Arlec Single Outlet Safety Switch

Thanks to my mate Raz I now have an Arlec Single Outlet Safety Switch from Bunnings. It’s a 30mA residual-current device (RCD), which is a type of earth-leakage circuit breaker (ELCB).

Over here:

You can see my bench UPS in the bottom right:

It’s a PowerShield Defender 1200VA.

The UPS then has the Arlec device in the back of it, which then powers the rest of my bench (behind the scissors):

You can see I still have my Xbox power cable plugged in. We’re not sure exactly what that does. In addition to an electronic fuse maybe an RCD or maybe an arc-fault circuit interrupter (AFCI) or maybe all of the above.

Two simple ways to version control your MariaDB schema changes

Over on Two simple ways to version control your MariaDB schema changes I learned a neat hack you can use to check for database schema revisions by reporting off the binlog.

The example command given was:

$ mysqlbinlog --no-defaults -R -u foo -p -d foodb -h db.home.arpa mysqld-bin.000001 > foodb.txt

Something Pretty Right: A History of Visual Basic

I read Something Pretty Right: A History of Visual Basic and found this interesting quote:

“They weren’t called ‘controls’ originally. Alan was going to call them ‘waldos’, named after remote manipulator arms. I couldn’t make sense out of that name, so I called them ‘gizmos’. Microsoft must have thought this name was too frivolous, so they renamed them ‘controls’.”

Web browser wish list

Apparently Amazon might be making a browser. Some features I would like in a web browser:

  • Full text search over everything I’ve ever seen in my browser
  • Image preview and browser for all images ever loaded in my browser
  • Ability to download streaming media as a file
  • Being able to use HTML tables like a spreadsheet (sort, edit/change/reference, row/col/block select, etc.)