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I think we should be careful when guessing why some application or other is becoming progressively more unreliable. The filesystem in use on a Windows box maybe FAT (unlikely), FAT32 or NTFS. It's largely irrelevant which one is in use, though NTFS has better recovery than FAT32. The...

Disagree completely. Corporate culture trickles down and in some cases is enforced. I'm not a huge fan of B&D these days - the fact they're the owner is an observation, make of it what you will...

I standardised on Makita 18V Lxt a few years ago using 5Ah battery packs. I have one bit of DeWALT kit, the DW717 compound saw, which is excellent but not battery. DeWALT is owned by Black & Decker. Nothing but good things to say about Makita. The tools get a lot of abuse, are comfortable to...

I'll vote for the above. My view, for what it's worth, is that it was "just" a monumental ****-up. There is a long and noble history of large organisations cocking up BGP changes and, as has been mentioned, once your AS is disconnected from the rest of the internet (which is the nett effect of...

All our are pressed, pasteurised and bottled for us by a local farm. Probable just a tonne this year - but almost no pears.... Very few figs too, but loads of plums...

I've used Metals4u for cutting & supply of all sorts of stuff, including large C-section parts that I subsequently bonded to a wall to support the floor of my workshop... (after the old Victorian floor rotted and collapsed!) ...they cut it in two FOC so that I could move the bits on my own. 9...

Not so. The guy who claimed he had this data is a scammer. The author of the above article has now amended the article to say that. Facebook etc. Going off air was not a hack, it was an error during an update of their border gateway routing (BGP) data. It's easy to distinguish this type of...

Generally, wind turbines generate DC and solar panels/photovoltaic converterss always do. They may be intermediate storage, e.g. batteries, but the DC is converted to AC at the appropriate voltage and frequency by inverters. Doing it this way is obvious when you think about it - the wind...

Not so. At 50Hz, the Skin Effect puts something like 60% of the current in the outer 9mm of the cable for copper and about 12mm for aluminium - as I mentioned before, with cables under 18mm in diameter, this effect is not important. But the OP was asking about power distribution networks where...

Quick note on IPA: only use in well ventilated spaces or outdoors and try to avoid inhaling the fumes - you can get a seriously unpleasant pounding headache. Not nice at all. IPA/isopropyl alcohol/isopropanol/propan-2-ol

Silly question: are you sure the phases in your workshop are labelled correctly? Secondly: is the motor wired correctly to match the type of 3 phase in your workshop, i.e. Wye/Y (4 wire) or Delta (3 wire)?

Before attempting to repair it, you should ask yourself why it failed and does that failure mode (melting due to overheating) present a greater risk, e.g. fire? The failure may have been caused by all sorts of different issues or a combination of several. As an electronic engineer, I would...

Caveat: I am not a power engineer, so the following comments are deliberately approximations - there are subtle effects which I carefully ignore! Couple of points worth mentioning. The skin effect is dependant on a number of factors, including the line frequency. At DC, there is no skin effect...

One thing I would say in public is that I was a national trust chippie based at Scotney about 5mtrs from Peter's workshops (an adjacent building, just across a small drive - we shared facilities). I spoke to a fair few of his students and with him often. Whilst we made stuff for the NT, his...

The normal way to do this is a separate circuit from the the utility feed. Use a couple of Henley blocks to split the meter to house CU tails and install a new spur with isolator, probably fused at 40 or 60A. That then goes to the shed meter and then there's a long cable to the shed which has...

Age and memory! The Scientific came out in 1974 - I was still at school and bought one - it was about 60 quid - a fortune in those days. I still have it!! (and, yes, it still works) It's on my "shelf of horrors" along with my British Thornton slide rule, book of log tables and random other...

We have a brown fig that I planted maybe 25 years ago on an old south-facing Victorian vine wall in part of the garden - our garden was once the kitchen garden for a big country house, long since gone, so the soil here has benefitted from 10s if not 100s of years of manure & digging over - the...

Ahhh. The joys of Gander International Airport. I was stuck in there for 3 days once during a blizzard... There's a lot of interesting history around that airport...

Having lived there (St. Johns) for a bit, I'm standing up for the Newfies. Back when I was living there in the early '80s, they were some of the nicest, kindest most helpful folk around. Newfies get a bad rap from mainland Canada, and unfairly so IMHO. One of the the first things I was asked...