Yet Another Cycling Forum

Off Topic => The Pub => Topic started by: ian on 05 February, 2021, 08:01:17 pm

Title: the peril of settings
Post by: ian on 05 February, 2021, 08:01:17 pm
So, I saw some stuff on the internet about settings. You know, the dials on the front of devices that kid you that you are in control of your fate.

I have heard that some people use these dials. I was unconvinced until recently when I discovered that my previous oven default of somewhere between 160-200 degrees could be set to 'max' for pizza. Two different settings. Oh giddy chefdom. That's it though, those are the only two settings I use. There's another dial that is illustrated with strange symbols that might as well be Babylonian, only two of which I have deciphered: one I think is the fan oven setting, the other is a grill. If I had speculate a translation, the third may well be 'burn stuff and set off the fire alarm.'

The washing machine and dishwasher are similar. The washer has dials and things called programmes. I know only two which I call one o'clock and four o'clock. One o'clock is normal. Four if something bad has happened and you need to get rid of potential forensic evidence. The dishwasher is a bit better, it does have pictures of different sized piles of plates and one that is 'eco' and who doesn't like to be 'eco.' There are about six other buttons on it, function unknown. All my kitchen appliances are Italian though, so I don't like to provoke them.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Flite on 05 February, 2021, 08:06:27 pm
My microwave is over 25 years old, and even in the dark ages had settings for potatoes, pasta, defrost etc.
I just press start for the number of minutes I want it to operate for...........

The AGA is great - it has no settings at all
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Kim on 05 February, 2021, 08:06:52 pm
Dials?  Luxury!  Proper settings are hidden n layers[1] deep in a menu system with a structure that hopefully makes sense to the codemonkey who wrote the software, because it certainly doesn't to anyone else.


[1] Where n is proportional to how frequently you need to change the setting in question.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Feanor on 05 February, 2021, 08:07:15 pm
The woodfired pizza oven cuts through all that Gordian Knot nonsense in a single swoosh.

It has no settings.
It has fire, or no fire.

You can perhaps pretend it has settings by throwing more or less wood on it, but it more or less does what it wants.
Mostly, it wants to do the Right Thing, which is good.

And Fire.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: citoyen on 05 February, 2021, 08:19:05 pm
I discovered by accident the other day that my oven has a pizza setting. It’s hidden behind the bread setting. I discovered it when I accidentally turned the wrong dial.

There’s also a Turbo Grill setting. I don’t know what this means.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Cudzoziemiec on 05 February, 2021, 08:20:09 pm
There’s also a Turbo Grill setting. I don’t know what this means.
I learnt about this in the other Plaice.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Kim on 05 February, 2021, 08:20:53 pm
The woodfired pizza oven cuts through all that Gordian Knot nonsense in a single swoosh.

It has no settings.
It has fire, or no fire.

Fire's also boolean on the ESP8266.  DAHIKT.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Butterfly on 05 February, 2021, 08:32:00 pm

The AGA is great - it has no settings at all

I miss having an aga to cook on. Always ready, does great tray bakes, warms your bum and dries your clothes. Fabulous things.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: ian on 05 February, 2021, 08:50:21 pm
I discovered by accident the other day that my oven has a pizza setting. It’s hidden behind the bread setting. I discovered it when I accidentally turned the wrong dial.

There’s also a Turbo Grill setting. I don’t know what this means.

It's quite possible my oven has a pizza setting but there's nothing that looks like the Babylonian glyph for a pizza. Max cooks one in six precise minutes.

The microwave has lots of settings, I just choose max and a number of minutes and seconds. There's a dial on the front of the central heating boiled labelled min and max. What possible reason would I want to set it to anything other than max? I'd like my house to get warm really slowly please.

I think this all my plea for boolean. No caveman looked at his fire and thought, erm, if only it had a reheat setting.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Kim on 05 February, 2021, 09:11:23 pm
There's a dial on the front of the central heating boiled labelled min and max. What possible reason would I want to set it to anything other than max? I'd like my house to get warm really slowly please.

Ah, I know this:  On a condensing boiler, there's a point where it condenses flue gas properly for maximum efficiency, and then there's max, where it gives you the hottest water for when it's bloody cold.  These are the only two settings you need, of course, the rest of the dial is pointless.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: rafletcher on 05 February, 2021, 09:22:27 pm
Our condensing boiler has a digital temp setting for the circulating water temperature. It’s set to the highest value permanently. There’s a tank stat too. Why change it? I like hot water.

I use 2 powers on the microwave, 600w and 900w.

The grill is always on max. The dishwasher only has 5 programmes. We use the eco (shortest) one mostly. For de-smelling we use the hottest (and longest). Similar for the washing machine. Whites and non-whites.

