Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[Saskia]

Oh. DHL in combination with customs is a class in itself.
But still better than GLS. I have yet to receive a package that is not broken ...

[Neomys Sapiens]

Oh. DHL in combination with customs is a class in itself.
But still better than GLS. I have yet to receive a package that is not broken ...

Uhuh. Especially as their local drop-off site is a backyard company that manufactures switchgear. So I'm not very happy to have packages containing tools, instruments or electrical parts going there.

[med6753]

I never have any issues with FedEx or UPS. The USPS? I never know what to expect. Case in point. AVG sent me the payment via registered mail. That requires a signature. So my carrier leaves a form that I have to go to PO the next day to sign for it. So next day I show up at PO. Give lady the form. She spends the next 10 minutes looking for the letter. Can't find it. She summons the Post Master. He spends another good 5 minutes looking. Can't find it. So he takes down my phone number and says he'll call when they find it. Yea right, sure you will.  Surprisingly at around 3:30 PM same day get a call. They found the letter. So I trek back down to PO. Give lady the form. She spends another 5 minutes looking. Can't find it. Once again summons the Post Master. He spends another few minutes looking. FINALLY.....find it filed in the wrong location.

You can't make this stuff up.     

[Neomys Sapiens]

On the topic of this 5G BS:

citing BBC:
One falsely suggests 5G suppresses the immune system, the other falsely claims the virus is somehow using the network's radio waves to communicate and pick victims, accelerating its spread.

Those that fabricate such theories obviously have never been involved with Telco providers. They are not known to allow anyone or anything to use their networks for free!

And there seem to be more of those nutjobs than the Yoobtoob guy:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52281315

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-52358920

This is really pushing the limits of freedom of speech. Those people ought to be committed to a psychatric institution.

[tggzzz]

Can I swap some of our local postal goblins for your humans and balance things out a bit?

You heathens would corrupt them, so after a short while you would be back to square 1.

Remember the old snark: "immigration to America from the UK improves the IQ of both America and the UK".

[Cerebus]

@AVG the package got lost when the sender brought it to the post kiosk. They never traced it there and it had remained in limbo for the past 5 days. DHL customer disservice told me to wait another 2 days before I could file a complaint.

Now I will not voice what I think of them to remain in politically adequate waters.

I still hope it may turn up, I want that friggin X99 board because it is splendid for running stuff I am used to and I hate to lose ...

I hate them too. Frequently they manage to leave two or more notifications on a single day requiring me to visit two different places to optain my packages. And both of those places are stationery shops run by elderly women which are not very attentive and talk too much. A special nuisance is when the declared time/date for retrieval does not match the real situation and you have to repeat those errands. Arrrgh!

They used to drive me nuts at my previous job - if something was shipped via DHL, I could pretty much count on getting a call from the receiving department of a company (with a completely different name and street number, but about a quarter mile up the road on the opposite side of the street - and mind that this was not a crowded, heavily built up area)to tell me that DHL had left my package there and I could come by to pick it up or they would hand it back off to DHL the following day for redelivery.  Needless to say, I welcomed the call and would always go and get it rather than risk it being handed off to those bozos to give them another opportunity to misdeliver it again.  UPS, FedEx and the USPS had no issues finding our building.  DHL?  Not so much...

-Pat

The sheer irony of DHL's incompetence is the origin of the original DHL in the UK. The name was originally Document Handlers Limited and they were a company expressly set up to exchange legal paperwork between lawyers in the UK and from lawyers to the courts, government registries and so on. The ownership structure was odd, but basically it was owned by the lawyers who were its customers. I have a vague memory of being told, but may be wrong, that its existence predates the General Post Office. They came into existence because the lawyers needed a strictly reliable, strictly trustworthy way to get papers back and forth. Instead of a full address you'd just put a "DH" number on a letter/package and law firms used to put their DH number on their letterheads for the benefit of other lawyers, right next to their telex number and telegraphic address.

Of course, with lawyers as clients you are not going to fuck up because if there's one bunch of people who won't even blink at the idea of suing you for every penny they can get, it's lawyers. At some point rather late in their history, as these things do, they changed the name to DHL, because everybody called them that, and carried on under the name DHL. So, the upstart American DHL (which was a completely different beast) went on to become the global behemoth it is today, started doing overt business in the UK, and sometime in the 1980's acquired the rights to use the DHL name in the UK. So overnight, DHL went from being the name of the most reliable courier ever, to the name of the DHL that we all know and loathe.

