receives
any inputs.

Digital filters, instead, can easily work with "negative
time" simply by spacing symmetrical taps earlier or later
along a shift register or its software sampling equivalent.
This lets you build all sorts of "impossible" filter structures.

Such as "brickwall" filters and "linear phase" filters that
have zero group delay distortion. Several detailed examples
appear in MUSE105.PDF and MUSE107.PDF

Curiously, we have had digital methods to solve messy math
problems even before we had analog ones. In particular, good
old Newton's Method often can solve stuff that is otherwise
difficult, non-obvious, or even unsolvable by known means.

With Newton's Method, you take a guess at where you think
a solution might lie. Calculate that guess. Make a very small
change in one of the variables and recalculate. Repeat for
each variable and keep making the changes smaller and
smaller until you get as close to a solution as you care to.

Solutions are often ridiculously faster and simpler. But you
do have to start with a good guess, might miss other solutions,
and can "jump mode" if your initial changes are not small
enough. And, of course, at least one solution must exist for
the method to work at all.

More details in STALAC.PDF and MSINTRO1.PDF

More on the "orange book": Pretty near every fire engine in the
country has a copy of the orange book near its front seat. The full
and correct name is the "2004 Emergency Response Guidebook".
It is downloadable free from the DOT using this link.

While hard copies of the book are usually given away as part of
hazmat training, they can be purchased from the GPO or from
Amazon Books.

The book quickly tells you how nasty most common chemicals,
gases, and similar hazmat items are. One section is by name,
one by DOT placard number (a four digit number inside a
diagonal frame on many trucks), the emergency response
procedure, and the necessary evacuation distances.

In particular. you can note that the daytime nowind evacuation
distance for a hydrogen incident is 2600 feet from any occupied
structure.

Hazmat response is very much different from fire fighting in
that the best thing to do is often nothing at all. Most often,
the first responders will do nothing but stabilize the scene and
wait till the calvary arrives ten hours later.

Needless to say, while anyone is welcome to study and use this
text, any response whatsoever can be monuentally stupid and
probably dead wrong. Especially without the proper training,
required safety gear, and ICS command structure all in place.

All first responders follow the Hazmat rule of thumb: "Hold your
arm fully extended with your thumb up. Close one eye. If you
can still see the scene, you are too close."

Expanded and updated our Hydrogen Energy library page.

Just picked up a bunch of stainless steel hose reels from a copper
company rumored to be in the Morenci area. These sell for nearly
a thousand dollars each new. email me if you have any interest at
a tiny fraction of this price.

A lot of hydrogen experimenters do not have the faintest clue how
dangerous hydrogen is or how stupid the things they are trying are.

Many moons ago, a Sci.Energy.Hydrogen newsgroup poster tried
for both the X-prize and the Darwin Award at the same time while
blowing Northern Nevada off the map. Sadly, his garage did not quite
reach suborbital velocity. And repeating the experiment would have
been somewhat problematical.

Some key points:

~ Hydrogen is monumentally and exceptionally
   dangerous, having one of the widest flammability
   ranges and lowest spark energies known. It also can
   be invisible (even when burning!) and odorless.

~ The contained hydrogen density by weight is much
   less than gasoline and its density by volume is an
   outright joke. No personal vehicle practical method
   of hydrogen storage is known. Except, of course
   by carbon bonding to a convenient and safe room
  temperature liquid.

~ Electrolysis makes no sense whatsoever for bulk
   hydrogen energy production because of its staggering
   loss of exergy as guaranteed by thermodynamic
   fundamentals. Electrolysis is pretty much the same as
   1:1 exchanging US Dollars for Mexican Pesos.

~ Stainless Steel electrodes are the worst possible choice
   for an electrolysizer because of (a) the hydrogen overvoltage
   of iron and (b) its low energy passivated surface. Any
   efficient electolysizer demands platinized platinum electrodes.

~ The "efficiency" of electrolysis is utterly meaningless, because
    (a) such figures do not include amortization and (b) electrolysis
    is inherently a destroyer of value because it converts many very
   high value kilowatt hours of electrical energy into far fewer
   and much lower value kilowatt hours of unstored hydrogen gas.

~  If you are both serious and safety competent, you rent your
   hydrogen by the bottle from your nearby hydrogen store.
   This is infinitely safer and cheaper than generating your own.

~  While a modest 5% hydrogen injection can in theory improve
    ICE performance, no onboard generation method to date has
    been able to show a net gain, even before amortization. Should
    such a method evolve, it certainly will not involve electrolysis.

~  The DOT Orange Book recommends a minimum daytime
   nonwind evacuation distance for hydrogen of 2600 feet from
   any occupied structure.

~  Bulk gaseous hydrogen energy is not now and never will be
   a viable or realistic solution for anything. This is absolutely
   guaranteed by thermodynamic fundamentals. 

Hydrogen does remain number one on the charts, though. Even after
all these years. Much more on our It's a Gas hydrogen energy page.  

I'm wondering if the conventional "darkroom techniques" courses
still being offered by community colleges are not totally worthless.
They offer zero in the way of marketable skills, and the odds of any
student ever again "slopping in the slush" are utterly negligible.

But worst of all is that they focus on the wrong things in the wrong
way. Digital photography, of course, has totally run away will all of
the marbles. With its utter elimination of any need of darkrooms
anytime ever. Along with obscenely simplified lighting due to its
much higher sensitivity and considerably wider dynamic range.

These days, the marketable skills all involve post processing.
which is where 95% of your time and effort of photography should
be focused. It often does not matter in the least what the original
image looks like, so long as the camera ( or often better scanner )
is pointed roughly in the direction of the subject most of the time.

Many examples of "new way" photography appear on our eBay
Store where we have the finest images, bar none. Some post prep
example techniques are detailed in our STEPPREP.PDF tutorial,
and in many other resources found on our Auction Help page.

If you are serious about "learning photography", start with free
ImageView32, then PhotoShop, then stup up to my Universal
Bitmap Manipulation utilities.

Consulting services available.

Hue adjustment of an image can end up a lot messier than it sounds.
I'm in the process of adding a hue adjustor to our Universal Bitmap
Manipulator, and expect it to be working shortly.

This might help with the "Nikon shown dark green as light blue"
quirk.

If done directly, there are six different cases, based upon the second
strongest RGB color increasing or decreasing. Also, the eye does
not perceive each color at equal brightness, using something like
0.59 green + 0.30 red + 0.11 blue for an equivalent gray.

I chose to ignore the perception differences and let PostScript do
all of the rest of the work...

            currenthsbcolor             %  get current pixel HSB
             3  -1 roll                         %  hue to top of stack
             hueadj add                    %  add 0-1 forward correction
             dup 1 gt { 1 sub} if        % trap out overflow
             3  1 roll                         %  hue back in order
             sethsbcolor                   % and replace

Hue in forward or reverse degrees can be preconverted once to
a value in the 0-1 range. Speed seems acceptably fast.

Posted a third party Early Article List to our Guru's Lair
Historical Repository. Also newly added third party reprints
of the Psychedelia I Color Organ and a Sports Timer.

Finally got our KB-27A USAF fighter aircraft strike cameras
up on our eBay store. Besides being highly collectible, they
should be of interest to beginning film students or for use as a
"throwaway" camera for high risk stunt gags. 16 mm.

We can supply the camera mechanism sealed in mil packaging
in fairly clean used condition, the camera mount in somewhat
used condition, and the film cassettes in heavily worn condition.

Sorry, no docs. A small electric-only control panel and some
stock machine screws are absent. email me for further info.

Not sure why very dark greens turn out a light blue with our
Nikon Coolpix 5000 camera. Probably has to do with spectral
filtering. Or a strong UV line in the flash. We also had a court
Stenotype do the same thing a few months back.

Color correction this extreme has to be done in stages with
a stripped and replaced background. So I just left it as is
At least for now.

More photo tips on our Auction Help page.
A custom regional auction finder can be created for you.

We just picked up bunches of a rather unusual item that may
have all sorts of unintended uses. We just got 51 Bypass
Feeders, all as new still sealed in original packaging that list
for $153 each. They are up on our eBay store and also available
direct via email. These are all Wingert model 2 HD...

These are 10 gauge steel, have a nice deep green epoxy finish,
(much darker than shown) and a doubly sealed cast twist cap.

These look like a heavier fire extinguisher, and their normal
use is to let you add chemicals to a recirculating liquid system
such as industrial wastewater control or HVAC. Such as acids
or algicides or scale control chemicals.

But they should work just fine cast in concrete for a "secret
stash". Or used as a base for a garden birdbath or gazing
globe. Or a small pneumatic accumulator. Or a tool or small
object stash you can weld onto a truck or ATV. Or for a
specialized piece of ag or farm equipment. Or as a mid-sized
telescope mount.

My guidelines of what works for me on eBay are found in
several tutorials on our Auction Help page. Always start with
our eBay Buying Secrets and eBay Selling Secrets.

I very much feel that my keys to eBay success include seeking
out at least a 30:1 sell/buy ratio, spending extreme time on
photo post processing, having no foreign sales, avoiding all sales
less than $19.63, not selling anything you cannot hold extended
at arm's length, providing lots of personal value added, selling
only highly unique items, providing detailed descriptions and
support links, and accepting VISA/MC/Paypal only.

And, of course, never ending an auction early, and never using
dropshitters, palletized liquidation scams, or consignment sales.
And never selling anything you do not own and have physical
possession of. And, of course, being scrupulously honest with
revenue neutral shipping and guaranteed products.

As I may have mentioned a time or two before, we do have an
associate site that receives our seconds and unsellables and
remarkets them at extremely low costs.

I also use this totally independent site for comparison, as they
often tend to do the exact opposite of what I do. Low sales prices,
any payment form, minimal photography, heavy items, lower margins,
limited descriptons, no link support, and foreign sales.

As near as I can tell, my methods seem to be to be generating
significantly more income for the same or less time and effort.
I am very careful never to critique their site. Nor they mine.

Here's a summary of our current photography techniques. My
goal here is to flat out have the finest images on eBay, bar none.
Such as this example or this one. (Be sure to click expand!)

Images are usually shot with a Nikon Cool Pix 5000 or a Hewlett-
Packard scanner. Flash is used except when it burns out white or
foreground areas. Otherwise, available light and white carded
boost is used.