The oven is a bit more nuanced, depending on fan or not. And low and slow or high and fast.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Mrs Pingu on 05 February, 2021, 09:28:08 pm
Oven;
160C fan for roasting veggies.
220C not fan for bread
Super'king hot for pizza (not officially on the dial)
180C fan for anything else

Washer:
40C with extra water (it's called dark clothing) for most stuff
Super'kin hot cotton for when the towels are too groady or the washer is too groady
8min spin for extra water removal

CH Boiler
II for most of the time
IV for abnormally cold winters (for Furrybootoon)
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: andrewc on 05 February, 2021, 09:29:45 pm
Remove all of this stress & confusion from your lives by buying a Baumatic cooker.   The "settings" appear to be Letraset & wear off in the first year of ownership, leaving you free to make your own guesses choices !
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Kim on 05 February, 2021, 09:30:49 pm
Our cooker (I forget what brand) has a similar arrangement, where the markings are soluble in curry sauce.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: rogerzilla on 05 February, 2021, 09:31:15 pm
Ah, for the olden days, when cars had both spark advance and mixture controls, as well as the usual throttle.  That kept the oiks off the roads.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: ian on 05 February, 2021, 09:35:14 pm
I learned to drive automatic. Anything else makes complicates drinking coffee and steering.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: aidan.f on 05 February, 2021, 10:00:28 pm
Quote
Our condensing boiler has a digital temp setting for the circulating water temperature. It’s set to the highest value permanently. There’s a tank stat too. Why change it? I like hot water.
Why would you not want to save about 10% on your heating bills? As Kim sed. Modern boilers only work at full efficiency if return is below 55C. Our Ch rad flow is 49C and the house is a comfy 20C. Hot water is set to 55 which gives a very pleasant shower. Boiler is running at low output and no on off cycling so reduced wear. Ian's OP and the follow ups are amusing but let's not be luddites.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: ian on 05 February, 2021, 10:09:34 pm
How the fuck do I set that with a dial labelled min and max? Give me settings that mean something. I don’t even know what a condensing boiler is and I’ve read Kant.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Jurek on 05 February, 2021, 10:15:50 pm
This is deep.
How the fuck am I going to guide my spaceship home without it hitting anything?
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Feanor on 05 February, 2021, 10:22:18 pm
How the fuck do I set that with a dial labelled min and max? Give me settings that mean something. I don’t even know what a condensing boiler is and I’ve read Kant.

Units are not required, that just complicates things.
You must recognise, as a mac user, the user paradigm must be 'don't bother me with technical details like units, just present me with a min-max scale'?

Anyways, if a control has a range from Min to Max, whatever reason would you not set it to Max?
Even if there are several controls, all contradictory.

Heat: Max.
Cool: Max.
Chickens: Max.
Goats: Max.

It's your responsibility to the economy. Everything is on max.

Can someone get this goat off me, please?


Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Feanor on 05 February, 2021, 10:34:04 pm
I discovered by accident the other day that my oven has a pizza setting. It’s hidden behind the bread setting. I discovered it when I accidentally turned the wrong dial.

I expect the pizza setting is pretty much "leave the element on 100%, and hope for the best. Perhaps it will reach an equilibrium temperature before it catches fire".
I can understand why they might want to hide that.

A normal domestic oven can manage 250 degrees, or perhaps a wee bit more at a push.
Pizza requires a base temp of 350+, and an air temp up there too.

Attempting pizza in a domestic oven is a fraught business, pushing the poor thing to it's absolute limits.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Mrs Pingu on 05 February, 2021, 10:36:43 pm
I think Ian's preferred goat setting is probably min, or off.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Kim on 05 February, 2021, 10:42:37 pm
How the fuck do I set that with a dial labelled min and max? Give me settings that mean something. I don’t even know what a condensing boiler is and I’ve read Kant.

Ours is labelled min and max, with a detent about 2/3 of the way round labelled 'E' or something for the optimum condensing point.  That's the heating loop temperature.

There's a separate dial for the hot water temperature with a sparkly footprint sticker denoting the least-worst compromise between not scalding yourself while washing your hands under the non-mixer hot taps and a half-decent shower/bath temperature.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Feanor on 05 February, 2021, 10:49:55 pm
I think Ian's preferred goat setting is probably min, or off.

Yes, but it seems to be linked to the Chickens setting in an incomprehensible way.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: cygnet on 05 February, 2021, 10:52:42 pm
But what toaster dial number do you use?
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: quixoticgeek on 05 February, 2021, 11:23:28 pm
The woodfired pizza oven cuts through all that Gordian Knot nonsense in a single swoosh.

It has no settings.
It has fire, or no fire.

You can perhaps pretend it has settings by throwing more or less wood on it, but it more or less does what it wants.
Mostly, it wants to do the Right Thing, which is good.

And Fire.

Oh dear...

Fire is much more configurable than that. You can get all sorts of temperatures and conditions of fire by carefully balancing the proportions of fuel and oxygen. A fire is a living breathing creature, and should be treated with respect. There is a true art in managing fire, esp when it comes to cooking with it. The wood you use, the moisture content of the wood, if you use charcoal, the wood the charcoal was made from. All sorts of things can change the result of your fire. It's not as simple as there being fire, or not fire.

This is a loaf of bread I baked with an open fire i the woods:

(http://photos.quixotic.eu/Microadventures/2016/04-29/XT1A2520_500.JPG)

(http://photos.quixotic.eu/Microadventures/2016/04-29/XT1A2525_500.JPG)

The wood was hornbeam.

