Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[med6753]

Next project on tap is re-cap of this Fluke 8021B. All 2 capacitors.  And they are accessible without removing the display. And I'm now wondering. What's inside the 87? It's coming up on 25 years old. Checked the parts list. 5 tants and no electrolytics. My experience with Fluke gear has seen exactly one lone tant fail. In a 8010A. So I think I'm safe to leave these alone for now.

And yes, that's the mini 212 in the background. That's next. I have the parts to rebuild the HV supply.

[Vince]

It's Friday evening, time for some Fun with TE!
Todays star of the show: a low noise preamplifier

Also, sorry for the big pictures Vince.

Good Lord.... have I sinned to deserve such a punishment ?!  18MP 3.5MB per pic 

I am sure your experiments are very cool, I will look at them as soon as I can, probably next month when the pics have finished loading 

I think I better unsubscribe from TEA until I can get fiber. 4G modem doesn't cut it even though signal reception is 100%, ISP giving crap connection on purpose I guess, but what can I do. Just got copper lines installed a few months ago, so could get xDSL but no point since I understand copper lines will be phased out pretty soon. So I am left only with fiber but the guy from Orange, the other day said I am the only house in my street who can't have it, though I can't see why and he didn't say either.
No I am not installing a satellite dish, looks ugly costs a fortune and upload speed is still via landline, which is slow and soon obsolete anyway.

So I think that's bye bye TEA for me. Will miss you all ! Well, most of you anyway.  Have fun.

[tautech]

It's Friday evening, time for some Fun with TE!
Todays star of the show: a low noise preamplifier

Also, sorry for the big pictures Vince.

Good Lord.... have I sinned to deserve such a punishment ?!  18MP 3.5MB per pic 

I am sure your experiments are very cool, I will look at them as soon as I can, probably next month when the pics have finished loading 

I think I better unsubscribe from TEA until I can get fiber. 4G modem doesn't cut it even though signal reception is 100%, ISP giving crap connection on purpose I guess, but what can I do. Just got copper lines installed a few months ago, so could get xDSL but no point since I understand copper lines will be phased out pretty soon. So I am left only with fiber but the guy from Orange, the other day said I am the only house in my street who can't have it, though I can't see why and he didn't say either.
No I am not installing a satellite dish, looks ugly costs a fortune and upload speed is still via landline, which is slow and soon obsolete anyway.

So I think that's bye bye TEA for me. Will miss you all ! Well, most of you anyway.  Have fun.

Right with you Vince as when we had a shitty ADSL connection and for that matter dialup before that any website that took ages to load was avoided like the plague !
Don't care much now as times have changed here however I sill feel for those with slow data connections and pics I post here are always slimmed down to 200kb or less.

[mansaxel]

So I think that's bye bye TEA for me. Will miss you all ! Well, most of you anyway.  Have fun.

Mais non!

Just stop downloading pictures.

[Vince]

The pics are loaded automatically by the browser every time I refresh the TEA page, it does not ask me "Oh, this page contains pictures, would you like to load/display them  Sir ? "

Anyway, the pics do show up eventually... I just go away do something else while it's loading, play a Sudoku game or two to waste time...

I just don't understand, especially on a nerd forum here, how people can not adjust the size of pics to something sensible. I set my camera to 2MP, 1600x1200, which is plenty enough to see what there is to see. Then I adjust the JPEG compression ratio to 80% which gets the pics to 200KB or something, well below 500KB anyway, without affecting the quality of the pic that a human can detect anyway.  Anything larger and/or heavier than that is just a waste of bandwidth, storage space, load time which affects every body but the rich guys lucky enough to have fiber or bve in a city/place that offers this service.. what about the rest of the world ? The guy in the country that's got just dial-up or crappy ADSL because the relay is far away ? That's just selfish.

Unless you want to print your damn picture on a wall, there is zero need/justification for mega high resolution and super heavy files especially since they always so grainy and blurry that a pic 10 times smaller would have done just as well. It's just a pic to show some stuff quickly to your buddies and forgotten next day, it's not meant to fill void space on your fancy 4K monitor. If you have too much real estate on your screen and now have this uncomfortable feeling of void and your brain feels the need to have mega large pictures to fill that space... well too bad for you, maybe you should have bought a smaller screen... or just zoom on the pics to enlarge them...    ... Maybe Firefox can do it automatically I don't know, or maybe there is a plugin available somewhere that can do it...

Regardless of download speeds, using an adequate resolution and file size is just basic engineering, which I thought every body here would not even need to be lectured about, should come naturally ?! 

