Pulse 6 Battery upgrade/replacement

[Burgerman]

The PL8 doesn't (that I know of) have an interface to do the equivalent of it's software on Linux

Dont be sad, linux is crap! A half finished thing that requires a ton of work, and that is like windows was 20 years ago. Or more. Why on earth would you even want to? It may be more secure than windows (depending on config, and user ability) but dont be fooled. Linux isnt secure. Theres crap loads of embedded devices that are hackable and that communicate with each other that have not and will never be updated that are insecure. nd my linux server has already been hacked and attacked on my last 2 hosts on at least 5 occasions since I started sites like this one. My windows host server never needed any help, wasnt hacked or overwhelmed by DOS attacks, in a decade and is much easier to use, but unfortunately it costs more... So no longer used. And windows 7 or windows 10 LTSC with all the crap removed by default, are both the same price as Linux if you can drive a computer. XP is junk, and 1.5 decades old!

[Arima]

Unfortunately I'm to lazy to spend a lot of time testing every linux distribution. Or figure out how to do accurate performance testing for a comparison with Windows. I've booted a few versions a couple times a few years ago. Think I even got it to browse the web once lol. When it comes to computers I usually do what I need to, and nothing more. It's always a moving target even if you are not updating windows the environment around you is constantly changing. I don't have the latest and greatest because I don't seem to need it. Kinda like my need for 50 mile range in my wheelchair.

[Burgerman]

Well computers are not simple. Theres been 1001 attempts to dumb them down. All it does is end up with a thing like the apple which is pretty much useless for anything other than web browsing (and I have a guy they keeps emailing me about being unable to sign up or navigate this site on one so they dont do that properly either). Unfortunately a decent and useful computer needs to be very flexible. And that means some knowledge and learning. And to keep on top.

And nobody NEEDS 50 mile range.
But my stock chair claims to have 20. Now depending on weight, configuration, terrain, and what you are actually doing that might be 3 or 5 in reality. I can easily kill a set of batteries in 2 hours at home. Or get 15 miles from them another day on a steady long distance trip. But the real reasons for having 50 miles of range is because:
1. Some days you wont get half of that. Other days you might twice that.
2. I wake up, have places to go, and realise I forgot to plug it in last night... Now, I dont care!
3. I dont need to consider range. I just go wherever I want. And back out in summer to the next "town" 4 or 5 miles away in an evening, at the beach where all the pubs and hotels and (pretty 25 year old blonde) tourists are!
4. Average daily discharge levels are low. And average Amp draw per cell is lower (less C rate). And so you may only want to charge twice a week. Makes your life easy, also makes those 2000 cycles last 3x as long in years.
5. You need the mass from the bigger pack for stability as lithium is 5x lighter by Ah. So fit much more. Or your chair will not be stable and tip on slopes and ramps.
6. One day you may NEED that range! Train not running, car breaks down, or ill or power cuts or whatever.
7. Its stored energy. It can charge another chair, run your mower, power a heater, or heated clothing, run your laptop, charge your model heli 5 times at the flying feild, run big lights, or an AC inverter when theres a power cut.
8. you can!

[swalker]

Well computers are not simple. Theres been 1001 attempts to dumb them down.

Anyone remember Microsoft's "Bob" operating system? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob

Steve

[Burgerman]

I skipped that one... 6.22 was better.

[ex-Gooserider]

I think I saw pictures of it, but ran screaming the other way....

I started w/ MS-DOS 3.1 and then multi-tasking with DesqView and while I think I did end up going to MS-DOS 5 and possibly 6.11, I never really used any of the Windows products on my own machines.... After I pretty much hit the limits of DesqView, I moved to Linux, and have been using it by choice ever since...

ex-Gooserider

[Arima]

You guys go back further than I do lol.

[Irving]

I remember Desqview. Back in the day the outfit I worked for did a 16 workstation time-shared 16bit cpu based office wp. that ran a multiuser CP/M OS. We wanted to do a 'low cost' version, 4 user, multi-user Wordstar and we used a version of DesqView to do the windowing as the CP/M os + WindowManager s/w licence was too expensive. Then the PC clones and Windows 3.1 came along and spoilt the party... They should have listened to me... I did a teardown of one of the first IBM PC XT machines shipped into the UK and basically said to the bosses, adopt this or die... they though they knew better. That was late-1982 or early-83-ish. The company was toast by 1988 but I'd moved on by then.

[ex-Gooserider]

I never did get into CPM, even though I was once gifted with a 'Vector Graphics' (I think?) machine that used it... It didn't have anything useful in the way of software, and I discovered that I had the dubious distinction of owning the ONLY known machine that the Boston Computer Society (at the time, the worlds largest computer user group) CPM subgroup could NOT support.... It had a 16 sector, HARD sector floppy, and the BCS didn't have a floppy controller that could write that format.... (to bad in some ways, as they were getting 1.4Mb on a 5.25" floppy, back when IBM was only doing 360K....)

The place I was working had some interesting history - my boss had been a hardware developer for the Redactron system, which was a 'word processor' that used an IBM Selectric II typewriter for IO... He said that this forced him to learn more about the innards of the Selectrics than IBM knew - or at least published.... As I understand it, there was a main 'operations shaft' that drove everything... IBM published specs of when events happened in terms of * rotation on the shaft. He needed to get it down into arc-seconds of rotation - can you say "High Speed Photography"???

By the time I worked for him we were slowly transitioning from the Selectrics to Daisy Wheel units, and one of the things I installed a lot of was a dedicated terminal that I think was running on CPM, but had officially a version of some word processor (I think it was WordStar) and a spreadsheet (Lotus 123?) Green screen monitor, 360K floppy, and a box that connected into the wiring harness of the daisy wheel printer.... Those were mostly what I worked on, although I did get to do the inservice training on the original 64K IBM PC, and then the XT....

ex-Gooserider