Status-Q

Are you socially handicapped by your lack of electronics knowledge? Wishing you could remember more from school physics/IT lessons? Ever wondered what these strange transistor things are and why they were so important?

I've just come across a very nice site called JeeLabs by Jean-Claude Wippler - thanks, Aideen - and in particular a set of posts called Easy Electrons, which introduce resistors, capacitors, diodes, transistors, and some of the things you can do with them.

It's not a series for complete beginners - you need to have some grasp of voltage and current and the relationship between them - but if you've ever wondered "Do I need a resistor with this LED, and if so, why, and how big should it be?", or "Why is my transistor getting hot?", then this could be useful reading.

I liked the ones about diodes and the set of posts about transistors....

Just setting up a new laptop here, readers, and enabling Address Book's built-in sync with Google Contacts so as to bring all my contacts over and... aargh! What is this I see? For some reason, the syncing system has decided that the new, empty address book with zero contacts is the up-to-date version, and so has deleted all my contacts from my Google account to make it match! Woe is me!

Now, I was about to write this up as a cautionary tale of cloud computing: if I didn't have my own local copy of my data here, I might have been in quite a pickle. But then I discovered that the good folks at Google hadn't allowed data just to vapourise... there's a handy option in the More Actions menu of Google Contacts, which lets you restore your lost contacts.

Phew!