Technology
Musical Reeds to measure RPM
This old tachometer uses music box type reeds to measure motor RPM without electricity. It's more useful than a digital Tach because it shows you resonant frequencies and can be used to check hammer and reciprocal speeds too.
This is a pretty neat device, after watching this video this weekend. They still make them but they are enormously expensive due to the limited demand and the cost of manufacture.
Technology Connections – Fans; High is next to Off on purpose
I've been woefully uneducated about the different types of electric motors and this got me reading and thinking about the different versions of this technology and how IGBTs and microprocessors using variable frequency drives have really changed things over the years.
Variable Frequency Drives Explained – VFD Basics IGBT inverter
This is an important energy-saving technology that is becoming more and more common in almost all large appliances in homes today, so it's important to know how it works.
Computers were faster when they were slower!
Luke makes some good points about computers getting faster -- they generally aren't for users -- because coders are getting sloppier and we are demanding more out of them all of the time. I know Luke, and so do I reject the fancy window managers that are popular, but still even if you don't use the resource intensive window managers, software in general from the web browsers to video players, are becoming more and more data intensive. Solid state drives are a bright spot in speed, but still technology just gets heavier and heavier, even as the raw speed gets faster.
LGR Oddware – Thermaltake 5.25
Y'know, sometimes you just wanna use your PC to light something on fire and hold your drink. Oddware has you covered with the Thermaltake Xray from 2004! Providing a 12V DC lighter alongside a cupholder in a single five and a quarter inch computer case drive bay.
Back in the day when you could smoke in your office, you might want a cigarette lighter in your computer.
Phil Ochs – Automation Song
People have been talking about automation since the 1950s. Has anything really changed since then? Technology has gotten more efficient, smaller, and able to process many more inputs quickly then in the past. But many jobs aren't easy to fully automate, due to the unpredictability of life. Computers are good at doing repetitive tasks accurately, but not very good at dealing with unexpected circumstances or widely varying materials and conditions. Microcontrollers only do what they are programmed to do, they can't do anything they aren't told to do.