I very strongly feel that most of your time should be spent in image
post processing, and have placed several tutorials on our Auction
Help library page. If you are not spending at least two hours per
photo, you are not doing the job right. Plan on less than five percent
of your image processing time taking the actual photo.

While others use Adobe Photoshop, my own preference is to use my
own hand written routines combined with ImageView32 and plain
old Paint. As many as seven or eight layers may be used in an image,
combining varying original exposure levels and original art.

On a "boxy" perspective subject, post processing usually begins with
a slight rotation, followed by a keystone correction that makes all
vertical lines perfectly so to one pixel accuracy. Our swings and tilts
and similar routines include a punchthru protector that eliminates any
true whites from creating problems inside the main image area.

Most of the background is then knocked out to white with this routine.
The background may ultimately remain white, be patterned, or even
have a Full AutomaticVignetting applied. Patterning or vignetting
will significantly reduce .JPEG edge artifacts.

The image itself is then improved by minimizing shadows and any
excessively white areas, and removing any camera-enhanced dust
or defects that will later be removed by the final product cleaning.
Lettering is sometimes improved by claning and sharpening the
background. Other times, a full relettering is done using our
Bitmap Typewriter routines.

Final post-processing consists of size reduciton, followed by gamma,
brightness, and contrast correction, cropping to size, sliding an
appropriate background underneath, and doing a very slight sharpening.
Sharpening is often best done before resizing. .BMP to JPEG conversion
is only done as a final out-the-door step.

Typical final image size is 680 pixels wide.

There's some further improvements I definitely want to make, but the
above process seems to barely let me squeak by. I've created a new
Universal Bitmap Manipulator you'll find on our GuruGram library
page. Two needed routines under developement are a precision sub-
degree rotator and a true "distortionless" keystone corrector.

Most electronic components run on smoke. If you let the smoke out,
they don't work anymore.

Picked up an incredible four-cents-on-the-dollar BIN deal on
an absolutely superb and super rugged data acquisition and logging
computer and placed it on our eBay store. Unit includes internal
plugins and external accessories to measure precision pressures,
speeds, clamped currents, time, frequency, low and high voltage,
and great heaping bunches more. Ultra high end SAIC brand.

Full docs are apparently included on the companion hard drive.

Heavy duty military unit appears to be in "near new" condition
with most cables and accessories clearly unused. The only minor
issues are that it is a 1994 era 486 machine with 16 Megs of RAM
and 600 Megs of removable(!) hard drive. And that an apparently
minor repair is needed to a nonresponsive keyboard.

REFURB LOG: Many traditional electronics sources have been
merged or otherwise combined into new corporate shells. Others
may simply have vanished without a trace Here are some of my
guidelines on finding out who is what these days...

If you can find the original address, punch it back into Google and
find out who is there today. Ferinstance, Sypris is now where the
F. W. Bell Magnetics folks used to be. If you have the original old
website, try using the Wayback Machine to see when they changed
to who.

Good old Thomas Registry might be of help. As might some relevant
newsgroups, such as sci.electronics.design. There are also Custom
Search Services available.

September 29, 2005

Just put a classic collectible Moviola 16 mm film editor up on our
eBay store. It appears to be in quite good condition and should be
easy to bring up to museum quality. Shades of the cutting room floor.

September 28, 2005

Your tax dollars at work.

FEMA, in their infinite wisdom, has demanded that emergency
services people blow a million manhours or so completing tests
on their innane micromeddled NIMS repurposing of the perfectly
fine and "ain't broke" existing ICS incident command system.

All emergency people have to take this three hour online test,
under the blackmail penalty of departments being barred from
federal funding. I'd guess costs at twenty million dollars.

You do have a choice. You can either (A) Study for three hours
and possibly pass while getting at least a few answers right, or
(B) Use my "paired keyword" scheme to ace the test in five
minutes flat . The secret to (B) is very carefully making sure that
you learn absolutely nothing about NIMS in the process.

Here's how to ace the NIMS test: Bring the tutorial up in Acrobat
and open your Acrobat search window. For each test question
answer, extract a set of side by side paired keywords. Such as
"vendor specifications".

Search on these. Typically the paired keywords will miss on three
of the four exam choices, and give a perfect hit on the fourth.

September 27, 2005

The latest "sounds like a good idea" water powered car scam
goes something like this: Put a piezo element at top dead center
of each cylinder that gets whapped. Use the electricity to generate
hydrogen by electrolysis. Run the car on hydrogen.

What's wrong with this picture?

We looked at piezo fundamentals back in Hardware Hacker 63.

Piezoelectricity is the property of certain materials to bend
when an electric field is applied. Or to produce a voltage when
bent. The effect is extremely useful for microphones, precision
micropositioners, sensors, sonic cleaners, lighters, laptop display
hv transformers, and sonar.

BUT -- piezo is inherently an E-field machine which means its
source impedance is often very high and normally quite difficult to
match. Very few piezo apps exist above the five watt power level.
Those few that do tend to be outrageously expensive.

Virtually all of the medium power apps convert electricity to
motion; practically none go backwards. For the same fundamental
reasons that virtually all serious power generation is done H-field.

The motion range of a piezo device is quite limited, and normally
less than one percent of its size. Thus stacks of devices sometimes
have to be used for larger strokes. Adding to cost and complexity.

Also, piezo devices are basically capacitors on which charge is
moved, so they have no DC response! It is only when a force or
a voltage is changing, that there is any piezo activity.

Naturally, any piezo device will require more mechanical
energy input than is electrically recovered as output. There
ain't no free lunch. The system described is thus a dynamic
brake that will stop the vehicle in less than its normal coasting
distance.

Further, most piezo materials have a Curie Point limit above
which they fail. Safe temperatures are typically well below that
of boiling water and ridiculously under car cylinder temperatures.
Many materials are also quite fragile and shock sensitive.

How much energy can, say, a piezo charcoal lighter produce?
Assume the lighter produces 1000 volts across an 0.1 microfarad
capacitance ( Chances are both values are outrageously high ).
The stored energy per whapping is 1/2 CV^2 or .05 watt second.
There are 34,560,000 watt seconds in a liter of gasoline.

As we've seen before, thermodynamic fundamentals involving
exergy absolutely guarantee that a kilowatt hour of electricity
is ridiculously more valuable than a kilowatt hour of unstored
hydrogen gas. Electrolysis is thus pretty much the same as
1:1 exchanging US Dollars for Mexican Pesos.

A quick look at physics and engineering fundamentals will often
totally trash what first may look like a good idea. Much more
on bashing pseudoscience is found here.

September 26, 2005

While I am still learning a lot about Blogs and RSS, I thought I
might start a list of blogging guidelines. As with our previous
website and newsgroup lists, I'll be adding and refining and
updating these as time goes on...

    ~  Have very specific goals for what you wish to accomplish.
    ~  Arrange entries by date, newest stuff at top
    ~  Aim for a consistent daily update. Try not to get ahead or behind
    ~  Have six or more persistent threads that you keep returning to.
    ~  Give the reader at least six links or other new fun things to do per entry. 
    ~   Avoid personal, political, or religious topics; they only piss readers off.
    ~  Use images only occasionaly and keep them small but expandable.
    ~  Provide a RSS feed and RSS links. Promote those links agressively.
    ~  As to minimum acceptable daily content, think Dilbert.
    ~  Provide archives every time the main entry gets too long.

    ~  Seek a balance between useful free info and heavy sales or promotion.
    ~  Use a page on your own website, rather than a blogging service.
    ~  Link as webpage, as blog, and as .RSS. Promote them all.
    ~  Include Permalinks, Anchors, and other means to return to major posts.
    ~  Suppress your ego at all times.
    ~  Always practice "kaizan" aka continuous incremental improvements.
    ~  Keep a "retro" or "Classic HTML" look. Avoid glitz, sound, or animation.
    ~  Scan newsgroups for possible topics of current interest.
    ~  Use entries as "idea feeds" or "outlines" for future web pages 
    ~  Seek out a consistency that meets reader ongoing expectations.

    ~  Have just enough length to put your key points across. Avoid verbosity!
    ~  Give your readers compelling reasons to re-read your entire archive.
    ~  Use humor with extreme caution. But use it. Just be sure it is funny.
    ~  Thoroughly test all provided links. Use W3C to proof.
    ~  Spend much more time on your blog than on newsgroup posts.
    ~  Use your web logs to monitor popularity trends and uncaught errors.
    ~  Personally useful links can be conveniently stashed on your blog page.
    ~  Use your blog to attract and build upon useful website traffic.
    ~  Be somewhat predictable with an occasional surprise.
    ~  Focus on timely insider secrets that are genuinely usable.

    ~  Assume others share your personal interests. Focus on these topics.
    ~  Avoid any and all direct attacks or confrontation. Stick to the facts.
    ~  Gather previous blog posts into definitive tutorials.
    ~  Re-Verify any and all .RSS and .XML changes
    ~  Continually correct any errors and provide updates on back entries.
    ~  Seek out coalitions of viewers, rather than one specific group.
    ~ Age any controversial post for at least 24 hours before going live.
    ~  Have a queue of future topics. Always post your best first.
    ~  Think eclectic.

September 26, 2005

Located some hard-to-find early documentation on GE Fanuc
PLC industrial programmable logic controllers. Both industrial
and student. Typically four books and a software package that
have been shrink wrapped together. I've now got several versions
up on my eBay store. Or email me for further details.

September 25, 2005

Many thanks to those of you who have been helping us debug
our new RSS Feeds. These should be working properly for you
now. Please email me over any difficulties.

To subscribe, click on the orange box on any of our web pages,
go to this link, or go to https://www.tinaja.com/whtnu.xml. One
useful RSS reader appears here, and a good book is found here.

Some minor mysteries remain, and I sure could use your input
in puzzling them out. We easily pass this validator, but others
insist on some header info that (1) I do not understand, and (2)
nobody else seems to be using.

Further, updates to what we are offering ( a what's new blog and
several tutorials ) do not seem to be getting picked up. In particular,
I wanted to change the offered sequence by changing the dates
and this does not seem to be happening,

Finally, we seem to be having difficulty getting into Weblogs and
Google's Blogsearch. Any hints or assistance would be welcome.

