Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[tggzzz]

So, how long do I have to wait?

Ordered a new CRT-based fleabay toy on 21st March, delivery 9-18th April.

It went through the GSP and Herpes got hold of it yesterday. Got up and checked the Herpes website to find my household had signed for it 5 minutes earlier. Found it on my doorstep, with cardboard box intact. The cardboard box is in good condition externally, but is smaller than I would like.

Two questions:

• what are the tell-tale signs that GSP might have removed outer packaging to save volume/weight?
• how long should I wait before it is safe to open it?

1). Look for signs of the US postal label address to Kentucky under the UK labels, if there isn't one then they have repacked it. Most of the parcels I've had recently haven't been repacked, but a few years ago they seemed to open everything & loose most of the padding. 

Makes sense.

A quick blast of a paint stripper allowed me to peel the Herpes (Covid?) sticker, revealing Earlanger as the Fedex destination. So if it is broken, I can't blame GSP

2). I've been opening them straight away, chucking the box somewhere for a few days, then washing my hands after.

I've left them a day, then done that. Outer packaging stays outside my house.

How can it be any worse than getting shopping delivered? which is something I've never had to do before now (advised to stay in for 12 weeks).

Just so.

As for leaving it on the doorstep, every courier is doing that now, you have to regularly check tracking if you have anything on the way. Also Hermes are fine where I am, never had any problems with the local independent courier they use.

Just so. Given the area I'm in, I'm relaxed about that.

Mind you, overnight a few weeks ago somebody nicked some lead roofing that was being discarded during renovations.

[mnementh]

[..]
@BU508A, it's a 2-way thing. I just raised "schadenfreude" as we were talking about humour. It's probably my favourite German word after "Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän".
[..]

May I extend that a little bit for you, just a random thought:

"Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänskajütenbullaugenausblick"      

Google translatwe thinks that means: "Danube steamship company captain cabin porthole view." Which, if you translate to German becomes: "Blick auf das Bullauge des Kapitäns der Donaudampfschifffirma." Which, if you translate back to English, does make a wee little more sense: "View of Looking out the porthole of the captain of the Danube steamship company."

[EDIT: Y'all can keep yer fukkin' post card collection. I have enough useless paper in my life.]   

mnem
You read this message. That's enough human interaction for one day.

[tggzzz]

it makes perfect sense to be careful with any reagent that is designed to denaturate / kill living matter. That is just pure common sense.
Unfortunately common sense does no longer seem to be common these days.

One of my longtime sayings is "common sense isn't".

Another is to wonder whether "artificial intelligence" will win over "natural stupidity", or not. No, machine learning isn't AI!

[tggzzz]

So prior to going down the 6.5 digit rabbit hole just out of curiosity how good were my unadjusted 190mv, 1.9V, and 19V references?

Pretty damn good I'd say. 

No, you can't infer that from those numbers 

[BU508A]

So prior to going down the 6.5 digit rabbit hole just out of curiosity how good were my unadjusted 190mv, 1.9V, and 19V references?

Pretty damn good I'd say. 

No, you can't infer that from those numbers 

med forgot to add "just right in this damn second." 

[AVGresponding]

   you guys...

There is in fact an even longer extension of my original post; Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft, which translates as "association of subordinate officials of the head office management of the Danube steamboat electrical services".

Mine however is the only one that some poor bugger would have to embroider on a uniform!   


If you're gonna use one of those UV-C lamps, why not put it inside a cupboard to use as a decon chamber?
Your options at this point for safety are: remote socket, £10 or so for 2 on fleabay, or limit switch safety interlock on the door.

Sadly I don't have a suitable cupboard to use; if I did, I'd definitely make it.

[mnementh]

Finally got around to it - building a dodgy vero board for the atmel micro for the Tek Logo and Wizard - I had to put it up on a Tek! Trying to decide whether I want to box it up properly or not. Does shimmer quite a bit.
Rob

That's awesome!

Could you PLEASE extract & post the code? I'm sure more than one of us would like to build that from scratch.

This bit of course just SCREAMS for 3DP... 

mnem

[tggzzz]

- set up DVD player and screen to watch Babylon 5, ...

I like your taste. Regrettably the DVDs tend to chop off the top of people's heads

Don't forget the Lurker's Guide, available in German: http://www.midwinter.de/lurk/eplist.html

It was fascinating reading JMS's interactions with the audience unfold on usenet (the Lurkers Guide is the edited highlights). That was truly original, and I don't think anybody has done that since.

[med6753]

So prior to going down the 6.5 digit rabbit hole just out of curiosity how good were my unadjusted 190mv, 1.9V, and 19V references?

Pretty damn good I'd say. 

No, you can't infer that from those numbers 

med forgot to add "just right in this damn second." 

Considering that those values were originally set with a 5.5 digit 8800A and the 8505A pretty much agrees is more than enough for me. Any arguments contrary to that are going to fall on deaf ears. 

