Stuff

[altivo]

Severe weather with hail and tornado warnings interspersed with trying to edit a newsletter without losing my work if the power goes out...

That about sums it up. Enough challenge without trying to come up with anything witty to say here. Lots of pyrotechnics and rain, but so far the really bad stuff has missed us.

Comments

[aerofox.livejournal.com]

Good time to have a laptop with a good charged battery to work on while the storms roll through ^_^

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, I find laptop keyboards literally unusable. I can do text editing on my older LCD screen portables, but this newsletter is in HTML and really requires access to a web browser to check my work.

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

Things are OK at your place, yes? The Weather Channel had some footage of some flooding in the city of Chicago and there were power outages from the winds.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Looks OK as far as I can tell right now. We have a heavy, brownish fog that looks like the smoke from a wildfire though. I doubt that's what it is, but the color is rather alarming. Otherwise, there was no wind damage or hail here overnight and probably only an inch or so of rain. From the warnings it sounded as if Chicago was hard hit, and that's very unusual so it would have made news. I haven't browsed around for photos because it's too slow on dialup. Have to wait until I get to work.

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

I'm glad things are OK with your place, although brownish fog would make me a wee bit concerned, too. From the radar, it looked as if the storm was just ramping up as it passed Rockford and really picked up steam the closer it got to Chicago

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Chicago got hit pretty hard I guess. There are photos on the Chicago Tribune web site.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/weather/chi-080805-big-storm-photogallery,0,3819845.photogallery

The storm just squeaked by to the south of us, with tornado warnings for Kane County but not for McHenry.

The brown looking fog was apparently a trick of the dawn light. By the time I left for work it was the ordinary white stuff, very dense at the crest of Marengo Ridge but completely gone in town when I got here.

[cozycabbage.livejournal.com]

I wonder how long a computer could last on AA batteries...?

120v = 100 batteries. I've got some at 2600mAh, so 260Ah.
So how many amps does a word-processing computer take? The power supply on Atomicat's machine seems to have three boxes, neither of which are checked. I'll go with 5A, so 52 hours. Or 7 hours, if you use the largest number on the grid of things (which sounds better).

Heee, I want to try it, now! Maybe I could skimp and go for 20 batteries. It seems each device only takes something up to 12 volts, though I'm sure the power drain from the board can be immense. In my experiences, things tend to work fine until the power draw becomes too much. Then it resets.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

A computer designed to run on batteries can last a long time. My older portables run for days on four AA batteries. Of course, they don't have flashy color graphics and the huge amount of power that modern machines waste mostly on frills, games, and such. Today's typical desktop toy would burn through an entire automotive or tractor battery in an hour or so.

[cozycabbage.livejournal.com]

An hour? Those ones mustn't be very long-lasting.

Those older computers lacked a lot of what I would say is essential to our current object-oriented GUI. I do some graphics work, so it would have to have enough memory to support the images (which would mean more than a few KB), and a 32-bit colour screen.

Sure, I could make some basic read-write system that could take keyboard input and display to a tiny digital-clock-like display. I think I had an organizer quite a bit like that, and it runs for years on watch batteries. But I need more lines and a more complex screen and a much larger memory.


Maybe if they made the screens like older gameboys, where it was great to have a lot of light. These current back-lit LCDs are disgustingly horrible to use in direct sunlight, and account for at least 50% of the power cost of a laptop.
There was nothing better than playing a game on the Gameboy Advance and finding that optimum beam of sunlight to make all the colours sparkle.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

An hour or two. Because the quad core CPUs and large memory and all that hog an awful lot of power, not because the battery isn't long lasting.

I find that today's typical laptop has a battery that lasts four hours when new, but if used and recharged regularly quickly begins to deteriorate until it's only good for an hour or two, often less.

The desktop machine isn't designed to be conservative with power. It eats more just running the fans and power supply than a laptop uses to run full blast.

Yes, my old machines are text editors. But that's the single most important application I use. While I find graphics editing (photos or drawing) useful at times, the rest of the GUI I'd just as soon do without. It just wastes energy, time, and CPU cycles in my opinion. That's why I like Linux, where it's more configurable and a lot of stuff is optional and not required.