J
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Mr Larrington on 05 February, 2021, 11:53:05 pm
If it doesn’t go up to 11 it’s not worth having.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Kim on 05 February, 2021, 11:54:11 pm
If it doesn’t go up to 11 it’s not worth having.

For $2000 I'll build you one that goes to 12...
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: hatler on 06 February, 2021, 12:13:26 am
Fire is much more configurable than that. You can get all sorts of temperatures and conditions of fire by carefully balancing the proportions of fuel and oxygen. A fire is a living breathing creature, and should be treated with respect. There is a true art in managing fire, esp when it comes to cooking with it. The wood you use, the moisture content of the wood, if you use charcoal, the wood the charcoal was made from. All sorts of things can change the result of your fire. It's not as simple as there being fire, or not fire.

But, have you worked out what colour it should be yet ?
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Jaded on 06 February, 2021, 12:20:23 am
What is the setting for bears?
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Mr Larrington on 06 February, 2021, 12:25:47 am
Fire is much more configurable than that. You can get all sorts of temperatures and conditions of fire by carefully balancing the proportions of fuel and oxygen. A fire is a living breathing creature, and should be treated with respect. There is a true art in managing fire, esp when it comes to cooking with it. The wood you use, the moisture content of the wood, if you use charcoal, the wood the charcoal was made from. All sorts of things can change the result of your fire. It's not as simple as there being fire, or not fire.

But, have you worked out what colour it should be yet ?

And do people want fire that can be nasally fitted?
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Beardy on 06 February, 2021, 12:31:38 am
I’ve relabelled all my appliances and replaced max with 11. It tells everyone where it should be set and saves thinking.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Mr Larrington on 06 February, 2021, 12:38:03 am
What is the setting for bears?

3 bowls, 3 spoons and a notepad for each BEAR to record its preferred porridge serving temperature.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Pingu on 06 February, 2021, 12:51:19 am
The woodfired pizza oven cuts through all that Gordian Knot nonsense in a single swoosh.

It has no settings.
It has fire, or no fire.

You can perhaps pretend it has settings by throwing more or less wood on it, but it more or less does what it wants.
Mostly, it wants to do the Right Thing, which is good.

And Fire.

Oh dear...

I thought that too  ;D
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: hatler on 06 February, 2021, 12:58:16 am
Fire is much more configurable than that. You can get all sorts of temperatures and conditions of fire by carefully balancing the proportions of fuel and oxygen. A fire is a living breathing creature, and should be treated with respect. There is a true art in managing fire, esp when it comes to cooking with it. The wood you use, the moisture content of the wood, if you use charcoal, the wood the charcoal was made from. All sorts of things can change the result of your fire. It's not as simple as there being fire, or not fire.

But, have you worked out what colour it should be yet ?

And do people want fire that can be nasally fitted?
Mr L, you clearly work in Marketing AICMFP.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Gattopardo on 06 February, 2021, 03:52:23 am
If it doesn’t go up to 11 it’s not worth having.

For $2000 I'll build you one that goes to 12...

For $1950 I'll just make 11 louder.
Title: the peril of settings
Post by: citoyen on 06 February, 2021, 08:49:00 am
I expect the pizza setting is pretty much "leave the element on 100%, and hope for the best. Perhaps it will reach an equilibrium temperature before it catches fire".
I can understand why they might want to hide that.

The bread setting is top and bottom heat, no fan, and goes up to 220C. The pizza setting is the same but goes up to 250C and adds the grill element too. I’ve not used it yet. It’s not really hidden, it’s just that each click of the dial has several sub-settings, and the pizza setting was one I hadn’t realised was there before. I don’t use most of the settings - for pizza, I’ve been using the ‘conventional’ setting, which is top and bottom heat, no fan - same as bread except it goes up to 250C. As with the washing machine, all the programs are just shortcuts to manually configurable settings.

The oven has a pyrolitic cleaning function so I expect it can handle seriously hot temperatures.

Quote
Attempting pizza in a domestic oven is a fraught business, pushing the poor thing to it's absolute limits.

One day I will get round to building a proper bread oven in the garden. One day!
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Cudzoziemiec on 06 February, 2021, 10:53:55 am
Our boiler has a E detent on the central heating dial but not on the hot water dial. Dunno why.

Charcoal should be served with vipers (Tim Hall should understand this).
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: T42 on 06 February, 2021, 11:46:45 am
The woodfired pizza oven cuts through all that Gordian Knot nonsense in a single swoosh.

It has no settings.
It has fire, or no fire.

You can perhaps pretend it has settings by throwing more or less wood on it, but it more or less does what it wants.
Mostly, it wants to do the Right Thing, which is good.

And Fire.

When we were buying this house the bloke who had rebuilt it after a fire showed us a darkened bit of stone wall in the cellar and said that there had been a wood-fired bread oven there but he'd needed room for the water heater so he had knocked it apart and thrown it out.  >:(
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: ian on 06 February, 2021, 08:45:30 pm
How the fuck do I set that with a dial labelled min and max? Give me settings that mean something. I don’t even know what a condensing boiler is and I’ve read Kant.

Ours is labelled min and max, with a detent about 2/3 of the way round labelled 'E' or something for the optimum condensing point.  That's the heating loop temperature.

