Info and forum posts by 'Tom P'

RE: Baby Sleeping problems - Advice Please

Damn, that goes back a while! Good memory, and no, I never got my prize!

RE: Baby Sleeping problems - Advice Please

Really feel for you, our 6th month old has been teething for the last couple of weeks, and we were down to about 40 minute sleeps over night with with wife feeding him every time! What we are working on at the moment is talking to him to reassure him we are there. the trick seems to be to catch him when he is just starting to wake so that he goes back to sleep quickly. We are up to about 3 hours between wakes now, and only feeding on every other one. He is getting much better at putting himself to sleep as well. YMMV, but gentle comforting words seems to help ours.

RE: Camcorders: Flip Ultra HD £62.75 , Flip Ultra £64.97 and Flip Mino II HD £104.98 - Amazon

Thank you! I was looking at these yesterday morning, and had just about decided to go for one, but at £50 off £120 had to.

Thanks again

RE: DAB radio in car

I got the wife an add on one for christmas nearly 2 years back, she seems to like it. The quality is either really good, or nothing, there is no middle ground. Her drive to work (from London out to nearly M25) she gets coverage for about 90% of it. I guess the coverage will get better with time, but when it is there is sound quality is really good!

She has the JVC: KT-DB1000 - DAB Tuner, as an addon to her JVC head unit (plugs into the cd changer connection of existing unit).

Tom

RE: Sub £40 DVD Recorder with upscaling and HDMI

Anyone tried one of these? Very tempted as we have just upgraded to a 37" LCD with a couple of HDMIs, so interested particularly in how the upscaling works - does it look better?

Cheers all

RE: Moving up to a digital SLR camera...

I would say go for it, once you have tried an SLR you will never look back. I had a couple of digital cameras, then when the Canon 300D came out I bought that, and a couple of months back I upgraded to the 40D when the 300D started playing up a little after 90,000 photos mind!
My advice would be to make sure you look beyond the body, and look at the range of lenses / flashes. When I look in my camera bag the two bodies count maybe 20% of the cost of what is in there! As has been said where in the past a body was for life and lenses come and go, its the other way round now. Any digital body you buy now will be out of date in a few years time, however the quality of the lens you put on the front wont change (though watch out for digital slr lenses that wont work with full frame sensors).
As you can probably tell I am a canon man, but a friend has the nikon, and just watch out for lens compatibility with their cheapest slr. Something about their focusing motors usually being in the body, but the cheapest one not having it, so not being able to use most of their lenses or something.

Tom

RE: POLL: lower back tattoos,do they hurt?

Made me think of the saturday night live sketch... ahh soo funny:

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/602087/tattoo_remover/

This item was edited on Sunday, 12th August 2007, 18:11

RE: Game Boy Micro in blue or green for £21.98

Anyone received their one? I ordered before 9.00 on the Friday, when both were showing in stock. I have got the games and DVDs I ordered with it, but the order is now showing as "Stock arriving within 48 hours". What do we think the chances are? Kinda hacked off as the missus and I are going away this weekend and it would have kept her quiet on the train!

Tom

Edit - Aint it always the way, just had an email from them saying order processed and dispatched! So thinks to OP

This item was edited on Wednesday, 18th July 2007, 11:17

RE: Anybody used Modchip World?

Just another shout for Kanection, ordered my modchip from them at midday ish on the Friday, had it in my mitts on Saturday morning...

Tom

RE: Looing for a free Grpahics Editor - something better than MS Paint !

I would use paint.net, it is a free app and works really nicely. Get it from here:

http://www.getpaint.net

From their website:
Quote:
Paint.NET is free image editing and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run Windows. It supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools.

Tom

RE: Free `Your Sandwich Made It` Book from Amazon

Yeah, nice one cheers. Even managed to get free first class shipping on the rest of the order!

Tom

RE: The hypothetical science question thread...

