Zel's Motoring Adventures...Peugeot, Renault, Rover, Trabant, Invacar & A Sinclair C5 - 16/04 - Routine Consumables...

[bobdisk]

Sounds daft but I keep all my usually used keys all in one bunch, so the "next one to be used" will always be there, and it such a bunch, I am aware if I havent got it. 😁 

[Zelandeth]

1 hour ago, bobdisk said:

Sounds daft but I keep all my usually used keys all in one bunch, so the "next one to be used" will always be there, and it such a bunch, I am aware if I havent got it. 😁 

I used to just have the one keyring...the problem is that nowadays it's just so unmanageably huge if I do that. 

The van has six keys, Jag has four, the house keyring has another five on it, the Xantia's fob is bloody huge...Plus the ignition in the Jag and Invacar are both positioned that a large keyring is a nuisance while driving.  So they just got separated out to one keyring for each vehicle.  I'm usually really good about only locking the door using the key...usually!  Plus I have always made a point of ensuring I have a spare (and the spare keys all live in a specific place in the house so I know where they are if I need them - or if I need to direct someone to find them).  Only reason I haven't here is because I had a headache getting one made.

[Zelandeth]

So after putting the new version of the website with a day and a half worth of updates included live...within half an hour I'd generated a list of snagging jobs needed that I just about crammed onto two sides of A4 paper.

 

Took me an entire evening to go through the list from yesterday, but it's now done...and the updated update is now live!

Over here...Go find broken stuff I need to fix!

To be fair...You shouldn't really see much different as the vast majority of what I've been doing has simply been fixing things that were broken or rough edges.  Like it was about 50/50 whether pages had a home link at the bottom right or left, and likewise pot luck whether it was just a text link or the correct graphic.  

Biggest changes:

[] All pages should now have a "home" link at the lower left of the page, which will take you back to the entry page (and reload the frame as this is also intended for folks who have landed on individual pages from Google searches etc).
[] All pages which are more than one layer deep in the directory structure will also feature a "back" button immediately above the aforementioned "home" button.  The back button should carry out the navigation in the current frame only.
[] All pages should now render in Aerial/Helvetica or whatever your system substitutes for that typeface family, and at 12pt size.
[] Several pages have lost the red table borders.  This has allowed me to space content out better I think and improved overall clarity.
[] Links page gone through and refreshed as about 80% of the links on it were to dead websites.
[] GEC BT304 Television now shown on the vintage technology page...It's been there since 2008 but orphaned as the link to it was never added to the page for some reason!
[] Streetlighting, Colour Rendering Tests and Spectrograph Plot pages have all been moved to become a subsection within the Lighting Technology section.  Just helps reduce clutter I think and one thing I'm going to be trying to do going forward is keeping the lighting, vintage technology and automotive sections more clearly separated from each other.  Should just make the site easier to follow, especially for a new reader who might not have interests covering all three areas.  There will be another section to be added in the nearish future too which again is something utterly separate...so reducing clutter in the navigation frame makes sense I think.
[] Nearly 500Mb of irrelevant images, dead pages etc deleted.  It's still well over a gigabyte in size and contains somewhere around 4,000 files.  That size will balloon as time goes on given that any page created these days includes linked full resolution copies of any photographs (so generally 10MP less any cropping).
[] All pages should now have the Statcounter code correctly embedded so I can actually see which pages are getting visitors again.
[] All pages should now have the viewport correctly set in the HTML header...mainly so the Google Search Console will quit whining at me about it.

Still a lot of work needing done on the site as a whole to get it growing again...but that's hopefully a lot of the tedium out of the way!

-- -- --

I needed to dive out today to pick up a prescription, and as it was dry decided to take the Jag.  Started first touch, sounding far happier now I've topped the battery off with a working charger.  Though obviously the starter still sounds a bit strange...because V12!  If folks really want I can record what a V12 sounds like cranking over.  Just let me know.