There's a separate dial for the hot water temperature with a sparkly footprint sticker denoting the least-worst compromise between not scalding yourself while washing your hands under the non-mixer hot taps and a half-decent shower/bath temperature.

I checked and the dial isn't at max, it's about three-quarters max (though there's nothing to indicate why it's there). I assume a grown-up set it thus. I know there's a thermostat somewhere on the hot water cylinder set to a value I don't know to ensure we don't get Legionella. Bacteria I understand.

The oven goes from 240 to max. I don't know how hot max is. 250? Three million degrees? Stick a couple of pizza stones in there (seriously, they're quite good, the closest you'll get to decent pizza without a dedicated fiery oven) and it produces a pizza with dough that's starting to char pleasantly after six minutes.

For toast, I just twist the dial to max and manually pop it when I see the first curls of smoke. Undercooked, raw toast is horrid. But a lot better than goat.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Kim on 06 February, 2021, 08:47:53 pm
For toast, I just twist the dial to max and manually pop it when I see the first curls of smoke. Undercooked, raw toast is horrid.

All modern toasters are rubbish. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y)  We just use the grill.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: quixoticgeek on 06 February, 2021, 08:50:45 pm
All modern toasters are rubbish. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y)  We just use the grill.

Is it wrong that I know exactly which video that goes to without clicking on the link?

What's your take on Brown?

J
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Beardy on 06 February, 2021, 09:24:24 pm
We have pleasingly retro and trendy toaster that doesn’t pop up automatically. It has a time dial and you have to remember on the second set of toast to reduce the time or rescue the bread before it becomes charred due to retained heat. As a bonus it is also repairable with parts available direct from the manufacture or pattern parts from the bay of e.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Mrs Pingu on 06 February, 2021, 09:50:32 pm
The woodfired pizza oven cuts through all that Gordian Knot nonsense in a single swoosh.

It has no settings.
It has fire, or no fire.

You can perhaps pretend it has settings by throwing more or less wood on it, but it more or less does what it wants.
Mostly, it wants to do the Right Thing, which is good.

And Fire.

When we were buying this house the bloke who had rebuilt it after a fire showed us a darkened bit of stone wall in the cellar and said that there had been a wood-fired bread oven there but he'd needed room for the water heater so he had knocked it apart and thrown it out.  >:(

Sacre bleu!  :'(

We've cycled past several village bread ovens and I love them.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: FifeingEejit on 06 February, 2021, 10:14:34 pm
The AGA is great - it has no settings at all

Aga's do have settings.
Fueled and unfueld.

Quote
Our condensing boiler has a digital temp setting for the circulating water temperature. It’s set to the highest value permanently. There’s a tank stat too. Why change it? I like hot water.
Why would you not want to save about 10% on your heating bills? As Kim sed. Modern boilers only work at full efficiency if return is below 55C. Our Ch rad flow is 49C and the house is a comfy 20C. Hot water is set to 55 which gives a very pleasant shower. Boiler is running at low output and no on off cycling so reduced wear. Ian's OP and the follow ups are amusing but let's not be luddites.

I've got a fancy stat hooked up to the OpenTherm terminals, (It was left lying around after Dad bought an incompatible boiler) the problem with this is I suspect the previous owner never had the decent enough boiler serviced and there's what sounds like a bearing howling somewhere at tick over.
Or in fact any of the other pretty decent stuff* she seems to have had installed (although I suspect it was the previous owners doing the place up for sale)

I've not died of CO poisoning yet and the new regulations complement of alarms were fitted before lockdown so I'm just going to have to hope until it's dodgy enough to claim to be a pressing safety need...

But what toaster dial number do you use?

What exactly do those numbers mean?
On most toasters I've come across I'm a 3 for fresh bread and about 20 for frozen.
On the toaster I've bought I seem to be a 3 on frozen bread and have to watch the discolouration as it turns from white to slightly browned in order to hit the eject button before it's beyond my preference level.



* Top end 8kg LG steam washer
top end of Zanussi scale for dishwasher and fridge/frezer
5 ring gas hob (I've almost got round to trying out the pan I have on each one, still burning water having been used to halogen)
Remote controlled living flame gas fire

For toast, I just twist the dial to max and manually pop it when I see the first curls of smoke. Undercooked, raw toast is horrid.

All modern toasters are rubbish. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y)  We just use the grill.

1:23 it has destroyed the bread rendering it a charred mess, even the modern toaster produced borderline vileness.

Pretty cool mechanisms though

Well except for the safety mechanisms...



Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: rafletcher on 06 February, 2021, 10:45:29 pm
Our boiler has a E detent on the central heating dial but not on the hot water dial. Dunno why.

Charcoal should be served with vipers (Tim Hall should understand this).

Ours has up and down buttons and a digital display. Detents you say? 
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: andytheflyer on 07 February, 2021, 08:37:48 am

The AGA is great - it has no settings at all

I miss having an aga to cook on. Always ready, does great tray bakes, warms your bum and dries your clothes. Fabulous things.
And warms up wet Labradors.....
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: TheLurker on 07 February, 2021, 09:05:53 am
In a fearless expedition undertaken solely in the interests of science I have just returned from terra incognita (the kitchen) and I can report the following findings.