September 24, 2005

REFURB LOG: The Tektronix 1502 TDR Cable Tester still has
quite a bit of value and interest. But there are some gotchas that
can quickly turn one of these into a sucker bet for refurb.

Always be sure you have full docs before working on these. Most
older tek repair manuals can be found on eBay as reasonably
priced CD's. As noted before, Tek has released most of their
legacy data to public domain. Others remain on the Tek Website.

The first 1502 problem is that a working NiCad battery pack must
be present! There are also hidden fuses, one on the battery pack
itself, and others on the charger circuit board. The tiny and costly
and obsolete fuse in the battery pack is best replaced with a plain
old fuse soldered in place and insulated with shrink tubing. There
is more than enough room beside the nearest NiCad cell.

The second 1502 problem is that earlier models used a tunnel diode
to generate the sharp waveform edge needed for time domain
reflectivity. This tunnel diode was easily damaged by applying input
voltage or static electricity. And is costly and difficult to replace.

You can split the problem by temporarily replacing the battery pack
with a current limited 12 volt supply. Watch your polarity if you do
this! And, of course, do not apply line power at the same time!

You'll have the best odds of refurb if you can start with several
1502's and can mix and match the good stuff.

September 23, 2005

We picked up several tons of aerospace quality printed circuit
boards that are a generation or two out of date. There are a
few dozen varieties, some including gold plate. Most are MSI
and LSI era pre surface mount platethru style.

These should be perfect for artists working with collages, mosaics,
sculpture, mobile, wall hanging, video, or costume uses. They
also eventually should become highly collectible and might still
see some breadboarding uses.

Samples are up on our eBay store. Otherwise, please email me
if you have any quantity interests here.

September 22, 2005

A reminder that our free Logfile Reader was recently updated to
include automatic eBay image theft detection and eBay "by name"
popularity views. And that the original logfile tutorial appeared
here, and its history extensions were found here.

I've since modified logrptx2.psl to report on .RSS hit popularity
by adding this code...

      0 cs-uri-stem {(whtnu.xml) search {pop pop pop 1 add }
      {pop}ifelse } forall /xmlviews exch store

     (Total whtnu.xml views (RSS) for session are ) xmlviews
     20 string cvs mergestr (.\n\n\n) mergestr print flush

Change your search and report strings for the first .RSS feed
and duplicate the code if you have more than one feed.

Much more in our PostScript libary.

September 21, 2005

At one time, "Farad Sized" capacitors were laughingly huge
with most electronic caps being in the picofarad to microfarad
region. We now have a second generation of double layer
capacitors, or "SuperCaps" that now offer compact and more
or less reasonably priced values to 100 Farads and beyond.

The trick is to humongously extend area by "going fractal"
with a layer on top of a layer. And by having an extremely
thin dielectric of a rather high dilectric constant.

Unfortunately, these devices still aren't all that great for power
density and remain utterly useless for serious energy density.

The energy storage of any capacitor in watt-seconds is
1/2 CV^2.

Problem number one is that that even the second generation
supercaps have a fairly high ESR or equivalent series
resistance which limits the maximum discharge current rate
at which they will not overheat or explode.

Problem number two is that these are strictly low voltage
devices (typically two volts or so) and have to further be
safety derated. Thus the "volts squared" in the above
equation is not going to help much with present devices.

Problem number three is the biggie. The above equation is
in watt-seconds. For energy apps that are potentially
competitive with batteries or gasoline, you will be a lot
more interested in watthours or kilowatt hours. Which
are respectively 3,600 and 3,600,000 times a larger unit
of measure.

Ferinstance, consider a 100 Farad supercap charged to two
volts for an energy storage of 200 watt seconds. This is .055
watthours. Or, assuming 1/20th of a liter cap size 1/27th of the
volumetric energy density of an already obsolete lead acid
battery. Or 1/ 8181th the energy density of gasoline.

Thus, while progress in supercaps has most certainly been
impressive, they have between two and five orders of
magnitude to go before you drive any distance with one.

A final Problem number four is that the "regulation" of
any supercap is an atrocity. Switchmode conversion will
be required to provide output at anything that remotely
resembles a constant voltage. And at least some ( and
possibly bunches) of the stored charge will not be
recoverable because of the conversion range limits.

More in our Energy Fundamentals tutorial.

September 20, 2005

We are starting to add an RSS Feed to our website. Initially
this should give you the latest info from our What's New? library
page as it (usually) changes daily. Plus a few of our best tutorials.

To participate, click on any orange RSS button, grab the url, and
transfer it to your RSS reader. Or https://www.tinaja.com/whtnu.xml
can be directly entered into your reader as the RSS feed.

A typical RSS reader is found here.
One good book on RSS is found here.

Things seem to be up and running. For some reason, we apparently
can pass only some of the validator web pages. Such as this one.
Please email me over any problems or suggestions.

We'll initially keep things fairly simple and ( perhaps ) get fancy later.

September 19, 2005

Continuing yesterday's item on what to take to an auction. This time
 we'll focus on preliminaries and your vehicle...

     PROPER FACTS - Make sure you have a map to the auction site,
     that you got your day and time correct, and that the auction is in fact
     going to be held. Some auctions are cancelled at the last minute and
     were never intended for anything but blackmail. Others may have
     bulk bids using Monopoly Money that make the live part a farce.

     NEEDED PAPER - Bring copies of your tax exemption certificate
    ( you DO have one, of course! ), and the needed finance stuff for the sale.
     Depending on terms, this can be cash, VISA/MC, a group of cashier's
     checks in $100 - $200 - $ 400 - $800 unsigned denominations made out
     to yourself, a bank letter of credit, or whatever. Keep any and all of these
     invisibly hidden.

     VEHICLE SIZE - Do not let the vehicle you came in unduly influence
      your buys. You can always make two or more trips, or rent trucks or
      trailers if needed. Do arrive in a vehicle as clean and as empty as possible.
      Should items be two large or too many, be sure the first problem item meets
      the following test: "Is this item ALONE enough to justify the extra time
      and effort and costs needed?"

     BRING TOOLS - Bringing a hand cart or a dolly with a rope handle is a
     very good idea, provided they do not eat up too much room. In a pinch, the
     dolly can be put on a roof carrier, abandoned, or someone else asked to hold
     it for you. Disassembly tools are also handy, particularly if you have to take
     apart some electronics. Size and bulk can often be dramatically reduced by
     minimal disassembly. Non-obvious tools can also help, such as WiFi web
     access, manufacturer's catalogs, or blue books.

     SNACKS AND SUCH - Supply your own fruit, juice, and other snacks. Use
     "just enough" meds to keep back pain or headaches from getting to you but
      not so much your judgement is impared. Take frequent mini breaks for brief
      rest and stress management. And, of course, know where the restrooms are.

     STRICTLY STAY WITHIN LIMITS - Have a realistic budget and never
     exceed it! Always seek out a 30:1 sell/buy ratio or higher. Reasonable goals
     might be a $250 average auction cost, exceeding $2500 only on exceptionally
     golden opportunities, and never committing more than $12,500 to any venture.

     More on our Auction Help and Custom Auction Finder library pages.

September 18, 2005

Noticed another auction buyer using a small magnet to test for stainless
steel. Which brings up the question of what you should or should not
bring to an auction to give yourself the best possible edge.

On one hand, you definitely want to stay lean and mean and flexible. On
the other, useful tools can give you a definite advantage...

     CLOTHES - You want to be absolutely invisible and nondescript
     until such times as you are in the auctioneer's face. Shirt pockets
     are a must, as is a very distinctive hat or other means of making
     yourslelf unique and immediately recognizable to the auctioneer.
     Sane shoes, of course, are essential.

     TOOLS - A small notebook for sure, and several pens including
      backups. While you don't want to haul excess weight around, a
      small tape measure and a calculator can be handy. Business cards
      for passarounds are super important.

     A PARNER - A second person for consulting and record keeping can
      be very useful. And can prevent stupid mistakes in "heat of the
      moment" misbuys. A cellphone should be available but probably is
      best left in your car.

     MAD MONEY - You should have a pocket full of five and/or ten
      dollar bills for quick loading hires and fast side deals.

      INVISIBILITY - Say nothing to nobody. But listen carefully to any
      and all side conversations. And always assume that anything you
      hear is a bald faced lie.

     BE IN THE RIGHT PLACE AT THE RIGHT TIME - Pre-position
     yourself near your interest lots so you will be in the auctioneer's
     face when they get to them. Or on the "wrong" side of a table. Or
     whatever it takes to not get your bids missed. But make absolutely
     certain the item being auctioned is the one you think it is.

      SECRET MARKS AND "ADJUSTMENTS" - While it is a no-no
      to rearrange items between pallets at an auction, there's often some
      "near the edge" possibilities. Such as making secret marks on lots
      you do want compared to those you do not. Or "just happening" to
      return a high value item sideways to the bottom of the pile.  Asking
      an auctioneer to split or combine lots at quiet times can also work.   

     A TIGHTLY FOCUSED ATTITUDE - It is easy to get utterly
     overwhelmed at any larger auction. Select a few to a dozen lots that
     you really want and carefully maximize your odds on them. And
     pick up other deals only as opportunity arises..

     WHAT THE HELL? BIDS -- Never bid on something just because
     you are at an auction. But if you are already committed to a truck or
     trailer larger than you could possibly use, consider triaging any lots
     that can be stolen for a pittance. But avoid hauling heavy trash
     long distances.

More on our Auction Help and Custom Auction Finder library pages.

September 17, 2005

Yet another alternator driven hydrogen injector has recently
entered the scene and is currently under lively Slashdot scrutiny.

Let's repeat some key points...

       ~ There is credible mainstream research evidence that shows
           that modest 5% hydrogen injection into an ICE can in fact
           offer performance and pollution benefits.

       ~ It has yet to be shown whether the costs and losses of onboard
           hydrogen generation can be done for less than these benefits.
           Especially if it has to be integrated into other ongoing ICE
           improvements. Naturally, there is no gain if the generation
           costs merely equal its benefits. Nor if any additional new load
           on the engine exceeds the possible gain.

