Curious, how do you "borrow" the book? You have to go there and physically bring it back? Or is it like the Kindle book nonsense where they keep track of it, you're really getting the right to use it? Oh, it's a copyright issue, only 1 person can view it at a time. 1942, hmm, I worked at a college where we had a copy of the books that came out of MIT labs during WWII, parts of those were quite interesting. And astronomy books, and telescope making books, anything but what I was supposed to be doing which was electronics for chemists.

That book I have ordered is listed here: https://openlibrary.org/works/OL6815342W/How_to_custom_design_your_solid-state_equipment but it says they don't actually have it. The other 2 places came up blank. So this open library is like a node on MARS or something, a network of libraries?

You could almost do useful work with a digital camera and a copy stand I think instead of a scanner. Or take something like a Raspberry Pi camera and mount it in a box with a bunch of LEDs so you set it on a page then move to the next one. Having the pages perfectly flat is an issue.

 

Hello,

It are likely PDF's that will stop opening after the "borrow" time.
You need to register and login to use the "borrow" type of books.

Bertus

 

Yep, it's like a pdf but you can't actually download it. When you borrow it, you can return it early otherwise it just times out and freezes up kinda. It's not like Kindle at all...

The window is kinda small or else you could screen grab each page and save it to a PDF. I assume that is why it is small. Annoying but I got used to it. Yeah working on Mathematics for Electricians and Radiomen by Nelson M. Cooke to hone my math skills a bit. Kinda interesting book since it was written back in slide rule days as it teaches you to guestimate/approximate and do a lot of thinking about how to formulate the problem to solve it.

 

DRM in overdrive, no thanks. Sounds like you probably open the book on a remote server which then doles out a page at a time. That would bug me and I'd find a way around it. Can you do screen shots or is the magnification wrong? I'd go for some script that flips the page, does a screenshot, flips the page.

 

The pages scroll either a single page width or open book/both pages. Single page scrolls down incrementally but both pages flip like reading the book. You could do a screen snip and save but it would be very time-consuming and the results probably a bit dodgy. Most of the books I am interested in I either buy used (AbeBooks my preferred vendor) or get as a PDF from various sources. PDFs are typically old editions of current textbooks and other more popular books usually from no earlier than the 60s to the 10s at the latest. At least for the ones related to electronics/engineering/math. That's all I read anymore, no more classical lit or pulp fiction these days.

 

At my last job before I retired I used to work with a program called Rational Robot, which I guess IBM bought then killed off. There are others. You could set up scripts that would click a next page button then another to do a screenshot, repeat. Use filenames that have the time in them so they don't collide. Then after your hour is up batch process the screenshots. Linux is somewhat better than Windows for this and everything is free. So this reader is a standalone program or are these web pages in a browser? It would take a bunch of work to set something like that up, but you can write scripts to automate Firefox/Mozilla. Yeah, I can't remember the last fiction book I read, there's too much Linux documentation to get through. It's free but there's a huge learning curve. I've been learning it for 25 years or so. Haven't gotten around to tackle SPICE though.

 

It is a standalone very similar to most PDF readers but without the ability to download the file. I tried doing a select all and save to a file and all I got was the picture of the front end interface. Try it and see. It could certainly be macroed. I used Venix, Xenix, Win NT Nutcracker running Unix with a Windows front end user interface for my DCS control systems, but never made the transition to LInux. Still on my bucket list along with an old box of RedHat still on the shelf and a corner full of old computers I haven't gotten around to scrapping.

 

Oh, I used OpenBSD for 15 years, switched to Linux mostly because getting various programs to compile under OpenBSD was a real PITA. And Linux is a little faster in some places. The first unix I used was Data General, then DEC. Then Slackware Linux because I could bring it home on floppies (no internet at home then). Then FreeBSD for a couple years, then OpenBSD. Linux has about 100 times as many users so they take care of wrinkles that the BSDs might ignore. I've tried Red Hat but they went commercial so I think it's not free anymore. There's a derivative called Fedora that I think is free. But what I didn't like is that they put certain files in odd places. There were 2 kinds of unix, System V and something else. Red Hat is based on one, every other Linux I've used is based on the other.

I'm actually using a $35 Raspberry Pi computer with Raspbian, which is a Raspberry Pi adaptation of Debian. I have 3 of them, they're ARM machines, you can hold one in the palm of your hand, they have cell phone CPUs, run on a couple watts. Debian actually means Deb and Ian, and Ian's a ham, that's what sold me on it originally. http://www.raspberrypi.org

In Windows if I remember right you do a screenshot with the Print Screen key, or ctrl-Print Screen to get the current window. That gets an image on your clipboard which you need to paste into something and save. IrfanView (free) works fine for that. Or Photoshop or Write.


Screenshot of my desktop: 1920x1080, 24 inch monitor, it's a real workstation. 6 desktops in my pager (lower right) so I can have a bunch of stuff open.