I used to have lawyers as clients, and so knew the original DHL and their fearsome reputation for reliability. In fact, the company I worked for at the time was one of those rarities, a non-law company with a Document Handlers Limited account, because we did so much business with lawyers that it just made sense. That DHL could get a bit of replacement kit to a London lawyer's office faster than anyone else. So, a different client was having terrible trouble with a "DHL" delivery and was bitching to me about it when I was in their offices. I'd never heard such rubbish about them, "Tell you what, let me call our account manager there, he'll get it sorted in 2 minutes". There then ensues a very confused phone call that takes 10 minutes before we discover what's happened and that we're talking about two different DHLs. I can't be the only person that happened to as it was some time after that, that the naming rights changed hands. As there were lawyers involved and reputational damage, albeit unintentional, had gone on, I suspect that was one of the most expensive acquisitions of a name that the general public had never heard of.

I believe that the original DHL is no more. I haven't seen a DH number on a letterhead for years. Probably killed by the rise of that 80s phenomenon, the fax machine.

[mnementh]

So... WhaddImiss...?

   

Been a bit busy doing tinkery-testery things on my 3DP: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/3d-printer-yet/msg3025964/#msg3025964

mnem

[mnementh]

At least you guys have never experienced the "Royal Mail Delivery Office" experience. Always starts with a red slip being quietly slipped into your letter box even though you're in. Then a drive to some shonky warehouse with not enough parking that smells of dust, tea and a faint smell of apathy.

(SNIP)

Them #2 (mustering their best customer service face which is reminiscent of a shriveled dog turd): "here's your package mate"

So you walk past the woman who gives you the stink eye, out of the door and there's a fucking traffic warden who's entire job is to sit outside and wait for the flies to land. One look at him and he gets the point that if he even thinks that fucking ticket is going near my car then I'm going off anime style



And you get it home and whatever inside is broken.

So pretty much like any UPS or PO in the Southern US then...? Or ANY "Customer Service" office ANYWHERE...? 

Remember MY recent Odyssey with the PO in Tejas... and that's not even the worst. There's a worse one in here somewhere, but I can't find the... post.

mnem
When did a dumb, blank look become an acceptable defense for fundamental incompetence at your job...?

[mansaxel]

You really don’t want to be depending on Cisco gear at home unless you are able to afford a support contract. Last I checked they will not provide you even with access to software images unless you are a paid support contract customer. Yeah, it might be cheap on eBay, but it might also end up being a doorstop. For home use, a pfsense box is way better supported. Combine it with a box running snort and you’ll have a pretty capable security gateway. Alternatively, ubiquiti security appliances are another viable option for a lot less $$ than Cisco.


Re IPv4 vs 6...don’t need that many addresses for my LAN, plus NAT is a useful extra layer of protection by not having every device right open to the the WAN.

One does not play in Cisco-land without access to software, so much is true, but that's no problem for me.

Having to think about "size of network" or "am I gonna run out" are two of the useless restraints we set ourselves in just because we're so used to them. We don't need to. But without the pain we become confused.

And NAT is no protection. Not when all your devices refuse to work unless you let them call mommy all the time and initiate connections to shady and worse sites. The threat long ago changed from "someone is using your open ports on the computer" to "someone is fooling you to run bad javascript code and download a trojan", and only after that, when they've got a foothold on your trusted computer, will they, if you're interesting, (or in some cases anyway) start scanning your net for unprotected stuff.  In any case, they will use your computer as a compute and bandwidth resource and sell the control of it as a dDoS resource.

[AVGresponding]

I never have any issues with FedEx or UPS. The USPS? I never know what to expect. Case in point. AVG sent me the payment via registered mail. That requires a signature. So my carrier leaves a form that I have to go to PO the next day to sign for it. So next day I show up at PO. Give lady the form. She spends the next 10 minutes looking for the letter. Can't find it. She summons the Post Master. He spends another good 5 minutes looking. Can't find it. So he takes down my phone number and says he'll call when they find it. Yea right, sure you will.  Surprisingly at around 3:30 PM same day get a call. They found the letter. So I trek back down to PO. Give lady the form. She spends another 5 minutes looking. Can't find it. Once again summons the Post Master. He spends another few minutes looking. FINALLY.....find it filed in the wrong location.

You can't make this stuff up.     

Do I have the only working Post Office in the world?

The staff are polite, happy to help, and pleased to see you.

My surname sometimes means confusion regarding where a parcel may be filed, but it never takes longer than a couple of minutes, and there's never any "hrmph"-ing.

The traffic wardens never do more than wag their finger at you (unless you're really taking the piss) as well!   


EDIT: No sign of the probe tips yet though...   