Anyway... do all as you please of course, as for me I am taking a step or two back from TEA, too much crap and too much traffic yet too low SNR.
Am too addicted now to give up on it completely, you are all a weird interesting bunch, so will keep a distant eye, lurk in the background and post every now and then if I have something on topic. Don't want to be involved in the daily shit anymore, that drives me nuts. Tired of people telling me how to conduct my life and telling me what to do, all the know it all and flame throwers..  Might do like Martin M in Germany. Comes here just once a month to drop a one liner, not even read / reply to replies, run away,... wait a month or two and repeat cycle. Seems to work well for him, maybe that's the recipe to stay sane, worth a try anyway.

[BU508A]

 

(only 207kByte)

[mansaxel]

The pics are loaded automatically by the browser every time I refresh the TEA page, it does not ask me "Oh, this page contains pictures, would you like to load/display them  Sir ? "

Anyway, the pics do show up eventually... I just go away do something else while it's loading, play a Sudoku game or two to waste time...

I just don't understand, especially on a nerd forum here, how people can not adjust the size of pics to something sensible.

For you, and to be able to squeeze more pics into a posting, I run the ImageMagick command:

Code: [Select]

convert -strip -quality 60 file.jpg smaller-file.jpegwhen I post here.  It keeps the pixel count but increases compression. This is the last picture I posted in the thread, my sons stompbox that we finished yesterday, as downloaded from the phone and as posted:

Code: [Select]

treize:tea mansaxel$ ls -l DSC_0966.JPG schtomp.jpeg
-rw-r--r--@ 1 mansaxel  staff  3150348  4 Nov 21:29 DSC_0966.JPG
-rw-r--r--@ 1 mansaxel  staff   611071  4 Nov 21:29 schtomp.jpeg
treize:tea mansaxel$ dc
5
k
3150348
611071/p
5.15545
treize:tea mansaxel$ Nice ratio there.  The "-strip" flag also cleans out all EXIF data, which I don't feel like sharing. 

Unless you want to print your damn picture on a wall, there is zero need/justification for mega high resolution and super heavy files.

A high-resolution picture is a thing of beauty, and very useful at that, because it will convey information better. I'm truly sorry for your situation, and will go to some length to accommodate your situation (I'm trimming the text I'm replying to, for instance! Mostly because I don't want the Aardvark to get cross...) but at the end of the day we sometimes need those big files.

On your network connection situation, I can offer little consolation, but perhaps some advice:

• DSL sucks, but still will work better than 4G, especially if you've got a quota per month on the wireless.
• Fibre of course is best. Strange you can't get it. There usually is a way, but it might cost a lot.
• Forget satellite. The latency is crazy and the bandwidth sucks.

And stay. We become a better thread with you.

[Vince]

For you, and to be able to squeeze more pics into a posting, I run the ImageMagick command:

Code: [Select]

convert -strip -quality 60 file.jpg smaller-file.jpeg

Yeah that's exactly what I do. I take pictures, I plug the camera to the computer, open file manager, navigate to the camera SD card, open a terminal window in it, and run image magick to batch adjust compression ratio and/or resolution. Takes only a few seconds and problem solved. I love ImageMagick...

[mnementh]

I usually use PowerToys Image Resizer; the retro version managed by Brice Lambson since the Vista days. It's always right there in my File Manager dropdown dialog, the executable is tiny, and it does no more and no less than you need for forum posting. You can still find it here, and to my knowledge, it still installs properly and works in current versions of Windows10: https://www.bricelam.net/ImageResizer/

 Not certain if it will continue to work in Win11; I hope so because the version MS included in the reiterated PowerToys is slow and bloated AF.

Sometimes I'm not on my Windoze box, and sometimes the subject demands more res. But I do try to be considerate of both filesize and rat's-nesting of posts.

mnem

[GreyWoolfe]

The day after...

Spent the afternoon showing my son how to do front brakes on the RAV4; it felt good to get my hands dirty for a change. He mostly whinged me to death. 

Today though, they're aching like a motherf*****... getting old ain't for wussies.

mnem

*toddles off to find some claw clippers*

Did the fronts on my Tradesman cargo van a couple of months ago.  It was a breeze with them new fangled 2 part calipers.  Not like the ratcheting rears that were a right bahstahd to do, not having the proper tool.  Since my hands ache all the time, it wasn't much worse than normal for me.  Living better chemically (Diclofenac 75 mg 2X as needed), I can actually do my job and things like this.

[Kosmic]

Number three is a low noise voltage regulator based on https://wenzel.com/documents/finesse.html

Now that looks more like it!

I also found this article some time ago and always wanted to try it out. Nice to see it's working well.

