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Tuesday, December 31st, 2019

Les voiles écarlates

Translation: [ Google | Babelfish ]

Categories: [ Books/Comics/Largo Winch ]

ISBN: B07T2H6SCQ

© Amazon.fr

Largo rencontre un criminel russe qui lui apprend que le groupe W est coté sur un marché souterrain et qu'il a machiné la perte de valeur du groupe W afin de gagner de l'argent sur ce marché là, où il avait parié sur la baisse de la cotation du groupe W. Aidé d'une agent du FSB infiltrée chez le criminel, Largo s'enfuit et trouve refuge chez un homme d'affaires Russe avent de rentrer aux États-Unis et de refiscaliser son groupe. Un peu plus tard, il apprend que l'homme d'affaires Russe est à l'origine du complot, car ce dernier avait parié sur la hausse de la cotation du groupe W sur le marché souterrain et voulait d'abord faire baisser la cotation autant que possible.

[ Posted on December 31st, 2019 at 01:10 | no comment | ]

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Monday, December 30th, 2019

Amber

Categories: [ Books/Comics/Golden City ]

ISBN: 9782413018742

© Amazon.fr

Harrison est élu maire de Golden City. Lors de la fête, Solo est tué par une bande de gosses de riches qui voulaient s'amuser avec un pauvre. Ses amis enquêtent pour trouver ce qui lui est arrivé. En parallèle, les opposants politiques de Harrison révèlent à la presse que l'une de ses entreprises en Russie fait du trafic d'organes volés sur des cadavres. Harrison se rend sur place, se frotte à la mafia locale qui le fait mettre en prison lorsqu'il refuse de continuer le trafic. Lorsque le criminel torture Amber, Il fait mine d'accepter sa proposition, mais le fait assassiner sitôt rentré à Golden City.

[ Posted on December 30th, 2019 at 19:23 | 1 comment | ]

Un caillou sur la tête

Translation: [ Google | Babelfish ]

Categories: [ Books/Comics/Troy ]

ISBN: 9782302078949

© Amazon.fr

Pour sauver le village troll d'une boule de feu tombant du ciel, Waha arrête le temps dans tout le village. Elle part alors à la recherche d'un dragon de neige pour éteindre le feu avant de laisser le temps reprendre son cours. Elle trouve un dragon dans une station de sports d'hiver, mais ce dernier est lié par contrat à la station et ne peut la quitter. Waha parvient à détruire le contrat, à faire venir le dragon au village et à sauver les trolls.

[ Posted on December 30th, 2019 at 19:14 | no comment | ]

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Anges et faucons

Translation: [ Google | Babelfish ]

Categories: [ Books/Comics/Yoko Tsuno ]

ISBN: B07QL3X7M2

© Amazon.fr

Dans une première partie, Yoko, Emilie et Bonnie repartent en 1935 pour sauver deux enfants d'un accident sur un passage à niveau. Dans une deuxième partie, Yoko et Emilia doivent convoyer par avion deux momies égyptiennes qu'un lord Anglais veut renvoyer en Égypte. Emilia apprend de Dinah, la pupille du lord, que la deuxième momie est en fait le corps de l'épouse du lord que ce dernier a tuée et embaumée trois ans plus tôt avec l'aide forcée de Dinah. Lors du vol, elles découvrent à bord de l'avion une bombe dont elles se débarrassent et de preuves que le lord est un espion travaillant pour les Chinois. Ayant fait demi-tour, elles sont attaqués à l'atterrissage par le lord qui y perd la vie.

[ Posted on December 30th, 2019 at 19:08 | no comment | ]

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La vallée des immortels - Tome 2 : Le millième bras du Mekong

Categories: [ Books/Comics/Blake et Mortimer ]

ISBN: 9782870972816

© Amazon.fr

Arrivé à Hong Kong, Blake part à la recherche de Mortimer. Pendant ce temps, ce dernier est transporté par ses ravisseurs vers leur camp en Chine continentale. Il apprend que le chef de ces derniers veut utiliser le texte caché dans un objet historique volé pour le légitimer comme dernier descendant d'un empereur du passé qui aurait obtenu la vie éternelle mais aurait disparu après avoir refusé d'em payer le prix. Durant sa captivité, Mortimer retrouve Nasir, très malade, et pour le soigner s'enfuit avec la complicité d'un malfrat qui veut un trésor mentionné dans la légende de l'empereur. Après un périple ils trouvent l'empereur, toujours en vie, et Mortimer parvient à trouver le remède magique pour Nasir. Il est recueilli par hasard par Blake, parvient à guerir Nasir, puis tous s'enfuient à bord de l'Aile Rouge que le chef des criminels avait récupérée et que Mortimer était censé réparer lors de sa captivité. Pendant ce temps, Olrik vole le prototype secret Britannique, mais échappe à sa destruction par les autorités.

