>>25935

In the adult world we call those PAs and yes, what I really want is a PA that works 24-7 and I don't need to see or pay.

>>25934
There are some Android apps which family your daily routine. Try 'life rpg' or similar.

This will allow you to micromanage your day, but you may need a separate app to trigger events based on alarms. I used to use one called alarm clock plus which had me perdoing sums to turn the alarm off and could probably be used for events.

>>25934

Learn Python then.

An app called Timetune has helped me do this.

>>25931
Don't forget Tasker, for your Android smartphone.

Lifehacker is basically an infinite repetition of 'use Tasker and IFTTT to automate your life'.

>>25940
If you do roll our own, avoid the obvious mistakes built into the off the shelf ones.

https://hackaday.com/2013/12/06/skyjack-a-drone-to-hack-all-drones/

>>25941
That is specifically one of the pitfalls I'd like to avoid - too many drones use shitty Wifi networks for communication. I would like to do the whole thing with a proper radio control setup - thats still quite hackable but not in as many interesting and varied ways as Wifi.

Spent a lot of time looking at Arduino based setups - http://www.arducopter.co.uk for instance.

I'd recommend starting out with an Almost-Ready-To-Fly or Ready-To-Fly product from Eachine. If you're starting out you will crash a lot, so it's worth starting out on something cheap and small. The Eachine E010 looks like a toy, but it's a really good trainer quad for indoor or backyard flying. It can be easily upgraded to FPV at a later date.

https://www.banggood.com/Eachine-E010-Mini-2_4G-4CH-6-Axis-Headless-Mode-RC-Quadcopter-RTF-p-1066972.html

When you're ready to upgrade to a full-size 250 quad, you'll need quite a lot of stuff. It's all fairly cheap individually, but it does add up. This video covers what you'll need and how to use it:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2Q2KdhtmFA

You'll also want a big packet of spare propellers, a spare motor and speed controller and a couple of extra batteries. If you've got a lot of money to spend and you're serious about the hobby, I'd suggest going with the FRSky Taranis radio and the Aomway Commander FPV goggles.

There are some fairly strict legal restrictions on drone operation. You really need to be aware of the rules, because the Civil Aviation Authority have handed out some massive fines to people who were flying like twats.

If there's no camera at all on your quadcopter or plane, it's just a radio controlled model and can be flown anywhere that is reasonably deemed to be safe. If you stick a camera on, then your model becomes a "small unmanned surveillance aircraft" and the rules get a lot stricter. You can't fly within 50 metres of any person, vehicle or structure that is not entirely under your control, within 150 metres of any "congested area", or more than 400 metres above ground level. If you fly with FPV goggles, you must have a competent observer with you, monitoring the flying area to prevent collisions.

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>>25922
I'll never understand why companies persist in thinking putting magnets in electronics is a good idea.

>>25923
So you have to buy another one.

Holy shit tablets have come a long way since I got mine. Looks like it's time for me to upgrade. Is any particular manufacturer considered to be leading the field at the moment?

I can't compare it to Android tablets but the Kindle Fire tablets are pretty good value for money. Only problem is that they are by default hooked into Amazon's app store not Google Play, so quite a few apps available on Android are either not maintained as frequently or completely absent. I'd say it's great for reading ebooks and light internet browsing but if you have want to use a lot of specific non-Amazon apps you may be out of luck.

>>25926
You can root them then replace the hideous launcher, disable the ads and install Google Play. I've been using my a while just for reading and a Spotify remote. I can't complain for £30.

>>25914
So where do they get used en masse? I know they're in quad copters and that kind of thing, anything else justifies mass production and brings the price down?

>>25915
Almost anything you see that's USB charged and not obviously 18650-shaped, will have pouch cells. They're available in hundreds of shapes and capacities, and generally work well, within their limits. https://www.aliexpress.com/store/group/Polymer-battery-wholesale/1681007_510525232.html
Shipping is a bitch, though.

>>25915

Quadcopters and other RC thingumabobs use pouch cells, because you can achieve a higher discharge rate at the same weight. Cylindrical cells are mainly used in bulk applications - electric cars and bikes, power tools, that sort of thing. A cordless drill might use eight 18650s, an electric car might use a couple of thousand. The market for cylindrical cells is gradually moving towards the 21700 size, which is slightly more energy dense.