[factory]

It's Friday evening, time for some Fun with TE!
Todays star of the show: a low noise preamplifier

Also, sorry for the big pictures Vince.

Good Lord.... have I sinned to deserve such a punishment ?!  18MP 3.5MB per pic 

I am sure your experiments are very cool, I will look at them as soon as I can, probably next month when the pics have finished loading 

I think I better unsubscribe from TEA until I can get fiber. 4G modem doesn't cut it even though signal reception is 100%, ISP giving crap connection on purpose I guess, but what can I do. Just got copper lines installed a few months ago, so could get xDSL but no point since I understand copper lines will be phased out pretty soon. So I am left only with fiber but the guy from Orange, the other day said I am the only house in my street who can't have it, though I can't see why and he didn't say either.
No I am not installing a satellite dish, looks ugly costs a fortune and upload speed is still via landline, which is slow and soon obsolete anyway.

So I think that's bye bye TEA for me. Will miss you all ! Well, most of you anyway.  Have fun.

Right with you Vince as when we had a shitty ADSL connection and for that matter dialup before that any website that took ages to load was avoided like the plague !
Don't care much now as times have changed here however I sill feel for those with slow data connections and pics I post here are always slimmed down to 200kb or less.

For the same reasons I no longer refresh the TEA thread while at work, uses too much mobile data.
I now load whatever was posted overnight before work and read them offline while at work.

Pictures linked from other websites can also be larger than needed, I remember med linking some Tek brochure pages that were over 5Mb each, quickly noticed by them loading line-by-line over mobile data, much like the web was decades ago.

David

[mansaxel]

For the same reasons I no longer refresh the TEA thread while at work, uses too much mobile data.
I now load whatever was posted overnight before work and read them offline while at work.

When I'm inside the EU, I have no practical limit on mobile data on the work phone, and it is suggested that I refrain from using public wifi for the work computer, except at home, instead tethering to the phone.  Last job was flat rate data in the entire world. And the instruction was clear: Bring your phone on vacation. We'd like to be able to call you. And it is quite OK to watch TV from abroad if you need to.

My private phone has -- I think -- 20GiB transfer per month, again mostly available wherever I am inside the EU. I rarely get even close to that, mostly because I use the work phone instead.

[factory]

Definitely no free WiFi for shopfloor staff where I work and I still use PAYG as I don't want to spend much on my phone.

David

[mnementh]

The day after...   

Spent the afternoon showing my son how to do front brakes on the RAV4; it felt good to get my hands dirty for a change. He mostly whinged me to death. 

Today though, they're aching like a motherf*****... getting old ain't for wussies.

mnem

*toddles off to find some claw clippers*

Did the fronts on my Tradesman cargo van a couple of months ago.  It was a breeze with them new fangled 2 part calipers.  Not like the ratcheting rears that were a right bahstahd to do, not having the proper tool.  Since my hands ache all the time, it wasn't much worse than normal for me.  Living better chemically (Diclofenac 75 mg 2X as needed), I can actually do my job and things like this.

The work wasn't bad; OEM pads were ceramic so very little filth and the calipers are traditional dual-slider design so it went quickly enough with the usual wire-brush abuse and a few squirts of alcohol.

It's just that by the time we were finishing up it was getting dark and at or below freezing, and it's the kind of work that's almost impossible to do entirely wearing gloves.

What's lingering now is the usual slices from thin metal brake hardware and several spots of cracked skin from cold and alcohol. I'll patch them up with CA & tweezers when I finally get around to trimming these grungy claws.

Ugghh... tomorrow morning and the road trip will be here afore I know it...

mnem
"...But it rings, and I rise;
Wipe the sleep out of my eyes.
The shavin' razor's cold, and it stings...

[Specmaster]

@Vince
I hear you loud and clear Vince, and I'll try and keep my pics down in file size, but sometimes you do need the extra pixels to convey details, as has already been mentioned, but you could also try and help yourself a bit here as well, there are a few things that you could try to help and improve the situation, the first of which is try and ask people nicely if they could spare a thought for your situation with piss poor bandwidth internet connection instead of doing a mini rant at other members all the time when you don't like something. The second thing you could do, is what I used to do, and that is install an app on your phone that will if I recall correctly reduce image files, so they display on the phone, you can also reply to posts directly and I think this is the link you need https://www.tapatalk.com/tapatalk_mobile.

If the man from Orange said you can't get their fibre, I suspect it's because they don't want to dig a trench to lay fibre just for you as your house is new and their fibre was already installed before you had your house built. What about your neighbour, have they got fibre? Perhaps if they have, you could approach them and discuss the option of possibly sharing their connection and paying half the rental and as well increasing the speed to a better package. You could then run a Cat6 cable from their modem / router externally to your house and direct to your own wireless access point. If that is an option, in the event of problems, your neighbour would need to unplug that lead before calling their engineers out.