It's a week or two since I last drove her...and it's kinda confirmed what I knew.  She's a keeper.  Drinks fuel like there is no tomorrow, is an absolute swine to work on, you can only just about cram three adults in, and parts require a second mortgage in many cases...However the moment you drive the car you forgive all that.  I can't quite believe that I'm a week away from having had the car a year...but it feels absolutely no less special now than it did the day I collected her from @Cavcraft.  She's a car I just meshed perfectly with the driving dynamic of pretty much immediately - even when mouldy and running on seven and a half cylinders.  Much like the van, and I know some folks will laugh, but also TPA the first time I drove her in decent health.  That was one reason I never really had much drive to hold on to the Riva.  I liked it...but that was it.  It wasn't like my Niva, which immediately got a name and made me come up with excuses to take the long way to get places. 

Black Magic ain't going to be going anywhere from my fleet in the near future as far as I can tell.  I reckon she may well wind up in the hands of a specialist at some point to do a few jobs to assist in the relationship being positive in the long term.

The Xantia - even in a straight line - is way faster.  It pulls 0.60 in just over 8 seconds, and to be honest, feels even faster thanks to the lovely 1980s bludgeon the turbo delivers the power with.  Despite it being a case of 299bhp vs 180(ish) bhp, the Xantia would be long gone before the Jag had even started moving...however the Xantia lacks one thing...and that's a voice.  The noise the Jag makes when she comes on cam at about 3500rpm is something that never gets old.

V6s growl.  V8s bellow, Straight Sixes both howl like nothing else though.  Plus the torque the V12 can deliver is just silly.  I can keep up with normal traffic from one side of town to the other without ever exceeding 2000rpm.  I rarely do that however because...Well because I'm an idiot and deleted the rear de-resonators on the exhaust so I can hear the exhaust note.  That's not conducive to good fuel economy as it encourages use of the loud pedal and dropping a gear!

So...Fleet.

[] TPA.  No chance she's being sold any time soon...nor to be honest can I see a situation where I'd consider selling.  She just puts too big a grin on my face every time I take her for a drive.  The improvements I've made recently (carpets etc) have just made that more apparent.  It's less of a Series Land Rover situation of "I do love it, but..." and becoming "Yeah, she's great fun to drive!" without any particular buts.  I'm actually starting to look forward to my planned UK-wide tour.

[] Jag.  See above.  She makes about as much sense in 2021 as an ashtray on a motorbike.  However she's a car I never even dreamed that I'd get a shot of driving, much less owning.  While I despise working on her, and the fact that £80 worth of fuel lasts about 130 miles does grate...Between the comfort, relentless pace and noise she makes...Nope.  Not going anywhere.  Oh, and there's the looks.  Can you ever see yourself getting tired of walking back to this in a car park?

[] Van:  Until something way, way bigger arrives...it ain't going nowhere.

[] Xantia: The only thing I can see replacing it might be a Volvo 850 or similar.  It's just so competent in absolutely everything it does...and the booooooost is bloody addictive.

...I need a bigger driveway.

[LightBulbFun]

8 hours ago, Zelandeth said:

So after putting the new version of the website with a day and a half worth of updates included live...within half an hour I'd generated a list of snagging jobs needed that I just about crammed onto two sides of A4 paper.

 

Took me an entire evening to go through the list from yesterday, but it's now done...and the updated update is now live!

Over here...Go find broken stuff I need to fix!

To be fair...You shouldn't really see much different as the vast majority of what I've been doing has simply been fixing things that were broken or rough edges.  Like it was about 50/50 whether pages had a home link at the bottom right or left, and likewise pot luck whether it was just a text link or the correct graphic.  

Biggest changes:

