Radio controlled clock wrong? – Tips

Woman with clock Since people keep coming to my blog looking for hints on how to deal with wrong radio controlled clocks and find only my annoyed post about a particular specimen with its stupid programming that lets is be wrong on the days of daylight savings time changes, I thought I’d put together a few hints for other kinds of radio clock problems:

  • Don’t position it too far inside the building, closer to windows may be helpful (preferrably towards the transmitter, wherever that is for your area). This especially applies to buildings with reinforced concrete walls.
  • Not too close to other electronic devices, especially those transmitting radio signals themselves. Also, the proximity to metal objects can cause interferences.
  • Cheap receivers may have problems with weak batteries, so try fresh ones.
  • And you shouldn’t forget to look at the often available symbol indicating whether the clock still receives a signal at all. ;) For if it has to keep running off its own quartz, a cheap model might show visible differences after only a few days.

Further notes:

  • Since the signal data usually offers only very little means of error detection (single parity bits for parts of the data; even 2 (or 4 or 6…) bits received wron cannot be detected), low reception can easily cause the clock to set the wrong time, especially if it’s programmed (too) simply and does not compare the signals over several minutes to avoid such consistencies. (The time signal is transmitted every minute, containing 59 bits with 1 bit per second.)
  • Most clocks don’t check the signal all the time, but at most every hour or a few times per day – or just once, and hopefully not at 0:00 like the specimen I mentioned.

Hope this helps someone… If you got anything to add, note, or correct, feel free to do so in the comments.


Photo by Martin Schmid – Fotolia.com

Karma-astrologic computer character analysis

zodiac Another “real” find that is no satire from me… this time from the German newsgroup de.admin.net-abuse.mail (translated by me for your amusement):

A woman, famous for replying to her own postings, posted in a thread that originally was about her problems to deal with spam with her antique mail software (since she says she needs DOS for her oh so great astrology program) a complete horoscope of 685 lines in order to illustrate that a few lines that were formatted as tables with blanks look bad in proportional text. Even though that doesn’t really fit the newsgroup topic “mail abuse” – on the other hand, couldn’t you see such mails full of nonsense as net abuse, too…?

No, not a horoscope – that’s rather called “karma-astrologic computer character analysis”!

:loll: By the way, you could abbreviate that as “KACCA”, if you’d wanted to be that mean…

These nearly 30 kilobytes of text contain over 4200 words, nearly 90 lines with many numbers for planet positions and besides much long blather text (which I really didn’t read in its entirety) also 137 lines with brief outlines which seem to follow no particular topical order, even within the same line – so you can find, for instance (my translations):

You could offer sanitary services, are cheerful, easy-going.

So cheerfulness and easy-going is a good prerequisite for alternative practitioners and doctors? At least doctors at hospitals will probably run into problems when they’re too easy-going, too lazy, when you think about their working time…

Your home is nature. It is Everywhere ! Your birth is connected to a secret.

Oooh, a secret! Always looks good. So I was born somewhere in the wild? Or what other connection could there be?

You have a good memory. At some time, you have something to do with seafaring.

horoscope clipping Sure, completely obvious that these two things belong together. Note that these sentences don’t follow particular planet positions, planetary relationships or planetary gear sets (with sand in them) as their “meanings” but are listed one after another by the dozen (though they probably are automatically interpreted from (or into) this planet data, anyway).

If you combine some scattered sentences, you get combinations like these:

You design your family life in a harmonic way. You are forgiving.

You mostly release your power at home, sometimes even destructively.

In love affairs you are unsteady, searching an extraordinary partner.

Harmonically unfaithful family bashers or forgiving dish-throwers, step forward!

Also matching the third line above:

You are self-confident. You are proud, faithful and moral.

Unsteady faithfulness, well that’s it! Know that from somewhere…

You are a diplomat, happy, and can make peace.

Your emotional relationships consist of quarrel and tensions.

Now is that a contradiction or the perfect combination, since the diplomat part of the person has experience in quarrels – even though (s)he can use these only outside of her/his emotional relationships?

The best one, I think, is this one:

You have a notedly strong intellect and are able to express your thoughts and formulate them in scientific ways.

And that’s what the astrologer (or the program) writes directly to astrology believers!
:lol2:

 

» Earlier posts about “The art of astrologers” (lower part) and “trustworthy horoscopes”.
» Skeptic’s Dictionary: Astrology.

Statistics!!!

At statista.com there are numerous statistics data of a lot of German surveys, “over 1 million“, they say – and not just small ones like in some blogs, but real, representative ones by major institutes.

The servers currently seem to ache under the number of visitors…

You can embed the statistics easily – I picked this one as an example:

Do you have a web blog (online diary) of your own?

Unmarried ones are blogging more than in another family status, and, no wonder, young people more than old people:

statista-blog

The differences between the sexes are very low and almost dissolve in rounding errors (men blog a little more), similar to monthly income with intermediate incomes blogging a little less.

Survey by: Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach, January to August 2007, published on 16.10.2007. 7594 German internet users aged 14-64 were asked.

(via Golem)

Music Quiz 15

Welcome to the latest edition of my music quiz. This time it’s a little different again…

The following image describes one line of the song that you have to find out:

music quiz 15

If needed, ;) I’ll post another image for more lines later, and of course I’ll give more hints and answers to questions and suggestions you might have… :mrgreen:

17:29: This picture describes the next two lines (or one, depending of how you write it):

Musik-Quiz 15.2

Solved :clap: by Buntklicker: “Don’t Stop Me Now” by Queen with the lines:

I am a sex machine ready to reload
Like an atom bomb about to
Oh oh oh oh oh explode

Thanks for participating!