[ Posted on December 30th, 2019 at 18:35 | no comment | ]

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La fille de Vercingétorix

Translation: [ Google | Babelfish ]

Categories: [ Books/Comics/Asterix ]

ISBN: 9782864973423

© Amazon.fr

Deux Arvernes confient Adrénaline, la fille de Vercingétorix, au village Gaulois pour la protéger des Romains qui veulent la capturer. Adrénaline, qui refuse de continuer à servir aux Gaulois et aux Romains de prétexte pour se faire la guerre, s'enfuit sur le navire des pirates. Le navire est attaqué d'abord par un renégat Gaulois au service des Romains, puis par les Romains eux-mêmes. Elle finit par partir sur le navire d'un jeune Breton, affrété par les Arvernes, et qui devait à l'origine la mettre à l'abri en Bretagne.

[ Posted on December 30th, 2019 at 18:19 | no comment | ]

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Sunday, December 22nd, 2019

Time Bandits

Categories: [ TV/Cinema ]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Bandits

Wikipedia

One night, Kevin is woken up in his room by a knight in armor coming out of his cupboard, who soon disappears without a trace. The next night, ready with a Polaroid camera, a band of dwarves appear and take him with them to the time of Napoléon's Italian campaign. They manage to loot Napoléon's treasure and use a map they have stolen from the Supreme Being to escape to the time of Robin Hood (who takes all their loot to give to the poor). Meanwhile, the Evil One is influencing the dwarves in order to attract them to his castle and steal the map. Escaping from Robin Hood's time, Kevin is sent to Mycenaean Greece where he meets Agamemnon, who takes him as an adoptive son. The dwarves reappear as a group of entertainers, steal some treasure and take the boy with them aboard the Titanic. After the ship has sunk, Evil transports the group to his Time of Legends, where they are rescued by the ship of an ogre. They escape the giant who carries the ship as his hat, and finally arrive at the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness, where Evil takes the map and locks them up in a cage hanging above a bottomless pit. The group manages to escape by swinging from the cage to the edge of the pit, finds Evil's headquarters, steal the map and split. The dwarves go away using the map while Kevin attempts to distract Evil, until the band comes back from various time periods with weapons and warriors. They prove unsuccessful and all seems lost when Evil suddenly bursts into flames. The Supreme Being appears and explains he had influenced the dwarves into stealing the map so that they would test the abilities of Evil (yet another creation of the Supreme Being). The dwarves collect the ashes of Evil, and then leave with the Supreme Being, leaving Kevin alone. Kevin then wakes up in his bed, the house on fire, and is taken out by a fireman. His parents then discover one smouldering remain of Evil, touch it and disappear. The whole world then gets rolled up into the map.

[ Posted on December 22nd, 2019 at 23:30 | no comment | ]

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Samuel Smith's Oatmeal Stout

Categories: [ Beer/Samuel Smith ]

Samuel_Smith_Oatmeal_Stout

Nice stout, quite sweet. Contains barley and oatmeal.

Samuel Smith, Tadcaster, North Yorkshire, England. 5% alcohol

[ Posted on December 22nd, 2019 at 23:07 | no comment | ]

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Monday, December 16th, 2019

Les vacances de monsieur Hulot

Translation: [ Google | Babelfish ]

Categories: [ TV/Cinema/Tati ]

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Vacances_de_monsieur_Hulot

Wikipedia

Monsieur Hulot passe ses vacances à la mer. Il parle peu, se montre maladroit et commet bourde sur bourde (il repeint un canot qui se casse en deux et ressemble à là gueule d'un monstre marin ; il crève un pneu de son tacot sur le chemin d'un pique-nique et se retrouve dans un cimetière durant un enterrement ; il se perd la nuit dans une cabane remplie de feux d'artifices et les fait tous brûler). À la fin des vacances tout le monde quitte l'hôtel ; il ne s'est rien passé de notable.

[ Posted on December 16th, 2019 at 21:02 | no comment | ]

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Samuel Smith's Nut Brown Ale

Categories: [ Beer/Samuel Smith ]

Samuel_Smith_s_Nut_Brown_Ale

“palate of beech nuts, almonds and walnuts”

Maybe a bit nutty, but just another ale. Contains malted barley.