[] All pages should now have a "home" link at the lower left of the page, which will take you back to the entry page (and reload the frame as this is also intended for folks who have landed on individual pages from Google searches etc).
[] All pages which are more than one layer deep in the directory structure will also feature a "back" button immediately above the aforementioned "home" button.  The back button should carry out the navigation in the current frame only.
[] All pages should now render in Aerial/Helvetica or whatever your system substitutes for that typeface family, and at 12pt size.
[] Several pages have lost the red table borders.  This has allowed me to space content out better I think and improved overall clarity.
[] Links page gone through and refreshed as about 80% of the links on it were to dead websites.
[] GEC BT304 Television now shown on the vintage technology page...It's been there since 2008 but orphaned as the link to it was never added to the page for some reason!
[] Streetlighting, Colour Rendering Tests and Spectrograph Plot pages have all been moved to become a subsection within the Lighting Technology section.  Just helps reduce clutter I think and one thing I'm going to be trying to do going forward is keeping the lighting, vintage technology and automotive sections more clearly separated from each other.  Should just make the site easier to follow, especially for a new reader who might not have interests covering all three areas.  There will be another section to be added in the nearish future too which again is something utterly separate...so reducing clutter in the navigation frame makes sense I think.
[] Nearly 500Mb of irrelevant images, dead pages etc deleted.  It's still well over a gigabyte in size and contains somewhere around 4,000 files.  That size will balloon as time goes on given that any page created these days includes linked full resolution copies of any photographs (so generally 10MP less any cropping).
[] All pages should now have the Statcounter code correctly embedded so I can actually see which pages are getting visitors again.
[] All pages should now have the viewport correctly set in the HTML header...mainly so the Google Search Console will quit whining at me about it.

Still a lot of work needing done on the site as a whole to get it growing again...but that's hopefully a lot of the tedium out of the way!

-- -- --

yay happy to see the website get some love  (if nothing else will be good to have a nice factual web page on the Model 70 I can link to people when needed!)

that GEC TV is neat, I wonder what options there are these days for generating a 405 line video signal for it...

(BTW I dont know if you can do anything bout it on your end but I noticed the Stat counter gets blocked by my Adblocker, uBlock Origin, I dont know if it blocks my visit from being recorded but if it does might also explain why visitor numbers have seemingly fallen off)

[Zelandeth]

Yeah, there's nothing I can really do about that, as any visitor tracker is going to get clobbered in the same way.  It's just useful to me to have some idea which pages get the most traffic, likewise to see what sort of routes folks take around the site - some of that data was what resulted in me bundling in the four disparate lighting sections together.

I can get raw pageload counts from the system logs, though that requires effort.  I should have a peek one day though to see if the figure differs much from what Statcounter reports.

It's just a shame that between script blockers and search engines encrypting search data, it's far less useful a tool than it used to be.

Regarding 405 line video, there are a few converters on the market, though being produced in small numbers does mean they're a bit expensive.  I've three sets which could make use of it, so I may look into getting one at some point.  Especially when I get around to sorting the next one - which will most likely be this one.

As it's in good order generally, should be a pretty simple re-cap and service job.  Even as it stands it does display a raster of sorts so that's a good starting point.

 

[LightBulbFun]

30 minutes ago, Zelandeth said:

Yeah, there's nothing I can really do about that, as any visitor tracker is going to get clobbered in the same way.  It's just useful to me to have some idea which pages get the most traffic, likewise to see what sort of routes folks take around the site - some of that data was what resulted in me bundling in the four disparate lighting sections together.

I can get raw pageload counts from the system logs, though that requires effort.  I should have a peek one day though to see if the figure differs much from what Statcounter reports.

It's just a shame that between script blockers and search engines encrypting search data, it's far less useful a tool than it used to be.

Regarding 405 line video, there are a few converters on the market, though being produced in small numbers does mean they're a bit expensive.  I've three sets which could make use of it, so I may look into getting one at some point.  Especially when I get around to sorting the next one - which will most likely be this one.

As it's in good order generally, should be a pretty simple re-cap and service job.  Even as it stands it does display a raster of sorts so that's a good starting point.

 

ohh a British Roundie, I look forward to seeing you delve into that

 

back when I was bed bound for several months about 8-9 years ago due to my chronic back issues etc I passed the time by watching lots of TV and Radio restoration videos from this chap https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ6nWQ7UO-Lve9ji2FUNYwg

so I know a lot about US TV's and Radios, but funnily enough not so much about British Radios and TV's

of course they all mostly operate on similar principles so im not completely clueless but im quite interested in seeing how they differ in the fine details etc

[PhilA]

Re TV and color stuff, shame about standards and such. I've got a Sony XC-900 color corrector sitting here, NiB.