[cozycabbage.livejournal.com]

The point I was trying to make is that a car battery is ten times the size of a laptop battery and only lasts half as long. I just wonder how the greater output would balance that.

My laptop, which I used for two years and did a whole cycle on the battery every few days, tended to keep at three hours, but that was if I kept my screen brightness to a minimum and didn't task the processor.
You know what, I haven't the slightest clue about the efficiency of recharging a car battery. I know they DO stop working after a good long while, but just how often are they drained? I'd think they're usually kept mostly topped off, unless you leave things running while the car is off.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Laptop computers use nickel cadmium (nicad) or nickel metal hydride (NiMH) cells. Those operate best when they are nearly drained between charges. In fact, the older nicads are best if drained dead and then immediately recharged, something that isn't the most practical thing to deal with. NiMH cells are a little more tolerant of varying recharge cycles, and they are what most cell phones use. They cost more than nicads.

Auto and marine batteries are lead acid cells. The batteries in most emergency lighting systems and UPSes are also lead acid, though usually gel electrolyte rather than the spillable liquid used in the auto and marine battery. Those perform best when kept topped up, constantly trickle charged. They have a hard time recovering from deep discharges, and repeated deep discharge weakens them.

The lead acid cell would power a typical laptop for a much longer time than the NiMH cells do. My point was that the typical loaded desktop machine eats electricity the way a Hummer eats gasoline. So even the lead acid cell wouldn't be able to power it for long.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

You can also buy deep cycle batteries for auto and marine accessories, those can be discharged and charged up repeatedly without damaging the battery.

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

There was a mini-tornado near my mother's house at the weekend. :D

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I hope there wasn't a lot of serious damage. Those things can be really nasty.

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

Couple of bins knocked over. A few chimney pots gone. Tornadoes here rarely reach the sheer levels of damage that the US ones inflict.

[doug-taron.livejournal.com]

We did not fare quite so well. My whole neighborhood is littered with downed trees, some quite large. The neighbors across the street had a huge one come down, taking out the power lines. I have to go all the way around the block to get into my driveway because the street is blocked by the tree. Power is unlikely to be back on today. Still, it could have been worse. My house is undamaged and, as far as I have been able to tell, nobody was hurt.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

NOAA says that Elgin and surrounding areas experienced straight line winds as high as 94 mph. I'm not surprised that you have trees down. I watched much of the sequence on the radar and wondered just how close to you it was passing. The storm went on right through our old area in Chicago. I haven't seen reports from there yet.

Our little piece of McHenry Co. seems to lead a charmed life. I suspect it has something to do with the terrain contours. We are in a slight depression sheltered from prevailing wind directions by the crest of the Marengo Ridge moraine. Storms and high winds often seem to veer off just to the north or south of us. The disadvantage is that the rain follows the winds too, and we get less even rain than the rest of the area.

[goldenstallion.livejournal.com]

Whinnyhi.

This is very weird. Suddenly all my IP adresses like FurryMuck and Tapestries and LavaddomeFive are gone and now I cannot connect nor do anything please.

Yet we are now going to delete our internet and our TV be outside of this forum for a while at least. Money mostly. TV is gone and so is our Internet

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Dunno if you'll see this then, but I'm more than a little concerned. I hope things are OK. If I don't hear anything else soon, I'll use the old ways and call or write. ;p

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Do you get many tornadoes passing by O.O

[altivo.livejournal.com]

We get more warnings than real tornadoes. Within this county and the ones that border it, there have been about six confirmed tornadoes that actually touched the ground since the beginning of the year. Most of them tore up trees and blew small objects around, I think only two did serious property damage and none caused any loss of life.

Compared with the open plains states like Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma, we really don't see a lot of tornado activity. We do get quite a lot of severe thunderstorms, though, with large hail that damages crops and vehicles, sometimes very heavy rates of rainfall that cause flash flooding, and straight line wind speeds of 60 mph or more.