Monday, October 29, 2018

Cost effective digital printing

Cost-effective digital printing with attention to detail

Interested in the latest technology in digital printing? Even without expensive printing plates or printing patterns, digital direct printing is possible, which it achieves the better results of textile prints in the high photo quality. This is particularly suitable for single pieces and short runs, because this method allows quick and easy creation.

In this article we show the functionality of digital direct printing. On a checklist, all their peculiarities are summarized to help you decide which benefits you will derive from it.

Preparations

Without costly or expensive preparations, an automated process is seamlessly integrated into the production, so that in a good price / performance ratio of the digital direct printing for large orders and unique items are unrivalled for the customer.

The operation of digital direct printing

If you want to apply digital illustrations and vector graphics true to detail and colourfast on textiles, you have the opportunity to benefit from the advantages of digital direct printing. It works in a similar way to ordinary paper printers, but allows for photo quality prints and fine gradients. Unlike traditional printing processes, there are no additional costs involved in setting up the textile printer so that production can begin immediately upon receipt of the data as it supports common file formats of the software known on the Internet. Once the design is aligned, textiles previously prepared for printing can be printed directly.

Fast and easy finishing of textiles

Due to the perfect ratio of price to performance, this printing process is just right for your small orders. Also, without special time pressure large orders can be carried out quickly when using the digital printing. Promotional items, as well as clothing and bags, are printed immediately after receipt of the order, so you get the ordered goods delivered after only a few hours after receiving your order. With digital direct printing, many complex motifs can be realized without additional effort, which can not be achieved with conventional printing processes.

The finished textiles are washable in the washing machine up to 40° C due to the particularly tear-resistant imprint. Thus, the textile will shine even after many years of wearing still as new. In the production no presettings are necessary, that you can also create small series cost-effective. Digital direct printing is one of the most widely used methods for enhancing its textiles with photos and motifs. Interesting color gradients and outstanding motifs irritate the technology and make every product a real eye-catcher.

Powerful Brother printers are often used for textile printing. They allow a particularly true-to-original contour sharpness and color intensity. Each imprint is fixed in a second step using a drying tunnel. This ensures that the required light increases the wash resistance and thus improves its elasticity. The result may be reminiscent of a screen printing, but in this case has significantly filigree color gradients and contours.

Thanks to its innovative technology, the color result radiates a special shine even with dark textiles. Various file formats, such as tiff, jpg and png, can be printed in any structure and hue without further editing. The manufacture of the textiles themselves is ecological and sustainable, since when used in the selection of printing materials on the application of harmful chemicals is omitted. This not only protects nature, but also your skin.

Preparation the files

Textile printers can handle almost all file formats. You should be careful to choose at least a resolution of 300 dpi. This prevents motive from being rendered "pixelated", which would otherwise make the expression on the T-shirt look weird. You should also use a transparent background. So not only completely dark or bright, so that no rectangular edge is created and the motif shines in its full beauty.

In its particularly elaborate production of flex and Flockdruck is one of the most commonly used Plottdruckverfahren. Specially cut films provide a fascinating look when using flexographic printing, even if the photo print is sometimes velvety and matt.

Small and medium transfer printing

For small and medium runs of transfer printing, flex and flock printing is of particular interest. For textiles made of complicated materials for printing, the transfer printing impresses with its brilliant colors and longevity.

For motives with few color areas, the flex and flock printing is therefore particularly suitable. Even highly detailed motifs are cut at high volumes of precise machines. The cutting plotter will prepare a special foil for each color layer, which will then be "latticed" by hand. An optimal cut of the desired motif is created, which is applied to the product with the printing press to produce the final product.

Saturday, October 20, 2018

Golden era of pinball machines

A pinball machine is an electro mechanical coin operated arcade game. It works by the principle of scoring points by directing one or more metal balls on a game board separated from the player by a window. The main goal is to achieve a high score. The secondary goal is to play as long as possible without the ball leaving game board and possibly obtaining extra balls and win a replay. This type of game was a great success from the 1950s to the late 1990s, to the point of entering the pop culture. Many cafes and restaurants offered them to their customers. There were also specialized gaming rooms known as arcades

History

The pinball as we know today derived from the French game Bagatelle around 1770 and the Japanese billiard, it was fully developed in Chicago in the 1930s by mechanics and electricians who were unemployed because of the financial crisis of 1929. By gambling for money it was banned in several major US cities soon after. Cash was later replaced by replays to make pinball legal. The electro mechanic was replaced by electronic (solid state) in 1976. Pinball suffered a decline in the 1980s as a result of the rise of video games. And major manufacturers like Williams, who had previously acquired Bally, went out of business in 1999 and Gottlieb in 1996, leaving Stern as the only manufacturer.