I'm also going to try get some nice snaps of the Pontiac- I just ordered a polarizing filter for the Canon so that should be in at some point in the near future.

I also probably need to get a muff for my microphone and record the straight eight on chat. It sounds quite different to many cars you hear today.

 

Phil

[Zelandeth]

Have found a few more website bugs that need to be swatted.  Mostly pages where I've got too many thumbnails in tables pushing the page width too far for mobile devices.  Easily sorted, and I think all the local ones now have been done.  Going to do a bit more testing tomorrow to see if I find anything else before updating the live version.

Also had a parcel which contained the next entry for the vintage technology page...

The early 80s were a truly fascinating period from the perspective of microelectronics.  Companies the world over suddenly found they had microprocessors which were affordable enough and had low enough power draw that they could stuff them into consumer products...even though they didn't actually know quite what to actually *do* with them.

Which is how we ended up with little gems like this one from Casio, circa 1983.

I have always thought of personal organizers as a strictly 90s thing...never really being particularly useful in any way that a traditional Filofax and a watch couldn't already manage.  There were zillions of the things made during the 90s, the vast majority of which most likely got used for a week then forgotten about. 

I did use the one I got in about 98 mainly as a task list right through until I got my first Palm (a fifth hand scruffy as hell Palm Tungsten E in about 2005 - which was one of the first bits of technology I truly found myself integrating into pretty much every aspect of day to day life) which is of course what the personal organizers were trying to be - it just took until the turn of the 21st century for mass market tech to really catch up to make them really useful. 

When my Palm Tungsten died it was the first time I'd had a device fail where I really felt it left a noticeable void.  It had my diary in (and synced with Groupwise at work so I had it all in one place), had my reading material for the train to and from work, had most of the reference manuals I used regularly in PDF form on, was an always present notepad (with handwriting recognition that didn't suck!), dictaphone, and even allowed me to - admittedly very slowly - send email when on the go when hooked up to my phone.

Then there's things like the Psion Series 5, which I also put a good number of hours on a well used one back in the day.  It won out over the Palm in quite a few regards, battery life and having a proper keyboard being two main ones.  Plus it virtually invited you to write your own software.

The idea of an electronic data bank though went back a lot further...This was Casio's first shot at what we'd later come to call a PDA.  It made sense for them to have a shot at the market...they already had a respected name in the field of portable electronics, especially calculators.  I can also see the sense in what they did, essentially expanding a calculator to include the databank capabilities rather than splitting it off as a totally separate (expensive!) device.

The resulting device has a very similar form factor to the fx-451M scientific calculator which was launched a couple of years later in 1985.  This used the same sort of membrane keypad on the folding cover to allow a (very well featured) scientific calculator to fit in to the same package as a basic four function pocket calculator.  It's still one of my favourite bits of design, and one I use regularly.

The family resemblance isn't hard to see is it?

With the PF-3000 however there are a few...well...issues.  Largely stemming from the fact that it was 1983 and this was largely uncharted territory.  First off...it has 2.9K of memory.  0.9K internally and with an additional 2K memory module slotted in the back.  Yes, I did type that correctly, a 2*kilo*byte expansion module.

The longest string of data it will let you input is 50 characters.  If you used the full length, sixty memos will fill the memory!  The phone directory is an even bigger memory hog as there are two lines of each entry, one for the name and one for the number.  I did a bit of quick math based on the average length of ten random names from the middle of my contacts, and came up with an average name length of 12 characters per name (including spaces) and of course 11 digits for a normal UK phone number (even though that would have been shorter back then).  So you'd fill the memory with 130 phone numbers.  It's fine for noting some down while you're away on a business trip, but it's not going to take over from your desktop phone book.

Then there's the UI.  Casio are actually pretty good at making these types of membrane keypads not suck, especially for their intended use case.  However the ABC keyboard layout is an abomination.  They would have been far better flipping it through 90 degrees and going for a Qwerty layout...oh...but then the display would be the wrong way around...yeah, you can see how it was a necessary evil to keep with the "normal calculator" form factor.