Sorry, badly worded. What I meant was that when you drop two objects of different mass they will accelerate at the same rate due to gravity, but that the force acting on them is different - it has to be, as force is mass multiplied by acceleration, so two objects of different mass accelerating at the same rate have to have different forces.

Clear as mud eh?

Tom

RE: The hypothetical science question thread...

Why not big G? To be fair it is just a constant - doesn`t really matter if we are talking g or gG. What is important is as you said acceleration is independent of the mass we are dropping, though as I said the force is different.

But yeah, I think if you could ignore air resistance (which you clearly cant on earth) it is safe to say the bullet would hit the ground at the same speed as it was shot upwards.

Tom

RE: The hypothetical science question thread...

Re: a = gG(m2)/r2

Basically I took the standard
F=gG(m1)(m2)/r2 where m1 is the mass of the object falling and m2 is the mass of the earth
said the acceleration of the body m1 comes from F=(m1)a

so
(m1)a = F = gG(m1)(m2)/r2
so a = gG(m2)/r2

i.e. as Ste says the acceleration caused by gravity is independent of the mass of the body we are dropping.

I however was talking about a balance of forces creating terminal velocity - the force downwards from gravity being balanced by the force upwards from air resistance.

Tom

RE: The hypothetical science question thread...

Sorry Ste, I grant you that the acceleration caused by gravity is constant (9.81meters per second squared as you stated earlier), but the FORCE due to gravity is as I stated above

F=gG(M1)(M1)/r2

From that since F=ma (mass time acceleration), when you calculate the acceleration of a body due to gravity the mass of the body cancels from both sides, leaving you

a = gG(m2)/r2

so the acceleration is only dependent on a couple of constants (g and G), the mass of the other body (the earth in this case), and the distance between the two objects.

Tom

RE: The hypothetical science question thread...

I stand by my simple physics (I think!). Just after the bullet leaves the gun it has a total energy made up of potential energy (height) and kinetic energy (speed), as it goes up it coverts that kinetic energy into speed - you cannot loose energy, just change its form. At the top of its path it has zero kinetic energy, it is all potential energy, then as it comes back down again it converts potential to kinetic. We are ignoring air resistance, so it cant bleed energy off as heat etc, so when it reaches the group the kinetic energy has to be the same as when it left the ground. (That all assumes that the bullet keeps the same mass - a reasonable assumption, much more so than no air resistance!)

Not true in real life, as air resistance gives you terminal velocity, and that energy gets burn off as heat through friction.

As far as terminal velocity / acceleration goes, as I understand it gravity exerts a force on all objects proportional to the weight of the two objects (and inversely proportional the the square of the distance). That force will create an acceleration proportional to the force (and the mass of the object).
However when you reach terminal velocity the force from gravity is balanced by the force from the air resistance, since there is no net force, there is no acceleration. The air resistance, as stated above, is dependent on the shape and size of the object - an unfolded parachute has a much higher resistance than a person without a parachute, hence the force upwards is much higher, hence the terminal velocity is much lower.

I think!

RE: The hypothetical science question thread...

If you forget air resistance etc then yeah - simple physics, it would have to come back down with the same total energy it went up with. Unfortunately you can`t forget air resistance. This one was covered by Mythbusters a little while back, see here:

http://kwc.org/mythbusters/2006/04/episode_50_bullets_fired_up_vo_1.html

The concluded that the bullet coming back down has nothing like the same energy as on the way up, but there are documented cases of people being killed by falling bullets.

RE: Had my car broken into...

Couple of weeks ago went out to find that both my car and my partners had been broken into! They had broken a window on mine and nicked the stereo and my cd wallet, on hers (a punto) they had knocked the lock out of the door and taken the stereo and a load of CDs. I just paid the £200 for the new glass and £100 for a new stereo on mine, but on hers cos it was the lock etc went into the garage to have all new locks and a new stereo fitted, away for a week and a claim on the insurance.
You just wonder how they justify taking them, they cant get more than £20 for them, and the agro and hassle they cause... Makes me really worry about society, as there doesn`t seem to any inclination to change.

