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PUBLISHER’S LETTER
www.siliconchip.com.au
Publisher & Editor-in-Chief
Leo Simpson, B.Bus., FAICD
Production Manager
Greg Swain, B.Sc.(Hons.)
Technical Staff
John Clarke, B.E.(Elec.)
Peter Smith
Ross Tester
Jim Rowe, B.A., B.Sc, VK2ZLO
Rick Walters
Reader Services
Ann Jenkinson
Advertising Enquiries
Leo Simpson
Phone (02) 9979 5644
Fax (02) 9979 6503
Regular Contributors
Brendan Akhurst
Rodney Champness, VK3UG
Julian Edgar, Dip.T.(Sec.), B.Ed
Mike Sheriff, B.Sc, VK2YFK
Philip Watson, MIREE, VK2ZPW
Bob Young
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ISSN 1030-2662
The change to nanofarads
This month readers will notice a small but significant change to our circuit diagrams. Instead
of capacitors being labelled in values such as
.015mF and 0.1mF, they are now labelled as 15nF
and 100nF. A number of readers have taken us to
task in the past for not making this change years
ago and now they should be happy.
Not that we have made the change to make
those people happy. It is more to keep the circuits in line with the labelling actually being
used on capacitors. For some time we have
been including a conversion table to show the
equivalence between specified values and the
two codes most frequently used: EIA (Electrical Industry Association) and
IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission). Now the values we will be
using for capacitor values will be very similar to IEC labelling. For example,
a capacitor labelled as 10nF will be labelled “10n”.
To those unsure of the change, one nanofarad is the same as 1000 picofarads (1000pF) or .001mF. Similarly, 10nF is equivalent to .01mF and 100nF
is the same as 0.1mF. Values of 1mF and above will still be labelled in “mF”
and values less than 1nF (1000pF) will be labelled in “pF”. To help with
the change, we will continue to give the equivalent capacitance values (in
brackets) in the parts list and we will also include them in the conversion
table in project articles.
Up to now we have resisted making this change because we have felt that
it was one more hurdle for beginners (and the old-timers) to deal with. But
now that so many of the MKT (block) style capacitors use IEC labelling, we
felt that it was appropriate to make the change.
Mouses should have keyboard equivalents
For years now, I have hated using a computer mouse. I would much rather use control keys or function keys to move around the screen and select
functions. Call me an old fogey if you like but now it has been proven to
be better for you. It seems that protracted use of the mouse leads to poor
posture, neck and back strain and related problems. The recommendation
now is that you should at least swap the mouse over to your left hand for
periods during the day, to give your right arm a rest. But better still is to use
control keys wherever you can.
I must also admit that part of the reason that I don’t like using a mouse is
that I have fairly large hands and therefore I find that the mouse, even larger
ones, is awkward to use, particularly when “double-clicking”.
Apart from that, I find it much faster to use Ctrl or Alt keys. In many programs you can do virtually everything without having to touch the mouse.
Drop down menus are great for complex programs but given the choice
between a keystroke and a mouse command, I will use the control key every
time. Unfortunately, in many programs there are lots of functions which
cannot be called up by keystrokes – you are forced to use the mouse. But
now that excessive mouse use has been shown to be undesirable, maybe
software designers will give more thought to this aspect and provide their
software with more control key functions for mouse actions.
Leo Simpson
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