European Commission has reached a voluntary agreement with some of the biggest names in the electronics industry to introduce a common charger for cell phones that fits all models. New phones configured to use the standardized chargers use a micro-USB connector for charging. Information on this USB charging connector is available at USB Approved Class →
Besides short circuit surge currents flowing on safety ground wire there are also other situations where you can see 60-115 V AC between the equipment cases. In the age of switch mode power supplies the safety ground has a new job, ie EMC line filter ground. When the power supply EMC filter is not connected →
I have written quite a bot of material on Ground loop problems and how to get rid of them. The ground loop related problems are often caused by small ground potential differences between different electrical outlets. Typically those ground potential differences are few volts or less. Not your fault article by Howard Johnson published in →
PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development. The PHP language is very widely used on web sites. Many parts of ePanorama.net site are built using PHP programming language. PHP programming language finally gets goto command. The goto operator is available as of PHP 5.3. I am not really →
Youtube has a Timelapse video of the set construction for the American Idol Experience at Disney’s Hollywood Studios: AI Timelapse vid. The attraction opened is February 2009. You can see in this vidoe how much construction work takes to make a big show like this. →
Digital cameras are slowly phasing out analog. In still cameras the situation seems to be so that the manufacturers of the films are stopping to manufacture well known film types. For example Polaroid has phased out Polaroid film years ago and Kodak is retiring iconic Kodachrome film. Digital photography winds the once-iconic color films into →
Solid-state disk (SSD) drives are all the rage among techies. The drives use non-volatile NAND flash memory, meaning that there are no moving parts and they are faster in reading and, in most cases, writing data. Computerworld magazine has published a worth to read article Review: Hard disk vs. solid-state drive — is an SSD →
I’ve been hearing and seeing a lot about these new LED TV models from Samsung. They are advertising them as entirely new type of TV that changes everything. After some checking round what is this new technology is I found out that it is nothing spectacular new in it. Samsung’s so-called “LED TV” is pretty →
John Huntington, the author of Control Systems for Live Entertainment book, is keeping an interesting John’s Entertainment Technology Blog at http://www.controlgeek.net/. It is worth to read. There are lots of material on different shows going on, including nice backstage technology tours on some shows. →
Ban on incandescent lamps is coming to Finland and other EU countries. Decision makers think that consumers and the environment alike would benefit from replacing the familiar incandescent lamps with energy-saving compact fluorescent light bulbs or LEDs. At present, some 80% of the electricity used for lighting by Finnish households is consumed by incandescent bulbs, →