The cooker is gas.  It has valves which control the height of the flame. The natives have inscribed images of fires of various intensities on these valves.  The μwave has two rotary dials, one of which has a set of indecipherable images and whose purpose is thought to be, "ritual".  The other is a time control, quite possibly clockwork, and it chimes a rather jolly "ping!" when the timed period has expired.

What's a toaster?
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: sam on 11 February, 2021, 12:49:10 pm
I set the oven at 200 regardless. I’m not even sure 200 what, as some things are F, some C. (Mostly the latter I guess, but the British have been known to throw a curveball in the metric dept.) Celsius discombobulates me no matter how sensible it is. Gas marks are for the next life.

I don’t operate the washing machine. We have our spheres of influence. She also presides over all thermostatic controls.

The settings controlling radio/CD/mileage etc. display in the car (largely my remit) are the worst. I would set them and leave them be for all time, except occasionally a dial or button is touched the wrong way or stared at too hard and it all goes haywire, requiring a dive into the owner’s manual <shudder>.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: ian on 11 February, 2021, 07:03:05 pm
There is one device to which I'm entrusted the settings, that's the timer on the driveway lights, a curiously dumb chronological concoction that also does a poor job of keeping time. It's actually by far not the worst the timer I have operated, the plug-based ones I used for lights required cryptic key combinations to do anything useful (now replaced by the internet); these came in a pack of five from Sainsbury's so I was cursed with using them as I never throw anything away. The prize goes to the growth chamber I used as a lowly student which, for reason unbeknownst to me, forsook any idle dalliance of 24-hour clock and replaced it with perky decimal time, the day neatly defined into one hundred ceaseless segments, each needless subdivided by ten because everyone needs to measure time in thousandths of a day. Setting it to be light from 6am to 8pm was a significant mathematic undertaking for the sort of boy who survived long division by hiding in a bunker.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Kim on 11 February, 2021, 07:10:20 pm
Plug-in timers come in three categories:

- Mechanical ones which count the 50 Hertzes and therefore keep excellent time, with on/off setting precision in the 15 minute range, while making distracting ticking noises and using more power than the device you want to switch on and off.

- Standalone digital crap that belongs in the bin.

- Internet-of-shit.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Cudzoziemiec on 11 February, 2021, 07:16:00 pm
We were given one of the first sort by the police after a spate of burglaries in the neighbourhood. We've never used it. I guess Avon&Somerset have a warehouse of them ready to respond to burglary statistics.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Kim on 11 February, 2021, 07:21:43 pm
We were given one of the first sort by the police after a spate of burglaries in the neighbourhood. We've never used it. I guess Avon&Somerset have a warehouse of them ready to respond to burglary statistics.

We got given some LED tea lights.

I did add a few lines of code to make lights come on and off at random at night when we're not at home.  But there's a pandemic and we haven't been not at home to test it.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Jaded on 11 February, 2021, 07:33:25 pm
I imagine a tea light would be pretty scary for a Brummie neer-do-well.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: citoyen on 11 February, 2021, 09:24:13 pm
I did add a few lines of code...

It's been a long day and I'm tired. Which is my excuse for imagining I just read Kim announcing "I did a few lines of coke..."
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: ian on 11 February, 2021, 09:44:58 pm
The magic plugs know when it's night and when it's day and so adjust things accordingly. This is the future. I always run an exceedingly sophisticated anti-burglar disco. Most of the sophistication is admittedly down to the fact I failed to change the timers in an orderly manner. I put some dedication in the driveway lights though as I receive instructions. It seems she can't change them, only order me to do so.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: citoyen on 11 February, 2021, 10:02:28 pm
I consider it a genuine advance in technology that many modern devices are capable of remembering settings even after a power outage.

I remember reading in the mid 90s of a generation of older people being labelled "the flashing noughties" because they were unable to program the VCR, so that was what was displayed on the LCD. They could get their grandson to program it for them once, but unless he lived within easy walking distance, a power cut would mean them being stuck back where they started until his next biennial visit.

Mind you, I'm still not entirely used to my phone updating itself every time the clocks go forward or back and have to double check via multiple sources before I'm convinced it is showing the correct time without my intervention. It's not only connected devices though - my wireless-but-dumb central heating controller can remember the extremely complex programs I set up some years ago, even when the battery dies.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Kim on 11 February, 2021, 10:26:57 pm
Flash memory became practical and cheap over the course of the 90s.  It wasn't just about NAND flash memory cards and USB thumb drives making Zip disks and CDs obsolete at the turn of the century:  Cheap NOR flash was the death knell for battery-backed SRAM and various flavours of ROM at the bitty microcontroller end of the spectrum.  Remember when gadgets needed a little lithium cell to keep the memory powered while you changed the main battery?

Connected devices are another kettle of worms.  Computers are surprisingly bad at being clocks, and if you want to waste a couple of hours reading the citations in the tzdata comments (https://data.iana.org/time-zones/tzdb/europe), you'll find yourself wondering if the rot actually set in around the time the sundial was invented.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: citoyen on 11 February, 2021, 10:34:05 pm
Remember when gadgets needed a little lithium cell to keep the memory powered while you changed the main battery?

