Mystery Object Answer

Now it can be told. The tool is for making holes in network cables so you can attach a Vampire tap to them. In the olden days Ethernet networks were made of a single thick piece of co-axial cable (the same stuff we use to connect TVs to aerials). This had a terminator at both ends and the way you connected a station to the network was to drill a hole in the side of the cable and push a pin into the central conductor.  These connectors got the name of “vampire taps” for obvious reasons.

Getting the hole wrong (too big or too deep) was bad, as you only had the one cable for your entire network. So we used to use a device with a drill bit which had been cut to just the right diameter and depth in the tool you see above.

This was in the “Good Old Days” of networking,  10BASE5 style (this means 10MBits/second, baseband signals and 500 metre maximum segment length).  Nowadays we are up to 100GBits/second on some networks. That is  10,000 times faster.

The tool has rattled around in my desk for a while and I probably should get rid of it.

Having said all that, it does remind me of a Veroboard track cutter. I used to have one of those too. It’s a tool which lets you make breaks in copper tracks on circuit boards by cutting through them with a drill bit. So, I reckon that Dave G is a winner here and if he wants to drop by he can have is Windows Phone lanyard.

Perfect Afternoon

The finished product

I spent the afternoon eating chocolate and drinking tea while making my own Lego private jet and watching a naff James Bond movie in HD.

Perfect.

This is what Lego thinks the pilot uses to fly the plane. Right hand down a bit I reckon.

Cheap Network Connection

Nice building in Hull today.

If you have an internet enabled phone and want the cheapest way to get on-line with it you really should take a look at Tesco Mobile.  These folks will send you a free pay as you go sim (it costs 99 pence to buy in the store) and you can put credit on it in all the usual ways. You can also have a 2 pounds a week “unlimited use” network connection for your phone. In this case I think “unlimited” means 500 megs in the week, which is OK unless you start streaming “Deal or No Deal” to it. But then again, why would you want to do that?

It does mean that you can have a fully working internet phone for around 8 pounds a month, which has got to be good value. I popped one of these into my Windows Phone and it works a treat. The network is actually provided by O2, which may or may not be good news depending on where you live.

Mystery Object Competition

So, what was this used for?

Close up of the pointy end

I found this in my drawer today. Not used it for a while. I’ve got a Windows Phone Lanyard (tastefully printed with a Windows Phone logo all along its length) to give to the first person to come to my office in Hull and tell me what is and what we used to use it for.

A clue, it is not directly related to phones as such…

Overlapping Display Elements in Silverlight

Overlapping cards in a white version of the game. I just changed the Settings to a white background, everything else was sorted out automatically.

I’ve solved my five card problem. I’m not sure if I’ve cheated or not, but I am sure that it works.

The way it works is by giving elements in the StackPanel a negative left margin, so that they go into the element to the left. The StackPanel only seems to use the width remaining width for each item in the panel, so I end up with all the card displays overlapping nicely.