EngrKeith

My daughter is thinking about attending Anglo-American University in Prague. The school is relatively cheap in comparison to most US schools, and offers (some?) Bachelor degrees in 3 years versus the traditional 4. AAU appears to be accredited, though I simply don't know enough about the various organizations to qualify how much so.

For typical US loan options, like Federal Stafford Loans, Parents PLUS loans, and Sallie Mae, AAU is not a participating school. There are hundreds of other schools in Europe listed, but not AAU. What options would be left? Unsecured private loans, which aren't eligible for deferral? Interest rates are likely to be high, there's much less protection if somethi

Traveling tomorrow from Wytheville to Anderson. Google maps suggests via Charlotte. Alternatively a longer route is through Asheville. It seems I'm either picking traffic or construction. What's easier w less fuss?

I figured a local would know. Thanks!

I've been using a Swiss Gear/Wenger Pegasus as a laptop backpack since 2008. It is an amazing bag and really has proven durable. The handle has cracked and it's simply time for a new bag. The one thing that has bugged me forever is that each zippered compartment is far too shallow. Works great for notebooks but horrible for anything thick like clothing -- anything deeper like 3-4 inches. It's never been super comfortable to carry on my back. The website claims 27.4L but it really doesn't feel like it.

Ideally I'd like something with a dedicated laptop section, perhaps 2, if possible. 15" or smaller laptops.

I'd like something durable, water resistant/proof, lifetime warranted, stylish b

I'm designing a PCB to interface with an expansion card on a Commodore Amiga 500 via a 20-pin PAL socket carrying Motorola 68K address signals. The board includes two ZIF sockets to compare PALs and logic analyzer headers to observe behavior. Only the reference PAL connects to the system. The bus runs at 7.14 MHz with ~560 ns memory cycles.

A simple extension from the machined-pin header to a ZIF socket doesn’t work, despite full continuity. Scope captures show more ringing, overshoot, and undershoot at the ZIF, suggesting a signal integrity issue. I'm probing carefully with ground springs, avoiding long leads. I recently replaced the main expansion board socket with a Preci-Dip gold mac

Placed an order early this morning for (5) 2-layer 3"x3" PCBs with 24-hour service and DHL shipping to the US.

Merchandise was $9.20 ($2 + $7.20 24-hr fee), shipping charge was $38.07, customs duties and taxes was $16.10, and then sales tax + credit card fee brought it to about $69 total.

Previous order was under $30 for the same service.

I understand a bunch of these policies are still in flux, and that perhaps things will be getting better soon, but I thought I'd share my experience.

I've written a Quarterback backup software file extractor that recovers files even in the presence of a corrupted file catalog.

Originally, it had no catalog support and simply dumped files into a single directory. It now attempts to process the primary catalog, restoring files/directories into their original locations. It tries to handle corruption automatically. There's command line options to ignore the catalog completely, and just retrieve the files.

There were at least two header formats used: a 16-byte header and a 20-byte header. I originally supported only 20-byte headers, but have also added a command line switch to support 16-byte ones.

The project is written in Python and

I really need help finding the hidden words within this data.

While this isn't encryption, but more like unintentional obfuscation or encoding, I've got a 680 byte binary file that contains three English words: "Porsche", "911", and "Turbo202" The words could be bit-shifted, or XOR'd with some value, spread out over multiple bytes. I don't think it's encrypted, and I don't think it's compressed.

The binary file is located here:

https://github.com/keithgh1/findmydirs/blob/main/FindPorsche911Turbo202.bin

I wasn't sure the best method for sharing this, and didn't want to clog your screens up with just some big list or array.

The background on this is that I'm reverse-engineering some

For PCB work/rework at home, I've got a 5" circular fluorescent tube magnifier from Office Depot. It works OK but the optics are not particularly clear. I find I have to have to perfectly positioned, and then only the center is in focus. It's mostly fine but I want to step my game up. I'd love to get a eyepiece-less stereo microscope like a Mantis or an Evo, but I'm not that rich.

I'm looking at either the Aven Tools Mighty Vue Inspector, or the Vision-Luxo Wave LED lighted magnifier. The camera is a fun addition on the Aven Tools, but unsure how useful yet. I do plug a USB microscope until an HDMI display, and it really is a game changer there.

Any thoughts to optical clarity between

I've got a 15-year old kid with an iphone. They want Bluetooth over the ear headphones that employ noise cancelling. Is a budget of $150 reasonable to get something of decent quality?

Budget and location - Under $150 USD. Amazon. B&H Photo Video. Sweetwater. Any other US-based retailers.

How the gear will be used - Connected via Bluetooth to an iphone. Main purpose is to block out distracting noises while listening to tswift via spotify when they are doing their homework.

Preferred tonal balance - I think an "average listening" profile for the type of music is fine.

Past gear experience - Limited. They love their Apple Airpods --- the cheaper, older generation ones. I love my Sen

I have approximately 20K PDFs where the filename, and PDF metadata Title field does not accurately reflect the content. I'm using Calibre to search/view them, but without accurate information it's impossible to know which is which. I don't want to manually review and correct each one myself.

My initial idea was to pay Amazon Mechanical Turks to review them, but it's fairly cost prohibitive. Even at pennies per PDF, assuming that's even a viable price, it's easily hundreds to low thousands of dollars.

After rejecting that idea, I wonder if chatgpt can't help me here. I extracted the text contents of a PDF, and fed it into chatgpt asking it to provide a good title for the content. It gave

I'm trying to decompress, on paper, the first dozen bytes from an LZW compressed file. This is a raw datastream with no headers from an early implementation from the late 80s. I believe it to be initially 9-bit codes.

Sample files here

https://imgur.com/a/2YlFIDf

For cutting and pasting,

https://gist.github.com/keithgh1/1c30d6fdc3b01025415d4c46c80044d8

What I need is to understand the exact steps to go from compressed bytes back to the original bytes. Should I be trying to parse the compressed version 9 bits at a time? Is the first byte handled differently? The first 9 bits are 011110001, which isn't 0x78. I can "see" the second original byte 0x53, in a left-shifted 0xA6 in the

I have images of the connector here

https://imgur.com/a/3g5vqvT

I'm looking to identify a digi-key, mouser, newark, etc part number of the connector in the images.

This is a 60-pin connector, which is 2 rows of 30 pins, which is used on an Agilent Logic Analyzer modules.

The dimensions are shown in the image. 39.53mm x 5.75mm tall for the inside portion, 50.62mm x 7.5mm tall for the entire black portion. Please see image.

Pin-to-pin pitch is 1.25mm, row-to-row spacing is 2.39mm. These are approximations center-to-center, but should be close.

I can't easily measure the male mating connector, but measuring the female, which is the connector I'm looking for, I measured 37.57mm