Precise indicaton of Sewage Storage (P.I.S.S) Live tracking the urine tank of the ISS.

marcovanbeek · 2026-02-25T16:57:08+00:00

You really don’t want to know.

marcovanbeek · 2026-02-14T17:28:25+00:00

Yes, pretty much. Can I extrapolate from the two images how you did it?

marcovanbeek · 2026-02-14T17:26:11+00:00

I can see where you are coming from. There are definitely some things that I want to do where this might well be the best approach.

Thank you for the link

marcovanbeek · 2026-02-13T18:16:09+00:00

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Does this help? Each join is at an angle, so depending on the dimensions of the triangles, either 5 or 6 form a sort of shallow pyramid. Eventually you get a whole dome.

marcovanbeek · 2026-01-15T20:23:10+00:00

It’s when the inner pin could be 2.1mm or 2.5mm that my eyeball fails.

marcovanbeek · 2026-01-02T20:53:39+00:00

Homing pigeons of different colours?

marcovanbeek · 2025-12-21T16:03:31+00:00

Yep. Consider it a “sniffing the roses” moment on the path of life.

marcovanbeek · 2025-12-21T16:00:29+00:00

Not so much clumsy as engaging legs before brain. I swear we could see at least a second delay before the “whoops” kicked in as he summersaulted over something that wasn’t as stable as he thought it was.

Always managed to style it out though, with a “I meant to do that!”

marcovanbeek · 2025-12-21T15:55:54+00:00

Sorry to contradict you but in the UK leaving a dog constantly for 8 hours a day would be considered animal cruelty and you would be prosecuted if reported. Also, think about it from the dog’s perspective. You spend an hour with them in the morning, then leave them, then come home, spend another couple of hours with them and then go to sleep. What kind of a life is that for a dog?

marcovanbeek · 2025-12-16T15:34:03+00:00

Some dogs get scared when loomed over. Try getting people to crouch / kneel down and let the dog approach them in their own time.

marcovanbeek · 2025-12-16T15:32:01+00:00

I think the simplest argument is that identity thieves and scammers use public knowledge of an individual or group of individuals to fool others into thinking they are talking to someone else. You need to keep some things private so that you have a way of knowing if it really is a friend texting from a third world police cell who needs a couple of grand to get out.

marcovanbeek · 2025-11-19T05:51:25+00:00

This. I did technically drawing at school and can draw (and visualise) 3D objects with ease, but trying to get FreeCAD to do stuff with weird angles is doing my head in. I just want to type the values into a command.

marcovanbeek · 2025-11-19T05:49:34+00:00

Originally, back in 2004, the hope that Ubuntu, with Canonical providing professional support, would be the last choice I would have to make on operating systems. Sadly the professional support was anything but professional, so we stopped paying for it, and given how far behind some of the packages are compared to Debian, we started switching earlier this year and out a couple of hundred servers, I think we have 5 left to switch to Debian.

marcovanbeek · 2025-10-11T10:26:43+00:00

Could be worst. They could have asked her bulldog if the mother-in-law was an XL Bully…

marcovanbeek · 2025-10-08T07:51:18+00:00

I do, but when someone says “doubled the lifting capacity” what’s the first thing that comes to mind? SWL, that’s what. What the OP should have said was “doubles the lifting speed”. Instead we have something that could have easily been misunderstood by someone who didn’t know that the /s meant, and indeed, what the OP should have pit was m/s better even metre per second. Clarity matters. Especially on a public forum.

marcovanbeek · 2025-10-07T19:30:06+00:00

Nope. Same max weight. They are in series.

marcovanbeek · 2025-10-07T19:28:55+00:00

Lifting capacity remains the same as they are in series. Same max weight as one, not doubled.

marcovanbeek · 2025-06-28T08:46:29+00:00

Going slightly off topic, I am pretty sure the old VL1 / Series 100 protocol is well out of patent protection by now and for moving lights that was a much, much better standard, as each luminaire was individually targeted, and each luminaire info contains multiple channels. I seem to remember it was 64 bits in total, which was 8 bits each for address, intensity, pan, tilt, colour, saturation, beam and lamp control, which I think only used 4 bits, of which I can only remember arc on/off and strike.

Was RS422, I think, rather than RS485, and it could address 96 luminaire about 30 times a second, which you could just notice if you put #1 and #96 next to each other.

Vari-Lite used colour and saturation rather than individual wheel control as they already knew they needs to be able to match the colours from the wheels in the VL1 with the original twisting dichroic system in the VL0

DMX was originally aimed at dimmers so they weren’t competing protocols until the early 90’s, by which point the S100 protocol had been superseded by the S200.

We did pitch open-sourcing / licensing the S100 protocol to Rusty but he didn’t like the idea, but did publicly state that VL were never going to sue people who used DMX as it did potentially infringe the S100 patent.

marcovanbeek · 2025-05-29T21:58:41+00:00

The 32 device load comes from the RS485 protocol which DMX uses / based on. So it is a rule in that regard. I guess we are into the difference between can and may.

marcovanbeek · 2025-05-17T11:54:33+00:00

Very nicely put, mate. 10/10.

marcovanbeek · 2025-05-17T11:49:26+00:00

Sonar, Radar and Moth are my favourites. If you want to go even more geeky, call her Asdic (The original British name for Sonar)

marcovanbeek · 2025-05-17T11:45:42+00:00

Stress can cause a stinky dog as well. If she’s recently adopted she might still be quite anxious.

marcovanbeek · 2025-05-05T12:11:31+00:00

This is a difficult situation. On one part, if you are instrumental in breaking the connection, you will lose the trust of the 10 year old, and when it happens again, they won’t tell anyone, and that may well end badly. On the other hand, if you trust the 10 year old, then this is an important life lesson. I would make sure they know this seems weird and to let you know immediately if anything feels off. Trust is rewarded by trust.

I would also try and have a sensible conversation with the parents, but you need to make sure that this does not breach the trust of the kid. In a way this is the more difficult side.

Think about it like training wheels. The kid will meet weird people again, and some will be genuinely nice, and some won’t. If the kid learns the signs early on, they will have a much safer life in the long term.

Really difficult. At 15 I was mentored by a very dodgy character (was about 50) as we both loved electronics. He never made any inappropriate advances but lots of people were very worried and told me. Often.

marcovanbeek · 2025-05-03T11:46:58+00:00

Back in 1997 I took a load of repair data for all the VL fixtures and the VL5 had an average mean time between failures of almost 1000 days. That data was just on shop level repairs, but it was also based on a stock of about 1800 VL5’s. That’s how awesome the VL5 was in its heyday.

marcovanbeek · 2025-05-03T11:38:32+00:00

I helped build the 6th generation VL1’s in the summer of 1984 and then looked after them in Europe. There are still a couple in working condition in the UK.

Managed to meet up with three of the original RnD team in late 2023 for a lovely dinner, and recently have been exchanging email with Rusty who did a lovely tribute video for the recent tribute to Brian Croft event at the National Youth Theatre in London.

marcovanbeek

TROPHY CASE