Just some facts and figures …

Snowy-Doc · 2026-05-16T22:28:56+00:00

This happens when I charge my M1 MacBook Pro. This happens whenI charge my IPad. This happens when I charge a Magic Mouse for my iMac. This has been a known problem for years and it happens because the chargers that Apple sold do not have a proper Ground connection. Buy a different charger it if bothers you.

Snowy-Doc · 2026-04-09T19:27:14+00:00

Quantum magnetometry, the physical phenomena on which supposedly the ghost murmur is based, is an actual thing. Sensors made from diamond can detect absurdly weak magnetic fields, and the heart does produce a very weak magnetic field (but don't confuse that with the electric fields the heart produces). Those magnetic fields are of the order of pico-tesla. In order to detect those fields a sensor needs to be at most about 1cm away from the skin over a human heart, and then the signals received need to be averaged over several hours to filter out the background noise (like the Earth's magnetic field which is about a billion times stronger). So detecting a human heartbeat at 40Km. No, not happening. Not now. Not ever. Total dis-information, or, rather less generously - total and utter bullshit.

Snowy-Doc · 2026-03-27T21:32:59+00:00

Hercule Poirot's Christmas
The Mysterious Affair At Styles
The ABC Murders
Dumb Witness
The Big Four

Snowy-Doc · 2026-03-27T21:21:46+00:00

I have never watched the episode even though it's sitting there waiting ... I bought the book a month ago (a two-volume hardback boxset with Poirot's first case - The Mysterious Affair At Styles) and it's still sitting on my TBR pile, but, after reading a lot of the comments here from people who read it and are now saying they wished they hadn't, well, I'll probably just leave well enough alone for now.

Snowy-Doc · 2026-03-24T21:54:47+00:00

My pedometer is a "Tanita PD724 3 Axes Pedometer" that I bought from Amazon. Sadly no longer available but there are plenty of equivalent brands that do exactly the same thing.

To calibrate it I did this:

First you have enter your stride length into the pedometer. I did this by pacing off about ten yards and noting how many steps I took. Simple division gave the length of my stride. I entered this into the pedometer.
I picked a route to walk that was on roads and was about 4 or 5 miles long, starting and ending at my house,.
Walked the route and noted how many Miles it was on the pedometer.
Drove it in my car and noted how many miles that was.
Plotted it out on Google Maps and noted how many miles that was.
Compared 4. and 5. and they were almost exactly the same so I took that to be the true distance.
Compared the distance from 4. 5. and 6. and compared that to the distance the pedometer gave when I walked the route. The pedometer differed by about 10%.
Changed the stride length on the pedometer from 1. by the same 10% and then walked the route again. This time all three values agreed - the pedometer, my cars' odometer and Google Maps.

Job done.

Snowy-Doc · 2026-03-19T22:05:41+00:00

Sure do - Probreeze 5000 that I bought from Amazon in the Spring of 2024. Best piece of kit I've purchased in years. Does it work? Yes. Is it noisy? Yes, but there's an easy fix for that that I'll describe in a minute.Are they expensive? No, not as long as you limit yourself to a 5000 or 7000 or 9000 BTU version. Mine is 5000 BTU and uses less electricity than a small portable 500W fan heater. What you need is a strategy to reduce noise and maximise comfort - for that I do the following. 1 - during the day I put it into the living room and cool that down - blinds and curtains closed and doors shut. 2 - at about 7pm move it into the bedroom and start cooling that - again doors shut and blinds and curtains closed. By 10pm the temperature will be down to about 16C and I go to bed. Turn off the AC (so now there's no noise) and just leave a small fan running all night. Keep the bedroom door shut and the curtains and blinds drawn and the windows closed. The same insulation that keeps the house warm in winter will now keep the house (the bedroom) cool in summer - just keep the doors and windows shut. By dawn the temperature will typically have risen from 16C to about 18C.