      ~ The cost of such a system has to be amortized over its benefits.
          If 48 cents per mile is taken as a vehicle operating cost (the
          new tax guideline), then a two percent improvement cannot cost
          more than a penny per mile. At 15,000 miles per year and three
          year payback at ten percent interest, the fully installed system
          cost and its maintainence cannot exceed a tiny fraction of $387.52
          total. Otherwise, there are no positive benefits.

       ~ On any "more miles per gallon" device, there are very serious
           issues over double blind testing and the placebo effect that can
           utterly overwhelm any actual performance benefits. Further, it
           would seem to be quite difficult to isolate hydrogen injection from
           plain old water injection, which has its own costs and benefits.

       ~ The inefficiency of a car alternator alone is probably enough to
           cause a lack of a breakeven. If the electrolysizer so much as
           used stainless steel instead of platinized platinum electrodes, this
           would guarantee a bad enough efficiency to prevent breakeven.

        ~ Needless to say, as the load on an alternator increases, your gas
           mileage will go down. Their ain't no free lunch.

       ~ By a fundamental thermodynamic concept called exergy, electrolysis
          is fundamentally and profoundly a destroyer of value. Any onboard
          injection system absolutely and positively must avoid electrolysis if
          it is to succeed.
 
       ~ Possibly exhaust gas driven reformation has a chance at succeeding.
          This has yet to be shown. But alterntaor driven electrolysis flat out
          ain't gonna happen.

September 16, 2005

Added this extremely rare 6502 collectible to our eBay Store...

Hewlett-Packard pod part nuber #01611-62108. Our scanner
did not at all like the satin aluminum dialplate, so this is one
of our finest examples of using our new Bitmap Typewriter.

Click on the image for the distribution JPEG. Or to appreciate
the full beauty of the production .BMP, click here. The click again.

Or, just for kicks, here is the original scan. See if you can spot
any of the more subtle differences.

More on eBay solutions to photography problems on our
Auction Help library page.

September 15, 2005

Another of the alternate energy myths is that "extra" electricity on the
grid is somehow "wasted" or "unused". In reality, there are typically
six or more different types of electricity on the grid at any given time.

Their mix is continuously adjusted to optimize costs to a fraction of
a millicent per kilowatt hour. Sources might include...

     ~  Baseload Power is from low cost sources that run continuously
         but may be hard to start or change.

     ~ Rolling Power is a source that is manned and ready-to-go at
         "full steam" that can be switched in only when and if needed.

     ~ Peaking Power comes from more expensive sources that can
        be rapidly turned on or off and otherwise quickly adjusted.

     ~ Brokered Power is bought and sold from other utilities to help
        even out supply and demand.

     ~ Stored Energy has been previously saved ( such as pumping to
        a higher lake ) during lower cost times. This process is quite
        efficient at load levelling.

     ~ Negawatts are conserved energy through demand reduction via
        time-of-day penalties, load shedding, or conservation incentives.

      ~ Returned power is the tiny fraction provided by solar pv users
         through synchronous inverters when they have excess capacity.

In "net metering" states, any returned power is heavily subsidized and
represents an obscenely unfair tax on the other utility users. A just and
neutral policy insted would be for a utility to sell at current retail and buy
at their current avoided cost. Any differential being fully justified by the
additional storage service that the utility is uniquely providing.

Additional energy fundamentals info is found here.
An intro to an energy conservation development is found here.

September 14, 2005

Considerable thermodynamic controversy remains over whether hell is
endothermic or exothermic. In one limiting case, hell freezes over. In the
other, all hell breaks loose.

September 13, 2005

Added Google's BlogSearch to our Search Engine Links.

At present, this What's New page is sort of a blog. I'm looking into adding
RSS feeds and such for full blogosity. Meanwhile, check back daily.

September 12, 2005

REFURB LOG: Many older test instruments used NiCad battery packs that
have limited capacity, shorted, cells, corrosion, etc.

The first things to ask are whether portability is really needed, and whether
the value of the instrument is really worth creating a new battery pack for.

Some older packs may come back after a careful charging or two. Others may
have only one shorted cell and be somewhat repairable. But chances are that
even working older cells will have disappointing remaining capacity.

Replacement early packs are either nonexistent or outrageously expensive.
They also probably hold cells that are twelve years or more old inventory. So,
building your own new battery pack from scratch may be worthwhile.

You would probably want to stick with NiCads, because Lithiums require much
more exotic charging circuitry. But you may be able to substitute modern AA
NiCads for older Sub-C Nicads since their storage may be actually higher.

The first rude surprise is that the stainless steel cells are not solderable by
any sane or safe method. Fortunately, solderable cells are newly available
for two to three dollars each. Suitable sources are found here, here, and here.
Newark also has prewelded sub-C assemblies available. Incredible (but
possibly risky) battery buys are often found here.  

Large diameter shrinkwrap tubing can ease repackaging and assembly. It is
usually not a good idea to mix old and new cells of differing capacities in the
same package.

September 11, 2005

Just had another "investor" try to hire me to research Brown's Gas.

Rather than take this damn fool's money ( it is a thankless task, but
somebody has to do it ), I thought I'd post my response here...

Brown's gas is an utterly useless and monumentally dangerous three
decades old scam foisted off by laughingly "not even wrong" researchers
upon gullible and totally scientifically clueless naive investors.

Brown's gas appears similar to stoke gas, an ordinary stoichimetric
mix of hydrogen and oxygen. Whose properties have been fully
known for several centuries. The fact that no credible spectrographic
test has ever been done to show any differences whatsoever is in itself
telling.

Stoke gas is exceptionally dangerous as only a trivially tiny amount of
spark energy is required to set it off. One newsgroup poster managed
to try for both the X-prize and the Darwin Award at the same time while
blowing Northern Nevada off the map. Sadly, his garage did not quite
reach suborbital velocity. And repeating the experiment would have
been somewhat problematical.

Long term storage of stoke gas is a big no-no. The only known use for
stoke gas is on-demand generation for precision welding of very small
objects where contamination prevention is crucial. Virtually all other
welding alternatives are much faster and more cost effective.

STP stoke gas has exceptionally and ridiculously low energy density.
Hydrogen itself has a STP energy density of 2.7 watthours per liter
electrically recoverable or 3.3 watthours per liter thermally recoverable.
Stoke gas, of course, is lower by 1/3 since it has to tow its own oxygen
along for the ride.

Contrary to outrageous claims, stoke gas does not burn at a particularly
high temperature. Acetylene, among others, burns at a considerably higher
temperature.

The claim that stoke gas can melt tungsten is a myth created by rotten
labwork. It turns out that side reactions involving both oxidation
and sublimination set in at temperatures as low as a few hundred degrees.

One of the many problems with Brown's Gas temperature measurement is
that emission is primarily in the ultraviolet rather than the infrared.

The claim that stoke gas implodes rather than explodes is a "physics 101"
parlor trick. IF the container walls are at a low enough temperature, a
post explosion condensation may sometimes result. This effect quickly
goes away if the experiment is repeated more that once per minute or so.
The condensation may sometimes end up as low as 1 PSI or so, but never
produces a "supervacuum", nor is ever able to get under the vapor pressure
of water limit at any given temperature.

Claims that stoke gas involves stable long term monatomics or in some
manner eliminates radioactivity are not even wrong. Should even the
faintest hint of a whiff of credibility of either occurance happen, it would
immediately have become the Science and Nature magazine centerfolds.

Brown's Gas is normally produced through a variation of electrolysis.

There are several immediate and fatal problems with this. First,
electrolysis is basically a double integration. So, any variations between
Brown's Gas and Stoke gas waveforms would be agressively minimized. No
double blind testing to show any difference between the two has ever
been credibly performed.

Secondly, the Brown's gas proponents feel that they are somehow able
to violate Faraday's Law by using fancy pulses or resonance, or
whatever for their electrolysis. In reality, their fancy waveforms are
exceptionally difficult to measure and their claims are incompetently
done bad labwork, plain and simple. Accurate measurements of the
gas components are equally difficult. Much of "Brown's Gas" is often
nothing but plain old water vapor.

Most Brown's Gas researchers have never heard of the "hydrogen
overvoltage" that guarantees stainless steel is about the worst possible
choice for an electrolysis electrode. Serious and efficient electrolysizers
demand the use of platinized platinum. Renewed often at great expense.

But the real biggie is that electrolsis is laughingly and wildly unsuited for
the production of hydrogen for bulk energy uses. A fundamental
thermodynamic property called "exergy" absolutely and positively
guarantees this. Very simply, a kilowatt hour of electricity is ridiculously
more valuable that a kilowatt hour of STP Brown's gas. Electrolysis for
bulk energy apps is thus pretty much the same as 1:1 exchanging US
dollars for Mexican pesos.

Brown's gas proponents tend to associate with the water powered car crowd.
As any phyisist or Engineer can tell you, a scheme that uses an alternator
to generate gas to run the car to run the alternator... is nothing but a
dynamic brake that will stop the car in significantly less than its coasting
distance.

The ever-repeating mantra of the Brown's Gas proponents is "But you have
not done the experiment". Well, (A) The experiment IS done many millions
to many billions of times daily by EIS researchers, and (B) The experiment
is not in the least worth doing because the outcome is not at all in doubt.

For related info, click for Energy Fundamentals, Pseudoscience Bashing,
Brown's Gas Meta Studies, Hydrogen Resources, or Electrolysis Guidelines.

Or, for a genuine alternate energy breakthrough, click here.

September 10, 2005

Added several new auction houses to our Arizona Auction Resources.
Including Bankruptcy Sales.

Your own Custom Regional Auction Finder can be built for you here.

September 9, 2005

Just placed a bunch of older telecomm gear on our eBay Store that may
be quite useful for hurricane infrastructure rebuilding. Most units are
either new in original packaging or in very clean "as new" condition.

Included are three Telinc WAN Testers for T1, E1 bit error rates and
such, some mint Pairgain Campus T1 units, and lots of mint Comdial
stuff that includes a DXCPU-68 controller, a DXSRV server, and several
"as new" manual and notebook sets.

September 8, 2005

One crucial issue of buying and selling surplus is closure. It is super easy
to end up with an ever increasing number of storage areas of ever diminishing
value. And longer and longer times before any buy falls off the radar.