There's also something blindingly obvious missing from the keyboard...an enter key.  It took me far longer to figure out that to save a record to memory you need to select the relevant mode, press the data button to light a *tiny* indicator on the display to show you're in data input mode, type whatever in, then to store it you have to press the mode button for phone or memo again.  Deleting data involves you finding the record, setting data mode to input, clearing the display and then saving it.  It's just clunky.  Especially is there is a mix of numbers and letters to enter as numbers have to be input through the calculator keypad.  Awkward and clunky.

As is reading anything.  You have a single line, ten character display to work with.

By the time you've fumbled your way to whatever you're looking for by the tiny arrow keys (there's no search function to jump to a selected letter or anything), even the briefest of memos is going to involve scrolling.

They get ten out of ten for effort...but it's just not very useful.  The lack of any form of clock whatsoever loses it points from the PDA usefulness side of things too.

It's a somewhat fascinating little technological time capsule, and feels like they really were trying to push the limits of what they could do...just before the technology was really there.  It feels like there isn't any real wasted volume in this thing... it's basically just a solid slab it feels like (must be nearly double the weight of the fx-451M), so they really had to work hard to fit everything into the case.  Just made a few too many compromises.  Even the calculator keypad has zero travel keys to shave an extra 0.5mm or so off the 10mm thickness of the device (it is literally twice as thick as the LC-826/8 pocket calculator from 1980/1).

It was in production for less than a year...suggests most prospective buyers thought the same!  That you were essentially paying a small fortune for a very bulky, very heavy 10-digit pocket calculator with a pretty poor keypad that ate CR2032 batteries at quite an alarming rate.  The whole idea of trying to cram a PDA into a calculator form factor was always going to be a huge gamble...and it was one that turned out to be a dead end eventually.  Hence after s few years devices trying to fill these roles had mostly adopted something more akin to what you'd recognise in terms of form factor.

This one while rebadged by Tandy was actually made by Casio.  This dates from 1990.

Very clunky compared to later offerings from the middle of the decade (and featuring some fantastically obtuse UI design), but it looks like a personal organizer rather than a prop from a cheap 80s sci-fi show.

Useful?  Not so much.  Deserving of mention for effort, definitely.  Exactly the sort of oddball technological ugly duckling my website was made to showcase.

 

That was meant to be a five minute post with one photo.  Oops.

[bobdisk]

14 hours ago, LightBulbFun said:

ohh a British Roundie, I look forward to seeing you delve into that

 

back when I was bed bound for several months about 8-9 years ago due to my chronic back issues etc I passed the time by watching lots of TV and Radio restoration videos from this chap https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ6nWQ7UO-Lve9ji2FUNYwg

so I know a lot about US TV's and Radios, but funnily enough not so much about British Radios and TV's

of course they all mostly operate on similar principles so im not completely clueless but im quite interested in seeing how they differ in the fine details etc

You might be interested in this bloke;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUfK3ULnVgs&list=PLdeAeCtGidE4NZ9MQNBHcI-TpgkeCGf_v&index=1

 

[bobdisk]

14 hours ago, LightBulbFun said:

ohh a British Roundie, I look forward to seeing you delve into that

 

back when I was bed bound for several months about 8-9 years ago due to my chronic back issues etc I passed the time by watching lots of TV and Radio restoration videos from this chap https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ6nWQ7UO-Lve9ji2FUNYwg

so I know a lot about US TV's and Radios, but funnily enough not so much about British Radios and TV's

of course they all mostly operate on similar principles so im not completely clueless but im quite interested in seeing how they differ in the fine details etc

You might be interested in this bloke;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUfK3ULnVgs&list=PLdeAeCtGidE4NZ9MQNBHcI-TpgkeCGf_v&index=1

 

[LightBulbFun]

6 hours ago, bobdisk said:

You might be interested in this bloke;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUfK3ULnVgs&list=PLdeAeCtGidE4NZ9MQNBHcI-TpgkeCGf_v&index=1

 

yeah iv heard of him/seen his videos in my suggested list but never actually checked him out

probably about time I gave him a watch, so iv got that playlist you linked queued up now and ill keep it up for when I need to kill some time  