Samuel Smith, Tadcaster, North Yorkshire, England. 5% alcohol

[ Posted on December 16th, 2019 at 20:06 | no comment | ]

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Saturday, December 14th, 2019

Battery Capacity Meter

Categories: [ Science ]

I have over forty Ni-MH low self-discharge rechargeable batteries (mostly Eneloops, and a few Vartas and GPs) and I have noticed that some of them tend to not keep the charge very well. In order to find out which ones are worth throwing away to be recycled, I needed a device that would measure their capacity.

The principle is very simple: recharge the battery, discharge it through a resistor with a known value, measure the current while it discharges, and integrate the current over time. This will give you the battery's capacity. A few things need to be taken into account: how do you know that a battery is depleted and what discharge current should be used? From what I could gather by reading a few Web forums, the battery is considered to be depleted when its voltage goes below 1.0 V or 0.9 V (I settled on 1.0 V), and the current should be such that the battery discharges in about five hours (for a 2000 mAh battery, that would be about 400 mA). If the current is too high, the battery's voltage while it is discharging will be very close to 1.0 V already at the beginning of the process and the capacity measurement will probably be biased. I noticed this in the first iteration of the device where I had a 1 Ω resistor and a 1 A current, and decided to change for a 3.3 Ω resistor after reading about the “discharge in 5 hours” rule.

The device

battery_capacity_meter

The prototype I built is very simple. The battery discharges through a 3.3 Ω ±1% 0.6 W resistor, and the voltage is measured using the Arduino's ADC (more on that below). A MOSFET (STMicroelectronics VNP35NV04-E, quite expensive but it turns fully On with only 2.5 VGS and its On resistance is only 13 mΩ, which is below the tolerance of the main resistor and the accuracy of what the Arduino can measure, so it can simply be ignored) controls the discharge and cuts the current once the “depleted” threshold has been reached to prevent damaging the battery. A 10 kΩ resistor acts as a pull-down for the MOSFET's gate, and a 110 Ω limits the gate current (whether it's really needed or not seems to depend whom you ask on Web forums, but since I had some lying around I decided to use them). There are two instances of the circuit on the prototype board, so I can test two batteries in parallel.

Accuracy of the Arduino's ADC

The Arduino's ADC has a maximum precision of 10 bits, meaning that the value read from e.g., A0 is translated to a value between 0 and 1023 included, by comparing A0 to a reference voltage that by default is the Arduino's supply voltage. It is however possible to get (reasonably) accurate voltage measurement with the Arduino (see this Web post titled Secret Arduino Voltmeter) by measuring first the supply voltage accurately against the ATMega328's internal band-gap reference. To do so, you need to first measure the band-gap reference's correct value (it's about 1.1 V, it's very stable over time and temperature, but it's exact value differs from one ATMega328 to the next).

The process therefore goes like this.

  1. With a trusted voltmeter, measure the Arduino's supply voltage VCC as accurately as possible.
  2. Using the code snippet in the blog post, measure the band-gap's value with the ADC; that gives you a number Nref. For better accuracy, compute the arithmetic mean of 1000 measurements to get rid of the random fluctuations in the measurement.
  3. Calculate Vref = Nref × Vcc / 1024 (and not 1023 as stated in the blog post). In my case, Vref = 1.089 V ±0.001V.
  4. Hardcode the Vref you have found in your Arduino program.

Then when you want to actually measure a voltage V with the Arduino's ADC, do as follows.

  1. Measure Nref with the ADC and compute the value of Vcc = Vref × 1024 / Nref (again, take the average of 1000 measurements).
  2. Measure N with the ADC and compute the value V = N × Vcc / 1024 (once again, average over 1000 measurements).

If my uncertainty calculations are correct, I get a 0.12% uncertainty on the value of Vcc (compounding the uncertainty of the voltmeter and the ADC), which is less than the 1% uncertainty on the discharge resistor value. I tried to accurately measure the 3.3 Ω resistor value, but my amperemeter is not accurate enough for currents above 200 mA, so that's the best I can hope to achieve.

Take a look at the code if you want to know the details of the implementation (especially computing in millivolts in order to use only integers instead of floats).

What about those batteries, then?

I measured the capacity of 27 batteries so far: 2 GPs, 3 Vartas and 22 Eneloops (6 of generation 1, 7 of generation 2, 2 of generation 3 and 7 of generation 4). All have a nominal capacity of 1900 mAh.

Both GPs have a capacity of 1 mAh, so they are useful only as paperweights. The Vartas have capacities of 870, 450 and 250 mAh, so they are only marginally more useful than the GPs.

