Retrodiode--LED retrofit kits for classic microscopes

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g4lab
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Joined: Fri May 23, 2008 11:07 am

Retrodiode--LED retrofit kits for classic microscopes

Post by g4lab »

I haven't bought one of these but this guy has cooked up an LED illuminator and has custom adapted it to a very large number of microscopes.

I am posting it here because I think some list members might be interested. For the price he charges (about $140) it hardly pays to go into the workshop.

http://www.ebay.com/sch/stanton!/m.html?item=262092325176&ul_noapp=true&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2562

If one of our moderators would fix the link that would be nice. [done -- rjl] I was not able to do it. Instructions how would be nice too. I tried the URL button but it did not work and made the whole post disappear.

Here is his web page: http://retrodiode.com/

rjlittlefield
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Re: Retrodiode--LED retrofit kits for classic microscopes

Post by rjlittlefield »

g4lab wrote:If one of our moderators would fix the link that would be nice. I was not able to do it. Instructions how would be nice too. I tried the URL button but it did not work and made the whole post disappear.
The problem is caused by a bug somewhere in the forum software, that is too restrictive about what it recognizes as legal characters in URL syntax. In this case the exclamation point in "stanton!" is erroneously treated as the end of the URL.

In most cases the URL can be made to work OK by replacing the troublesome character with its URL-encoded percent-number notation. (See the "ASCII Encoding Reference" at http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.asp.) In this case would mean recoding "stanton!" as "stanton%21". Unfortunately, in this particular case that attempted fix still fails, because then eBay does not handle the URL correctly. (I'm guessing that eBay fails to un-encode the %21 before trying to use it. Even though Firefox properly echos the "stanton%21" as "stanton!", eBay complains that "One or more of the seller User IDs you entered was not found." Oh, what a tangled web we weave...)

As a result, the cure in this case requires switching gears entirely and running the desired URL through TinyURL or some equivalent, to convert the whole mess to some short and well behaved character string like "http://tinyurl.com/jdpl8zd" that can then be wrapped in tags to preserve the original appearan ... 7675.l2562

--Rik

g4lab
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Joined: Fri May 23, 2008 11:07 am

Post by g4lab »

Hi Rik,
I saw that it truncated at the exclamation point and suspected that had SOMETHING to do with the problem.

I feel much better knowing that the explanation was not moronically simple. :lol: :lol:

What is the purpose of the URL button? When I attempted to use that, the whole post disappeared.


rjlittlefield
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Post by rjlittlefield »

g4lab wrote:What is the purpose of the URL button? When I attempted to use that, the whole post disappeared.
As with all of the other buttons, the purpose of the URL button is simply to wrap certain tags around whatever happens to be selected.

In turn, the purpose of the and tags is to explicitly identify a URL and optionally substitute other text for display purposes. Given what is recognized as a well formed URL, the syntax URLstring displays the URLstring as blue, not underlined, and clickable, while the syntax substituteText causes substituteText to be displayed as blue, not underlined, and clickable to visit URLstring.

The wrinkle is what happens when the URLstring is not recognized as a well formed URL. In that case -- as far as I can tell by experiment -- the tags are either ignored completely or cause the entire post to render as blank, depending on some aspect of the "invalid" URLstring that I have never exactly figured out.

I assume that rendering the post as blank is another bug, because I cannot imagine anybody deliberately programming that behavior. But I've never tried to track down the offending code. It's buried someplace in the roughly 110K lines of PHP that comprises the forum software.

--Rik

rjlittlefield
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Post by rjlittlefield »

By the way, I took the liberty of editing your post two up from here, to use URL tags to shorten the displayed strings by deleting unnecessary tracking information.

When simply clicked, the URLs will do exactly what you had, but if copy/pasted they are still valid as the shorter forms.

The advantage of the shorter forms is that they do not mess up the forum page format so that the viewer has to scroll just to see each whole line.

--Rik

g4lab
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Joined: Fri May 23, 2008 11:07 am

Post by g4lab »

Thank you, Rik!

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