Quote:
Originally Posted by McMurdo
My grandma used the end of her walking stick to turn off the MK dolly-switched wall socket to control the Bush tv. The on-off-vol control was too stiff with too small a knob for her arthritic fingers to operate. I still turn stuff off at the wall socket, the kitchen tv, the PC & monitor, the scanner, soldering iron, phone charger etc. I love switched sockets and when I moved here I changed all the unswitched ones to switched. I can leave the plugs in with leads tidily routed out of the way, and just flick them off knowing they're not idling in standby, cooking their cheap chinese SMPSU capacitors or wearing out the 220K bootstrap resistors.
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[The following is a copy & paste of a USENET post I made ten years ago.]
Does anyone remember those sets in the 70's that had "touch tuning"
The tuner buttons were just metal disks that relied on earth-leakage
through your body. They didn't work too well when the set was
connected via an isolating transformer, which you were wise to
use when servicing. In a damp house the set would randomly change
channels on its own.
Anyway when I worked for Granada TV Rental I upgraded
a customer to a Finlandia (Salora) TV with "sensomatic"
channel-change. This was before remote control was the norm
(we were to take industrial action against the company, as we thought
we should get a pay rise for that kind of new-technology)
Anyway, back to this subscriber (that's what we called them back
then)
He was disabled and it was his practice to change channels on
his old set by prodding the buttons with his walking stick.
So it looked for a while as if this new set was going to be unsuitable.
So I had a think and asked him if he has a few kitchen and garden items.
What I did was to tape some aluminium foil to both ends of a garden
cane with a length of wire connecting them together.
I think he gave me a bottle of something for my trouble.
--
Graham.
%Profound_observation%