You should have a definite series of steps you go through between an auction
buy and absolutely nothing remaining of your purchases. All done within a
reasonable and efficient time frame. But still clearing the big bucks first.

First and foremost is depressurizing. You return any rental trucks and get
your vehicles back the way they were before you left for the auction as
quickly as possible. Literally dumping items into your primary triage area.
But, as always, being very careful not to inflict any storage damage. And
minimizing disruption of the rest of your life as quickly as possible.

Next is primary triage. In which you carefully sort, group, then identify and
inventory all items. High value individual items into one pile. High quantity
longer term primo inventory items into a second. Potential repairables and
refurbables into a third. Strippables into a fourth. Smaller lower value items
into a fifth. And trash into the Alvin Pile, given to the fire department, traded
to a neighbor, or simply thrown out.

Next is careful research, especially through Google and eBay and appropriate
newsgroups. Chances are there will be both pleasant and rude surprises over
items that you have grossly over- or under vaued.

Next is cash retrival. Your goal should be to completely pay for the auction
purchase, labor, and trip within twenty-one days of the buy. Should you
acheive your goal of at least a 30:1 sell/buy ratio, this means that only
three percent of your items need to be immediately sold.

Naturally, you list any mint high value biggies on eBay immediately. But
should you have seventy of something that can consistently sell over the
next fifteen months, these should also receive priority to get them into the
pipeline as quicky as possible.

Any dregs should be grouped as efficiently and as compactly as you can.
With the twin goals of nothing remaining that is not paid for and virtually
everything outtahere within fifteen months.

Boredom or screwoff time efficiently should rework the strippables and
low value boxes. Always with a goal of minimizing weight and volume
while maximizing the remaining value. Always delegate anything that is
repetitive or not fun. But do enough of the work yourself to know what
can and cannot result.

It also pays to consistently check into the bottom of the pile of the oldest
and least selling items. With the rule "if you pick it up, you immediately
get rid of it in one way or another". And a second rule of completely
cleaning out any shelf or other area once you initially attack it.

More auction help is found here.
Your own custom regional auction finder can be gotten here.

September 7, 2005

Made some minor additions to GONZOPOW.PDF, our PostScript
emulation of Powerpoint. Emulated files web distribute ridiculously
easier, consist of one much smaller file, have outstanding graphics,
involve no .GIFs and few (if any) large bitmaps, display much faster,
and offer a number of other compelling advanatges.

Flashing text or artwork can easily be added by using the JavaScript
techniques of PDFFLASH.PDF . More details on our Gonzo Utilities
appear on our PostScript Library page.

The actual GONZOPOW.PSL sourcecode appears here, while an
Energy Efficiency Opportunity example appears here.

September 6, 2005

More solar pv enthuasiast miisinformed mania: "Getting rid of
the grid" simply is not in the cards.

As in "ain't gonna happen".

At present, no means of storing solar pv electricity is known that
is remotely as convenient, as cheap, as simple, or as cost effective
as synchronous inverted grid storage. Further dramatic hardware cost
reductions can also be expected just as soon as markets evolve.

Nor is any alternate storage likely to evolve until well after truely
renewable and sustainable pv is a significant fraction of the total
electrical energy. Even them, pumped storage via the grid is likely
to be essential.

There's no reason whatsoever that today's $2600 2 kW synchronous
inverter systems cannot be sold for under twenty bucks each once
quantity demand becomes obvious.

More in our Energy Fundamentals tutorial.
A significant energy savings opportunity appears here.

September 5, 2005

Fab by Neil Gershenfield is an interesting new addition to books
on Santa Claus Machines and rapid prototyping.

It wasn't quite what I expected, but it nevertheless is quite well
done. Long ago and far away, Lee Felsenstein and Bob Albrecht
set up the Peoples Computer Company where just anyone could
walk in off the street and start using otherwise unavailable
computers for anything they wanted to.

Neil seems to be doing a rerun where he is filling a room with
rapid prototyping desktop manufacturing Santa Claus devices
and letting just anyone ( including a parrot! ) access them with
stunning results.

Most of the machines are conventional low end items such as sign
cutters and programmable milling machines. But a few exotics
such as waterknives are most definitely included.

Similar topics and related books in our Santa Claus Machine library.
Additional eclectic titles on our Recommended Books page.

September 4, 2005

I guess I just don't get it. Or else the emperor has no clothes.

Most methanol fuel cell research is using highly highly diluted solutions
in the 5 to 10 percent aqueous range for their laptop apps. And airlines
are going to demand high dilutions for onflight acceptability.

Such dilutions give energy densities that are considerably lower
than conventional batteries! What is the point?

More in our Energy Fundamentals tutorial.

September 3, 2005

Most modern Browsers now allow Greek letters and other
symbols such as the theta's shown below. Here is a summary
of the needed HTML commands.

Lower case theta in particular is entered into GoLive or
elsewhere as an ampersand followed by "theta" followed by
a semicolon. A capital theta would use "Theta" instead.
Other oddball characters are treated similarly.

A second HTML typographic character set appears here.
Curiously, there seems to be very little overlap between these
two lists!

September 2, 2005

One of the present extensions to our Universal Bitmap Image
Manipulator is an image rotator. I need ultra fine rotation for
such things as scanner alignment or setting the initial edge on
a keystone correction.

Sadly, ImageView32 only offers one degree resolution; this is
often not nearly good enough for my needs.

We saw the basics of image transformation back here. The
general rotation transformation math is...

                           x' = x cos θ + y sin θ
                           y' = y cos θ -  x sin θ

        ... where θ is your angle of rotation. For a fixed rotation,
the trig functions become constants, and the operation remains
a linear transformation.

Usually, we want to start with our x' and y' position and find out
where we came from to get there. In this rotation case, our reverse
transformation is simply a rotation by the negative of the original.

Two other complications may come up: The final image may have
to be larger and framed with black triangles if nothing is to be missed.
And rotating about the image center or some other point may be
preferable to a lower left axis.

I hope to have some working code shortly.

September 1, 2005

Many pv solar enthuasiasts still do not get it: Dollars and
kilowatt hours are often tightly related! And that considering
one without the other is both ludicrous and nonsensical.

Thermodynamic fundamentals absolutely guarantee that true
energy costs ultimately dictate the cost of everything else in
any economy. For economics is a subset of thermodynamics.

Consider this highly useful definition...

     DOLLAR - A voucher exchangable for the personal
                          use and control of ten kilowatt hours of
                          electricity or (until recently) thirty kilowatt
                          hours of gasoline.

The relationships between dollars and kilowatt hours are often
tightly linked. That UNLEADED $2.65 sign down the street is
a good example.

More to the point, should your utility agree to pay you a dime
per kilowatt hour while selling you electricity at a dime per
kilowatt hour, then every dime involved at that time in the
transaction is precisely equal to one kilowatt hour of electrical
energy. And vice versa.

If you are generating two dimes worth of electricity per day and
if your system amortization is three dimes per day, then you have
a net energy sink and are destrolying traditional energy. The
longer you run the system, the more energy you are destroying.

When considered on a total system wide basis, not one net watt hour
of solar pv electricity has ever been produced! Nor will any ever
be very likely using conventional silicon technology.

Thus, to date, solar pv is not in any manner renewable nor sustainable.
At present, the fully burdened synchronous inverter alone is enough
to guarantee a net energy sink on any conventional pv project.

Energy parity can be expected when and if the fully burdened costs of
pv drop to eight cents per kilowatt hour. Energy parity, of course, is
simply slapping a green label on traditional sources in an elaborate
"smoke and mirrors" transfer scam.

True sustainability and renewability can be expected something like
eight years after parity is established, provided the fully burdened
costs can be gotten down into the twenty cents per peak watt region.

Naturally, once parity is in sight, pv solar will become an enormously
larger energy sink as zillions of dollars will be thrown at it in expectation
of future returns. Hopefully, this will be a one time glitch. And not a
sucker bet.

Additional economic analysis in ENERGFUN.PDF.

August 31, 2005

The Onion satire site has just announced the Google is going to
destroy any and all information that they are unable to list.

While intended as humor, this is exactly what is going to happen
if traditional journal publishers do not immediately wise up and
provide, at the very least, all abstracts freely available without
registration or other hoops to jump through! Or, preferably, all
papers more than five years old freely available without restriction.

Consider a sloppy and slovenly inexperienced and "not even wrong"
wannabe who throws his stuff up on the web. Compared to a formally
trained legitimate researcher who pays big bucks to publish in a scholarly
journal that even his own university library can no longer afford.

Data unaccessed is data destroyed. Iffen it ain't free on the web, its
very existance ain't gonna be recognized.

And thus destroyed.

August 30, 2005

As we've seen before, Tektronix has released all of their legacy
manuals to the public domain. And a number of eBay sellers have
made these available in varying quality and cost.

HP and Agilent are now in the process or aggressively making their
legacy manuals available. Reprint rights are apparently available
on written request, and a collection of back manuals is starting to
appear on the Agilent website.

As a ferinstance, complete programming, service, and user manuals
for the 3488A switch unit can be found online.

By one of the most utterly astounding coincidences that seem to
infest these blog messages, I just happen to have a 3488A and four
44470A plugins up for sale on eBay at a bargain price.

This is a scanning switcher that dramatically simplifies production test
by eliminating the need to continually reconnect everything.

We also do have several dozen 100% authentic real and original HP
manuals remaining on our eBay store.

August 29, 2005

Just came back from a major printed circuit house auction. Where they
could not even give away their production equipment! I dearly would have
loved to strip this stuff for parts, but the rigging and travel logistics made
this a much better deal for somebody else.

Price examples included a quad Excellon drill that went for $500 and originally
sold for $500,000. And several hundred lineal feet of oak book cases that went
for five bucks total.

As usual, the online bidders got totally screwed. There were times when the
comm was down, or when the real auctioneer got impatient. More to the point,
the auctioneer often combined lots on very short notice. Some of which ended
up as good deals, and others that involved heavy rigging to remove useless junk.

But the really big negative about online bidding is that you do not have a prayer
over "contents of room" or "contents of cabinet" deals that can range from
utterly useless to outstandingly spectacular.

And that what an online proxy considered to be "fair" is either waaaay too high
or ridiculously too low. Online awards were typically around five percent of the
total. Several of which were ridiculously high for what was offered.