[mnementh]

   you guys...

There is in fact an even longer extension of my original post; Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft, which translates as "association of subordinate officials of the head office management of the Danube steamboat electrical services".

   Dieses Gespräch wird von der Gesellschaft zur Verhinderung, dass Petersilie Menschen an öffentlichen Orten unterbringt überwacht, um festzustellen, ob sie für den öffentlichen Konsum geeignet ist. Sei nicht beunruhigt; Machen Sie mit Ihrem Geschäft weiter.

[edited to fix missing plates]

mnem
   

[AVGresponding]

What have you got against parsley?   

[Cerebus]

it makes perfect sense to be careful with any reagent that is designed to denaturate / kill living matter. That is just pure common sense.
Unfortunately common sense does no longer seem to be common these days.

In that respect common sense can only take you so far.

I have used, and still use, a reagent known as sodium dodecyl sulphate (SDS). In the lab it is used to strip the outer cell membrane off eukaryotic cells (i.e. cells like yours and mine, unlike prokaryotes like bacteria) to gain access to the cell contents - a process known as lysis. Typical usage might be to disrupt a sample of cells in a centrifuge tube before gradient centrifugation to separate the cell contents into stratified fractions of nuclear material, ribosomes and so on. It is very good at this - a low concentration will strip all the cell membranes off a sample in seconds. So, very good at denaturing/killing living cells, right?

If you had a good biology or chemistry teacher you may even have used SDS in a (high) school experiment. If you scrape the inside of your cheek with a spatula you can get quite a good harvest of cells. If you treat this with SDS to disrupt the cells and then treat the lysate so formed with alcohol you can extract a stringy, gloopy sample of your own isolated DNA. If you've done this you've seen quite how good SDS is at destroying living cells.

[ pause ]

SDS is the name you'll see in chemical catalogues, scientific papers and so on - the IUPAC name. There is another parallel naming system for a subclass of chemicals that gives it a different name - sodium lauryl sulphate. Now those who read the labels on their household products will probably recognise this. It's the principal ingredient in most washing up liquid, it's also a principal ingredient in toothpaste.

If this stuff is so demonstrably lethal to cell membranes how can you do the washing up, or clean your teeth, without doing yourself serious harm? Common sense would say that SDS was going to be very harmful in these situations, but clearly it is not. Why is left as an exercise for the student^*. Sometimes common sense only goes so far and it requires a subtler understanding of what is going on to come to the correct conclusion.

The same common sense thinking that means the layman would regard SDS as lethal if only given my description up to the pause, is the same thinking that causes overreactions to ionising radiation, non-ionising radiation (5G death waves), and the like. Common sense is great, but only when dealing with the commonplace - which for us ground dwelling monkeys is things that we've had hundreds and thousands of years to get used to. For more modern stuff it can fail us.

^*Teacher/lecturer speak for "I can't be arsed to explain it to you and the thinking will be good exercise for you.".

[mnementh]

What have you got against parsley?   

The Society dislikes having it ALWAYS THERE on people's plates, whether appropriate or not. We suspect THE PARSLEY due to its ubiquity.

mnem

[cyr]

No Datron 1281 for me. The auction went crazy in the last minute (as always) and ended at 12,611kr - way too rich for me.

Indeed it did, pretty close to my maximum bid 

Not to rub it in or anything, but it's now up and running in front of me and passes self test. Repair method was "poke at ROM pins with scope probe". I think it must have been a poor socket connection.

Turns out the seller once worked at the same place I do, and that's where the unit came from before he got it. Must be a sign that it was meant for me..

[mnementh]

(At the risk of getting an unflattering answer...)

Do you mean the daft side or the non-daft side?

Click..click..click..click..click... ...click-clack.  Ready.

You're assuming that, amongst the bunch of monkeys you've chosen to hang out with here, that there is a non-daft side. I fear that you many be wrong.

Interesting point....

mnem
*back to the bench*

[Ero-Shan]

Und was sieht der Donaudampfschifffahrtskapitän, das auf der Ansichtskarte verewigt wird?

Donauwellen!



Along other household chores, today's project of mine (eating it at this very moment).

I know, BU508's would be several leagues upon mine, but they're sufficient for me. 

[Saskia]

^*Teacher/lecturer speak for "I can't be arsed to explain it to you and the thinking will be good exercise for you.".

While I do agree with you regarding this reagent, a there are a lot of reagents that can kill you given the right concentration. You should not put too much potassium chloride into your system, for example. Also you should not imbibe large quantities of detergents. There have been those tide pod challenges, and several darwin awards won in the process.

There is always the question of dosage. And some stuff you only try once.

[Saskia]

Und was sieht der Donaudampfschifffahrtskapitän, das auf der Ansichtskarte verewigt wird?

Donauwellen!



Along other household chores, today's project of mine (eating it at this very moment).