Do these options offer you any help?

[Cerebus]

@Vince
I hear you loud and clear Vince, and I'll try and keep my pics down in file size, but sometimes you do need the extra pixels to convey details, as has already been mentioned, but you could also try and help yourself a bit here as well, there are a few things that you could try to help and improve the situation, the first of which is try and ask people nicely if they could spare a thought for your situation with piss poor bandwidth internet connection instead of doing a mini rant at other members all the time when you don't like something.

Don't pin this on Vince, the "please don't post anti-socially large images" request has been made many times before by many people. For a while some people scale it back, and then before you know it somebody links in 35Mb of images into a post and we all have to wait for them to load every time until we roll over to the next page on the forum, meantime watching the pages squirm as the images load. It would help if people stuck to the official forum upload limits which are a reasonable compromise (10 files per post, max 5Mb total, largest single file 4Mb) but which are not enforced when people link to offsite resources.

Please people, don't be lazy - resize your images to something appropriate before posting. Picking on ch_scr simply becuase his images above are the prompt for Vince's discomfature - they're 3.5Mb each and over 5000 pixels wide but you can see all you need to see if they're resized to 1000 pixels wide at which point they are only 244kb each, fourteen times smaller.

Cue usual rant about "If you link offsite the resources can disappear without notice, either when the site in question changes its rules, or when you don't pay your subscription fees to them".

[beanflying]

If you need more detail crop the bit that needs the detail  As most of us are taking happy snaps with phone cameras (yeah I know some are not) the easy way to get them off the phone is email them to yourself and my Droids have always allowed a few levels of resizing as a standard one click option which is at least a good start to being bandwidth friendly.

Better yet download https://www.irfanview.com/ and use the batch conversion part of it if you have a stack of full size images to upload to the web for any use. I still run my stripped  image through it to 1000 wide for Landscape and 800 wide for Portrait shots, anything much more than this is a waste of bandwidth for general uploads.

The only offsite photos I would ever link to is the odd evilbay link and if those images disappear along with the add in time it generally doesn't matter to much. Luckilly this place is better than most but using off site image services has made content elsewhere on the web in some cases useless due to ceased operations changed links or other randomness over the last 20 years.

[mnementh]

@Vince
I hear you loud and clear Vince, and I'll try and keep my pics down in file size, but sometimes you do need the extra pixels to convey details, as has already been mentioned, but you could also try and help yourself a bit here as well, there are a few things that you could try to help and improve the situation, the first of which is try and ask people nicely if they could spare a thought for your situation with piss poor bandwidth internet connection instead of doing a mini rant at other members all the time when you don't like something.

Don't pin this on Vince, the "please don't post anti-socially large images" request has been made many times before by many people. For a while some people scale it back, and then before you know it somebody links in 35Mb of images into a post and we all have to wait for them to load every time until we roll over to the next page on the forum, meantime watching the pages squirm as the images load. It would help if people stuck to the official forum upload limits which are a reasonable compromise (10 files per post, max 5Mb total, largest single file 4Mb) but which are not enforced when people link to offsite resources.

Please people, don't be lazy - resize your images to something appropriate before posting. Picking on ch_scr simply becuase his images above are the prompt for Vince's discomfature - they're 3.5Mb each and over 5000 pixels wide but you can see all you need to see if they're resized to 1000 pixels wide at which point they are only 244kb each, fourteen times smaller.

Cue usual rant about "If you link offsite the resources can disappear without notice, eithe⁵r when the site in question changes its rules, or when you don't pay your subscription fees to them".

C, he wasn't pinning it on Vince; Spec was just asking him to dial the drama knob down a few clicks. I don't think that's unreasonable.

I agree with everything else you've said here, as do most of the regulars. But of course we all slip up from time to time.

mnem
*knocks self unconscious with a floutist mallet*

[cyclin_al]

I got invited out to a concert of Nordic Jazz a couple of years back. My first thought was Won't the poles get in the way of playing their instruments?  But actually it was pretty good

As a nordic skier, I immediately got it 

Way way back I played the bassoon.  I was not quick enough for smaller instruments.  The wood used for the double reed made a huge difference.  A wood even slightly too hard made it very difficult to modulate the embachure to anything other than fully open or clamped fully closed.  Fully open or fully closed gets you no sound at all; it needs to be modulated just so.  Also, the musculature would be fatigued very quickly in that case.