Indeed. I was thinking about just that in relation to my heating controller - I have a vague feeling that it requires such a battery. But I've never changed it in ~15 years, as far as I can recall. Maybe I'll discover it has died the next time the main power source (2xAA) needs changing.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Kim on 11 February, 2021, 10:36:56 pm
Remember when gadgets needed a little lithium cell to keep the memory powered while you changed the main battery?

Indeed. I was thinking about just that in relation to my heating controller - I have a vague feeling that it requires such a battery. But I've never changed it in ~15 years, as far as I can recall. Maybe I'll discover it has died the next time the main power source (2xAA) needs changing.

Possibly only to maintain a real-time clock, rather than store the settings.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Cudzoziemiec on 12 February, 2021, 10:31:39 am
What exactly is 'flash' memory and why is it called 'flash'? This is the kind of question which, when answered, is liable to leave me my informed but unenlightened, but I'm asking it anyway.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Cudzoziemiec on 12 February, 2021, 10:37:55 am
Perhaps I should make that a more high-level question: how on earth do 'silicon chips' store things? What happens when something is 'remembered' on one? What gets rearranged and how does it then get interpreted into something humans can see, hear, etc?
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: ian on 12 February, 2021, 10:43:25 am
Basically, the chips are arrays of little boxes, like bazillions of egg boxes joined together, that are either empty or full (of electrons). Volatile memory means those boxes are leaky unless kept topped up, non-volatile means the boxes stay as you left them. But it's all 0s and 1s, all the information has to be encoded multiple times to get from these words to the binary data stored in memory.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: citoyen on 12 February, 2021, 11:07:31 am
Basically, the chips are arrays of little boxes, like bazillions of egg boxes joined together, that are either empty or full (of electrons). Volatile memory means those boxes are leaky unless kept topped up, non-volatile means the boxes stay as you left them. But it's all 0s and 1s, all the information has to be encoded multiple times to get from these words to the binary data stored in memory.

It's really just as well electrons are very small.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: ian on 12 February, 2021, 11:19:35 am
That's the problem of smallness, eventually, you reach a point where quantum effects become significant. That's like putting one egg back in the box (one egg left, I'd eat it, to be honest, but that's a non-quantum effect), in one of the middle holes, and then the next day, opening the box and finding the egg has moved to the corner hole.

Obviously, if you have egg-based memory (or anything else based on the precise location of eggs), that's a problem. Fortunately, it's only noticeable if you have every small eggs. And you'd need a lot of those to make an omelette.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: rafletcher on 12 February, 2021, 12:14:22 pm
What exactly is 'flash' memory and why is it called 'flash'? This is the kind of question which, when answered, is liable to leave me my informed but unenlightened, but I'm asking it anyway.

In even more laymans terms, it doesn't remember what you put in there (as Ian says, "volatile").  We're currently trying to document for a customer that all the non-volatile memory (other than the obvious stuff, like hard drives) in one of our systems isn't capable of revealing their secrets should someone else get hold of it.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: ian on 12 February, 2021, 12:31:51 pm
Even non-volatile memory will eventually degrade. Any given electron may simply vamoose and pop up somewhere else which is a quantum effect so defined by probability. It's very improbable that an entire hen's egg will do this since every single component would need to do so at the same moment, but at the single electron level it is measurably probable.

To be more correct, in semiconductors, it's the empty holes in the egg carton that are important, not the eggs.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Cudzoziemiec on 12 February, 2021, 02:00:45 pm
Basically, the chips are arrays of little boxes, like bazillions of egg boxes joined together, that are either empty or full (of electrons). Volatile memory means those boxes are leaky unless kept topped up, non-volatile means the boxes stay as you left them. But it's all 0s and 1s, all the information has to be encoded multiple times to get from these words to the binary data stored in memory.
That's what I thought all along.

What was the question again?
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Cudzoziemiec on 12 February, 2021, 02:04:22 pm
What exactly is 'flash' memory and why is it called 'flash'? This is the kind of question which, when answered, is liable to leave me my informed but unenlightened, but I'm asking it anyway.

In even more laymans terms, it doesn't remember what you put in there (as Ian says, "volatile"). 
So it's memory that doesn't remember?
 ???
I shall do my own research...
(click to show/hide)
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Pingu on 12 February, 2021, 02:07:13 pm
Mmm... Egg and chips  :P
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Kim on 12 February, 2021, 02:26:11 pm
Perhaps I should make that a more high-level question: how on earth do 'silicon chips' store things? What happens when something is 'remembered' on one?

The lies-to-children version of the main flavours of computer memory:

Quote
What gets rearranged and how does it then get interpreted into something humans can see, hear, etc?

As any good hacker movie will tell you, "it's all just ones and zeros".  What I've described above covers a single one-or-zero 'bit'.  To do anything useful, you need a metric fuckload of them.  8 bits gives you a byte, which can hold one of 256 possible values, for example a number between 0 and 255, or between -127 and 128.  That's starting to become useful, as you have enough values to hold one character from most alphabets, in upper and lower case, with room for some punctuation and things like 'backspace', 'carriage return' and 'end of file'.  Given enough kilobytes, you can store and manipulate useful amounts of text.