Curiously, the auction house did zero advertising anywhere in the entire state!
Which is why it is super important to really dig deep to find the secret insider
stuff. Similar topics on our Auction Help page. We can also create a Custom
Auction Finder for you.

August 28, 2005

Latest GuruGram #56 is a tutorial on our Universal Bitmap Manipulation
Utilities. Sourcecode for the tutorial appears here, while a current version
of the ongoing utility development appears here.

August 27, 2005

This image from the http://www.engrish.com website remains one of my
favorites for substitution when someone tries to steal one of my older
eBay images...

Naturally, a suitably clad individual pioneering new methods of animal
husbandry can also prove of value. But messing with their head is a
lot more fun.

Our Logfile Readers, of course, make spotting eBay theft trivial. And
newly include the latest of eBay referral inclusions. Per this tutorial.

August 26, 2005

One of the more minor themes in WAYWERE.PDF was whatever happened
to Cameradio in Pittsburgh. It turns out they still survive as CAM/RPC, a
second tier electronics distributor that specializes in custom parts kitting and
meeting regional needs.

They are apparently now well north and east of their original location, which
apparently became a convention center parking lot.

August 25, 2005

We are nearly sold out of our Adept Precision Robotic Sliders that
we are offering on our eBay store...

Only five of the normal duty 950 mm units remain, along with three
of the heavier duty 1000 mm units. As before, these are the sliders
only, less docs, cables, software, or driver electronics.

We are unlikely to find any more of these that are remotely as large
or as precise. Or in as superb a condition.

These are UPS shippable for an additional $75 professional and custom
packing fee. We also offer free local pickup or delivery. Or can deliver
at our convenience to certain Phoenix or Tucson addresses for $39 each.

August 24, 2005

Our new pixel interpolation routines seem to work just fine
for everything but image downsizing. Obviously, if you reduce
the number of pixels, you also reduce your info content. The
problem is to do so gracefully without single pixel line droupouts.

What are the standard image downsizing algorithms? I've
been having problems finding any. Apparently low pass filtering
has to be combined with pixel interpolation.

At 50%, a 2x2 averaging works quite well. I'd assume 3x3 would
be effective at 33%. But what are the rules for intermediate
values?

Until I find a "real" algorithm, here is something that seems to
work fairly well for me...

    (a) Use pixel interpolation at or above 1.0 magnification
    (b) Use 2x2 pixel averaging at 0.5 magnification.
    (c) Proportion the two bewteen 0.5 and 1.0 magnification.
    (d) Prescale by 2x2 pixel averaging below 0.5 magnification.

Thus, at 1.0 or higher mag, the fractional x or y interpolation value could
range anywhere between 0 and 0.9999. At 0.5, the fractional x and y
interpolation value would both be fixed at 0.5. At 0.75 magnification,
the possible x and y interpolation range would be between 0.25 and 0.75.

This is quite simple to implement and fairly fast. But I'd still like to
know how everyone else does it.

August 23, 2005

I've begun a long overdue major combination and overhaul of
our Pseudoscience Bashing library pages. You can follow the
ongoing progress here, while the originals still remain here and
here.

August 22, 2005

I started adding links to third party reprints of many of my classic
construction projects to our Guru Archive Reprints library.

23 new links to full reprints of my classic projects have just been
added, along with some updates and corrections. A dozen or more
links are supposedly in process as well.

Some background on the projects appears here. 

I would like to instead have all my own reprints onsite. Done to
much higher resolution, in full .PDF, including annotation and
history notes. And, above all, userful text searchibility standards.

This would need new banner advertisers or Synergetics Partners.

August 21, 2005

The "best" pixel manipulation is called bicubic inperpolation.
We looked at the fundamentals here, and example code appears
in our Universal .BMP Image Manipulator.

The key secret is to provide a "smooth but rather sudden"
transition halfway between pixels. Which can actually sharpen
and "improve" any pixels that are scaled or moved.

The full XY interpolation is somewhat messy and takes into account
sixteen neighboring pixels in a 4x4 array...

    New Pixel =

           p03(b0y)(b3x) + p13(b1y)(b3x) + p23(b2y)(b3x) + p33(b3y)(b3x) +
           p02(b0y)(b2x) + p12(b1y)(b2x) + p22(b2y)(b2x) + p32(b3y)(b2x) +
                          evaluated pixel -----> X <----- is positioned here
           p01(b0y)(b1x) + p11(b1y)(b1x) + p21(b2y)(b1x) + p31(b3y)(b1x) +
           p00(b0y)(b0x) + p10(b1y)(b0x) + p20(b2y)(b0x) + p30(b3y)(b0x)
       
         .... where pixel p11 is at the lower left corner of the point to be
interpolated, and (b0x) is a typical directional Basis Function. This
gets repeated three times per pixel for blue, green, and red.

Here are two sample Basis Function table lookups for twenty intermediate
points...

     /b0 [ 0.000 -0.007 -0.026 -0.053 -0.083 -0.111 -0.132 -0.145 -0.147
            -0.140 -0.125 -0.103 -0.080 -0.057 -0.036 -0.020 -0.009 -0.003
            -0.000 -0.000 -0.000 ] store

     /b1 [1.000 0.999 0.998 0.992 0.979 0.954 0.916 0.863 0.795 0.715
            0.625 0.529 0.432 0.338 0.252 0.176 0.113 0.064 0.028 0.007
            0.000 ] store

B(2) is the mirror to B(1)and is read right to left. B(3) is the mirror to
B(0) and is also read right to left.

Note that testing is needed to make sure a pixel is in legal range. A
few bicubic results may sometimes slightly overflow or underflow,
so a conditional trapping is also needed.

A lookup table of crossproducts can be generated ahead of time to
save considerable per-pixel processing time. Per this preliminary
utility. Generation time is only a fraction of a second. I'm not sure
what the optimum table size would be. 16x16 is probably good enough,
while 64x64 certainly should be.

Since there often is not all that much observable difference between
bicubic and bilineal interpolation, the simplicity and speed of bilineal
may be "good enough" for most uses. Especially eBay photos.

August 20, 2005

An Assertiveness 101 review, starting with the biggies...

      (A)  The best way to prevent something from happening is to
              just say no.

      (B)  The best way to get something to happen is to specifically
              ask for it.

      (C)  The best way to defuse a personal solution is to tell them
              exactly how you feel.

And some lesser guidelines...

      (D)  Avoid ever being an "enabler". You might be causing or at
               least worsening the situation.

      (E)  A tug-of-war can always be prevented by not picking up your
             end of the rope. Or else suddenly letting go of it.

      (F)  Politely and exactly and briefly repeating yourself can be
            devastatingly effective.

     (G)  Delay is the surest form of denial. Dwell on trivia.

     (H)  The fundamental magician principles of misdirection, diversion,
             collusion, and deception can sometimes be of value.

     ( I)   Third party all unpleasantries. Let someone else clean up the mess.
             Or play the role of the bad guy.

     (J)   The other person will have the last word. All you can do to your
             advantage is determine when and where this will happen.

     (K)  Reinforcement can be eliminated by switching from positive
              experiences that happen often to vaguely negative ones that
              occur much less frequently. Or, better yet, not at all.

August 19, 2005

Here's how you can do your own HTML expanding picture menus
for your eBay offerings or other image additions like this one...

       <table border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="2" width="450"
          height="33 <tr height="112">

         <td height="112">
                <a href=""https://www.tinaja.com/images/bargs/orprop01.jpg
                <img src="https://www.tinaja.com/images/bargs/orprop01.jpg"
                width="150" height="112" border="0"></a>
         </td>

         <td height="112">
                 <a href=""https://www.tinaja.com/images/bargs/orprop03.jpg
                 <img src="https://www.tinaja.com/images/bargs/orprop03.jpg"
                 width="150" height="112" border="0"></a>
         </td>

        <td height="112">
                 ((( more row photos here)))        
       </td>

        </tr>

        <tr height="112">
                ((( repeat above for second row )))  
        </tr>

        <tr height="112">
                ((( repeat above for third row )))  
        </tr>

        </table>

Each <a href> entry is the link to the image you want to go to.
Firefox will show the image at one convenient size initially, and
then expand to full size on a second click if needed.

Each <img src> entry is the picture you want to show in the box.
If the image is larger than the box, HTML will squash it and
make it look somewhat ratty. If superb in-box appearance is
essential, then do your own image reduction ahead of time and
create a special access file for it.

Note that each row item gets bracketed by a <td> and </td> while
each row itself gets bracketed by a <tr> and a </tr>. Use of "d"
for "right" and "r" for "down" seems somewhat counterintuitive.

But this is all plain old basic HTML.

August 18, 2005

Pixel interpolation is needed any time you change the size of an
image, rotate it, or do geometric alterations on it. There are three
common methods, called nearest neighbor, bilineal interpolation,
and bicubic interpolation.

Nearest neighbor looks kinda awful but is fairly fast. In which you
simply pick the closest of four adjacent pixels to the spot you want.

Bilineal interpolation is a weighted average of your four nearest
neighbors. When the math is tightly wrung out, you end up with...

              ll(x-1)(y-1) - lr(x)(y-1) - ul(x-1)(y) + ur(x)(y)

where ll is lower left, etc, x is 0-1 fractional distance to the right and
y is 0-1 fractional distance up. Repeated for each R, G, and B value.

Bicubic interpolation uses Cubic Spline Basis Functions to create a
sharper transition between values. This computationally intensive
method uses a 4x4 array of sixteen adjacent nearest pixels.

Some of these methods should shortly be added to our Universal
.BMP Image Manipulator

( updated entry )

We just relisted our stunning Southern Oregon Gold Hill  
spectacular view property for sale with Chris Marshall of
American Forest Management at (541) 664-9200.

20 acres. Find it here on Craig's List.

Price has been reduced to $7475 per acre. This is the last
remaining large developable property immediately adjacent
to the northern Gold Hill city limits.

We have secured a full access easement for these 20 acres.
Power and cable on the property.

Legal description is T36 R3W S16 Tax Lot 400.

Attractive financing is now available. Mid-size city
amenities are twelve minutes away at Medford. The
property borders directly on the town of Gold Hill. The
Rogue River is very close; beaches and mountains
are only an hour away.