[mansaxel]

Definitely no free WiFi for shopfloor staff where I work and I still use PAYG as I don't want to spend much on my phone.

David

Heh, if there wasn't wifi, nigh-indistinguishable from wired connections in quality, everywhere at work, both an internal SSID for work issued devices and a guest net for private devices, there'd be revolution. We live in different realities, in some ways.

[ch_scr]

Number three is a low noise voltage regulator based on https://wenzel.com/documents/finesse.html

Now that looks more like it!

I also found this article some time ago and always wanted to try it out. Nice to see it's working well.

I selected a transistor that I could find a specific model for, and
made an LTSpice simulation (transient and noise). Then played with the values until it seemed to fit.
The explanations are a good starting point and LTSpice gives a nice way to play around and get a feel for it.

Also, after a good nights sleep, I resized all the pictures 

[BU508A]

Number three is a low noise voltage regulator based on https://wenzel.com/documents/finesse.html

Now that looks more like it!

I also found this article some time ago and always wanted to try it out. Nice to see it's working well.

I selected a transistor that I could find a specific model for, and
made an LTSpice simulation (transient and noise). Then played with the values until it seemed to fit.
The explanations are a good starting point and LTSpice gives a nice way to play around and get a feel for it.

Also, after a good nights sleep, I resized all the pictures 

Maybe you'll find this article interesting:

https://people.phys.ethz.ch/~pmaerki/voltage_regulator_2013_0.02/20140120a_voltage_regulator_2013_0.02_description.pdf


attached for convenience reasons.

[TERRA Operative]

Managed to convince my TDS744A 500MHz scope to identify as a TDS784A 1GHz scope.
Just gotta calibrate it now, so I need to reassemble my SG503 levelled sine wave generator, which brings me to a question.

I need to bake a 1/8w carbon composite resistor, 80 degreesC for 8 hours. Any ideas on the easiest way to do so, that don't involve using the oven in the kitchen?
I wonder if my soldering iron can go that low......

[Vince]

Pic size.

- I don't use my smartphone to take pictures, I use a... camera, that's what it's for. I know it's all fashionned and all, who uses a camera to take pictures in 2021. But what can I do, I am dinosaur, I am 44 next week ! 

- No I am not asking for people to watch pic size just for me, it's not fair. That's missing my point. Again I thought it should be obvious to watch image size especially from a technical crowd we have here.  Just like quoting 10 pages of comments to ad a one liner or sometimes not even that, just a smiley. This does not have to change just for me ! TEA is what it is. It's up to me to adapt or leave. Nobody is putting a gun on my head to stay here. Tautech merely suggested I have a look at TEA, but he is not keeping me hostage, I am still allowed to make my own decisions...

- Fiber install : no they don't have to dig a trench, I have already paid for that 3 years ago to bring electricity. Copper line has been installed via the same trench. At the other end of the trench are both the phone pole and power line pole. My house is new but street is 95% old houses. Fiber is not there... it's in the process of being implemented. It will be fitted using the same path that the copper lines : fiber will linger along the copper lines, then down to the telephone poles then down to the same trenches/tubes that the copper line is currently using. Actually, the technician that installed my copper lines earlier this year said that when they install fiber, they actually use the old copper line to pull the fiber through the tubes/trenches ! This way they get rid of the old copper at the same time... killing two birds with one stone. So basically if I have copper line, there is no technical reason why I could not have fiber, just like all the other houses in the street.... I think this Orange guy was just incompetent and lazy. Maybe his database was not up to date as when he came my copper lines had only been very recently installed, so maybe his computer showed him I did not have copper lines so he thought too bad you can't have fiber... I guess I should contact Orange again, they might give a different answer 6 month later...

- @ch_scr : sorry it looked like I was picking on you ! I was not believe it or not !
Just the opposite : you are the only one who actually seemed to care about this issue since you thought of me ! 
I didn't even plan on "complaining" about it or anything, but since you explicitly put my name in there, would have been rude not to reply, so I did !
I was only joking, was not really complaining, was being sarcastic / friendly actually, believe it or not ! 
but then since others replied, it was the opportunity to discuss the root of the problem, which has nothing to do with you particularly, it's a general disease that spreads the internet, but that I was kinda shocked would affect a place like TEA, who should know much better.

Anyway it's not about me, it's about everybody watching this thread, being considerate for other people, technical common sense, and what used to be obvious, widely accepted netiquette.

I guess I am just obsolete so I will just go and hide, I have to adapt to the new ways of the internet. or die.
Maybe if I can get fiber one day I will take my revenge and too post GB worth of pics each and every day. 20MP pics with zero interest and super blurry, just because. And when someone complains about it I will tell him to stop whining !