Pouch cells can be economically produced in fairly small quantities, so you can often design the battery to fit the product rather than vice-versa. This is a big advantage for mobile devices where every millimetre matters.

This thread continues to deliver. Good job lads.

>>23774 Blue Tac lad, come on... easy option.

Amazon sell a Pantum laser printer for 31 quid. It's wireless and black and white and I swear by mine.

>>25903
Most of them. Epson are a bit odd - some of their inks are somewhat odd, with pigments held in a solvent that smells funny. (My R2400, for instance - pigment inks, and 8 colours. Tesco value ink isn't going to do the job for that. I buy the inks by the 0.5l and pipe them in to fake cartridges, CISS-style. )

So - maybe. Check t'internet.

Use knock-off toner cartridges. The print quality is very slightly worse than using original toner, but it's perfectly acceptable for office use. Knock-off drums are more of a mixed bag, so if you're buying a second-hand printer you might want to inquire about the condition of the drum.

You can get a perfectly good WiFi laser printer for £60.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Brother-HL-1210W-Mono-Laser-Printer/dp/B00NUB8J3Q/

>>25909

Inkjets don't really make economic sense unless you print an awful lot of photos. Online photo printing services are much better value for the occasional set of prints.

>>25910
Seems like the toners are quite cheap, and can be refilled at home anyway. Might go for that one.

Shame it's not cheaper on ebay. Was hoping for something in the £40 region, with a toner that's good for 10,000 pages or something, like the HP ones.

Handheld scanners are rubbish.

If you need to occasionally scan a few pages, use your phone. There are great apps that will instantly produce print-ready PDFs. As long as your phone has a half-decent camera, you'll get perfectly usable results.

http://lifehacker.com/five-best-mobile-document-scanning-apps-1691417781

If you need to digitise large quantities of documents, use a Scansnap iX500. It does 25ppm full duplex and you can get spare parts at a reasonable price. If you need to digitise large quantities of books that you don't mind destroying, take them to a printing shop and have them cut off the spine on their guillotine. You can then run the loose pages through the iX500.

If you need to digitise large quantities of books that you can't destroy, you'll want a dedicated book scanner. The Scansnap SV600 is acceptable, but the Archivist Quill is the cheapest serious option.

>>25894
Your phone.

>>25895
>If you need to occasionally scan a few pages, use your phone. There are great apps that will instantly produce print-ready PDFs. As long as your phone has a half-decent camera, you'll get perfectly usable results.
This. On top of simply spitting out images, some apps will even do cool things like pick out the edges of the document and distort the image so it has the right proportions, and then attempt to read it.

Like most TVs, the KDL32W705C only has one tuner. This means that you can't watch one programme while recording another - the TV can only tune in to one channel at a time.

I think you'd be better off with a streaming stick like a Fire TV Stick or a Chromecast. Everything you'd want to watch is available via streaming, without the faff of remembering to record anything. A decent 64GB USB stick is about £20, but a Chromecast is only £25 from Currys.

People throw away laptops with those sorts of capabilities at the skip. Get down there quick and have a rummage, you might save some poor African kid the trouble.

>>25886
Agreed - many of the T series and X series of Lenovo are actually still IBM designs in disguise, before Lenovo bought them. They are very very good PCs and what I would have were I not a Mac person. We use them extensively at work, also. You can pick them up s/h very easily and they are quite upgradable and fixable.

>>25886>>25888

Thanks lads, I went with an X100E, which is meant to be highly portable. I'll report back whether it's up to much as a laptop.

>>25887

A bigger or more fancy laptop really wouldn't suit my needs here. No sense in spending more than I have to.

>>25886
Good advice.
>It's also well worth considering an SSD upgrade
I would say that an SSD is one of the most important considerations for a new laptop (or PC for that matter). There's been plenty of evangelism for them here in the past so I'll spare you the sales pitch, but get one, even if it means getting a machine that's shittier in other ways.

>>25890
Yep - easiest and most effective PC upgrade out there at the moment.

I predicted about six weeks before the EU referendum that May would be the next leader of the Tories after seeing a very cagey and vague interview she did with the Beeb. I posted about it in the relevant thread on here somewhere, but have yet to receive my one million Swiss francs reward.

Also Deus Ex famously lacks the twin towers from the New York skyline.

