Stupid Designers

Consumer induction hot plates operate between 25 - 50 KHz. You can see it on a spectrum analyzer or SDR (software defined radio) receiver:

"Induction cooker interference"

Some induction cookers drop below 25 KHz, which can be heard by some children and people with unusually sensitive hearing:

"My new Wolf induction cook top is unusable because of the high-frequency screaming"

(Click on "read more").

Some people are allegedly "electrosensitive":

"Electromagnetic hypersensitivity"

The problem seems to be sufficiently common to support an industry:

"RF Protection Apparel"

"EMF shielding clothing"

"Tin foil hats:

I bet that this is the reason. In my youth, I could hear 20 KHz. My wife still can.

Back in Baltimore in the 1970s, there was a local big-box Drugstore that left their ultrasonic motion detector burglar alarm system on standby, and a girlfriend complained that the place made here depressed. I was skeptical, but agreed to go to that store. It depressed me too. Turned out we sensed the 26 KHz howl as pressure, and effect I had experienced in my own home lab. I went to the store manager, who was also skeptical, and I pointed out this could be costing them sales. Don't know what happened, but they turned the alarm system off during business hours, and the depression lifted.

Joe

When I was a teenager I could hear 22 KHz. It felt like pressure.

I could walk past a house with an open widow and hear the 15.7 KHz horizontal oscillator in their TV.

I'm down to about 8 KHz now, but there's really not much going on above 8K.

Ditto. What's most annoying is you hear this annoying sound and, when you turn to complain about it to those STANDING NEXT TO YOU ("What's that godawful noise?"), they look at you like you're crazy!

A colleague in school doubted my ability to hear these things. So, we played the "can you hear it now?" game (while he "randomly" decided whether to turn it on or off) and he was rid of his disbelief in short order.

Now, hearing the flyback in a conventional TV is taxing for me. :<

Yes..

Not sure I ever had that feature 'on' in my 'joe' editor (that I use to type this) The all-knowing ducduckgo tells me: Search Assist To enable or disable word wrap in JOE, you can use the command Control + T followed by W. This toggles the word wrap setting on or off while you are editing.

Have to try it! lemme see: here I am formally asking, asking you to use word wrap the line gets long, longer, and even longer, longer and longer it gets no end to it so far, where will it go? to the Moon or Mars to infinity or where or were or what is beyond infinity?

234 columns it says when it breaks the line,. Must be some default setting

Search Assist To set the word wrap size in the JOE editor, you can adjust the right margin by using the command ^T R to set the desired column number for wrapping. Additionally, you can modify the -rmargin option in the joerc file to set a specific right margin for word wrap.

Checking /etc/joe/joerc is set to 210:

-rmargin 210 Right margin

So just learned something, never used that or lines that long. At least not deliberately

'joe' is a great editor in Linux, been using it since the early Linux days.

All code I wrote it written with it.

Where will it go? Voice input? LOL. Anyways

Better set it to 77. Will I? Freedom ! But can I?, yes.

Anyways to go back, even when activating wordwrap on Usenet, you should set it to 77 or so too.

But I have an other trick: when activating joe in NewsFleX to reply it starts a terminal with

80 character width. But of course you can click to get a full screen terminal.

So visual guide, and lines and characters per line is displayed on top like this: Row 84 Col 66

Can call spell shaker (ispell) too on the text with ctrl L, insert files, what not.

We had 'tropical' temperatures here a few days last week, some more predicted later this week.

29.5 C indoors (no airco here) 32 C outdoors... Did some mowing of grass in the garden, was OK in the sun, wearing a hat. Things are very dry here, gras hardly grows due to lack of water. River water levels (Rhine river) are at an all time low. In Germany they are now allowing trucks on sundays as the water levels in the river are too low for the shipping. And we (Neterlands) are even downstream of that.

Yea, tin foil hats are cool. It could be some ultrasonic effect. did a lot of high power ultrasonic stuff:

at some point I had some balance problem from building noise + the ultrasonics.

Had to do a special excercise to fix it (took a few days before I could use a bike again). What happens is that some of that bone structure in your inner ear that senses balance breaks or is damaged or loosened, making specific moves fixes it again.

I have been close too (and am radio ham too) high power RF transmissions all my life. Broadcasting also emits many kilowatts, it but it never bothered me. I do not like cellphones close to my head, neither do I like those RF bluetooth earplugs.

Nice big Sennheiser HD201 headphones are good, also for playing the keyboard without freaking everybody else out :-)

out external noises too. Lots of F35 noise making planes here, am close to a mil airport. Oh and radar pulses maing ticks in some equipment:

My younger brother' example has lasted twenty ears so far. The parts that might fail are the high frequency switches, and they should be replaceable. You can claim to be able to afford one, but some people do find the price discouragingly high - and others prefer to spend the money on Audi cars.

The cookware gets heated by the currents induced in it by the cook-top. Anything metallic works, but stuff designed for the job works better.

And the gas it burns can accumulate unburnt and blow up your house. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen.

In the studios where I worked I could hear if the 15625 Hz horizontal sound coming from a monitor was not in sync.. Bu then that was among many other ones that were in sycn. Difference ..

I do not have what they call 'absolute pitch' hearing but sometimes I wonder.. I can at night hear a different tone for every moving awake lifeform. Can tell you how many people are moving about. Great in the wild survival. Yea did that too.

