Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[mnementh]

...I actually like everything about that KB, except I guess I've gotten a little spoiled by my Toughbooks and my new Lenovo. I'm just NOT willing to give up "backlit" in my keyboard anymore; I now consider it to be a "minimum standard" feature since I found I could get "backlit" in a $27 cheapie. 

mnem
moo...?

   yeah same. My T470 has an illuminated keyboard. I rather like them as well. Subtle neutral colours like white are good. With firmware fix, low illumination:     Written a few hundred lines of kubernetes manifests and got used to the keys being different shapes now and this is exactly what I've been after.    (excuse the skanky hand prints on it now  )

Oh shoot... I guess I misremembered. I could have sworn you said this one wasn't backlit and that was the only thing it was missing. 

Agreed on the neutral colors... I keep mine set to TEAL at the brightest level; other colors (even the "white") don't seem to have as good contrast.

What's the linky again, for those playing along at home...? (Not for me, because I'm lazy... honest...  )

mnem
*muted clicky-clicky...clickety-clickety...clicky-clickety...*

[mnementh]

Boo hoo... 3/4 of the country is closed up shop entirely, I have to wait a week before Amazon ships me my 3D printer parts because they're prioritizing food & medical shipments 6 days out of 7. Guess I'll have to while away the hours watching Prime TV or listening to Prime Music, which their servers are getting fuxxoring SLAMMED but they're still providing service.    Get a little sense of fucking proportion.

mnem

I'd tell you what you could do with that spoon you like to stir but you'd probably enjoy it. 

Oh come on man... tell me that little voice inside your head wasn't already saying the same damned thing, even as you were typing? We all thought it... if only for a moment. I just said it out loud. 

mnem

[med6753]

Boo hoo... 3/4 of the country is closed up shop entirely, I have to wait a week before Amazon ships me my 3D printer parts because they're prioritizing food & medical shipments 6 days out of 7. Guess I'll have to while away the hours watching Prime TV or listening to Prime Music, which their servers are getting fuxxoring SLAMMED but they're still providing service.    Get a little sense of fucking proportion.

mnem

I'd tell you what you could do with that spoon you like to stir but you'd probably enjoy it. 

Oh come on man... tell me that little voice inside your head wasn't already saying the same damned thing, even as you were typing? We all thought it... if only for a moment. I just said it out loud. 

mnem

Exactly...if you care to read back and comprehend I said "do I want to be a jerk or let it slide?"

Amazon is asking us to be patient with non essential deliveries. I get that and I understand why. No issue. But to continue to charge me the same for LESS of a service? Gee...are you a Bezos advocate?

Guess I'm a jerk.   

[Specmaster]

Agreed, but all the same it does kind of grate a bit especially if you don't use any of the other benefits that prime membership offers much, which I don't, then you are or in my case paying about £70 for the same service as others get free.

[bd139]

Bezos is making a fucking killing at the moment so he can afford to issue some Prime discounts ...

All that bandwidth outbound from AWS is covering it. I think our monthly outbound budget is about £20k.

[Specmaster]

Bezos is making a fucking killing at the moment so he can afford to issue some Prime discounts ...

All that bandwidth outbound from AWS is covering it. I think our monthly outbound budget is about £20k.

What do you all make of this then?

[tggzzz]

Went for reds. Keyboard very nice apart from one really flipping annoying "feature" and that is the cherry lock function. Perfect for games but when in office mode, which honest is what this keyboard will be spending most of its time in, it has the scariest bright white LED under the windows key that you've ever seen.

It is rather a torch, isn't it! Mind you I quite like the "turn off capslock you dingbat" searchlight.

I have a suspicion that one of the cherry downloads allows you to update the firmware[1] to

Version 1.03: Add brightness values for dim of the modifier status display:
The status display (Cap-Lock, Scroll-Lock, Num-Lock, FN-Lock and Gaming-Mode) will dim from 80 % to 30 % of the button illumination. The brightness of 30 % is the darkest value for the active status display.

Since I don't have Win>XP, that's useless to me....