I know, BU508's would be several leagues upon mine, but they're sufficient for me. 

are those the good ones which include the grassy bits ?
are you far from me ?
Share and enjoy !

[Ero-Shan]

Und was sieht der Donaudampfschifffahrtskapitän, das auf der Ansichtskarte verewigt wird?

Donauwellen!



Along other household chores, today's project of mine (eating it at this very moment).

I know, BU508's would be several leagues upon mine, but they're sufficient for me. 

are those the good ones which include the grassy bits ?
are you far from me ?
Share and enjoy !

I've never heard of grassy Donauwellen ... Even without those bits they're still tasty..

No I do not live close to you. So no sharing. I'll eat them all by myself!  (Though not all at once - even I couldn't digest that much Sugar and fat.)

[mnementh]

... but sometimes I just wish he would get on with it as he seems to talk really slowly.

That's true for almost all videos; hence I avoid them unless necessary.

CGP Grey is a notable exception: his yootoo vids are as information dense as 1970s and 1980s documentaries.
https://www.youtube.com/user/CGPGrey

I miss 70s & 80s documentaries. They assumed you weren't a fucking moron and WANTED to learn because you bothered to be there. I grew up on Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom; today's "Documentaries" make even that mainstream pablum feel like a N.dG. Tyson TED Talk.

mnem
"Aye Calypso, the places you've been to; the things that you've shown us, the stories you tell.
Aye Calypso, I sing to your spirit; the men who have served you so long and so well..."

[mnementh]

      Finally got around to it - building a dodgy vero board for the atmel micro for the Tek Logo and Wizard - I had to put it up on a Tek! Trying to decide whether I want to box it up properly or not. Does shimmer quite a bit.
Rob

I though that the 2246 had one of those built/hidden in (possibly the wizard one), sadly I couldn't remember how to get it to appear when I last used it at work. I rarely get the opportunity to work on electronics these days, hopefully the scope will still be there when I return.

David

My 2230 had it. It's built into the ROM; it uses the same "retrace character generation" subsystem that makes the menus, OSD, etc work by drawing them between scope traces.  Think of the image as just a big, complicated character on the display; that's how it works. It's kindof integral; not a circuit or anything discrete you could remove from one of these scopes, aside from extracting the vector map it uses to generate the image.

[EDIT] This is how the folks at vintagetek.org made their board. [/EDIT]

mnem
 

[mnementh]

Finally got around to it - building a dodgy vero board for the atmel micro for the Tek Logo and Wizard - I had to put it up on a Tek! Trying to decide whether I want to box it up properly or not. Does shimmer quite a bit.
Rob

Any idea who is still selling the programmed chip (or where can I download the binary) ?

Have you checked out this website?
https://vintagetek.org/vintagetek-demo-board/

-
Since the vintageTEK Museum is closed for the near future, we may not have access to our stock, so we must put the store on vacation indefinitely. Many of the manuals we sell in paper form are available on the tekwiki site at w140 dot com.
-

Have checked their evilbay store before and all sold out 

Yes, they sell (or sold) the ATMEL pre-programmed; they don't have the code posted anywhere. I'm certain SOMEBODY has extracted it and shared it somewhere; this project is decades old. But so far, I have not found it in the wilds of the intardnet.





mnem
 

[mnementh]

it makes perfect sense to be careful with any reagent that is designed to denaturate / kill living matter. That is just pure common sense.
Unfortunately common sense does no longer seem to be common these days.

One of my longtime sayings is "common sense isn't".

Another is to wonder whether "artificial intelligence" will win over "natural stupidity", or not. No, machine learning isn't AI!

Grand-dad used to say: "Horse sense is so rare anymore that only horses have it."

AI is when a blonde dyes their hair brunette. *rimshot*

mnem
I married a unnatural redhead.

[mnementh]

^*Teacher/lecturer speak for "I can't be arsed to explain it to you and the thinking will be good exercise for you.".

While I do agree with you regarding this reagent, a there are a lot of reagents that can kill you given the right concentration. You should not put too much potassium chloride into your system, for example. Also you should not imbibe large quantities of detergents. There have been those tide pod challenges, and several darwin awards won in the process.

There is always the question of dosage. And some stuff you only try once.

Where "common sense" fails here is in the application of another old adage: "All things in moderation." Knowing where the line lies between moderation and excess in this case requires both pretty esoteric knowledge AND the wisdom to use it properly. AVGresponding's story of getting sent to the nurse's office for drinking a test tube of saturated sodium chloride solution and the fact the nurse had to look it up is an example of how grossly we've mismanaged our education system; that someone supposedly educated enough to serve as a nurse-practitioner to our children doesn't know this one off the top of her head.

Common sense must be applied to a sufficient base of knowledge to be of value.

mnem
 

[Saskia]

why am I reminded of the intro of Idiocracy ...