I've never seen those PDFs that you borrow, only the kind you can write in and then save.

 

Here is what you get on Win 10 print screen

If you try and do a screen save on it you get

And it's always there when I want to "borrow" it for an hour so I just bookmark it.

I worked with a DEC PDP using OpenVMS and eventually their Alphas (one of about 14 DCSs with 4 different operating systems on them I was responsible for). I did like OpenVMS as it kept every file iteration. Make a small change and it was a new file saved. After a few years it did require some file management paring and had the tools to do it. Had lousy/none full screen text editing so I hooked up some terminal emulation software on my office WinNT and would transfer the files to my office desktop over our in-plant fiber network (designed and built by me under one of our capital projects) to work on and then transfer back to the control system out in the plant. Go out to that areas control room about a quarter mile from the office and compile on the DEC Alpha engineering workstation and load into the DCS to run. Much better than the original DEC PDP11 with workstations that I upgraded from.

 

Yes, the versioning. Back in 1968 I was a 7th grader and my high school had a teletype terminal to a PDP-something at Dartmouth College, then it got switched to Northfield Mount Hermon (private high school). Then I worked 1980-1990 at Amherst College which had a VAX. All VMS. I remember a "purge keep=2" that was in my login batch file to keep only the last 2 versions of everything.

I wrote in C a little program I call backdir that copies every file in the current dir to a ./backups dir with date and time appended to the filenames. If no files have changed since last time nothing happens. Mostly I wrote it because if you've got mismatched { and } that are a couple hundred lines apart it's almost impossible to find them. So every time something compiles I do the backup. It looks like this:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   921 Nov  4 04:18 junk_2020-10-29_1502.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  6876 Nov  4 05:25 junk_2020-11-04_0521.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    39 Oct 29 14:52 Makefile_2020-10-29_1447
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  6951 Oct 29 14:52 mv3_2020-10-29_1451.c
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  6994 Nov  4 04:18 mv3_2020-10-29_1455.c
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 11182 Nov  4 04:23 mv3_2020-11-04_0423.c
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 11685 Nov  4 05:16 mv3_2020-11-04_0515.c
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 11693 Nov  4 05:25 mv3_2020-11-04_0523.c

 

OK, I finally got it, it's the book I was thinking of. The first circuit got more of the author's attention than most because it's longer. But notice the "Modification and Optimization Data" section, they all seem to have that.


This is pretty close to the circuit I was thinking of building anyway, except what I was working from runs on 30 volts and the 2nd stage isn't an emitter follower. Both have negative feedback which I've never really noticed except in op-amp circuits. I want to amplify an electret capsule output to drive a sound card, seems like it should work OK with about 9 volts or less in. If it works out maybe I'll use a VW solar panel into a pb137 chip then into a 7 AH SLA battery. Filter and drop to 9 volts or so. The VW panel puts out about 135 MA max, that should be OK.

 

I worked with a DEC PDP using OpenVMS and eventually their Alphas (one of about 14 DCSs with 4 different operating systems on them I was responsible for). I did like OpenVMS as it kept every file iteration. Make a small change and it was a new file saved. After a few years it did require some file management paring and had the tools to do it. Had lousy/none full screen text editing so I hooked up some terminal emulation software on my office WinNT and would transfer the files to my office desktop over our in-plant fiber network (designed and built by me under one of our capital projects) to work on and then transfer back to the control system out in the plant. Go out to that areas control room about a quarter mile from the office and compile on the DEC Alpha engineering workstation and load into the DCS to run. Much better than the original DEC PDP11 with workstations that I upgraded from.

There were Heathkit PDP-11s, I worked under a professor that had one, he eventually got a MicroVax. That thing had a 19 inch monitor with over 1000 pixels vertical resolution. You could drag tasks around on it and see a bunch at once. Another had a MINC(?) which had bunches of A/D inputs brought out to screw terminals. Might have had GPIB. 8 inch floppy disks, those were a hoot. We had a JEOL NMR with a TI minicomputer which had one too. And a real front panel like an Altair, to boot the thing you folllowed this written procedure where you entered an address on toggle switches. But my job was an electronics technician, I wasn' t supposed to be interested in the computers. I bought parts and built a couple PC clones in my shop, that wasn't appreciated.

We had an Apple II in one lab, which eventually also got an IBM PC AT (286), then there were a few more ATs. I didn't see Windows until about 1995 at a different college and by then I had a semester of Mac experience. Then Windows 3.1, then 95, 98, etc.

 

Yup, it had the 8" floppies (but no disk packs or tapes) and was the PDP-44 before I upgraded it to the DEC Alpha Workstations. It got so loaded up it was beginning to run hot and shut down, so the "fix" was to run a 1/4" copper tubing with dry instrument air @ 100PSI that was pinched down to form a jet and directed directly onto the processor card. NO, I had nothing to do with that! That was how I inherited it. It was running an interesting DCS from GSE systems. They were/are one of the few DCS certified for nuclear power as it was able to simulate the process to train operators offline. We were using it to control 19 100'+ steam-heated fractional distillation columns with multiple plates to within 0.01°C. If I remember right the tallest column was ~240'.

