Archive for April 2012

Use sound card for science experiments

EFFICIENT SOUND CARD BASED EXPERIMENTION AT DIFFERENT LEVELS OF NATURAL SCIENCE EDUCATION paper tells that sound cards can be turned into measurement tools, making science experimentation very efficient and cheap. Sound-card experimentation becomes really viable only if we demonstrate how to connect different sensors to the sound card and provide suitable open-source software to support

Visa shows off data centre security

Credit card company Visa has boasted that one of its US data centres possesses the ultimate security features. Many details of the site are reported by USA Today and Fast Company, which both seem to have been invited to the facility, the company’s Operations Centre East (OCE). Also The Register and ABC news have written

Resistance grounded laptop PSU output

I have one pretty new ACER 5552G laptop that cam with with Delta Electronics ADP-90CD D8 power supply that has grounding practice different from other laptops I have seen (normally grounded or floating): The power supply output (otherwise floating) – side seems to be connected to mains ground through 1 kohms resistance on the power

Isolated laptop power supply issues

I have earlier written about grounded laptop power supply problems. Other popular laptop power supply configuration used is floating output. There are power supplies without ground, for example some Apple laptops and many other brands. The power supplies where there is no ground on connection on the mains side are for sure built in this