Wimshurst machine

Natasha is working on a Wimshurst machine for a science fair project. I had one as a child myself and apparently talked about it enough for her to somehow remember it fondly. This is a machine for generating static electricity that can be manually powered. With luck it can generate substantial sparks, but I have read that it took some people many weeks of tuning and she has about 10 days to complete and tune her assembly.

Although Krys and I each wanted to suggest some design ideas, she insisted on inventing a design of her own without really having any input from us. In many ways this was kind of frustrating, but she came up with a very neat design based on plumbing supplies, and is probably more proud of it this way. It's far from finished but the partly-assembled device on the kitchen table, even though it's held together only with masking tape, can already generate a tiny bit of voltage.

  

dvb kernel 2.6 and vdr stutters

This is a very technical entry.

In recently building a 2.6 linux kernel (2.6.18 specifically) for use with vdr using dvb, I found that vdr delivered poor performance, slow response and generally was unresponsive. This seemed to be fixed, to a large extent, by recompiling the kernel with Preemption Model set to "No Forced Preemption (Server)". This can be found under the 2.6.18 menu configuration under

    Processor type and features  ---> 

      Preemption Model (No Forced Preemption (Server))  ---> 

           (X) No Forced Preemption (Server)