RE: 1000 Microsoft XBox Live Points - Free!!

Can you please check that email addy for us? I have just tried it and got back a message saying user does not exist.

Cheers! Tom

RE: How good are you at Rubicks cube? Have a go here!

Nup never saw anything. Strangely enough I was thinking about this yesterday as Slashdot had a story on 4D and now 5D Rubiks cubes, and was going to give them a go!

Have had a change of address since winning this, so maybe it went to my old address....

Tom

RE: Some nero 7 Niggles.

What I do on mine is leave the MP3s in their folders, my head unit then kinda treats it like a cd changer, each folder is a disk, and it plays through them in order, I would give that a go and see if it works on yours.

Tom

RE: Where can I download funny clips on to my PSP?

The easier way to do it is to go to google video, search for the video, then in the drop down box on the right select Sony PSP and click the download link, no recoding etc, ready to go!

Tom

RE: Adverts on the telly

As Mark says, with PVRs it is so easy to not watch adverts, I would struggle to tell you what the last advert I saw was for, let alone buying something from an advert. Between the PVR and Adblock in firefox, about the only place I see / hear advertising is on the radio, and Capitals current "never more than 2 advers in a row" seems to be always 2 ads in a row, all the blooming time. I am about to give up on radio as well and just listen to mp3s.

Tom

RE: free CARDBOARD radio ..................?

According to the site:

Quote:
It`s a cardboard radio
This novelty product is a cardboard model kit that resembles an Evoke-1 DAB digital radio from Pure Digital. It is not a real radio, so don`t expect it to work and don`t connect it to any form of electricity. The kit comes with instructions for assembling the radio.


An interesting freebie, but not a working radio!

RE: Sudoku Handheld Electronic Card Game was £34.99, Now £4.99

Nice one, the missus is into her sudoku, so this should keep her quiet for a while!

Cheers

RE: IT Crowd

Yeah, enjoyed the first episode, but we need to see where they are going to go with it. I agree that more BOFH type story lines would be good. The power button lines bought back horrible memories of working on the Helldesk!
Quick reminder that it shows on C4 tonight at 9.00 (I think), and a double episode? Or you can watch it on C4s website now:
http://www.channel4.com/entertainment/tv/microsites/I/itcrowd/index.html

Tom

RE: houses with far too many external Xmas Decorations? Here`s the music if anyone`s interested.

Saw this in an email video, and Wow! Everyone in the office was speculating that it was mocked up, and just a load of still photos set to music, but a quick google, and:

http://www.snopes.com/photos/arts/xmaslights.asp

It really is real, and damn impressive! Maybe next year......

RE: Spooks Series 3 (5 Disc`s) £12.99

Yeah cheers, just put my order in.

Tom

Canon MVX35i Mini DV Digital Camcorder @ £266.36???

Not sure about this one, but ebuyer are listing a rather nice camcorder at £466.36, with a £200 cashback direct from canon. This camcorder is listed at over £700 on expansys, dabs, novatech etc, so I am guessing this is a pricing error, but who knows. Anyway some links:

Ebuyers page:
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?product_uid=92058


Canon specs page:
http://www.canon.co.uk/for_home/product_finder/camcorders/digital/mvx35i/index.asp

Canon Cashback page
http://www.canon.co.uk/camcordercashback/

The only thing that worries me is that the T&C on the Canon site that says selected stores only, but the ebuyer site clearly implies that you can get the cashback on their price....

Buy at your own risk! Tom

RE: What part of no don`t you understand

As I am the telecoms manager for the place I work, and we spend about £10k a month on calls, I am constantly getting people trying to get our voice traffic - maybe 4 calls a week. My current game is to tell them that I am really interested in changing, then say I have another call comming in, and put them on hold. Then time how long it takes them to hang up, the record so far is just over 20 mins! Cos I have a 2 line phone its not a problem, I can carry on working, knowing that the blinking red light is some sales guy not earning a commission!