Score

Counting of points with the pinball machine is rather particular and arbitrary. The scores of very old machines were counted in hundreds of thousands points which were displayed by lamps signaling a row of 100,000 and was left to the user to add them. The arrival of electro mechanical wheel counters brought the scores down to hundreds of points, with a lamp lighting a number "1" at the top of the 3 digits when it was above 999.

In the 1970s, with the arrival of electronic displays, the scores began to count thousands or tens of thousands of points. This "inflation" continued until the mid-1990s, when several games allowed up to millions of points to get a free game. Quite recently the counting of points returned to more reasonable values.

Friday, October 5, 2018

Ben Daglish passed away

The Commodore 64 community mourns Ben Daglish who passed away October 1st 2018.

Ben was well known to many who spent their teens in front of their 8bit computer as composer from video games. Tunes like Last Ninja, Auf Wiedersehen Monty, Bombo or Bulldog remain classics to this day. You can download many of his music in original C64 format my SID download web page.

He was born in London in England and later moved to Sheffield. Besides the breadbox he also composed music on other computers from the 1980s, including the Amstrad CPC and the Sinclair Spectrum. He was 52 years old.


Ben's famous Trap demo which blew away many Commodore 64 users in 1986.

Saturday, September 29, 2018

Plane crashes in aviation history

Definition of a plane crash

An air accident, also known as "plane crash", is an event related to the operation of an aircraft that results in the death or serious injury to one or more persons and often irreparable damage to the body shell of the aircraft. An event involving flight safety without serious consequences is considered an air incident. The term air disaster is used by the media, especially for accidents involving an airliner. In most accidents is only one plane involved. Mid-air collisions of two planes are rare. The attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) 9/11 are not considered air accidents.

States may establish an authority to ensure flight safety and accident investigation. These agencies, as well as a few non-governmental organizations, maintain databases whose purpose is to advance security. All American airlines, be it Delta Air Lines or United Airlines experienced fatal crashes.

The main reason is bad weather in combination with human error misjudging the thunderstorm in front. Other problems of human errors include not to communicate in the cockpit. Problems leading to structural damage include design flaws, material fatigue or mistakes in maintenance of an airplane.



The development of statistics groups air accidents according to various criteria, thus makes it possible to raise the awareness of manufacturers, operators, crew, air traffic controllers, maintenance personal and others by identifying the primary or secondary causes of accidents.

  • Destruction of the plane in flight: collision between two planes, major structural defect, fire, terrorist attack, interception by the Air Defense of the country overflown
  • Destruction of the structure on impact with the ground, better known as "crash": navigation error and striking an obstacle, serious mechanical incident forcing the pilot to attempt an emergency landing
  • Ground accidents: collision between a plane in take-off or landing with another aircraft that has entered the runway

The vast majority of accidents concern general aviation but the media and the public are mainly interested in accidents involving airliners.

The International Civil Aviation Organization - ICAO

The ICAO definitions and the resulting statistics relate to motorized aircraft used by organizations or civil companies. States relying on ICAO recommendations to establish an investigative agency may, however, extend the scope of the jurisdiction to include non-motorized aircraft accidents, unmanned aircraft on board and military uses, but excluding related cases.

Aim of the ICAO is the recommendation of an accident analysis process to investigate the causes and to derive actions to improve safety. The accident report establishes the primary cause and, often, the sequence of secondary causes that contributed to the problem. These conclusions are of interest to manufacturers and equipment manufacturers, airlines or operators, crews, navigation controllers and maintenance services. The determination of responsibilities does not fall within the scope of investigations.

The term "disaster" does not appear in the official texts but appears in the media when the accident concerns the commercial air transport of passengers. The notion of "catastrophe" is also changing in relation to the increase in traffic and the increase in the size of aircraft.

General aviation and, in particular, light aviation generate far more accidents than air transport, but they are rarely the subject of media coverage at the national level. Air accidents related to military activities, training and missions outside conflict, are rarely the subject of a report made public that could reveal classified information.

Aircraft accident investigations aim to improve flight safety. An accident rarely has a single cause. Unofficial reports or databases compiling accidents most often identify a determining cause, but the report of the investigative office looks for the causes that generate or participate in the determining cause as well as the errors of perception or action that did not allow corrections or palliatives. The report is used by the Official Services to modify the standards and by the manufacturers, operators, crews, air traffic control service and maintenance workshops to modify the procedures. In principle, the report of the investigative office does not determine the responsibilities but is an essential element for any legal action.

Wednesday, September 5, 2018

Stingray 1985 - 1987 series underrated

There is a movie from 2019 called Stingray, also known as Raymond, starring Joel Edgerton, Jon Bernthal and Anthony Hayes. I wonder if this is a sequel to the series by the same name which was originally aired in two seasons from 1985 to 1987 with a pilot of 90 minutes from 1984, featuring Canadian Actor Nick Mancuso, which I want to talk about.