I'll desolder that LED this evening as it appears no warranty stickers are obscuring any screws

... so I inserted a bit of a post it note to make it a dimmer lemon yellow.

[1] firmware in a keyboard?! WTF

[URI]

Went for reds. Keyboard very nice apart from one really flipping annoying "feature" and that is the cherry lock function. Perfect for games but when in office mode, which honest is what this keyboard will be spending most of its time in, it has the scariest bright white LED under the windows key that you've ever seen.

It is rather a torch, isn't it! Mind you I quite like the "turn off capslock you dingbat" searchlight.

I have a suspicion that one of the cherry downloads allows you to update the firmware[1] to

Version 1.03: Add brightness values for dim of the modifier status display:
The status display (Cap-Lock, Scroll-Lock, Num-Lock, FN-Lock and Gaming-Mode) will dim from 80 % to 30 % of the button illumination. The brightness of 30 % is the darkest value for the active status display.

Since I don't have Win>XP, that's useless to me....

I'll desolder that LED this evening as it appears no warranty stickers are obscuring any screws

... so I inserted a bit of a post it note to make it a dimmer lemon yellow.

[1] firmware in a keyboard?! WTF

That's not a new feature.
It's new that you can update the firmware.
In the now old days they abbreviated it "OTP".   

[Cubdriver]

That's good to hear. I'd check them over carefully anyway as they do crack and die suddenly. One reason I keep getting put off buying the things. There's a guy who manufactures replacements but the cost is similar to another 8640B now.

I got a set for mine a few years ago from the bay that were sold by a guy in India.  I haven't yet needed to install them, but figured it would be best to have them on hand.  IIRC it was on the order of about $50 shipped for the lot, and they seem to be decently made.  I too looked into the set made by the other guy who posted in the HPAK list; I can't recall his price at the moment, but they would have been more than I'd paid for the instrument.

I just looked for the gears from India on eBay and didn't find them just now, but have seen them off and on in the past so I think he makes some, sells them then eventually makes more.  It might be an option if they're needed, but some patience may also be necessary.

-Pat

[AVGresponding]

LOL depends with the Germans (no offense to BU508A). There are a lot of traditional businesses there who don't seem to have the same day urgency that everyone expects now. Bamatech is a good one. When you place an order they give you a dispatch date some time in the distant future. The item will be dispatched on that date but never sooner or later 

Not to pick nits or anything (who am I kidding, it's my favourite pastime) but the stereotype is of German efficiency, which is not quite the same thing as speed.

If the efficient thing to do is to send a bulk quantity of packages to a given general destination at a particular time, that is what I would expect to see...

[bd139]

Bezos is making a fucking killing at the moment so he can afford to issue some Prime discounts ...

All that bandwidth outbound from AWS is covering it. I think our monthly outbound budget is about £20k.

What do you all make of this then?

I make only three observations on Bezos:

1. Everything he does has penises all over them.
2. Lots of money seems to make people dress like 1970s lamp shades.
3. Dr Evil

[bd139]

Went for reds. Keyboard very nice apart from one really flipping annoying "feature" and that is the cherry lock function. Perfect for games but when in office mode, which honest is what this keyboard will be spending most of its time in, it has the scariest bright white LED under the windows key that you've ever seen.

It is rather a torch, isn't it! Mind you I quite like the "turn off capslock you dingbat" searchlight.

I have a suspicion that one of the cherry downloads allows you to update the firmware[1] to

Version 1.03: Add brightness values for dim of the modifier status display:
The status display (Cap-Lock, Scroll-Lock, Num-Lock, FN-Lock and Gaming-Mode) will dim from 80 % to 30 % of the button illumination. The brightness of 30 % is the darkest value for the active status display.

Since I don't have Win>XP, that's useless to me....

I'll desolder that LED this evening as it appears no warranty stickers are obscuring any screws

... so I inserted a bit of a post it note to make it a dimmer lemon yellow.

[1] firmware in a keyboard?! WTF

If you install virtualbox, then install virtualbox extensions pack, then install a suitable version of windows, you can pass through the USB device to the VM to upgrade the firmware.

