Strange Screws

[Folkert Rienstra]

And another idiot with a broken newsclient showing Reply-To addresses.

Try again.

No, it's not. This is a five-pointed star. Torx screws have six points.

And the 5 pointed star is a Torx too.
There is no such thing as *the* "torx" screw.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

Ignore the SCSI troll.

It was, until you gave it attention.

 

[Joshua Putnam]

http://www.stanleysupplyservices.com/product-group.aspx?id=7957

Doesn't appear to include 5-pointed Torx, only 6-pointed.

 

[Chris Lewis]

Please, do not use Reply-To addresses in attribution lines. Get a decent newsclient, or change
your attribution line, like everyone else.

I assure you, trn 4 is a decent news reader, and substituting in the Reply-To for
From: is actually the right thing to do if the attribution line is to have anything
in it resembling the followup'd to user's address.

Spammers aren't stupid enough to ignore Reply-To headers - in fact, smart
ones would be scraping them in _preference_ to From: headers.

And those that scrape the whole message (which is why you're worried about
my attribution, right?) will scrape the reply-to _too_. So, you're shooting
yourself in the foot far more than the occasional followup from someone
using reasonable newsreader attribution defaults like me.

If you want to avoid Usenet scrapers, you need to not mention your real
email address AT ALL, or munge it.

Eg: "folkertdashrienstra (at) wanadoo.nl", or "(e-mail address removed)".

Reply-To is not a useful approach for evading Usenet email address scrapers.
If you don't want to get it scraped, _don't_ imagine that Reply-To will hide it.

 

[Chris Lewis]

well the ones i tried were small button type maybe 1/3" diameter and 1/8"
thick they certainly were strong they hold more to the fridge than those
crap magnets and prettier too

The Lee Valley catalog has a variety of rare earth magnets from 1/4" to
1" in diameter. The 3/8 & 1/2" ones are great for fridge magnets.

The 1" ones are used for cargo strap tie-downs, which should give you
an idea of how strong they are. Need special techniques for prying
two of them apart. If they're allowed to come together unrestrained,
they _will_ chip and throw chunks. I wouldn't want to get a small
fold of skin between two of those!

[I have 5 of them, I just haven't gotten around to making the separation
jig yet.]

 

[Arno Wagner]

Yes... you can actually hold the screw with the screwdriver... that is, put
the screw on the end of the screwdriver, then move it into position.

Exactly.

Arno

 

[Arno Wagner]

Square drive (eg: Canadian "Robertson") are almost as good. I drove several
hundred 3" deck screws through flooring yesterday - once put on the driver,
they stayed put on the driver and could be started and driven without touching
the screw.

No cam-out either.

I still think they should make the manufacture and sale of slotted and
phillips screws a capital offence.

Careful! Outlawing stupidity, while highly desirable, would lead to
chaos.

Arno

 

[Arno Wagner]

Or a little work with a strong, small flat blade, to bend it back and
forth until it breaks off.

Should work as well, agreed. Unless you want to make warranty
claims afterwasrds ;-)

Arno

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

I assure you, trn 4 is a decent news reader,

Obviously not if it is straying from standard practice.

and substituting in the Reply-To for From: is actually the right thing to do

No, it is not.

if the attribution line is to have anything in it resembling the to user's address.

Nonsense. Obviously Reply-To is for replying-to/following-up.
Contributor attribution has nothing got to do with follow-up.

Any decent news/email client automatically uses the Reply-To from the header
if you choose email reply (reply to sender) and reverts to From: if it is empty.
No point whatsoever to use it in attribution lines.
Any news/email client that relies on attribution lines for replies is obviously broken.

Spammers aren't stupid enough to ignore Reply-To headers - in fact, smart
ones would be scraping them in _preference_ to From: headers.

Practice says different.

And those that scrape the whole message (which is why you're worried about
my attribution,

right?)

Wrong. I don't want my Reply address used in bodies.

will scrape the reply-to _too_.

So, you're shooting yourself in the foot

Nope, it is you who is shooting me in the foot.

far more than the occasional followup from someone
using reasonable newsreader attribution defaults like me.

If it was reasonable every other newsreader would use it. Guess what.

If you want to avoid Usenet scrapers, you need to not mention your real
email address AT ALL, or munge it.

Or use that what was intended to use and isn't normally used in usenet bodies
(not the header).

Eg: "xxxxxxxx (at) yyyyyyy.zz", or (e-mail address removed).

