Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[mnementh]

Slow down you mob 6 pages in 12 hours major verbal diarrhea

Suck it up, princess.   

Ow! Ouch! There appears to be a pea stuck under all the pages of this topic. Oh no, my mistake - it's a green coffee bean. 

Nope... a dingleberry.    Go wash your hands.     And for Ifni's sake, don't try to roast it. 

mnem
Okay... mnem is weirdening again...

[mnementh]

am also looking for a vintage rpn hp calculator. my plan is to get some of med's tek blue paint and give it a couple of coats.

no need to mask off the keyboard or the display.  it will be more useful without that rubbish anyhow.hmmmmmm.   in fact.....maybe just dipping it in a bucket of paint would be quicker.

edit   hey med.  will the paint adhere better if i give it a good treatment with some 200 grit?

Now yer just agitatin'.      

mnem

[med6753]

am also looking for a vintage rpn hp calculator.

my plan is to get some of med's tek blue paint and give it a couple of coats.

no need to mask off the keyboard or the display.  it will be more useful without that rubbish anyhow.

hmmmmmm.   in fact.....maybe just dipping it in a bucket of paint would be quicker.

edit   hey med.  will the paint adhere better if i give it a good treatment with some 200 grit?

The Krylon spray paint will adhere to plastic just fine with no additional treatment.

[worsthorse]

There are times, in this thread, when it seems better to sit back and

     

for a while.

[med6753]

And there are days where I shouldn't get out of bed....

Upgrading Mint 17.3 to 18 via terminal commands....a real treat.

I spilled a full mug of coffee all over bench 2.....

[bd139]

Code: [Select]

# apt dist-upgrade
# apt spill-coffee


[med6753]

Code: [Select]

# apt dist-upgrade
# apt spill-coffee


You're no fucking help. 

[tggzzz]

absolutely. add to that some chemicals that I would definitely stay away from such as hydroflouric acid.

Here's a few more, delivered with a delightful sense of humour: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/category/things-i-wont-work-with

Random example:

Over the years, I’ve probably had more hits on my “Sand Won’t Save You This Time” post than on any other single one on the site. That details the fun you can have with chloride trifluoride, and believe me, it continues (along with its neighbor, bromine trifluoride) to be on the “Things I Won’t Work With” list. The only time I see either of them in the synthetic chemistry literature is when a paper by Shlomo Rozen pops up (for example), but despite his efforts on its behalf, I still won’t touch the stuff. And if anyone needs any more proof as to why, I present this video, made at some point by some French lunatics. You may observe the mild reactivity of this gentle substance as it encounters various common laboratory materials, and draw your own conclusions. We have Plexiglas, a rubber glove, clean leather, not-so-clean leather, a gas mask, a piece of wood, and a wet glove. Some of this, under ordinary circumstances, might be considered protective equipment. But not here.

or:

In a comment to my post on putting out fires last week, one commenter mentioned the utility of the good old sand bucket, and wondered if there was anything that would go on to set the sand on fire. Thanks to a note from reader Robert L., I can report that there is indeed such a reagent
...
It is apparently about the most vigorous fluorinating agent known, and is much more difficult to handle than fluorine gas. That’s one of those statements you don’t get to hear very often, and it should be enough to make any sensible chemist turn around smartly and head down the hall in the other direction.

or an example where HF is merely a precursor which has to be first purified - and then trapped as it boils off:

The SI of the paper casually mentions that you can use double vacuum distillation in a metal line to get your HF sufficiently anhydrous for the reaction, and you can go ahead and get cranking on that without waiting for me to show up.

You condense the latter two reagents onto a solid charge of the bromate at liquid nitrogen temperatures, and then let it warm all the way up to -78C, at which point a “vigorous” reaction sets in. Imagine running these things for the first time, waiting for said reaction and wondering if it’s going to stay inside your apparatus or invigorate itself all over the ceiling. Once you have made your bromyl fluoride, you raise the temperature a bit more to -40 and pump off the excess HF and pentafluoride, and you will want an extremely capable trap on the other end of that process, which according to the paper can take several hours, and probably had better.

last example:

Take this paper from Jean’ne Shreeve’s group at Idaho, a lab that has certainly given us all some alarming compounds over the years. If you or I (’cause we’re sensible, right?) look at a well-known crater-maker like dinitropyrazolopyrazole, we’ll probably decide that it has pretty much all the nitrogens it needs, if not more. But that latest paper builds off the question “How do we cram more nitro groups into this thing?”, and that’s something that wouldn’t have occurred to me to ask. Saying “this compounds doesn’t have enough nitro groups” is, for most chemists, like saying “You know, this lab doesn’t have enough flying glass in it” – pretty much the same observation, in the end.