Here's a newer group of photos...

You can click expand these. Then click again.

This steep to sloping parcel is immediately adjacent to
the Gold Hill city limits and offers absolutely outstanding
views. It is in one of the most in-demand rural areas in
the country, and has really great access both to recreation
and to midsize city resources. Plus superb climate, low crime,
and good schools.

Here is a map. Property is the green rectangle "pointed to"
by Thirteenth Street. You can click here for an aerial photo
and flyby.

You can contact the owner directly by phoning (928) 428-4073
or don@tinaja.com .

Additional older photos here. More info here and here. Free
guided tours are immediately available.

August 16, 2005

A reprint of my classic TV Typewriter I project appears here.
And some background on how it came to be is found here. This
was by far the most popular hobby construction project of all time
and is considred by many to be the opening shot fired in the
personal computer revolution.

August 15, 2005

It continues to amaze me how many people do not realize how big or
how small a difference cables can really make.

On a VCR or a DVD, there are as many as FOUR possible ways to
connect to your tv or monitor...

      If you use three video cables marked R, G, and B, you will
     get by far the best picture, sharpest res, and cleanest colors.

     If you use a S-Video cable, you will still get a decent picture
     but the colors and sharpness will not be quite as good. The
     reason is that the color is encrypted but at least remains
     separate from the black and white luminance video.

     If you use a single yellow NTSC phono jack, your colors and
     resolution will be fairly bad. Caused by the color encryption
     and color/luminance having to share the same limited bandwidth.

    If you use a channel 3 or channel 4 rf modulator, your results
    will be mesmerizingly awful. Because you are adding distortion
    and further bandwidth limits on top of a pitiful NTSC signal.

On the other hand, thre's all sorts of ridiculous claims made for
super performance audio cables. Beyond not skimping on decent
shelding, the claims made for premium cables are outrageously
bogus.

For the definitive discussion on whether two-point or four-point
barbed wire is best for speaker cables, see MARCIA.PDF

August 14, 2005

Our recent tilt and keystone utilities are approximations that
trade simplified code and fast processing for certain restrictions.

These work just fine over the normal and expected eBay photo
/tiltfactor correction range of 0.04 to 0.12 or so. Above 0.16, a
slight curvature may be noted for diagonal lines. Above 0.20,
correction or adjustment will most likely be required.

A "perfect" tilt corrector requires full XY pixel manipulation.
You can find the basic algorithms here. I'll try to work this up
as a future addition to our Universal .BMP Image Manipulator.

August 13, 2005

REFURB LOG:

It is often the tiniest details that can cause you the most frustration and
grief.

Recent examples included my overheating a cable modem by setting
a router on top of it, mixing up old and new coin cells (and their orientation)
during a replacement, and having the spoke magnet on a bike computer
flip around 180 degrees and thus appear mysteriously "weak".

BTW, most coin cell uses inherently protect against reverse polarity as
double contact cannot normally be made with an upside down cell.

Yesterday's time wasting travesty involved some bizarre Moire effects in
our Universal .BMP Image Manipulator development. Caused by my
confusing 3 mul cvi with its wildly different cvi 3 mul.

Note that cvi always rounds towards zero, while round itself behaves as
expected. Your other options are ceiling and floor. What was happening
was the RGB pixel grabbing would sometimes not end up an integer multiple
of three and end up offset by a RGB color or two. Org.

August 12, 2005

Our latest and best new material often appears right here in our What's
New blog, followed up by a tutorial and tool links on our GuruGram library
page. It sometimes may take a while for the GuruGram links to ripple
through to our subject specific library pages.

Ferinstance, our Enhancing your Ebay Skills II has not yet made it to our
Auction Help page. But should end up there shortly.

Currently active projects include a universal bitmap manipulator, generating
additional Magic Sinewave evaluation chips for Delta 28, Best Efficiency 28,
Delta 44, and Best Efficiency 44. And lab verifying and characterizing them.

Plus expanding our Arizona Auction Help to nationwide status; and beginning
.PDF archiving of ourIncredible Secret Money Machine and other earlier
books and articles.

Background projects that I seem to never get near include translating all
of our Apple IIe and older software, and refurbing dozens of items that now
include programmable wire strippers, highly collectible classis comercial
silent movie projectors, a lab oven or two, a superb spectrum analyzer, some
cash registers, and a few other really interesting items.

Plus clearing several storage sheds worth of items that are now several years
old and getting them up on eBay.

We are also considering RSS feeds and an online shopping cart.
Consulting Services available on these and other topics.

August 11, 2005

A very obnoxious and obscene parrot gets put in a freezer for punishement.
On release, parrot profusely apologizes for errant past behavior and asks....

"May I inquire what the chicken did?"

August 10, 2005

O.K. Here's the story on the SUV cargo nets: Ford Motor apparently
totally screwed one of their suppliers of these superb quality products.
Which went up for a distress auction a while back. I ended up with all
of the production machinery ( long stripped and sold ) and two zillion of
the nets, plus several miles of the raw net material. All as new.

I've been offering these $24.50 dealer price nets on our eBay store for
$5.95 and opening as Dutch Auction at $4.95. But we simply have far too
many of them and I decided to blow off excess inventory at $19.63 for a
case of fifty.

The only two little catches are that no, we will not sell partial cases for
less than our unit price, and yes, the UPS shipping weight is actually a
fairly hefty 31 pounds. Our shipping charges are always revenue neutral.

We can also offer ten or more cases at $14.95 per case, but that is FOB,
Thatcher AZ, 85552 only. We can assist you in loading but will not ship
nor make any shipping arrangements for you at this price point.

August 9, 2005

A Universal .BMP Image Manipulator written in most any language
might start with an array of arrays in which each subarray represents
one horizontal line of pixels. The ability to access the entire image at
once permits virtually any pixel-by-pixel modification, including 3x3
or even 5x5 filtering, pixel interpolation, true image rectification,
swings and tilts, dodges and burns, keystone correction, high precision
rotations, and just about anything else you could dream up.

PostScript offers a unique opportunity that should significantly both
simplify and speed things up. An image line is typically an array of
integers having values of 0-255. A PostScript-as-language string also
is typically an array of integers having values of 0-255.

By using strings all the way through the image manipulation process,
many string-to-array and array-to-string conversion steps can often
be eliminated. Powerful string manipulation tools can also be put into
play. The bottom line is that most manipulations can be done at a speed
around a few seconds per megapixel.

I've got the new code working and am presently rippling it through the
demos. The above link should shortly be updated with a dozen or more
examples.

August 8, 2005

A reprint of my classic IC-67 metal locator project appears here.
And some background on how it came to be is found here. This
was one of the earliest hobbiest "analog" integrated circuit
construction projects.

August 7, 2005

To prevent a URL from breaking up (and 404'ing on you) in an
email messge, try bracketing it with <carats>. This should work
with most mail and news servers.

August 6, 2005

After many frustrating hours, I've pretty much decided to stick with
the "EWNS" .BMP image knockout algorithm we already have up
for you and stashed here.

Fancier code seems to be extremely sensitive to extra white pixels or
variable width white borders. And often fails spectacularly by tearing
rather than graciously by skipping.

This code runs about twenty seconds per Megapixel and normally
handles between 98 to 100 percent of a white outlined knockout.
Only undercuts are partially missed.

Repeating the EWNS algorithm: (A) start at the left edge and add white
pixels horizontally till you find a white pixel. (B) repeat from the right edge
and work left. (C) repeat from the top edge and work down. (D) repeat
from the bottom edge and work up.

As we've previously noted, (C) and (D) are the most time intensive.
They also require full bitmap memory access.

Please email me if you have any references to knockout algorithms of
others.

August 6, 2005

Apparently, the new eBay logfile-with-item name referrals only
apply to auction format at present. There is a new store referral
log format that does not yet include names. A typical example
might ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3276531406&ssPagename="
MERC_VI_RSCC_Pr4_PcY_BIN_Stores

Apparently, this new store format only appears when a new store
item is added or an old one gets renewed.

I've got a temporary patch to our logfile analyzer utilities and a
sample printout that splits out the store items but does not yet
count or sort them. I suspect there will be further changes here.

More details on logfile analyzers are in our GuruGram library.

August 5, 2005

Analog Devices has just come out with an utterly fantastic
collection of new chips and evaluation boards that allow the
simple and accurate measurement of tiny values of capacitance
and impedance.

The capacitance chips include the single ended AD7447 and the
balanced AD7745 and AD7746. Obvious uses include proximity
sensors, automatic water faucets, pressure gauges, accellerometers,
and great heaping bunches more.

Kiddies, we are talking 4 femtofarad accuracy and sub attoFarad
resolution here. The opporknockities boggle the mind.

The impedance chips include the AD5933 and its companion
EVAL AD5933 U1 evaluation board. Which means that Electronic Impedance
Spectroscopy used for everything from battery fuel gauges to corrosion
studies to cancer cures to proving hydrogen energy scam bogosity is
now many thousands of times cheaper and infinitely more convenient.

Sadly, the swept frequency impedance chips do not have nearly the
precision or resolution of the fixed frequency capacitance measuring
chips.

I'm also wondering if these dudes might not make a jim dandy and
ultra simple metal detector. The key to most traditional metal locator
circuits is accurately measuring very small changes in inductance and
impedance. Which these chips should do in spades.

They might also be useful for archaeological surveys because disturbed
and native earth might have different impedance versus frequency
characteristics. But asking them to locate caves might be a tad much.

August 4, 2005

Kiss or Cross?

A single pass scan line oriented .BMP background knockout is more
subtle than appears at first glance. If you clearly cross a white line,
then you have obviously gone from the background to the object or
vice versa.

Crossing could occur on the incidence of a vertical or diagonal white line.
Or on a white horizontal stub with an inflection point. But if the white line
only concavely or convexly kisses the scan line, then you still have the
previous background or object status.

This algorithm now looks promising...

     For each horizontal scan line, intially set an /outside flag. Inspect each
     horizontal RGB pixel triad in sequence until a white-to-color transition
     is found. If no transition, continue replacement for background or no
    change for object.

    Count the white entries and exits above the white pixel or white
    horizontal stub. If there are zero or two, you have a "kiss" situation
    and the /outside flag does not change. If there is one crossing, assume
    a "cross" situation with a matching below exit and change the /outside flag.

