I got a quite unpleasant kick (okay, kicks) from a compact camera flash. The cap rating is in the ballpark of 330 uF/300 volts, or about 15 joules. Bigger flashes have bigger caps with more energy.
A cap of this size is slowly encroaching into the territory that can be potentially lethal. And it can be lethal with a delay of couple hours, if it causes a blood clot that then moves elsewhere and does a damage.
Even the safe values can be annoying. I usually do a trick with breaking out the cap pins to a pair of headers or socket pins (painted yellow as a sort-of personal standard) so the cap can be easily discharged. With higher energy caps the possible trick is a normally-closed relay with a bleeder resistor that keeps the cap discharged when power is disconnected, and opens on attaching power supply. An indication of present voltage (a neon lamp, for example) is also useful. Design these things for a tired, scatterminded technician.
The cellphones, the laptops, the tablets? It looks like a white half-melted ice slab, and it is getting more and more stupidly thin without any reason to, other than being thin. With the associated servicing and mechanical and thermal issues. Which is not so bad on its own if others wouldnāt imitate it for no other reason that Apple Did It.
All beautifully designed pieces of metal and glass. I own each, though work pays for my MacBook Pro. Easily the best laptops Iāve ever owned too after all the Sony and Lenovo plastic bricks.
Your opinion of their design is very much a minority one. Apple is widely admired for its industrial design. The laptop really is a thing of beauty. Theyāre also the only company selling more laptops, not less, year after year.
I avoid Sony but I owned a couple Lenovos back to when they were still IBM. Solid machines that are easy to service.
What I saw from the fruits, the serviceability outright sucks. Starts with those stupid pentalobe screws, ends with the abomination of adhesives in the needlessly thin design. (Todo: try to find if the heated bed of a 3d printer can be used as a hot plate for such adhesive softening for disassembly. Could be tested on e.g. peeling off the polarizing foils from broken displays, they are handy for e.g. polariscopes and microscopy mods.)
By repairmen, or by liberal arts majors?
Beauty in this case is in the eyes of a beer holder. I am not drunk enough yet to consider such thing āprettyā.
As a kid I took apart a disposable camera and was messing around with the xenon flash mechanism. I accidentally/foolishly shorted the leads on the fully charged 350V cap across my finger. It hurt like a motherfucker and the pain didnāt go away for hours.
I donāt care how easy it is to service. Iāve only ever needed to have my laptop serviced once in 10 years using MacBooks. I took it to the Apple Store and they did it in 10 minutes.
I care about weight, size, and thickness because, unlike servicing, carrying it and using it are things I do every day. My goal with my work computers is to do my workā¦not take them apart for fun.
Apparently, a lot of folks agree here as well since these machines sell better than anyone elseās.
If you donāt care about being dependent on services and warranties, and if your friendsā machines donāt end up on your surgery (or sometimes autopsy) tableā¦
I had some things fail on me, usually because my machines used to be secondhands that lived for a bit too long. The most annoying was when a brand new bad memory module killed two motherboards (I first thought it was my mistake) and I then had to mate a top of a R60 to a bottom of a T61 (it can be done, the display is compatible down to the connector and its approximate position, you just have to dremel a new mountpoint for the display lid to the chassis).
ā¦reportedly my current one can have a better display from another typeā¦ The displays have fairly common interface, so many kinds are compatible down to the connector, and even more need just an adapter.
You can see it yourself if you take a look at the schematics from illicitly obtained service manuals for several similar types. And, if you look at the different types and different vendors, you get the general similarities and possible ways to do a cross-species transplant.
Minor things like connector replacements or brazing together lid mounts that failed on fatigue (the fruit is apparently not immune to cracking hinges too) donāt count; thatās a short episode with a torch and a silver alloy rod. I never had a brazed part fail on me (in the same area) again.
Thickness is the unimportant of those. Weight can be annoying but a few millimeters more that make the machine more pleasant to work with, easier to repair and generally more robust wonāt add that many grams, I remember calculating it some time ago.
Same here. So they should be possible to take apart, mod/repair, and reassemble with ease within the timespan of one Star Trek episode rerun.
It is often less demanding, on both time and money and time without the machine, to just do it yourself instead of lugging the thing to an āauthorized serviceā and waiting.
As I sad, you have a north opinion if you consider Appleās industrial design to be horrible. Most folks that care disagree and they consistently are praised for the design of their machines. I concur. This applies equally to their mobile and tablet devices.
Remember what phones looked like before the iPhone? Radically different than they did after. People didnāt race to copy Apple design elements (such as all screen and no physical keypad) because they were horrible and everyone hated themā¦
Yes. I used them before they turned into the featureless fondleslabs. Back when they still had a real keyboard, sometimes even a full qwerty one, where you could type by haptic feedback without having to waste brain on hand-eye coordination.
Back then The Thing, my favorite one, was a Nokia E61. Then they screwed up with that E71 that took away the Ctrl button, adding keystrokes to my terminal use, and made the display smaller and harder to read when in ssh console (but also adding GPS that I needed so a compromise had to be swallowed).
Now you cannot find a decent usable phone at all, everything is eaten by touchscreens with the haptic feel of an inert glass slab.
The point isnāt that you hate people. The point is that your idea of good industrial design isnāt very close to that of most of the world buying laptops and phonesā¦
My iPhone is probably the closet to a perfectly designed device as Iāll ever own. My 14 year old geek self, 30 years ago, would never have hoped or dreamed to have a device this well put together, usable, and sleek.
When I designed my Nixie watch, I chose to use 0.01uF capacitors in the voltage tripler. Not enough storage to be lethal. Same can be done with any Nixie tube HV supply.
Thatās not enough storage even to be significantly unpleasant.
Who drive the market, which drifts away from what I want. Hence I hate people, for their inability to see under the shiny plastic surface and to think long term.
Itās a fondleslab crap. A major step back, design-wise.
When I was in about that age, I was drafting something that was a cross between the E61 and a multimodal display from a fighter plane cockpit. A real keyboard, a screen, and multimodal buttons around the screen.
THAT is what the stuff should be. Not something that you cannot operate by touch alone, that ties eyes and mind. And that doesnāt even let you, at least not without a fight, to rule its processor with the iron fist of root.
In the world according to me, weād get the same people who design aircraft and nuclear power plant user interfaces to design consumer stuff. In the world according to you, which we got instead, the aircraft and nuclear power plant user interfaces are apparently being designed by people designing consumer goods onesā¦
ā¦and instead of something sensible, things are converging to voice control, with every command being sent to Holy Cloud to process and likely also to remember and datamineā¦
Also, the things could be operated with ease in winter when a bead is sewn to the glove, concentrating force to area small enough to touch a single one of the little E71 buttons even in thick gloves.
Now we can have conductive fabric attached to regular gloves too (there are some such ones in stores but itās easier to mix and match with military surplus and some DIY to get all the functionality better and cheaper and without annoying shopping with too many constraints and compromises), but with thicker ones the lack of haptic feedback and the need of visual feedback instead, together with the opacity of the fingers, brings problems.
You mean āglass and shiny steel,ā right? The devices made out of plastic are things like the Nokia and Lenovo that you love.
Just because you assert this, that doesnāt make it true. The entire mobile world copying Appleās design for the last seven or so years says the opposite, in fact.
Youāre the kind of person that thinks emacs is well designed too, right?
Yeah but it turns out people donāt want that worldā¦
They want sleek touch devices made from metal and glass with an easy to use interface. They want it so much that the entire world copies Appleās design to try to replicate its successes in computers and mobile devices.