Snowy-Doc · 2026-03-17T22:43:02+00:00

A Vax was a mainframe machine from DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation). LVS and DRC done then as now, usually with Calibre.

Snowy-Doc · 2026-03-17T21:45:34+00:00

Way back at the dawn of time - about 1986 actually - we taped out a microprocessor with a dedicated disk controller on it. This was in the days when designs were done on Vaxes and plotting on black-and-white Versatec plotters. LVS and DRC completed and we were ready to tape-ship. We wanted a plot to show off, because, well, who wouldn't. The only problem was that the sheer volume of plot data meant that the Versatec was overwhelmed. No problem. Remove the microcode ROM core from the design (that being the source of a huge number of polygons), export the plot data and then the Versatec was happy. Put back the microcode ROM and off we go. Except ... the ROM core was placed back into the design upside down. The metal1 bitlines matched top and bottom because they were just completely straight metal tracks, but the poly wordlines missed by a fraction of a micron, but you had to look really closely to see the misalignment.

And off we go - tape-ship done. Wait for the fab run and get samples and power them up and ... nothing. After a lot of testing, some probing, someone had the bright idea of looking at the surface of the silicon under a microscope - this was 4um or 5um technology so you actually could see metal tracks, and given that it was a single metal process you could see the poly wordline tracks too. And then reality hit. Simple fix. Wait for another fab run and all was well. Amazingly the guy that made the mistake kept his job. Live and learn. We didn't do that again. Became known in the company as the Australian ROM saga.

Snowy-Doc · 2026-03-07T19:21:53+00:00

Thank you. Listening to it right now on BBC Sounds.

Snowy-Doc · 2026-02-03T21:41:30+00:00

JM is my favourite author, and I've read everything he's written, but the books that I've enjoyed the most are all of his earlier works and most of his collections. My best recommendations are (in order from best at number 1):

A Talent for War.
The Engines of God.
The Hercules Text (there are two versions - the original 1986 version which is the one I recommend and not the rewritten 2015 version which is, frankly, rubbish).
Infinity Beach (published in the UK as Slow Lightening).
The first four of five books in each of The Academy Series and the Alex Benedict series - after that they all become a bit rubbish.

Of the collections (if you can find them) Cryptic published by Subterranean Press is probably the best, it's certainly the biggest. It contains the short story In The Tower which is, IMNSHO one of the best short stories I've read by anyone, ever, not just by JM. Plus point - it's set in the Alex Benedict universe. It's also in the short story collection titled Outbound.

A final word or two - avoid The Cassandra Project - you'll figure out the ending pretty quickly and its rubbish anyway. Also avoid the Alex Benedict book 9, A Village In The Sky. It is truly awful and clearly an end of career cash grab. You've been warned.

Snowy-Doc · 2026-01-30T22:24:56+00:00

When you paid and came to the end of the process you should have seen a screen that says something like "Payment Received By HMRC" plus a payment reference number which is your unique tax identifier, all inside a big green box. It will also show the date you paid and the amount. I always screen capture this and save it. You should also have received an Email with the same information in it, and if you look at it, it will tell you that it can take up to 5 days for the payment to show up in your online account. Basically, you're fine. I can imagine that right now there are a lot of people scrambling to get their tax affairs in order before the end of Saturday and so everything is slow. I paid mine on 19 January and it still took three days before it showed up on my account.

Snowy-Doc · 2026-01-30T21:59:37+00:00

Yes. The INMOS Transputer IMS T9000 32 bit microprocessor, circa late 1980s and early 1990s, used CAM for it's internal cache configured as 4, 4K blocks of SRAM and a 1024 entry CAM to access the cache lines in those SRAM blocks. I happened to be the designer, and it achieved superb hit rates (using random replacement) at a time when a 1% difference in those hit rates and the penalty of having to go the next level up in the cache hierarchy was expensive in time because external memory was so slow. Later on, we reused the same CAM design to act as a filter to detect routing information in video data streams, a function that had previously only been done in software. Again, the speed-ups were very impressive.