I'll work up some code to try this and see if there are additional problems.

The algorithm is encouraging since it is single pass and because more
complex calculations and decisions are typically limited to a few per line.

August 3, 2005

As I mentioned a time or two before, if you ever need to escape or
drop out or depressurize for a few days, check out the Black Range
Lodge. Cleverly hidden in the part of New Mexico that you cannot
get to. In a remote mountain valley just under the Continental Divide.

Ask Catherine or Pete about the Percha Creek Salmon Run. And don't
miss the Kingston Frisbee Festival. The latter usually runs from
January 1st to December 31st in any given year.

August 2, 2005

Got a simplified knockout routine working and posted here. It works
ok, but is a tad slow at 20 seconds per megapixel and misses a small
percentage of undercuts. But it presently saves hours of manual
knockout time and tedium.

I'll probably be improving or replacing this code eventually.
Consulting services available.

August 1, 2005

There are some subtleties in dealing with PostScript composite objects.

Ferinstance, PostScript does not place strings into arrays or data
structures. All it places is a pointer to that string! Should the string
change later between generation and actual use, all sorts of rude
surprises can result.

The solution is string de-referencing...

      ( reusable old string ) dup length string cvs --> ( new safe string )

We saw details on this back in STRCONV.PDF of GuruGram #30.
It is also important to note that strings are not preserved by saves
and restores.

Just ran into a similar problem with PostScript arrays. Say you define
array /aaa and then do a /bbb aaa store. Followed by a bbb 2 (value) put.
That value will go into both aaa and bbb!

The de-referencing workaround is similar...

    [ reusable old array] mark exch aload pop ] ---> [ new safe array ]

Things get even messier if you have an array of arrays...

        mark inarray { mark exch aload pop ] } forall ]

Note that these deferencing techniques are slow and resource instensive.
They may also trip garbage collection, so you might have to bracket them
with a -2 vmreclaim and a 0 vmreclaim as well if they seem exceptionally
slow.

More on similar topics in our PostScript library.

July 31, 2005

A fast and sneaky /quickknockout routine has been added to our
Universal .BMP Image Manipulator. Removing all background pixels
to white or to a bluescreen or greenscreen is crucial for everything from
eBay images to video overlays to computer animation.

Sadly, the paint bucket in Paint will only replace a color within a solid
area. And the lasso-and-delete tends to be error prone and tediuous.

I started looking at various fill algorithms and did not get very far with
them. Repeated samples or handedness or outside-insidedness quickly
become complicated. Especially in "kiss" situations where an edge
concavely or convexly touches a scan line.

Instead, a much simpler algorithm seems to handle "nearly all" of a
knockout for typical eBay product images and such...

Starting at the left edge of each scan line, replace all pixels
until a white pixel is found.

Starting at the right edge of each scan line, replace all pixels
until a white pixel is found.

That quickly will remove around 90 percent of your background. To get up into
the 98 to 99 percent range, also do these...

Starting at the top edge of each vertical line replace all pixels
until a white pixel is found

Starting at the bottom edge of each vertical line, replace all pixels
until a white pixel is found.

These two are considerably more computationally intensive as programmable
access to the entire bitmap is required, rather than just one scan line.

Your subject to be kept must have a continuous white line around it. Diagonals
are permitted. There must not be any pure white background pixels present.
A routine such as my NOWHIT01.PSL easily takes care of this for you.

The above algorithm is easily modified for bluescreens, patterned underlays
similar to NUBKG01.PSL and such. The only areas requiring retouch involve
undercuts of one sort or another. Even these will be significantly reduced.

July 31, 2005

Work is proceeding on our Universal .BMP Image Manipulator, intended
to be a generalized open source and platform independent framework from
which any .BMP image processing can be internally handled.

So far, the core routines are in place, along with a dozen of the more
simple examples that include cropping, mirroring, total axis rotation,
negation, and a very preliminary background knockout routine.

Next in line are the cubic spline basis function pixel interpolation
routines that will allow swings & tilts, keystone correction, scaling,
zooming, precision rotation, and such.

You are welcome to play with and experiment with the code. It is not
remotely complete (nor can it ever be), and bugs may remain.

July 30, 2005

One of the more obscures technical backwaters has been Electrochemical
Impedance Spectroscopy, or EIS for short. Per this tutorial, this book, or
this book, or this book. EIS applies swept frequencies to a liquid or other
substances to obtain distinctive capacitance- and resistance-versus-frequency
plots.

Important EIS uses range from corrosion studies, electrochemistry, cancer
research, nondestructive testing, paints & finishes, and, most importantly,
measurement of battery life for emerging advanced batteries.

EIS also instantly and completely also discredits the pseudoscience attempts
of the resonnce electrolysis and pulse electrolysis crowd.

Some traditional EIS resources are found here, but the really big news is
that Analog Devices has come up with a new $5 chip called the AD5933
that replaces tens of thousands of dollars of arcane test equipment.

July 29, 2005

eBay just made a dramatic change in the format of the referral
info they provide to your ISP's log files. You can now extract
item names and other useful info from your log files. This is
enormously useful, both to keep track of your own more popular
eBay items, or to detect any image piracy.

The new format of the referral string in your log entry will look
something like http://cgi.ebay.com/Refrigerator-freezer-energy-
saver-10-amp-plugin_W0QQitemZ5982681673QQcategory
Z3188QQtcZphotoQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem.

In particular, we see an http://cgi.ebay.com/ prefix, followed by
the item name with spaces replaced by hyphens, followed by a
unique "_W" deliminiter. If wanted, QQ tabs can be further
used to extract the item number and the category number.

Some minor points: Old logfile readers will have to be modified
and your log files will get somewhat longer. It should take some
time for older format info to disappear from caches and such.
The prefix /ebaymotors/ shows up before any auto item names.

eBay listings with more than one image will create more than one
log referral and need a count adjustment. This can be resolved by
the GET string filename elsewhere in your log entry.

And you may want to add an eBay exclusion string to your regular
referral reports.

Here's our modified logfile reader and a sample logfile for you
to play with.

July 29, 2005

Details of the BMP Image File Format have been available as our
GuruGram #14. Thought I'd review a point or two on these that may
cause some grief.

There are two areas in the header that hold the horizontal and vertical
pixel info. These are both 32 bit words of four 8-bit bytes each, LSB
last. Normally these should accurately match the bitmap image data
that follows. Your display ap must either read these values or else be
specifically told them. Otherwise, shifting, tearing, or error messages
are near certain to result.

Bitmaps build by the horizontal line and do so from the bottom up.
Note that this is the opposite of a scanned display that normally
builds from top down.

Any given pixel in the .BMP data follows a blue - green - red sequence
with blue being presented earliest. This may seem odd or unexpected.

Should you decide to change the size of a bitmap, your results will
almost certainly look awful unless you do a true high resolution cubic
spline interpolation. These can be quite computationally intensive and
slow. Amazingly, such an interpolation can actually improve perceived
image quality! Image interpolation example sourcecode appears here.

The .BMP format apparently demands use of 32-bit words. Thus,
each new horizontal line MUST start on a 32-bit word boundary!
Because three does not divide into four all that well, a number of
null padding bytes may have to be added to the previous line of
data. Zero, one, two, or three bytes may be required.

Here is some padding byte example code. It is shown in PostScript,
using my Gonzo Utilities and starts with the present horizontal line
data string ready to be written to disk...

/onepad [ 0 ] makestring store             % previously defined
/twopad [ 0 0 ] makestring store
/threepad [ 0 0 0 ] makestring store

dup length 4 mod dup 0 gt { [ (xxx) threepad twopad onepad ]
exch get mergestr}{pop}ifelse

writefile exch writestring

July 28, 2005

We just listed some automated wind speed and direction sensors to
our eBay store. The feds paid $14,500.00 each for these incredibly
superb pole mount units that have no moving parts. They even do
include a barometric pressure measuring capability and communicate
very easily with most any modern computer or microprossor or BASIC
STAMP by way of ordinary 1200 Baud Bell 202 FSK modem comm.

These are accurate to three degrees, work when ice covered, and
withstand 175 MPH winds. The units work by heating special matched
platinum temperature sensors. We only have five of these remaining.

Sensor is part of a AN/FMQ-13(V)2. Amazingly, full technical manuals,
detailed schematics and any and all docs are readily web available!

July 27, 2005

I've been noticing that Adobe Acrobat 7 does not appear nearly as
robust or stable as earlier releases. In fact, it seem to be the only
program that continually and regularly blows up for me under Windows
XP. Symptoms include random blowups and leaving bits and pieces
of previous code modules on the machine that are not found until
a shutdown.

That Content Preparation Process box may also be involved somehow.
Other times, the "not responding - end program" shutdown option
either does not work at all or has to be repeated a dozen times.

Some defenses appear to be making sure there is only one instance
of Acrobat active at any time, and never running Acrobat and GoLive
simultanously. And giving ctrl-shift-escape or end program more than
enough time to finish shutdown. I'll see if I cannot narrow this down.

Adobe has published some XP Blowup Guidelines.

Meanwhile, there is an infuriating new bug in Distiller that causes
running of PostScript-as-Langauage programs to slow down by
factors of fifty or more. Apparently the garbage collection is now
super robust. Possibly because of a sledgehammer repair to a
memory leak or something.

Creative use of -2 vm reclaim (stop!) and 0 vmreclaim (do now!)
inside loops dramatically repair this problem. Which should not
even be there in the first place.

Plese email me if you are having related problems.

July 26, 2005

Updated and corrected many links on our Arizona Auction Resources
library page. Your own Custom Regional Auction finder can be obtained
thru this link.

July 25, 2005

I'm trying to work up a universal image manipulator that goes way beyond
our swings and tilts and dodges and burns routines. This would "byte the
bullet" and actually transfer the entire image into groups of PostScript
line related subarrays that are RAM resident.

From which true X-Y image rectification using high resolution interpolation
could be done. As could 9-cell or 25 cell digital filtering, direct swing correction,
precision fractional degree rotations, and just about any other image manipulation
you could possibly dream up.

Speed might not be all that great for really intensive calculations. So be it.
More on this as it evolves.