A lot depends on the positioning of the sensor and the food to be cooked. Many of the old recipes for gas cookery specified the top, middle or bottom of the oven. Even in my electric oven there is a big difference in the way things cook in different positions and how long the element is on and red hot during the cooking time.

The shorter wavelength radiant heat from a red-hot element will brown the surface differently from longer wavelength and there is an unwanted positive feedback mechanism: as the surface changes colour, it absorbs more heat and browns even faster. In bread toasters, where the element is visibly red hot, this effect makes them much more difficult to control.

As well as the cooking mode. E.g., convection tends to circulate the heat for more even cooking.

[If I were to rewrite the code for the oven, I would provide independant control of the convection fans without their accompanying heating elements]

Some US ovens (from my limited observations) identify the positions of the rack with a letter code: A - D. The position selected determines the amount of "clearance" above (for the item being cooked) as well as its proximity to the heat sourced from below as well as above and behind.

I specify, on my recipes, where the rack(s) is expected to be located, which oven, the type of cooking process, temperature and time. The oven is almost invariably "preheated".

Plus additional notes that may be appropriate (e.g., how to cool the item down when cooking is complete). For example, one common recipe says: "Do this for 37 minutes; then THIS for 16; then this for 4" instead of "Do this for 57 (37+16+4)"

I will insist on the second half of a bake cycle take place with some "barrier" beneath (e.g., the next sheet of cookies), even if there is no *need* for it (e.g., when the last sheet is being baked).

An "old habit" when baking cookies has been to rotate the cookie sheet 180 degrees in an attempt to even out the front-to-back variations in the oven's temperature distribution. It's such an ingrained behavior that I have no idea if it has any current value! :<

This assumes you know how YOUR oven cooks, how true to setpoint it is, etc. People with "knobs" that indicate temperature obviously are just "in the ballpark".

I have an electronic thermometer; the sensor is probably a termopar, which can be positioned inside the oven.

For instance, to cook potatoes, I put one sensor in the tray, and with the other I pierce the potato. When the temp inside the potato reaches

100°C, I power off the oven.

I have forgotten the oven temp, but with this method it doesn't matter much.

We are in Truckee at 6400 feet, and we expected it to be cool, but it peaks in the high 80's F. Yikes. At least the humidity is low.

It does get cool at night, low 50's, so we can open the windows at night and cool off the cabin.

People claim that it can snow any day of the year here. I wish it would.

I did ski on the 4th of July here once.

We were having lunch outside one Memorial Day, last Monday in May, looking at people golfing, and we had a flash blizzard.

John Larkin confuses weather with climate and imagines that because weather is unpredictable, climate - as the average of weather - is also unpredictable. It's an intellectual failure, and one that his vanity doesn't let him recognise.

Yes, our oven supports such a probe -- as does the microwave oven. I can't recall ever using it.

Most people just "set" the intended temperature of the oven interior and adjust their recipes accordingly. A recipe would call for a "350F oven" or a "400F oven" or a "slow" oven, etc. These being settings one could command from the markings on whatever control "knob" was available. The oven would use its sensor to drive the interior to that nominal temperature.

E.g., I'd not insert the probe in *a* cookie to verify the internal temperature of THAT cookie. Or, a cake.

[I believe it is intended primarily for large pieces of meat -- a pork shoulder, beef roast, etc.]

But, ovens vary. The markings on one "knob" are only suggestive of the internal temperature attained and will vary with the same make/model oven elsewhere. Hence, "know your oven"

When does 'weather' become 'climate'? Apart from some trivial periodic phenomena, it's noisy at all time scales. Probably 1/f, but I have yet to find a dataset that makes this obvious.

Identifying trends in noisy data is fraught with pitfalls.

Jeroen Belleman

When it grows crops.

Weather is periodic over periods counted in years.

It is reliably cold for most of winter and warm for most of summer. This may be a trivial periodic phenomenon, but farming relies on it.

<xxxx>

I do nearly all the cooking.

We've had electric with spiral elements, electric with flat elements, gas and induction. Also have used halogen.

At the moment it's gas, because we recently moved and that's what is here for now. As soon as I get the chance, the gas is scrap and we're going back to induction.

Very easy cleaning. Very low power possible - useful for dry frying onions for example. Very high power possible - much quicker than gas to bring a pot of water to the boil. The top only gets hot through contact with a hot pan. No wasted heat up the side of the pot heating the handles. No fumes or condensation. Undoubtedly safer.

The cookware isn't 'special' nowadays, but there will be some old pots and pans you can't use. Also, because the coupling seems to be different for different pans, it can be harder to judge how far to turn the knob. I have a small two-egg omelette (US: Homeopathic omelette) pan which needs a surprisingly high setting. Just a question of getting used to it.

While gas is cheaper than electricity, I would guess that the lack of wasted heat compensates for that. The cost for a reasonable quality induction hob isn't that much different. On balance, induction hobs are not perfect, but are very much better than the alternatives.

On 08/08/2026 15:17, Don Y wrote: <xxxx>> Our furnace uses a hot plate igniter (previous one used a spark igniter).

I believe the sensor is a thermocouple which generates enough power to hold a solenoid gas valve open against a light spring. You need to manually open the valve and wait till the thermocouple is hot enough to provide the holding current.