I am quite interested in seeing a Colour vacuum tube TV in depth, the Channel I normally watch tends to deal with Black and white stuff (although he did get a Colour roundie a while back but i dont think he has done many videos on it yet)

[Zelandeth]

25 minutes ago, LightBulbFun said:

yeah iv heard of him/seen his videos in my suggested list but never actually checked him out

probably about time I gave him a watch, so iv got that playlist you linked queued up now and ill keep it up for when I need to kill some time  

I am quite interested in seeing a Colour vacuum tube TV in depth, the Channel I normally watch tends to deal with Black and white stuff (although he did get a Colour roundie a while back but i dont think he has done many videos on it yet)

Mate of mine back up north has an ITT CVC-1.  I've helped work on it a few times.  It's one of the most overcomplicated pieces of hardware I've ever come across.  Good space heater though...and gave a cracking picture when behaving. 

Setting the convergence was a process that could put grey hair on your head though...about a dozen adjustments, all of which interact with each other to varying extents.

You never wanted to move it either as it weighs as much as a small car.

[bobdisk]

On 1/12/2021 at 3:00 PM, Zelandeth said:

Regarding 405 line video, there are a few converters on the market, though being produced in small numbers does mean they're a bit expensive.  I've three sets which could make use of it, so I may look into getting one at some point.  Especially when I get around to sorting the next one - which will most likely be this one.

As it's in good order generally, should be a pretty simple re-cap and service job.  Even as it stands it does display a raster of sorts so that's a good starting point.

 

Why not try making one of these?;

https://electronics.frankcuffe.ovh/hedghog

Seeing this and reading about the ITT has brought back my tv repair days, starting with dual standard 405/625 b&w tvs. 

  If you thought the ITT was complicated, have you ever seen a DUAL STANDARD (405/625!!!!!) Bush CTV25, 25 inch crt colour tv? 

https://www.scienceandsociety.co.uk/results.asp?image=10687270

 

[bobdisk]

On 1/12/2021 at 3:00 PM, Zelandeth said:

Regarding 405 line video, there are a few converters on the market, though being produced in small numbers does mean they're a bit expensive.  I've three sets which could make use of it, so I may look into getting one at some point.  Especially when I get around to sorting the next one - which will most likely be this one.

As it's in good order generally, should be a pretty simple re-cap and service job.  Even as it stands it does display a raster of sorts so that's a good starting point.

 

Why not try making one of these?;

https://electronics.frankcuffe.ovh/hedghog

Seeing this and reading about the ITT has brought back my tv repair days, starting with dual standard 405/625 b&w tvs. 

  If you thought the ITT was complicated, have you ever seen a DUAL STANDARD (405/625!!!!!) Bush CTV25, 25 inch crt colour tv? 

https://www.scienceandsociety.co.uk/results.asp?image=10687270

 

[bobdisk]

Its done it again, I posted 1 each of those posts, but the system has put up 2 of each. would like to find out why.

[LightBulbFun]

49 minutes ago, bobdisk said:

Why not try making one of these?;

https://electronics.frankcuffe.ovh/hedghog

Seeing this and reading about the ITT has brought back my tv repair days, starting with dual standard 405/625 b&w tvs. 

  If you thought the ITT was complicated, have you ever seen a DUAL STANDARD (405/625!!!!!) Bush CTV25, 25 inch crt colour tv? 

https://www.scienceandsociety.co.uk/results.asp?image=10687270

 

oh thats very neat! thats exactly what I was wondering about on the 405 to 625 convert front, In that I wondered if in this day and age of cheap and cheerful microcontrollers  and FPGAs and the like if someone had knocked something up based around one  

glad to see that someone has done something on that front

 

and LOL the Burning bush comment  in the Bush CTV25 link you posted made me chuckle, reminds me of the ending scene in the secret life of machines the Television episode

all those Poor Televisions! 

[somewhatfoolish]

2 hours ago, bobdisk said:

Its done it again, I posted 1 each of those posts, but the system has put up 2 of each. would like to find out why.

The three dots at the top right of your posts leads to a menu to edit or delete posts.

[Zelandeth]

2 hours ago, bobdisk said:

Its done it again, I posted 1 each of those posts, but the system has put up 2 of each. would like to find out why.

