From time to time the heated discussions on this newsgroup about those
mysterious chemical boxes under the settee that keep the lights on
arises.

Well, over on alt.binaries.e-book.technical someone has posted:
Electric Vehicle Battery Systems - S. Dhameja (Newnes, 2001) WW.pdf
which my robot dutifully downloaded this morning with its big load of
books/manuals/etc., I'll probably never have time to read.

This one caught my eye so I opened it (Adobe Acrobat Reader for the pdf
file). Aimed at the electric vehicle market, it discusses a wide variety
of lead-acid, Ni-Cd, Ni-MH and more exotic new battery technologies up to
its 2001 publishing date.

It's a fantastic read for those interested in why we can't recharge the
house batteries in 30 seconds with a 5000A alternator, or why the
batteries wear out. It goes into great detail, without going into page-
after-page of advanced mathmatics, on how the beasts operate, what their
inherent limitations and drawbacks are and how to maximize their utility.

For those not all uptight about downloading copyrighted materials from
Usenet (where everything is illegal to download, not just pictures of
naked little girls), it's worth the effort to retrieve it.
alt.binaries.e-book.technical is a VAST, continuing library of books on
all kinds of topics. You wood polishers will be impressed at the array
of woodworking books and magazines that constantly appear. A couple of
naval museums are posting a vast array of seamanship, knot tying, and
other nautical books over 100 years old someone took the time to scan
into pdf or chm (Micro$oft has a free reader) formats.

Books in RAR file sets, like the new Janes Fighting Ships posted a couple
days ago, require WinRAR to decode and assemble the resulting set of rar
files. This is a proprietary, and very popular, file splitting and
compression program from www.rarlabs.com and well worth the pittance
price if you intend to download a lot.

To download and decode binaries like these, I recommend freeware Xnews
from:
http://xnews.newsguy.com/
Xnews, once you spend a little time reading and learning the
documentation also on the website, will assemble all the message parts
into a single line on the file list, in order....tell you which parts
have missing pieces...que up (the Q column means Que) what you want and
download them in the order you marked them...decoding whatever usenet
binary encoding the posted used, automatically, storing the results where
you tell it to on your hard drive. Once you've que'd the list, started
the download...you simply walk away until it's finished. Once you're
addicted, as I am, you'll never "finish" one newsgroup before starting
another...(c;

Those without good binary completion news servers, I recommend
Usenetserver.com, a very professional system in Atlanta used by customers
across the planet. It's $15/month or 3 months for $39...a real bargain.
Completion is 98-99%, easily recoverable when you learn how to use the
PAR (parity correction) files on large groups, and retain the files for
over a month in massive disk drive arrays in Atlanta.
www.usenetserver.com for details.

Many ISPs, such as Comcast Cable, try to keep customers from actually
USING the bandwidth promised by limiting their downloading, in Comcast's
case, to 2GB/month, a pittance only good for text newsgroups. They block
port 119, the NNTP port Usenet servers listen on, so UNS allows you to
bypass that nonsense by having many different ports available to get
around it. Comcast comes with 2GB/month of Giganews, a different
company. They want to SELL you more...(sigh).

Well, great battery book. It's only 1.2MB or so of PDF file. Those on
text only news server...go buy a better system, cheapskates!



--
There's amazing intelligence in the Universe.
You can tell because none of them ever called Earth.