Images, well, we could use that text to store a list of instructions: Draw a horizontal line this long; draw a vertical one twice as long at the end; join them up, fill it in.  That's vector graphics, and while it's extremely useful, it went out of fashion for most purposes as computer memories got big enough for:

Bitmap graphics:  Start at the top left corner; fill the pixels with balck, white, black, black, black, white, black; next line: black, black, white, white, white, black... etc.  One bit for each pixel, and with a few hundred bits you've got a grainy black & white image.  Want colour?  No problem.  Let's use three bytes for each pixel, giving the relative amounts of red, green and blue.  Yay, colour.  Cripes, what a lot of bytes.  Maybe a few million.

Want video?  Well, it's just 25 of those every second.  Gigabytes.

Audio?  Well, as found on the back of your record player, it's just a voltage somewhere between -1 and +1 volts.  We can map that to a value between -127 and 128 and store it in a byte.  Do that a few thousand times a second, and feed it through the right circuitry to convert it back to analogue and drive a speaker, and you've got sound.  Megabytes.

The thing that's made modern digital audio and video possible is clever programs that can take an image or audio file and work out a series of instructions to re-create it that's smaller than the original file.  Instead of saying "black; black; black, white, black, black, white, white" you might say "three black, one white, two black, two white" (this is how GIF and fax works).  For video you can compare the difference between the frames and just copy the stuff that hasn't changed from the last one (MPEG).  For audio you can look at what frequencies are present in the signal at any given time, and throw away the insignificant ones (MP3, AAC, etc) and hope that nobody hears the difference.

It's algorithms all the ways down.



[1] Static and Dynamic Random Access Memory, respectively.  'RAM' comes from the early days of computing, when the distinguishing feature was that you could read or write to any part of it at any time, rather than spooling through a paper or magnetic tape.
[2] This is a lie, DRAM relies on the charge in a capcitor being constantly refreshed, but that's not important right now.
[3] It turns out you can also discharge the capacitor by shining light on it, due to the photoelectric effect - arrange your memory bits in a line or grid, and you've got some pixels.  There was also a predecessor to EEPROM, EPROM, where the erase process required you to shine ultraviolet light through a little window in the chip package - same principle.
[4] "A place to keep files" and "What the computer' currently thinking about".  Non-trivial computers, like your phone or laptop will use SRAM or DRAM for RAM, and flash memory (or magnetic disk) for storage.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: ian on 12 February, 2021, 03:26:57 pm
It's all ultimately quantum mechanics. Which, brilliantly, no actually really understands. But it works.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: sam on 12 February, 2021, 04:04:05 pm
Richard Feynman reportedly said "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics,” and he wasn’t joking. Speaking of which. (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphy.2016.00053/full)

(https://i.imgur.com/baeQ7B7.jpg)
Bananas: they just work
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Jurek on 12 February, 2021, 04:14:07 pm
Richard Feynman reportedly said "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics,” and he wasn’t joking. Speaking of which. (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphy.2016.00053/full)

(https://i.imgur.com/baeQ7B7.jpg)
Bananas: they just work
Using a Biro on a bananananana is exceptionally satisfying.
ETA: And yes, that's the end which monkeys open them.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Poacher on 12 February, 2021, 04:19:03 pm
Richard Feynman reportedly said "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics,” and he wasn’t joking. Speaking of which. (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphy.2016.00053/full)

(https://i.imgur.com/baeQ7B7.jpg)
Bananas: they just work
Using a Biro on a bananananana is exceptionally satisfying.
ETA: And yes, that's the end which monkeys open them.
But:
There is nothing better in life
Than writing on the sole of your slipper with a Biro.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Jurek on 12 February, 2021, 04:21:05 pm
Richard Feynman reportedly said "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics,” and he wasn’t joking. Speaking of which. (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphy.2016.00053/full)

(https://i.imgur.com/baeQ7B7.jpg)
Bananas: they just work
Using a Biro on a bananananana is exceptionally satisfying.
ETA: And yes, that's the end which monkeys open them.
But:
There is nothing better in life
Than writing on the sole of your slipper with a Biro.
It is a similar experience to that of using a ballpoint pen to write on bananas.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Cudzoziemiec on 12 February, 2021, 04:24:42 pm
Perhaps I should make that a more high-level question: how on earth do 'silicon chips' store things? What happens when something is 'remembered' on one?

The lies-to-children version of the main flavours of computer memory:
I hope you enjoyed writing that – and I expect you did!

Right, I've got my own geek analogy in my mind now. It's like old-fashioned hump-shunting railway waggons, where you push them all up to the top of the hump then as they trundle down the other side under gravity, switches are switched and points are pointed in such a way as to make all the coal trucks go to the coal train, all the blue trucks to Thomas and all the carriages with dangly bike spaces to the train that goes where all the short people live. Except we've only got two sorts of truck, and they are truck and no-truck, one electron being identical to any other electron. But we've got a series of switches that sort out trains of electrons. And then these trains of electrons don't actually go anywhere, they just get announced: the train now standing at platform one is a letter black pixel. I think it's that interpretation bit I want to understand but let's leave that for another day.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Kim on 12 February, 2021, 06:26:39 pm
Perhaps I should make that a more high-level question: how on earth do 'silicon chips' store things? What happens when something is 'remembered' on one?

