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On Wed, 2006-11-22 at 22:16 +0000, Neil Will > > Are you going to be using some form of UPS between the machine and the > generator? Computers don't like variations in voltage. This is the next problem to be solved >;) once one gets restored a gennie (having a supply of biodiesel or filtered straight oil - these things will burn straight oil). But what I am concerned about is getting stuck with "a part" which might/will fail, and then finding that part is unavailable. One could get a set of spares I suppose. Or one could breadboard up one's own circuits using utterly standard components that can reasonably be expected to be in production forever. Or perhaps not even for that stuff - with the growth of integration onto single wafers etc. the time may come when even an individual condenser/diode/resister ceases to be a seperate component to be de/soldered onto a breadboard... I'm not up on power supply and voltage regulation in general, from pretty well first principles. What sort of thing would one want to build into the system - and what sort of thing would one want to build into the system that broke first (and cheaply and easily replaced) if something went wrong? The reason why I'm raising the issue of off grid in DC lug is that it is by definition I would have thought one of the more rural lug cohorts (or perhaps not) and people around with experience or know people with experience of off grid working, possibly as a necessity rather than as an option to give vent to my frustrated creative drives and 41 year ecological committment as of last June (when I read Silent Spring 'cos that year in the part of Ontario I lived it really, really was ... a silent spring ... I had a real row with the library about borrowing the book as they thought it was unsuitable for a 9 yr old. This was essentially political censorship. They were even less pleased when I put in an order later that year or next year for Murray Bookchin's newly published .... oh sh*t I've just had one of those senior moments about its title, something about the manmade world or summat. That book had a profound effect upon my political and intellectual development, as did getting my hands on a newly published complete collection of George Orwell writings and then the stuff from out of '68. By the time I got around to Marx that summer the damage was done - his scientific reductionism crap blew it, as if one could play that sort of cogs and wheels games with complex socioeconomic and cultural psychological systems. Still, a lot of very useful analytical stuff to be used in science and social policy and environmental work and open source software movement, for instance, bears reading Marxian analyses to a surprising degree, and even more particularly the earlier stuff like Grundrisse and 1848 manuscripts. He wasn't far off with regards to corporatisation and globalisation, bt the worm in the apple core was of course Leninism. Would have arisen from the science kick crap with his or someone elses name, really no escape from "the end of politics" once he lost his way from the fertile pastures of the manuscripts, so for most of us technofreak alternative tekky tyoes we looked to older formations like the English Cuvul War stuff for inspiration. Eclectiscsm is the watchword, basically, and openn source people could do with some self educaion in intellectual histgory and ideology, if only to avoid repeating history as farce... -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html