I didn't watch it then. May be I thought it's another series with a talking car full of electronics. I thought of Knight Rider's K.I.T.T. Also Street Hawk, the series with an experimental super bike, came to my mind so I just ignored it.

Recently someone on Youtube showed a video composed of 1980s intros of shows loved by us teens then. Stingray was among them. I was instantly hooked by the musical score. Sounded to me like straight from Miami Vice and Jan Hammer on the keyboard. Instead it was done by Mike Post, Pete Carpenter, and Walter Murphy. Amazing!

I ordered a DVD set and enjoyed this short lived US series. "Ray", as he was called by others, is untouchable and almost always has full control of any situation. Even when it seemed he now takes some beating or was betrayed he will come out on top instead. Then he vanishes silently and without a trace like he appeared. He only revealed his real name once by whispering into the ear of somebody so the audience wouldn't know.

The series was well underrated. May be the move to the filming location in Vancouver in Canada, with its bad weather conditions in the second season and thus bad plots, led to the series cancellation. Too bad. If it would had stayed in sunny California it would had deserved a third season in my opinion.

Sunday, September 2, 2018

CP/M, the first operating system

The operating system CP/M

CP/M, the acronym for Control Program/Monitor or Microcomputer, is an operating system created in the year 1974 by Gary Kildall, founder of Digital Research. It is used on 8-bit Amstrad CPC and Amstrad PCW, Commodore 128, TRS-80, Osborne 1, BBC Micro, ZX Spectrum. It also found use on PCs, including the standard Amstrad PC-1512 in addition to MS-DOS and GEM.

For the Apple II, Microsoft created in 1980 the Z-80 Soft Card expansion card that allowed the use of the operating system of Digital Research. Early versions of MS-DOS were largely inspired, if not copied by CP/M.

Organization of memory

The memory of a computer under CP/M is divided into four parts:

  • BIOS: The Basic Input Output System for serial peripherals. It handles peripherals, floppy disks, monitor printers, etc. Usually, the BIOS occupies the "high" part of the memory.
  • BDOS: The basic disk operating system primitives. It contains the operating system. Usually, the BDOS is under the BIOS.
  • CCP (console command processor): Usually, the CCP is under the BDOS. This part of the CP/M corresponds to the user interface.
  • TPA (transient program area): This part of the memory starts at 100 (hexadecimal address). It is intended for user programs.

The different types of files

CP/M system stores files on floppy disks according to a specific logical organization, which has not been taken over by MS-DOS and can fill the disks. CP/M can also handle hard disks. In fact, as the BIOS is open, as clearly described in the documentation that Digital Research provided with some of its software, so it is possible to adapt any particular CP/M system to any available mass memory and devices available. Some computers running CP/M were originally sold with hard drives. Altos is one example.

Each file has a name and an extension.

  • ASM: assembler source file
  • PRN: assembler listing file
  • HEX: Machine language presented as a series of hexadecimal octets in Intel format
  • BAS: BASIC source file
  • INT: intermediate basic file
  • COM: command file, memory dump file, starting at address 100 hexadecimal under CP/M. Executable files always have the extension .COM
  • SUB: a file with a sequence of commands to be processed in batch mode by the command SUBMIT.
  • BAK: backup file is often used by word processing programs
  • $$$: temporary file, used for example by SUBMIT
  • LBR: archive file

Different orders of CP/M

CP/M commands can be internal or external, as was subsequently the case with MS-DOS. For the user under CP/M there is no difference between launching an internal command, such as DIR as *. * or an External like STAT as *. *. Or any other program.

Under CP/M, the shortest program needs only one byte, which returns to the System. On the other hand, it must be saved as an executable file using a .com extension, whose minimum size is one sector with a 128 bytes minimum.

The external commands of the CP/M or MP/M called programs of the same name which had the extension .COM or .PRL (only in the case of MP/M). Additional information: the MP/M was similar to CP/M but with a multi-user functionality.

Saturday, July 21, 2018

Gaps between primes

Everyone has probably learned in mathematics at school what primes are. They are numbers that are divisible only by 1 and themselves. So all the numbers that are divisible by 2 are missing.

Twin prime

While many primes are still close together for small numbers, separated by "even numbers", this becomes rarer as the number grows. For example, numbers less than 10 contain quite a few primes, so called twin primes which stand "side by side", separated only by even numbers. Like 2, 3, 5, and 7. The bigger the number, the less likely it is. For example, between 400 and 410, there are only the primes 401 and 409.

Cryptography uses primes to encrypt files and other data. For this large primes are used. Powerful computers are set to find ever larger primes, which turns out to be more and more difficult.

On the other hand, the question arises as to whether it is probable that, according to the currently largest prime number found, there are numbers that follow (after an even number) two prime numbers. Since there are an infinite number of numbers, I suspect that will eventually apply. Or maybe not? Nobody will have an answer for that until proven.

Or has any reader here an answer? Please comment.

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