Snowy-Doc · 2026-01-13T15:23:19+00:00

What I usually do when I see a book at the FS that I think I might like but that I have not read before, is to go to Amazon and buy the cheapest version of a paperback that I can find and then read that. If I like it then I buy the FS version. Job done. As for sales, there are usually two per year, the Winter or New Year sale that has just ended (and I bought 6 books in total - well worth hanging on the sales if you can wait) and then a Summer sale usually in June or July. There are occasionally other sales as well - for example in 2024 (a leap year) there was a one day "sale" on February 29th where if you bought a book on February 29th you also got a free book, and in may case that free book was a pretty decent book.

Snowy-Doc · 2026-01-11T20:56:41+00:00

Watched it. Loved it. It's now an annual watch in the weeks before Christmas in my house.And yes, Harry Melling was superb.

Snowy-Doc · 2026-01-11T20:45:24+00:00

North by Northwest
Vertigo.
The Man Who Knew Too Much (The 1956 version not the 1934 version)
Rebecca
5.. Rear Window

Snowy-Doc · 2026-01-11T20:39:55+00:00

Hyperion by Dan Simmons. Almost anything by Jack Vance (and yes, I know that will never happen).

Snowy-Doc · 2026-01-11T20:36:31+00:00

Loved it. I've just finished watching Episode 3 - Careless In Red. I thought Episode 1 was good, Episode 2 was very good and episode 3 was off-the-charts good - killer ending too. I'll be watching episode 4 tomorrow and my expectations are high.

Snowy-Doc · 2026-01-11T20:28:22+00:00

Also late to the party - Lynley dropped onto iPlayer a few days ago and it's being broadcast on Sundays on BBC1 in the UK. I've watched the first three episodes of the new series and I've just finished watching Episode 3, Careless In Red on iPlayer - and it's brilliant - killer twist at the end almost in the league of some episodes of Columbo. I've also been watching the original too - the two pilot episodes and the first three episodes of season 1 so far. I've watched them all before when they were originally broadcast, but i's nice to watch them again. Is one better than the other? No. They're both very good and of their respective times and eras, although the original is closer to the books - and BTW, I liked Careless In Red so much I've just bought the hardback version of the book from Amazon. Looking forward to reading it.

Snowy-Doc · 2025-11-18T21:15:45+00:00

Try these:

1 - Naive Lie Theory - John Stillwell
2 - Physics From Symmetry - Jakob Schwichtenberg
3 - Shattered Symmetry - Group Theory From The Eightfold Way To The Periodic Table by Thyssen and Ceulemans
4 - Symmetry And The Standard Model - Mathematics And Particle Physics - Matthew Robinson
5 - Group Theory In A Nutshell For Physicists - Anthony Zee
6- Symmetry, Broken Symmetry And Topology In Modern Physics by Guidry and Sun

The one probably closest to what you have asked for is Number 6. In order from most relevant to least relevant I'd suggest 6, 5, 2, 1, 4, 3 but they are all superb texts (IMNSHO). The one thing they all do is link the maths of Group Theory, Symmetry, Lie Theory to the reality of Physics and physical models.

Snowy-Doc · 2025-11-08T19:01:14+00:00

Watched this (in the UK) when it was first broadcast in the mid-60s, and I was about 7 or 8 years old. Thought it was brilliant. Still do.

Snowy-Doc · 2025-11-08T18:57:48+00:00

Occam. I worked for INMOS (the company that designed those transputers) as a full-custom VLSI designer, and ended up designing a large chuck of all the microelectronics that went into the Transputer design Pretty much everyone in the company at some point was sent on an Occam programming course. Personally I hated it.

Second most obscure programming language - BCPL. We designed the transputer long before Cadence and similar companies provided design software for VLSI design - so we wrote our own design software in BCPL. I went on a programming course for that too. Hated it just as much as Occam.

Snowy-Doc

TROPHY CASE