I told you not to use my Reply addres in usenet messages and here you
go again. It's bloody obvious how to undo the spamtraps from that.

Reply-To is not a useful approach for evading Usenet email address scrapers.
If you don't want to get it scraped, _don't_ imagine that Reply-To will hide it.

I don't imagine, you are. I just see what happens in practice.

 

[Dan Lanciani]

| In article <L44zf.13116$Zo.11468@trnddc07>,
| (e-mail address removed) says...
| >
| >
| >
| > > If you want to buy Torx Plus tools you must, in theory anyway, be a
| > > legitimate user as defined by Textron although if you know anyone who
| > > works with them they should be pretty easily obtained at the cost of a
| > > case of beer. ;-)
| >
| >
| > http://www.stanleysupplyservices.com/product-group.aspx?id=7957
|
| Doesn't appear to include 5-pointed Torx, only 6-pointed.

How about this:

http://sjdiscounttools.com/sk84231.html

(The SK84231 set is available from many sites, but this one had a short URL.)

Dan Lanciani
ddl@danlan.*com

 

[Doug Miller]

And the 5 pointed star is a Torx too.

Not correct.

There is no such thing as *the* "torx" screw.

Also not correct. But you seem impervious to logic, so I'm done.

 

[Stan Blazejewski]

I'd have to side with Odie here. About 15 'years' ago I pulled apart an (now)
old 85meg RLL hard drive because the auto park wouldn't release. This was on
the kitchen table & that drive is still working today .... you'd think it would
have just plain worn out by now.

I noticed it had filters inside it to clean the air moving inside it so I expect
it was all clean again within seconds if not minutes of firing up again.

The 'new' drives I've pulled apart for the magnets seem to have the air filters
as well although I'd expect today's technology to be less tolerant to dirty air
what with the amount of data that they pack into the smaller space but I still
wouldn't expect it to die in "a few days or weeks".

Cough! I said class 1 not class 100!

Sure a drive will function for a while with the case off, but it will die
soonish (maybe a few days or weeks, but it will die).

If OTOH all you are doing is extracting the magnets from old drives - then
go right on ..

Dave

Perhaps the drive already *is* dead.

Don't overestimate clean rooms - they contain 100 particles per cubic
meter as opposed to an "average" room containing 600 particles. A
"clean" "average" room will contain far less than the 600 particles.

For what it's worth, I've had a drive running non-stop for over a week
without its cover (platters exposed) and haven't had any hiccups. This
hype about "clean rooms" is a load of drivel.

There are those who will say "if you get one single particle of dust on
your platters, your drive will be irretrievably damaged."

Bollox. And bollox to FR, who will no doubt disagree.


Odie

--

Australia isn't "down under", it's "off to one side"!

(e-mail address removed)
www.cobracat.com (home of the Australian Cobra Catamaran)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cobra-cat/

 

[James Sweet]

Rob B wrote:

Yes I've gotten nasty blood blisters on several occasions. Take apart
any 3.5" hard drive and pull the magnets out, they'll stick to each
other very strongly. If you can find an old 5.25" SCSI drive you'll
likely find even bigger magnets.

 

[J. Clarke]

Should work as well, agreed. Unless you want to make warranty
claims afterwasrds ;-)

Hey, not his fault that the blasted screw was defective.

 

[J. Clarke]

I'd have to side with Odie here. About 15 'years' ago I pulled apart an
(now)
old 85meg RLL hard drive because the auto park wouldn't release. This was
on the kitchen table & that drive is still working today .... you'd think
it would have just plain worn out by now.

I noticed it had filters inside it to clean the air moving inside it so I
expect it was all clean again within seconds if not minutes of firing up
again.

Examine that filter carefully and you will find that its primary function is
to filter the tiny amount of air moving through the pressure-equalization
hole and that there is no mechanism by which all or any significant portion
of the air circulating inside the capsule can be made to pass through it.

The 'new' drives I've pulled apart for the magnets seem to have the air
filters as well although I'd expect today's technology to be less tolerant
to dirty air what with the amount of data that they pack into the smaller
space but I still wouldn't expect it to die in "a few days or weeks".

It dies as soon as something hard enough to scratch the platter or head and
small enough to get wedged between them finds its way into that space.

In the real world people have tried this, and the drives typically died in
anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks.

 

[Rob B]

Stan Blazejewski wrote:

Examine that filter carefully and you will find that its primary function is
to filter the tiny amount of air moving through the pressure-equalization
hole and that there is no mechanism by which all or any significant portion
of the air circulating inside the capsule can be made to pass through it.