One Eneloop is in really bad shape (200 mAh), but the others have capacities between 1660 and 1900 mAh, with a mean of 1790 mAh.

eneloop-gen4-Q

This is a typical battery, in good shape (1890 mAh). The voltage quickly drops to around 1.2 V and remains stable for a while before dropping again.

eneloop-gen4-D

This one is definitely good for nothing (200 mAh). I remember accidentally dropping batteries on the floor a couple of times in the past, maybe this one suffered from it?

eneloop-gen1-M

This one is a first generation eneloop, bought probably around 2011. It still has a capacity of 1660 mAh, but the shape of the curve is different from the typical one, maybe due to old age?

[ Posted on December 14th, 2019 at 17:08 | no comment | ]

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Thursday, December 12th, 2019

Beethoven's 5th

Categories: [ TV/Cinema ]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beethoven%27s_5th_(film)

Wikipedia

Sara and Beethoven spend the summer at Sara's uncle Freddy in a small town called Quicksilver. During at stroll in the mountain, Beethoven returns with an old 10 dollar bill which is quickly identified as part of the treasure hidden by a bank robber couple in the 1920s, and is worth a lot more to collectors. Soon many inhabitants go searching for the loot, while Sara gets repeatedly threatened by someone who obviously doesn't want her to find the treasure. Searching for information about the robbers, Sara and her friend Garrett start by suspecting the grumpy librarian, but they eventually manage to get Beethoven to lead them to the treasure (in the old mine) where they are attacked by the head of the local chamber of commerce; the librarian is innocent even if he's the direct descendant of the robbers.

[ Posted on December 12th, 2019 at 22:42 | no comment | ]

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Monday, December 9th, 2019

Ghostbusters (2016)

Categories: [ TV/Cinema ]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostbusters_(2016_film)

Wikipedia

Abby's career in astrophysics comes to an abrupt end when her dean discovers she had she appears in a video with her friend Erin (who does scientific research on paranormal phenomena in a lesser university and gets kicked out as well) documenting an authentic apparition in an old New York manor. With the help of Erin's lab engineer Jillian, they decide to do proper scientific research on the topic, setting up their laboratory above a Chinese restaurant. They are called by Patty, an MTA employee who also witnesses an apparition in the metro, and discover that the ghost has been “called” by an electronic device. Jillian develops gadgets capable to grab a ghost and eventually trap it. They get into trouble when a debunker gets killed by the ghost he released from the trap, and are told by the mayor that supernatural activity is usual in New York, under the jurisdiction of the DHS, and that they must keep it quiet. The team eventually discovers that a man called Rowan is planting the devices is specific locations to eventually cause a paranormal catastrophe. They locate the main device in the basement of a hotel, but cannot prevent Rowan from dying of electrocution. Rowan killed himself on purpose, to take control of the army of ghosts that he releases. While the police and DHS agents are subdued by the ghosts, the Ghostbusters manage to go through and throw their car and its nuclear generator into the vortex coming out of Rowan's device, effectively closing it.

[ Posted on December 9th, 2019 at 20:43 | no comment | ]

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Sunday, December 8th, 2019

Belhaven Black

Categories: [ Beer/Belhaven ]

Belhaven_Black

“Scottish triple malts… chocolate malts… fresh roasted aroma… hint of coffee… dark chocolate complexity… hopped with Challenger”

Roasted yes, chocolate not really. Contains oats and malted barley.

Belhaven Brewery Company Ltd., Dunbar, Scotland. 4.2% alcohol.

[ Posted on December 8th, 2019 at 11:57 | no comment | ]

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Tuesday, December 3rd, 2019

Beethoven's 2nd

Categories: [ TV/Cinema ]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beethoven%27s_2nd_(film)

Wikipedia

Beethoven meets a female St. Bernard named Missy, just before she is kidnapped by Regina, the ex-wife of her owner who wants to pressure her ex-husband for money. Beethoven manages to find Missy and they have puppies together, before Missy is taken again. The Newton children find and raise the puppies in the absence of their mother, at first hiding them from their grumpy father. Then the whole family and the dogs go away in the mountains for the 4th of July. There Beethoven finds Missy again (her kidnapper happens to spend her vacation in the same place as the Newtons) and escapes with her into the mountain. Regina steals the puppies from the Newtons and then goes after the two escaped dogs. She is followed by the Newtons who eventually catch up with her, defeat her and recover the puppies with Beethoven's help.

[ Posted on December 3rd, 2019 at 22:49 | no comment | ]

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Sunday, December 1st, 2019

Little Valley Moor Ale

Categories: [ Beer/Little Valley ]

Little_Valley_Moor_Ale

“smokey flavours and hints of moorland heather”

Not distinctly smokey, a bit sweet, not bad. Contains malted barley, malted wheat, peat malted barley.

Little Valley Brewery, Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, England. 5.5% alcohol.

[ Posted on December 1st, 2019 at 21:24 | no comment | ]

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