Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[med6753]

Morrisons custard creams are the best

Careful! 

[mansaxel]

On it 

An interesting data point is that in the UK, junk food is significantly cheaper than real food, whereas in Sweden, my impression is the opposite.

When you are unemployed, which is to say
when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to
eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is
always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let's have three pennorth
of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and
we'll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are
at the P.A.C. level. White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don't nourish you
to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than
brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment is an endless misery
that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the
English-man's opium. A cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a
temporary stimulant than a crust of brown bread.

(from The Road To Wigan Pier by George Orwell, 1937)

That text is 84 years old, but it stands as a lasting headstone over the health of the chav.

[Cerebus]

Talking of using Cisco 7206 VXRs as garage heaters, if someone really wants to combine winter warmth and a big wired home network - on eBay, a full Cisco Catalyst 6500 chassis complete with 288 10/100/1000 Ethernet PoE ports and two 6 kW PSUs. Currently sitting at £80 + £35 carriage, likely to go for that too.

[bd139]

It's worth pretty much nothing though. The amount of stuff that goes in the WEEE skip these days is scary.

[Robert763]

And last, but most certainly not least, where the magic happens in the P6042. These things must be treated like Fabergé eggs, and unfortunately it looks like there may be a crack started in the top half. But, it seems to work fine, so not bad for a pennies on the dollar property auction purchase. [edit] I also confirmed that dc response is fine...it tracks my in-service P6042 perfectly.

Looks like the crack is just in the potting not the ferrite so should be OK

edit - typo

[Cerebus]

You know, that is odd - I'm sure I was seeing an IPv6 address in the 'connection' field when I was looking at my own eevblog posts a year or two back (A&A ISP customer here!)

Do keep in mind that Eevblog is on Cloudflare, which means that there are different answers depending on where you are. There is no universal truth.

Yup, current view from someone also on A&A's network:

Code: [Select]

cerebus@shu:~/Desktop$ dig [url=http://www.eevblog.com]www.eevblog.com[/url] aaaa

; <<>> DiG 9.10.6 <<>> [url=http://www.eevblog.com]www.eevblog.com[/url] aaaa
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 42163
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 4096
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;[url=http://www.eevblog.com]www.eevblog.com[/url]. IN AAAA

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
eevblog.com. 3048 IN SOA erin.ns.cloudflare.com. dns.cloudflare.com. 2034806799 10000 2400 604800 3600

;; Query time: 31 msec
;; SERVER: 90.155.xxx.xx#53(90.155.xxx.xxx)
;; WHEN: Fri Oct 09 11:58:30 BST 2020
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 103

I used to get the forum via IPv6, but haven't for some time now. There used to be 'funnies' from time to time if you accessed via IPv6 and they went away of you used v4. I suspect that they may have reverted to IPv4 only becuase of this.

[bd139]

An interesting data point is that in the UK, junk food is significantly cheaper than real food, whereas in Sweden, my impression is the opposite.

To be fair the non junk food is pretty cheap as well. Meal for 5 at just over £1 a head. Add gravy of course. And there's enough left over potatoes for mash a couple of days down the line.



The problem is it takes an hour and a half and you have to prepare the veg yourself which is beyond half of the population here. Oh and most people eat too much.

[BU508A]

You know, that is odd - I'm sure I was seeing an IPv6 address in the 'connection' field when I was looking at my own eevblog posts a year or two back (A&A ISP customer here!)

Do keep in mind that Eevblog is on Cloudflare Clownflare, which means that there are different answers depending on where you are. There is no universal truth.

Fixed that for you.       

[Cerebus]

It's worth pretty much nothing though. The amount of stuff that goes in the WEEE skip these days is scary.

I once saw a whole big brand new BT owned SDH add drop multiplexer complete with STM16 cards (when STM16 was still something impressive ) go in a skip. If I had 0.001% of corporate Britain's wastefulness as hard money I could buy us all a large country estate to live on, run it, and still have money left over to build the labs and have a virtually bottomless TEA fund for us all.

Edited to add: The more I think of it the funnier the idea of a commune of TEA addicts, at various stages in old codgerhood, living together in the countryside becomes. Think "The IT Crowd" meets "Last of the Summer Wine".

[nfmax]

It's worth pretty much nothing though. The amount of stuff that goes in the WEEE skip these days is scary.

I once saw a whole big brand new BT owned SDH add drop multiplexer complete with STM16 cards (when STM16 was still something impressive ) go in a skip. If I had 0.001% of corporate Britain's wastefulness as hard money I could buy us all a large country estate to live on, run it, and still have money left over to build the labs and have a virtually bottomless TEA fund for us all.

At one place I worked, they were having a clear-out because tidiness, and they set out a bin labelled 'scrap titanium". It wasn't empty

[Specmaster]

An interesting data point is that in the UK, junk food is significantly cheaper than real food, whereas in Sweden, my impression is the opposite.

To be fair the non junk food is pretty cheap as well. Meal for 5 at just over £1 a head. Add gravy of course. And there's enough left over potatoes for mash a couple of days down the line.



The problem is it takes an hour and a half and you have to prepare the veg yourself which is beyond half of the population here. Oh and most people eat too much.

Meal for 5??? I hate white potatoes, slushy and tasteless, give me Albert Bartlets Red Roosters any day of the week, only £1.99 at Morrisons

[bd139]

Yeah that actually feeds 5 adults the right amount of food. Yeah I don't eat the "white potatoes" myself but if you're on a budget it's a win. King Edwards here usually, failing that Maris Pipers

What I had for dinner on Tuesday...