Not a prediction but when I was about 7 (which would be 1987) I had a dream I had a handheld "bus radar" which had a street map and showed where all the buses were moving about on it. It still kind of blows my mind that now there are apps for exactly that.

I predict that within at least ten years, we'll be wearing in ear translators and the teaching of foreign languages will be entirely obsolete or just a hobby

If anyone is interested you can view Usenet posts from 30 years ago as they would have appeared back then at http://olduse.net/ .

>>25879

Actually, this is one of the few industries likely to survive 20+ years.

>>25869
Details, lad. What happened, what were you doing, and what fucking half-witted shit did you pull? What model, what filesystem, and what OS was on the machine it was plugged into?

Why isn't there some sort of protection against simple things like this?

I was video editing on an mac, some video put her bag on the USB on the USB cable.

>>25871
I don't think it's possible to protect yourself against all the possible ways you can be an idiot, such as using a removable hard drive in circumstances where someone could put a bag on it.

>>25872
Sorry mate, you'll just have to buy a new Mac.

https://www.piriform.com/recuva

>>25866
Stick with the 6S until next year would be my view. It's not enough of an upgrade over that to justify the cost.

>>25867

Ta very much, I appreciate it.

>>25862
The same way you signed up for Gmail, but this time chuck 'em a few quid each month.
https://gsuite.google.co.uk

What's the business? Shouldn't you have a website anyway, in which case you could get the email server through your hosting provider?

I can't really say without a much higher-resolution image. There's a fairly good chance that the circuit board has a conformal coating - a very thin layer of waterproof lacquer protecting the entire board. The gap in the case might be there for a reason, or the manufacturer might have just re-used a case from another product.

The case as a whole clearly isn't waterproof. Taping up the gaps might provide some protection from water, or it might trap moisture inside the device and accelerate the rate of corrosion.

Ultimately, I'd suggest getting your washing machine repaired rather than trying to mitigate the effects of the leak.

>>25857
>There's a fairly good chance that the circuit board has a conformal coating - a very thin layer of waterproof lacquer protecting the entire board
Makes sense, I'll take the risk and leave it as-is. I can't see any lacquer, the top of the chip looks matte, whereas I'd expect it to look shiny if there was a lacquer layer on top, but honestly I'm not sure I'd know it if I saw it - attached an image of the chip anyway, but it's not great quality.

>I'd suggest getting your washing machine repaired
Sounds advice, I just can't afford to get a plumber out, or a new washing machine. I don't think it's the washing machine that's at fault - I've watched it flushing at the end of a washing cycle and it's not any faster than a tap, it's just that the back pressure on the pipe makes it spit back up and out (I've run a few packs of descaler through the machine anyway and will be doing so regularly from now on, I guess). The whole place has problems with plumbing, I have to pour drain cleaner down both sinks and the bath every month or water starts backing up, and I'm not flushing coffee grinds etc down there, so I don't think I'm doing anything especially dumb to cause it. I've checked the accessible piping for blocks and there's nothing present. I do have a housemate but he's aware of the issues and has been told the do's and dont's so I doubt he's doing anything much to cause these problems.

Thanks for your advice, anyway - any further input appreciated, obviously I'm not an expert in any of this stuff.

>>25858
Can you share a photo of the plumbing underneath your sink? i.e. showing the drain hose from the machine, and the u-bend and everything it's connecting to? There's probably just a blockage further down in the system but there might be an obvious issue one of us can spot.

>>25852
Display Ports

>>25852
Yeah, DisplayPort. Graphics card & monitor manufacturers are keen on it. You can get passive adaptors to single-link DVI and to HDMI if you need to, or active adaptors (read: adaptor actually has to have electronics in it, more expensive) to even VGA.

On its own, the port has roughly the same merits as HDMI. The standards are defined by vaguely competing organizations. You shouldn't worry too much about any of this unless you're buying a 4K/5K monitor and don't want to be stuck at 30fps max - if so, you'll want to read into the various versions of HDMI & what the graphics card supports to see if it can handle that amount of data.

Same nonsense applies with DisplayPort, although DP 1.0 is way faster than HDMI 1.0. But you can have longer HDMI cables generally than DP cables, because lower bandwidth ~= you can have longer cables before things stop working. Swings and roundabouts.

For Freesync/G-sync I think you need DP, so bear that in mind.