The lies-to-children version of the main flavours of computer memory:
I hope you enjoyed writing that – and I expect you did!

Right, I've got my own geek analogy in my mind now. It's like old-fashioned hump-shunting railway waggons, where you push them all up to the top of the hump then as they trundle down the other side under gravity, switches are switched and points are pointed in such a way as to make all the coal trucks go to the coal train, all the blue trucks to Thomas and all the carriages with dangly bike spaces to the train that goes where all the short people live. Except we've only got two sorts of truck, and they are truck and no-truck, one electron being identical to any other electron. But we've got a series of switches that sort out trains of electrons. And then these trains of electrons don't actually go anywhere, they just get announced: the train now standing at platform one is a letter black pixel. I think it's that interpretation bit I want to understand but let's leave that for another day.

Train analogies aren't bad once you go up a layer of abstraction and stop worrying about the electricity and start thinking  about bit streams.  A hump-shunting yard isn't a bad analogy for a shift register - a type of memory that's frequently used for converting a series of bits on individual wires (parallel data) to one bit at a time over a series of clock cycles[1] (serial data), or vice-versa.  Sort of thing a CD player might use to turn that stream of 1s and 0s from the FRIKKIN LAZER into a byte at a time to represent voltages for the digital-to-analogue converter.


[1] We haven't talked about clock cycles yet.  They're important because it takes time for all this circuitry to settle when something changes state, and if the input of one thing is connected to the output of something that's still in the process of changing from 0 to 1 things can get a bit wibbly.  So you have a clock, ticking out pulses so things only change when there's a new pulse.  This is, like so many things in life, best portrayed through the medium of interpretive dance.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Mr Larrington on 12 February, 2021, 06:34:31 pm
What exactly is 'flash' memory and why is it called 'flash'? This is the kind of question which, when answered, is liable to leave me my informed but unenlightened, but I'm asking it anyway.

In even more laymans terms, it doesn't remember what you put in there (as Ian says, "volatile").  We're currently trying to document for a customer that all the non-volatile memory (other than the obvious stuff, like hard drives) in one of our systems isn't capable of revealing their secrets should someone else get hold of it.

Long long ago in a data centre far far away* The Mgt decided some, or more, of our VAXen needed MOAR RAM.  The easiest way to do this was to take out the old memory boards, install new ones with the more capacious chips and flog the old ones on eBay back to DEC.  “Wait… WHAT!” exclaimed a Very Senior IT Manager.  “Suppose the new owners plug it in and start reading OUR data?  No, they'll have to be smashed up with hammers, then burned.  And the ashes fired into the sun!**”  The professionals eventually managed to pummel the concept of volatile memory into his skull, but apparently it took a very long time.

* SE1
** This bit may contain traces of Lie
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: ian on 12 February, 2021, 06:58:43 pm
I was once terribly mocked by a gang of uncouth Brazilians for opening a banana wrongways. To this day, I still can't look at a banana without thinking of that moment.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: PeteB99 on 14 February, 2021, 09:33:56 am
Until a few posts ago I had no idea there was a right or wrong way to open a banana. Why?

I've always opened them from the stalk end.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: sam on 14 February, 2021, 09:47:50 am
Until a few posts ago I had no idea there was a right or wrong way to open a banana.

There's no shame in it. It's something passed down from monkey to monkey.

(https://i.imgur.com/o7NTM22.jpg)
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: PeteB99 on 14 February, 2021, 11:38:20 am
Ah It's a monkey thing is it?  That explains a lot. I'll add it as a footnote to the report I'll take back to my home star system.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: ian on 15 February, 2021, 10:59:21 am
The stalk is where the banana's butt is. Probably.

It's just easier, the stalk lets you hold the banana so you don't get sticky fingers at the end.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Mr Larrington on 15 February, 2021, 11:32:03 am
You mean you ent got one o' these?

(http://viz.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/012_AD_ronco_bananamatic-210x300.jpg)

Standards are slipping.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: rafletcher on 15 February, 2021, 02:53:44 pm
The stalk is where the banana's butt is. Probably.

It's just easier, the stalk lets you hold the banana so you don't get sticky fingers at the end.

But you do get a mouthful of bitter skin to start off with.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: ian on 15 February, 2021, 03:55:48 pm
No, you pop the seam at the top, while checking carefully for banana spiders.
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: JennyB on 15 February, 2021, 04:24:12 pm
No, you pop the seam at the top, while checking carefully for banana spiders.
FWIW that''s what the monkeys and apes I've known do. Baboons use their teeth; chimps use their nails. With a bit of practice you can doo it one-handed and the skin you leave still looks like it has a banana inside. 
Title: Re: the peril of settings
Post by: Davef on 15 February, 2021, 06:43:25 pm
You have to be quite careful removing the banana from the bunch not to accidentally open it the difficult way.