It dies as soon as something hard enough to scratch the platter or head and
small enough to get wedged between them finds its way into that space.

In the real world people have tried this, and the drives typically died in
anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks.

<snip>

the Math-CS dept at my alma-mater had pretty poster depicting the magnified
size of various particles hair, dust, skin cell and smoke particles next to
the disk heads and the cushion of air that head float on and if i remember
correctly the smoke particle would barely squeeze between the head and
platter

guessing you were dust lucky with the drive surgery

 

[Rob B]

Yes I've gotten nasty blood blisters on several occasions. Take apart
any 3.5" hard drive and pull the magnets out, they'll stick to each
other very strongly. If you can find an old 5.25" SCSI drive you'll
likely find even bigger magnets.

ok curiosity has the better of me , i have several pandora drives stuffed in
a box, couple of old 420 mb scsi out of old sun classics some old 180 -
1.2GB drives lying around, i will be going on the magnet hunt shortly. too
bad i just recently dumped an old 1 GB 5 1/2 full height scsi out of old
HP/UX box it made a great desk anchor

 

[James Sweet]

Nonsense.
If it's clicking it means it does a rezero every time it retries a read operation.
It does that on ECC errors and also on CRC errors on the interface.
Neither is necessarily caused by a hardware failure.
Bad power supply, overheated drive or bad data cable can cause this too.

Every single time I've ever had a hard drive clicking it was caused by a
failure of the drive, I've never even heard of it caused by those other
issues, with the exception being a couple of early very hot running 10K
rpm drives. Bad drive is 99% the reason.

 

[J. Clarke]

<snip>

the Math-CS dept at my alma-mater had pretty poster depicting the
magnified size of various particles hair, dust, skin cell and smoke
particles next to
the disk heads and the cushion of air that head float on and if i
remember correctly the smoke particle would barely squeeze between the
head and platter

guessing you were dust lucky with the drive surgery

Not me, the only time I've opened drives either they were already dead or
they were old drives being used as show-and-tells when teaching a class.
Never expected them to actually run afterwards. But if you will google
the archive for this newsgroup I think you'll find some reports from people
who have done this to see how long the drive would run.

One thing that is really bad news is fingerprints. I've seen a fingerprint
rip the head off and toss it across the room (somebody decided to power up
a show-and-tell after it had been passed around the classroom).

If it's _thicker_ than the gap and not stuck down and not too massive it
just gets pushed aside. If it's brittle though it may shatter when it hits
the head and make smaller particles. If it's hard and massive enough then
it can chip or deform the head. If it's an insect you get ichor on the
platter and the result is similar to fingerprints.

Bear in mind that that poster dates from the days of removable disk packs,
when drives were _not_ sealed. Few minicomputers were installed in special
rooms and even mainframe shops generally didn't have laminar-flow positive
pressure clean rooms with airlocks. Nonetheless a standard operation was
for some guy in a suit and tie (if it was a corporate shop) or tie-dyed tee
shirt and jeans and hair down to his ankles (if it was a university shop)
to change disk packs and they ran a good long time despite such treatment.
That's the reason for the posters, to remind people of why that area was
supposed to be kept clean.

 

[Chris Lewis]

Obviously not if it is straying from standard practice.

What standard? trn set _the_ standard for more years than your newsreader
has existed or you have been posting to Usenet.

There is no standard on attribution lines. Indeed, the only comments
on this topic I've been able to google say _exactly_ what trn is doing -
reply-to if present, From otherwise.

No, it is not.

Funny, in the 20+ years I've been posting on Usenet (largely to groups specific
to Usenet, Email and anti-spam standards, operations and practise), and the 10s
of thousands of postings I've made to Usenet, you're the first to suggest it's wrong.

Practice says different.

I don't think someone who uses Outlook as a newsreader should be lecturing
anyone on newsreader "practise", let alone lecturing _me_ on spammer practises...

Perhaps Outlook's braindamage leads you to believe that spammers can't see
reply-tos.

I assure you, spammers don't do this by hand. They use specialized
NNTP clients, and scan _everything_ in the message - headers, bodies,
everything. Valid Reply-tos are vastly more blaringly obvious than
arbitrary hand munging.

Any spammer with enough neurons to be able to
write a generalized demunger is sure going to notice
reply-to.

If you don't want your email address scraped, don't include
it in the posting.