[0culus]

You really don’t want to be depending on Cisco gear at home unless you are able to afford a support contract. Last I checked they will not provide you even with access to software images unless you are a paid support contract customer. Yeah, it might be cheap on eBay, but it might also end up being a doorstop. For home use, a pfsense box is way better supported. Combine it with a box running snort and you’ll have a pretty capable security gateway. Alternatively, ubiquiti security appliances are another viable option for a lot less $$ than Cisco.


Re IPv4 vs 6...don’t need that many addresses for my LAN, plus NAT is a useful extra layer of protection by not having every device right open to the the WAN.

One does not play in Cisco-land without access to software, so much is true, but that's no problem for me.

Having to think about "size of network" or "am I gonna run out" are two of the useless restraints we set ourselves in just because we're so used to them. We don't need to. But without the pain we become confused.

And NAT is no protection. Not when all your devices refuse to work unless you let them call mommy all the time and initiate connections to shady and worse sites. The threat long ago changed from "someone is using your open ports on the computer" to "someone is fooling you to run bad javascript code and download a trojan", and only after that, when they've got a foothold on your trusted computer, will they, if you're interesting, (or in some cases anyway) start scanning your net for unprotected stuff.  In any case, they will use your computer as a compute and bandwidth resource and sell the control of it as a dDoS resource.

 

Defense in depth is a thing, and considered a security best practice. NAT is one part of defense in depth; it is NOT the only part. For a normal home user who is otherwise careful, it's a pretty useful part of the puzzle so stupid gotcha things like your never-gets-a-patch printer isn't wide open to the world, and other similar things. 99% (ok, ok,  this is a SWAG, but it's probably ballpark) of the threats on the open internet are bot scans looking for easy pwns with common services on common ports (don't believe me? Run a server for a while in any of the public clouds and take a look at the ssh logs after a few weeks). But, if there's no low hanging fruit for them to latch onto, they don't do much other than cause noise in your logs. On the flip side, if you're in a situation where you have an APT after you, you really have bigger problems than all of this. Determine your threat model; only then can you make informed decisions about how to protect yourself appropriately.

Phoning home to the mothership problems obviously cannot be solved by NAT; you need a firewall and whitelist-based rules to keep everything manageable. Better yet, keep the IoT crap on a VLAN with a firewall between it and the rest of your network.

Personally, I'm a proponent of building better computing stuff (this has been done, e.g. Multics), with security in mind from the ground up. Sadly, that ship has sailed and we are saddled with an ocean of crappy IoT devices (remember kids, the S in IoT stands for Security!!), unpatchable silicon (first x86 CPUs, and now Xilinx 7 series FPGAs, and likely much more). The best a home user can do us utilize all the tools available to them in order to not be an interesting target. And don't download porn, do disable javascript when you can (this is hard, but noscript helps), do use adblocking (Pihole if possible), etc. Use common sense!

[med6753]

I never have any issues with FedEx or UPS. The USPS? I never know what to expect. Case in point. AVG sent me the payment via registered mail. That requires a signature. So my carrier leaves a form that I have to go to PO the next day to sign for it. So next day I show up at PO. Give lady the form. She spends the next 10 minutes looking for the letter. Can't find it. She summons the Post Master. He spends another good 5 minutes looking. Can't find it. So he takes down my phone number and says he'll call when they find it. Yea right, sure you will.  Surprisingly at around 3:30 PM same day get a call. They found the letter. So I trek back down to PO. Give lady the form. She spends another 5 minutes looking. Can't find it. Once again summons the Post Master. He spends another few minutes looking. FINALLY.....find it filed in the wrong location.

You can't make this stuff up.     

Do I have the only working Post Office in the world?

The staff are polite, happy to help, and pleased to see you.

My surname sometimes means confusion regarding where a parcel may be filed, but it never takes longer than a couple of minutes, and there's never any "hrmph"-ing.

The traffic wardens never do more than wag their finger at you (unless you're really taking the piss) as well!   


EDIT: No sign of the probe tips yet though...   

It really depends on who is working the counter. When I took the probe tips down the 2nd time the guy was most helpful and made sure the customs form was complete and accurate. And I thanked him for his assistance.

The lady who was looking for the letter I've dealt with before and she seems completely uninterested and I'm sure she's saying "hrmph" under her breath.

There's a 3rd lady who is most friendly but her favorite saying is "I apologize" which doesn't resolve the issue or concern you may have.

I have no freaking idea where the probe tips are but I think we can be confident that they made it this time through US Customs.     

Edit.....the probes are in the UK! They arrived on the 20th (Yesterday). They got to US Customs on the 4th and it took THAT long to get across the pond. I think they went across by canoe so check for salt damage. 