[bd139]

Code: [Select]

# apt dist-upgrade
# apt spill-coffee


You're no fucking help. 

Seller didn't accept my offer on new toy

My Condor power supply just arrived:





Nicely built. Will see if it works later when I can be bothered to lash up a suicide cord

[med6753]

Any good technician worth his salt always has a suicide cord on hand. 

Oh that's right....you're an engineer.....don't hang yourself with it. 

[bd139]

 

The engineer in me is wondering if I can add OVP to it seeing as it has the footprints 

[med6753]

Pray tell...what be "OVP"?

[Cerebus]

Code: [Select]

# apt dist-upgrade
# apt spill-coffee


You're no fucking help. 

Yeah. It should have been:

Code: [Select]

apt-get --dry-run spill-coffee


[med6753]

Holy crap, this Mint upgrade is taking forever. And you can see this obvious family resemblance to Ubuntu.

[bd139]

I have never done a dist-upgrade on any Debian derivative in the 20 odd years I've been using it. 

Pray tell...what be "OVP"?

Over-voltage protection

Fat SCR shorts the output if it goes above target.

[med6753]

Go for it...you're the one who has to fix it if it goes south on you.....or put out the fire. 

[bd139]

Yep. I was thinking more that I'm fed up of dodging bits of flying MOSFET 

Random thing. Found this rather amusing. ST TnG camera stablised 

[Cerebus]

Holy crap, this Mint upgrade is taking forever. And you can see this obvious family resemblance to Ubuntu.

Serious suggestion this time:

Code: [Select]

apt-get update
apt-get --download-only dist-upgrade

before you get properly started. You can walk away and leave the "--download-only" to its own devices. Then when you're ready to sit down and actually do the upgrade all the packages are cached locally and it only takes a few minutes and, most importantly, you only have to pay attention for those few minutes.

[med6753]

Yep. I was thinking more that I'm fed up of dodging bits of flying MOSFET 

Random thing. Found this rather amusing. ST TnG camera stablised 

Ever see a chip get blown clean through a TO-3 case leaving a nice little hole? I have, multiple times, with early switch regulators at IBM that clearly had a design flaw. 

Edit....makes a hell of a bang too.

[med6753]

Holy crap, this Mint upgrade is taking forever. And you can see this obvious family resemblance to Ubuntu.

Serious suggestion this time:

Code: [Select]

apt-get update
apt-get --download-only dist-upgrade

before you get properly started. You can walk away and leave the "--download-only" to its own devices. Then when you're ready to sit down and actually do the upgrade all the packages are cached locally and it only takes a few minutes and, most importantly, you only have to pay attention for those few minutes.

Too late...it's doing the upgrade.

[Cerebus]

Holy crap, this Mint upgrade is taking forever. And you can see this obvious family resemblance to Ubuntu.

Serious suggestion this time:

Code: [Select]

apt-get update
apt-get --download-only dist-upgrade

before you get properly started. You can walk away and leave the "--download-only" to its own devices. Then when you're ready to sit down and actually do the upgrade all the packages are cached locally and it only takes a few minutes and, most importantly, you only have to pay attention for those few minutes.

Too late...it's doing the upgrade.

Oh I guessed it was too late, but there's always next time.

[med6753]

The patient survived. Mint 18 successfully installed.  Mint 19 is the latest distro but I think I'll wait a while before upgrading.

[bd139]

So invested in a cheap power supply module. Now need to invest in an enclosure. And like fuck there's anything cheap and off the shelf. Looks like I may have to actually invest in some sheet metalwork tools.

[kj7e]

Someone here needs this;



https://www.ebay.com/itm/Singer-Friden-EC-1117-Vintage-Calculator-WORKING-with-NIXIE-TUBE-Style-DISPLAY/133259847344?hash=item1f06e7e6b0:g:7UwAAOSwR-9d5bZX

[med6753]

Choke on the price of this one....

https://www.ebay.com/itm/RARE-Vintage-Commodore-NIXIE-TUBE-Calculator-512-WORKING/254189140299?_trkparms=aid%3D888008%26algo%3DDISC.CARDS%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D40718%26meid%3D27a35375ba914599861f612dbce81d80%26pid%3D100009%26rk%3D1%26rkt%3D1%26sd%3D133259847344%26itm%3D254189140299%26pmt%3D0%26noa%3D1%26pg%3D2047675&_trksid=p2047675.c100009.m1982