[BU508A]

Silly me. I thought, the people in the UK are eating baked beans all day long.   

[med6753]

Very tempting. But no......haven't got the room. But damn, tempting. Looks kinda rough though but it should clean up. Interesting that he says 9 tubes lost vacuum. I see one. Unusual for that many tubes to go to air. Overheated perhaps?

Anyway.....Pat (Cubdriver), this is just a short drive for you. Go get it. 

https://newhaven.craigslist.org/ele/d/cos-cob-tektronix-oscilloscope/7208436371.html

[Mr. Scram]

Talking of using Cisco 7206 VXRs as garage heaters, if someone really wants to combine winter warmth and a big wired home network - on eBay, a full Cisco Catalyst 6500 chassis complete with 288 10/100/1000 Ethernet PoE ports and two 6 kW PSUs. Currently sitting at £80 + £35 carriage, likely to go for that too.

You couldn't pay to collect and run that. Well, it'd be a pretty penny at least.

[bd139]

Silly me. I thought, the people in the UK are eating baked beans all day long.   

Yes  But not those ones. They are quite frankly disgusting these days. Mostly water.

Best I have found are these:



Proper food 

[Specmaster]

Silly me. I thought, the people in the UK are eating baked beans all day long.   

Don't be silly, that's the Mericans, surely you've watched cowboy film

[med6753]

Well that certainly explains the "London Fog". It's all farts. 

[med6753]

Silly me. I thought, the people in the UK are eating baked beans all day long.   

Don't be silly, that's the Mericans, surely you've watched cowboy film

[bd139]

Nailed it  . That or chicken and broccoli and this place is a write off 

Lurking for ebay deals this weekend. Fingers crossed I'll land something because everything I've got is working and not broken now 

[mnementh]

On it     

An interesting data point is that in the UK, junk food is significantly cheaper than real food, whereas in Sweden, my impression is the opposite.

When you are unemployed, which is to say; when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let's have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we'll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are at the P.A.C. level. White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don't nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the English-man's opium. A cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a temporary stimulant than a crust of brown bread.

(from The Road To Wigan Pier by George Orwell, 1937)

That text is 84 years old, but it stands as a lasting headstone over the health of the chav.

Wigan Pier is a much more direct assault on the Western social malaise which even today barrels like a locomotive at full steam headlong towards the proverbial cliff. 1984 was sufficiently "distanced" from the age it was written to serve as a cautionary tale (and unintended, as the blueprint for the current corporate machine's hostile takeover of its host organism); Wigan Pier bluntly placed the blame on all echelons of society, each in its own part, and the human drive to either take the path of least misery or that of the greatest perversity, but almost never to find a civil middle ground. This quote was part of a much larger context; which today is as incisive as it was nearly a century ago:

...A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into; the other functions and faculties may be more godlike, but in point of time they come afterwards. A man dies and is buried, and all his words and actions are forgotten, but the food he has eaten lives after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children.

I think it could be plausibly argued that changes of diet are more important than changes of dynasty or even of religion....Yet it is curious how seldom the all-importance of food is recognized. You see statues everywhere to politicians, poets, bishops, but none to cooks or bacon-curers or market gardeners...

...Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing.

The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't.

Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you...

Not surprising; really... as we are today engaged in the very same war against the very same machine which nearly destroyed humanity a century ago... with a century of practice to perfect the opiates and beat the voices of reason into submission... I have little doubt that the machine will succeed this time. 

If we're lucky... it'll happen before the race of man gives birth to SkyNet.

mnem
     
Food for thought; Thought from food.

[URI]

Yep. That one. Just bought it for 340,-.
I will have the opportunity to test it when I'm there to fetch it. 

I just got the info it was sold, still had it on my watch list. So you will take a huge PS to get it warm? I was not amused to have a ride of abt. 500km to get it.
Would like to see insight photos when you got it.

My second KP184 arrived and this one works. Still waiting for the RMA of the broken one.

For me it's an under 1hr ride.   
I don't have such a powerful power supply, to be honest. But I will take an ATX power supply with me delivering loads of Amps at low voltages and a supply capable of 50V at low Amps.
I won't do a real load test -that would take hours. I just want to check if the basic functions (CV,CC,CR) of the load are ok.

I will share photos when I got it here.      

Will you modify your KP184 to get rid of its safety flaws?   

[mnementh]

It's worth pretty much nothing though. The amount of stuff that goes in the WEEE skip these days is scary.

I once saw a whole big brand new BT owned SDH add drop multiplexer complete with STM16 cards (when STM16 was still something impressive ) go in a skip. If I had 0.001% of corporate Britain's wastefulness as hard money I could buy us all a large country estate to live on, run it, and still have money left over to build the labs and have a virtually bottomless TEA fund for us all.

Edited to add: The more I think of it the funnier the idea of a commune of TEA addicts, at various stages in old codgerhood, living together in the countryside becomes. Think "The IT Crowd" meets "Last of the Summer Wine".

Add random alien anal probes and I'm in! 

mnem

[bd139]

Should I be glad that video is showing up as unavailable based on the previous mention of anal probes? 

Edit: so I was bored this afternoon and have run my OS test suite against Fedora 32 and the damn thing passed everything. Is this a turning point?!?! 

[mansaxel]

Got a -hp- 432A today. 15€. No mount, no cable, VGC. It's full of relays!

Very optimistic plan is to bodge a mount. There's a AN describing the 478 mount, so some guidance is provided. No, won't be even close to the real thing, but without trial, how can there be error?