[tggzzz]

At least you guys have never experienced the "Royal Mail Delivery Office" experience. Always starts with a red slip being quietly slipped into your letter box even though you're in. Then a drive to some shonky warehouse with not enough parking that smells of dust, tea and a faint smell of apathy.

(SNIP)

Them #2 (mustering their best customer service face which is reminiscent of a shriveled dog turd): "here's your package mate"

So you walk past the woman who gives you the stink eye, out of the door and there's a fucking traffic warden who's entire job is to sit outside and wait for the flies to land. One look at him and he gets the point that if he even thinks that fucking ticket is going near my car then I'm going off anime style

And you get it home and whatever inside is broken.

So pretty much like any UPS or PO in the Southern US then...? Or ANY "Customer Service" office ANYWHERE...? 

Not here

When I have to go to the post office or sorting office (which is in a shed round the back of the post office), it takes the people all of 60s to find whatever is waiting for me.

It probably helps that whenever I see them outside my house or in the post office / shop, I treat them as if they are human beings.

Ditto the Herpes couriers, if I catch them in the act of delivery

Never had a problem with UPS either.

The only problem I have is people that get the wrong road, and deliver stuff[1] to me. The "other" road with a similar name isn't on some satnavs, and even google maps has it in the wrong place. (Bing maps and openstreetmap are correct) The houses are only 80 years old, so what can you expect!

[1] up to and including full height scaffolding!

[bd139]

Well UPS trouble here today. Yesterday guaranteed delivery. No delivery. Today no guaranteed delivery 

Undeterminable Parcel Service

Edit: Courier comparison day today. I've got the following all due today 

UK Mail (DHL)
Amazon
Royal Mail
Parcel Force
Possibly UPS

[Zucca]

This Munich apartment is full of surprises,
now I know why that plug works sporadically...



 

why? why? Oktoberfest and then go to work??? Why nobody said anything before me?

bd can I reuse it?

[bd139]

Hahaha that's as badly wired up as my place was when I moved in 

I had to rip the whole place out and start again.

Edit: welcome to reuse 

[McBryce]

This Munich apartment is full of surprises,
now I know why that plug works sporadically...

(Attachment Link)

 

why? why? Oktoberfest and then go to work??? Why nobody said anything before me?

bd can I reuse it?

I've come across that before. The previous tenant used that socket only for a lamp.

McBryce.

[med6753]

I'm not getting the issue.  It's not unusual here to have half or even an entire outlet wired to a wall switch for lighting.   

[bd139]

Left light switch turns the socket on and off. It’s wired to the wrong bit of the switch. Also correlates with the switch rather than the light bulb as well due to the dual switch topology. Total nightmare to work that out I bet for Zucca 

[BU508A]

[story snipped]

[bd139 goes anime]

Oh! How nice!
bd139 managed to become super saiyajin bd139.   

[BU508A]

This Munich apartment is full of surprises,
now I know why that plug works sporadically...

(Attachment Link)

 

why? why? Oktoberfest and then go to work??? Why nobody said anything before me?

My assumption is: this is a switched wall socket, because the previous owner had plugged in a lamp and wanted to switch it on with the other lamp. I saw this config occasionly and it is not that unusual. But it is a good idea to mark such wall sockets. 

[med6753]

If a room does not have an entry switched ceiling light I think the code requires at least one outlet wired to the entry wall switch dedicated for lighting.

[URI]

Well regarding deliveries from the U.S. to Germany:

They come in at Frankfurt airport and are being handed over to a special sorting office of DHL.
I'm waiting for a plate sticker for an Agilent 8110A that I bought and paid on March 5th, 2020. It made it's way over to Frankfurt and was "out for delivery" there on March 20th, 2020. "Out for delivery" is the step when it's handed over to the DHL/customs sorting office.
After that: No f***ing tracking by DHL anymore!   

I have opened a case at *bay now before I'm over the deadline for doing so. Told the seller how it is and that it's not against him. 

I'm waiting since four weeks for this packet being delivered now!
Calling DHL to have them investigating where the packet is won't help.
Been there, didn't help at all: That packet back then was delivered to my local customs office and I picked it up long before DHL answered my request: DHL was not able to find the packet.        

[med6753]

And regarding AVG's probe tips. Once the package hit UK shores the USPS tracking is no good because the snobby royal snail fail doesn't recognize USPS tracking numbers. I guess they're still pissed at us colonials. Perhaps should send them some soggy Boston Harbor tea to appease them? 

[bd139]

Should do. Usually work. Assuming they look like EE123456789XX. Unless you lot have freedom tracking IDs to go with your freedom units