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A Nokia Worth Attention But Not for Why Youd Think

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The new Nokia Lumia 1020 smartphone is worth paying attention to, but not for the reason you've heard. The key figure in Nokia's ads and marketing is 41 -- as in, the number of megapixels of the Lumia's camera. That's a crazy number, triple what any other manufacturer except Nokia itself with its 808 PureView (which runs the old Symbian operating system, as opposed to the Lumia's Windows Phone 8) has ever put into a smartphone. The thing is, the number of megapixels, while important, is vastly overrated in evaluating smartphone cameras. Where it matters most is in maintaining sharpness at large sizes. Now, when was the last time you printed a poster from a photo taken on your phone? In fact, photos that pixel-dense can be a problem in real life; they take up lots of storage space and don't lend themselves easily to sharing. So now that we've disposed of that, here's what's important about the 1020: the camera. Nokia has included several feature...

A Nokia Worth Attention But Not for Why Youd Think

Image
The new Nokia Lumia 1020 smartphone is worth paying attention to, but not for the reason you've heard. The key figure in Nokia's ads and marketing is 41 -- as in, the number of megapixels of the Lumia's camera. That's a crazy number, triple what any other manufacturer except Nokia itself with its 808 PureView (which runs the old Symbian operating system, as opposed to the Lumia's Windows Phone 8) has ever put into a smartphone. The thing is, the number of megapixels, while important, is vastly overrated in evaluating smartphone cameras. Where it matters most is in maintaining sharpness at large sizes. Now, when was the last time you printed a poster from a photo taken on your phone? In fact, photos that pixel-dense can be a problem in real life; they take up lots of storage space and don't lend themselves easily to sharing. So now that we've disposed of that, here's what's important about the 1020: the camera. Nokia has included several feature...

Simple But Reliable Car Battery Tester

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This circuit uses the popular and easy to find LM3914 IC. This IC is very simple to drive, needs no voltage regulators (it has a built in voltage regulator) and can be powered from almost every source. This circuit is very easy to explain: When the test button is pressed, the Car battery voltage is feed into a high impedance voltage divider. His purpose is to divide 12V to 1,25V (or lower values to lower values). This solution is better than letting the internal voltage regulator set the 12V sample voltage to be feed into the internal voltage divider simply because it cannot regulate 12V when the voltage drops lower (linear regulators only step down). Simply wiring with no adjust, the regulator provides stable 1,25V which is fed into the precision internal resistor cascade to generate sample voltages for the internal comparators. Anyway the default setting let you to measure voltages between 8 and 12V but you can measure even from 0V to 12V setting the offset trimmer to 0 (but i think ...