Seems to happen about 1 post in 20 when I'm on my phone.  I've never had it happen on desktop so far.

[PhilA]

3 hours ago, LightBulbFun said:

 all those Poor Televisions! 

Tim said they were all very very broken.. and if he couldn't fix them, they were good for a final hurrah!

[GeorgeB]

Just possibly, maybe, perhaps, it's a problem with your phone? (Or the operator.)

[bobdisk]

9 hours ago, somewhatfoolish said:

The three dots at the top right of your posts leads to a menu to edit or delete posts.

I know the 3 dots, I usually do delete the extra post, Just thought I would leave it this time to see what happened. The extra post on another thread disappeared by itself the other day.

[bobdisk]

6 hours ago, GeorgeB said:

Just possibly, maybe, perhaps, it's a problem with your phone? (Or the operator.)

I am using Chrome, and the laptop is running Linux Ubuntu. Dont usually use the mobile. 

[GeorgeB]

11 hours ago, bobdisk said:

I am using Chrome, and the laptop is running Linux Ubuntu. Dont usually use the mobile. 

Sorry, I was replying to Zelandeth.

[Zelandeth]

24 minutes ago, GeorgeB said:

Sorry, I was replying to Zelandeth.

Pretty sure it's not just me!  There do seem to be some particular "quirks" unique (at least among the websites I use on a regular basis) to the editor on here which can be at times maddening.  Pretty much all of them are repeatable - albeit often on an intermittent basis.  Because intermittent faults are always so much fun to trace.

I use seven forums regularly on a day-to-day basis, and it's only the editor on here that usually has me wanting to bash my head against a brick wall.

As far as the device goes, it's a relatively recent, up to date Android device running a mainstream browser...so there's not a huge scope for me having fouled up settings there as there's not really much *to* change.  Especially given you can't even get to the advanced configuration options in Firefox as of a few updates ago!

[GeorgeB]

I think I should have added a smilie. Thought it was obvious I was joking.

[Zelandeth]

15 minutes ago, GeorgeB said:

I think I should have added a smilie. Thought it was obvious I was joking.

Sorry!  One of the curses of my ASD is that I tend to automatically take anything literally unless it's made clear in black and white it's not meant to be.

[Paul-l]

On 1/12/2021 at 11:33 AM, LightBulbFun said:

yay happy to see the website get some love  (if nothing else will be good to have a nice factual web page on the Model 70 I can link to people when needed!)

that GEC TV is neat, I wonder what options there are these days for generating a 405 line video signal for it...

(BTW I dont know if you can do anything bout it on your end but I noticed the Stat counter gets blocked by my Adblocker, uBlock Origin, I dont know if it blocks my visit from being recorded but if it does might also explain why visitor numbers have seemingly fallen off)

Hmm, I was looking at this earlier

https://www.tech-retro.com/aurora-design/wc.html

goodness knows why.

[Zelandeth]

1 hour ago, Paul-l said:

Hmm, I was looking at this earlier

https://www.tech-retro.com/aurora-design/wc.html

goodness knows why.

There's a familiar name.  The Aurora was the Rolls Royce of standards converters when I was first getting into vintage technology more years ago than I care to think about.  They were a very impressive bit of kit back then, albeit with a price tag to match.  To be honest given the amount of effort that had been put into making it be the best of the best I don't think said price tag was at all unreasonable...it was a top notch bit of kit.

Pretty sure one of the developers was a regular on the UK Vintage Radio Restoration forum (which also has a dedicated section to all things TV and video) back then too.

[Noel Tidybeard]

On 19/12/2020 at 15:36, Noel Tidybeard said:

i had a 451 like Zels and the leatherette cover used to freak everone out as they thought it felt like skin!

 

***edit***

i think i may have had 2 of these as i'm sure one had a full width solar panel

 

***edit 2***

it would seem i may have had a fx-450 before the 451!

it transpires that the 450 may have been a 451 after all then the 2nd one was a 451m

i do remember the 2nd one had a smaller solar panel

[Noel Tidybeard]

flip me there was also an fx-411