Scarecrow's 14TGE

Way2go · Post by **Way2go** » Mon Feb 14, 2011 12:00 am

electrokid wrote: Definitely - vista's a nasty excuse for an OS

Windows 7 came in to adoring aclaim but even that seems to be gathering more critics these days.
XP still seems to get the award for favourite of all the windows flavours but I wonder how long that will continue to be supported for?

rayfenwick · Post by **rayfenwick** » Mon Feb 14, 2011 12:35 am

scarecrow wrote:Thanks Ray.

You did notice that the guitar is collection only?

I did, but was going to run past you the possibility of us both meeting up at one of the shows - I'm in no hurry for it.

scarecrow wrote:I used to have a Les Paul copy and it was my favourite guitar ever - endless sustain and beautiful warm tones - and the wide neck was better for my pudgey hod-carriers fingers

I love mine. A 1989 Gibson USA goldtop'56 spec, with P90's rather than humbuckers and custom hardware. Being a big Jeff Lynne fan I made a replica of his '73-'83 stage guitar. </nerd>

Sadly somewhere between Domodedovo airport (the one that had the bomb a couple of weeks ago..) and Heathrow the headstock suffered a nasty fracture, which will require expert repair before the guitar can be played again. To say I am gutted is an understatement. The guitar was worth £3k or so, and now I'll have to spend £500 to make it worth £1500....ho hum.

scarecrow wrote:When I finally find a place to call home, I'm gonna get me an old piano and I'd love a cello - not that I know how to play them, but that probably qualifies for a night with Simon Cowell and a recording contract these days

Lovely instrument, cello. When not producing noises that sounded like a bull had accidentally got hooked up to a milking machine I found I was able to occasionally get something musical out of it...

Post by **mat_fenwick** » Mon Feb 14, 2011 8:13 am

electrokid wrote:I've got lots of other things to twiddle with at the mo

and

electrokid wrote:you can't get the wood these days.

Too much twiddling?

electrokid · Post by **electrokid** » Mon Feb 14, 2011 8:33 am

Windows 7 came in to adoring aclaim

My mate Tim and I are opposites when it comes to OSs / computing generally - Tim gets the lastest of everything (Volvo, Mac, Win7 etc) and I expect to be able to continue using something for ever (BX, Win98SE, Win2Kpro, XPpro etc

) - his assessment of Win7 was that it's vista with some of the bugs removed and generally tidied up - so I've not even bothered to look at it. I have a very expensive laptop with vista on it and it's rubbish.

I do like XP despite having the version that won't run flash, I like Win2Kpro as well but that machine is a stand-alone - not even web connected. I have a project coming up where I'll be using Dos6

for 2 reasons - 1) I know how to design the hardware interfaces I'll need and 2) it does what it's told

I'd love to move to Linux but there would be so much to change it would feel like stepping off a cliff.

scarecrow · Post by **scarecrow** » Mon Feb 14, 2011 1:23 pm

Linux has a free equivalent for every Windoze application - apart from maybe some high-end CAD stuff. Anything that is irreplaceable can be run on a virtual machine from within Linux - you just install your flavour Windows inside the virtual box and away you go... There's another emulation package called Wine, but I never had much luck with it. You don't need to install your own copy of Windows to use Windows applications with Wine though.

Set up a separate partition on your HD and install Ubuntu (it takes up a fraction of the space of any Windows) and give it a whirl, you'll be pleasantly surprised at how easy and quick it actually is (unless you have a Compaq or HP laptop - then you're f****d if you want wifi)

scarecrow · Post by **scarecrow** » Mon Feb 14, 2011 1:25 pm

rayfenwick wrote:
scarecrow wrote:Thanks Ray.

You did notice that the guitar is collection only?
I did, but was going to run past you the possibility of us both meeting up at one of the shows - I'm in no hurry for it.

I'm sure we could find a way to get it to you

electrokid · Post by **electrokid** » Mon Feb 14, 2011 7:19 pm

you can't get the wood these days.