 

On with off-topic reminiscing. I had nothing to do with nuclear power really but Yankee Rowe was in the next town, I might have gone there once to apply for a job. I know a guy that worked there. I remember when it was built
and when it was dismantled. Never had any incidents that I know of.

I sit here in my recliner with my Pinebook Pro laptop (1920x1080 pixel screen). I used to have in the server room a couple raid stacks with Seagate 5 1/4" drives, 4 in each cabinet, each weighed close to 90 lbs. Total storage was a whopping 64 GB. Now you can buy a 64 GB SD card for under $15. Most of my current computers can at least fit and mount them even if they don't boot from them. I have a 1 TB Intel SSD with an MTBF of like 180 years in this PBP, it doesn't boot from it yet. Bought a 2 TB version and put it in a USB case so it's portable permanent storage. I have a few hard drives in USB cases, when you unmount them they aren't spinning and wearing out, and I can plug them in to any of my computers. No fans in any of them.

Computers were a life-long interest and looking back I was good enough that I got paid to play and learn. Never made huge money but I never moved a long way to do it.

Electronics I dabble in, it was a while before I got binocular magnifiers and lights enough rigged up up so that I could see again. I remember working on Motorola handi-talkies, I think without magnification, when I was iin my 20s. Now I can actually build things on pad-per-hole board again, I've got a bag of 50 transistors in my pocket that came a couple days ago.

 

Computers were a life-long interest and looking back

Hi Alan,
What's with this 'were' bit...
Does this mean you have hung up your electronic spurs.?

E

 

I hung mine up for a while when computers came out and then work and family. Now I'm sharpening the gaffs on my fighting rooster since I'm retired.
Interesting story I got during a training session with GSE. They did the DCS software for Chernobyl and trained their operators. They were contacted to set up a training session for several of them to be held at GSE which is near Baltimore. GSE didn't understand it so they replied that it would be much less expensive to send their guy to Russia to do the training. The answer they got back was basically "NO, There is no Walmart in Russia".

 

I worked as an electronics technician for 20 years, mostly at close to minimum wage even though I studied and got the state licenses to be a radio and TV technician. The last 10 years I worked for the chemistry department at Amherst College, completely outside consumer electronics. That ended about 1990 and I went to finish up an Associate's degree at the local community college. Got hired as a student worker my first week, worked in computer labs as a tutor. Then full time at a different college for 9 years. I haven't done much with electronics in a long time, mostly because I couldn't see small things. But experimenting lately I have one of those over the head binocular magnifiers which I rigged about 8 LEDs across the front of. That sort of works but then I added a good bright desk lamp in addition to an overhead one. Works reasonably well except I'm in a microcosm, I can only see about a foot. Drop something and I have to untangle myself to find it. And all that's in an unheated basement which I'm reluctant to spend lots of time in during the winter.

 

mostly because I couldn't see small things

On my last visit, a couple of years ago, to my local Optometrist's office, they informed me there was nothing they could do for me until I had cataract surgery and gave me the names of several local doctors who do it. Instead, I went to the Mayo Clinics Ophthalmologists who after doing a very intensive survey of my eyes and vision informed me that I didn't need cataract surgery for some time unless things got much worse. Then gave me a prescription for glasses optimized for reading and computer monitor distance as well as outside usage. Which I had filled at the Mayo Optical Store. Get a second opinion and explain that you need better up close and fine resolution vision. I also use a visor at times and even more important, for me, is bright lighting. I have a gooseneck magnifier with LED ring that is adjustable and for close work I turn the LEDs all the way up. Reading chip markings I will use the gooseneck magnifier at full LED lighting AND a small high-intensity LED flashlight with a concentrated focus beam at a low angle to get better contrast.

 

Yeh they can fix your eyes but it's that annoying sound !

 

I haven't been to an Optometrist since I was in high school. I was near-sighted, started wearing glasses about 5th grade to see blackboards. But I was told to do focusing exercises and didn't. I wore glasses all day. When I got out of high school I kept them on the rear view mirror in my car since my license said I had to wear them. Next time I renewed my license I passed the eye test without glasses. None since then. The last test seemed really easy at 65.

The lenses lose their ability to change, become more stiff I think as you age. I discovered non-prescription readers when I was about 45. Now I have half a dozen pair, even some I carry in my pocket in a little aluminum case. But diopter on the glasses relates to focal length. HIgher diopter means you focus closer. When you add more lenses like magnifiers you have to be even closer.

I'm wearing a pair of "progressive" reading glasses which take a little getting used to. They're a diopter 3 at the bottom, that tapers down to maybe a 1 at the top. About the only thing they're good for is looking at my laptop screen, and even then I have to tilt my head right to see different parts of the screen. But if it weren't all in the same plane it would be worse.