Too much twiddling?

As I mentioned earlier, Yamaha were making their guitars out of very well seasoned wood at the time... hmmm I supose I'm getting to the stage of being well seasoned too

which has its downsides - my dad once described getting old as 'a bit of a sod'

I picked up 2 of the things I'll be twiddling with today

...

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll? ... K:MEWNX:IT

and

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll? ... K:MEWNX:IT

sdelasal · Post by **sdelasal** » Mon Feb 14, 2011 7:37 pm

that last one looks more impressive than a Gunsons GasTune. Steve

electrokid · Post by **electrokid** » Mon Feb 14, 2011 7:42 pm

Linux has a free equivalent for every Windoze application - apart from maybe some high-end CAD stuff. Anything that is irreplaceable can be run on a virtual machine from within Linux - you just install your flavour Windows inside the virtual box and away you go... There's another emulation package called Wine, but I never had much luck with it. You don't need to install your own copy of Windows to use Windows applications with Wine though.

Set up a separate partition on your HD and install Ubuntu (it takes up a fraction of the space of any Windows) and give it a whirl, you'll be pleasantly surprised at how easy and quick it actually is (unless you have a Compaq or HP laptop - then you're f****d if you want wifi)

Thanks for that Steve. I've thought about setting up dual boot with Win2Kpro - mainly because it will run everything I normally use without asking Microsoft's permission to use it

but putting that as a VM inside Linux is veeeeery appealing - many thanks - I shall investigate further - in fact I have to use the damn thing tomorrow - I don't want to change the browser on my XP machine (Explorer 6) so I'll try that on the laptop which I don't (at the moment anyway) care about - I need to look at later browsers because eBay have 'updated' the code on their 'leave feedback' page and it no longer works. They've suggested updating the browser to fix it - but they suggest that for most things - cavalier customer 'service'

And yes it's an HP Pavilion HDX9000 - so I'm f****d

but then I've felt that way about it since I bought the damn thing

citsncycles · Post by **citsncycles** » Mon Feb 14, 2011 9:45 pm

I must admit I'm quite happy running XP on my old Del Inspiron, which will hopefully see me a few years yet. As it's running software that's more up to date than I use at work, I'm hoping that XP will continue to be supported for a while yet.

My brother has a much more up to date (& higher spec) laptop that was running Vista. He has upgraded to 7, which he recons has made it much easier to add either hardware or software to.

scarecrow · Post by **scarecrow** » Wed Feb 16, 2011 12:44 pm

I just collected the 14 and it runs pretty good having had the Carb. work done. It's with the Carb. specialist now for a rolling road tune-up so I should get it back tomorrow all fixed. I did notice that the hot starting issue is no longer there

Completely different to drive compared to the tzd - the non-power steering takes some getting used to again, and the clutch is totally different.

I love it - and the garage even washed it for me! I think the mechanic enjoyed doing the conversion, it must have made a change from fiddling with ecu's

sdelasal · Post by **sdelasal** » Wed Feb 16, 2011 1:11 pm

"...from fiddling with ecu's " - I know how that feels! Steve

scarecrow · Post by **scarecrow** » Wed Feb 16, 2011 7:55 pm

sdelasal wrote:"...from fiddling with ecu's " - I know how that feels! Steve

I forgot that you program ECUs Steve. That's about all I know to say constructively on the subject I'm afraid. No, actually what language do you program in? I cut my teeth on 6502 on Commodore 64s

sdelasal · Post by **sdelasal** » Wed Feb 16, 2011 8:12 pm

Yep, I lucky enough to work on Engine controls for Ford. It's mostly C code - some generated automatically from a higher model abstraction.

scarecrow · Post by **scarecrow** » Wed Feb 16, 2011 9:06 pm

Does that mean that you define the parameters for a model to generate customized code according to a particular application, but within specific boundaries? I suppose it makes for better efficiency and economy of size - having custom code rather than drop-in modules with variable data? Or have I just talked myself out of a job..?