Liking this keyboard a lot - thanks for the link again

Edit: much boredom. Nothing on ebay at the moment. Have however bought a graphics card. So I can't expense anything with "gaming" in the title without causing trouble so I had to pay for it myself and that means no RTX because I'm a cheap arse. So I got a Gigabyte GTX 1660 w/ 6GB of RAM. It'll do for 1080p stuff and fan is off when idle / 2D which is important as it's a silent build. I couldn't get on with TensorFlow after playing with it anyway so meh and I wasn't really that impressed by the difference ray tracing made to games. CUDA on the other hand is fine and that has enough grunt for that.

[Saskia]

enjoy.

Fun and games on the job. I want to retire. now. Or do something useful, like, err, work for Lockheed Martin ...

[duckduck]

Your way out is Debian...

I second that. Debian has been getting quite good recently. Been using Debian forever. KDE works well enough. Avoid LVM like the plague. I actually like snaps on Debian, but only to run the latest Firefox. I wouldn't want it for everything. Can't imagine that.

Microsoft's GUI-of-the-year is annoying when managing diverse servers from 2003R2-2019. Now where did they put the damn log out button on THIS version?

I feel funny rambling on about the price of vinyl siding in Oklahoma since what people want is (1) deals on TE or, at the very least (2) pictures of TE that some lucky bastard got a deal on. I swapped out the power smoothing caps on my recently acquired Topward TPS-4000 bench power supply. The new Nippon Chemicons are 100 V vs the spec'ed 75 V cans and they are still < half the size. I cut a piece off of an old closed-cell foam camping sleeping pad (I'll just sleep a little on the left now...) to fill up the space in the holding strap. Getting the tiny nuts back on the screws was the biggest pain of the whole operation.

I noticed on ebay that there is a lot of TE that is sold close to Richardson, Texas. This is obviously TE that has failed outside of warranty or has been retired from TI's RFAB (Richardson Fabrication) plant. Are there other hot spots for TE? Surely there are many in Silicon Valley, as I see a lot of TE selling from California.

I saw Paul Carlson getting the distortion specs on a tube monobloc (the Maas-Rowe) using a Stanford Research SR780. I thought "well now that looks like a neat bit of kit". Turns out they start at US$3,000 on ebay. Ugh. HP made a nice SINAD meter 8903A (and the newer 8903B). Looking though the "sold" items I see that (presumably) working examples have sold for as little as US$225 + probably US$60 P&H since they are 3U (4U?) rack-mountable boat anchors from the 80s. I'm not quite ready to spend that much on something that I will probably use only once or twice. Here's one from RFAB:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Agilent-8903A-Audio-Analyzer-20hz-100khz-Guaranteed-GOOD/133410220815

Here's the slightly better B version that's now in a bidding war and on it's way to US$500:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-8903B-Audio-Analyzer-20Hz-100Hz-OPT-001/293577080017

I am, however ready to buy a Kikusui PAN35-20A power supply (see that fine gentleman's thread on it if you haven't already). I'll post pictures when it arrives.

Well, now I'm out of anything to clean electronics: wife took all of the IPA, I used my last can of contact cleaner on Jr's bicycle, and I just used up the last of my DI H20. I'm going to have to leave the house now.

[bitseeker]

So my latest addition just arrived.  It's a Lafayette Lab tester, once I saw the chain driven selection switch I added it to my watch list.
(Attachment Link)

That's neat, Alex. Added to the POI. Do you have a model number or any other info on it?

Yeah unfortunately it seem like it's a bit hard to find info on this meter, saw a picture of the internals about a year ago and have been looking for one since.  In that time this is only the second that I've seen pop up on ebay.  Now that I finally have one I can say that it is a Lafayette Lab-Tester 99-5065, that and an inspection sticker from 1873 is all the info I have on it.

Thanks. I've updated the Points of Interest link, accordingly.

[bitseeker]

Geez, the speed of these Chinese doing hand soldering, if you don't want to watch the entire video, skip forward to 23:30, strewth.

... snip soldering video ...

Blimey that's fast. Might explain why half of it doesn't work 

Yeah, precisely. No need to wonder anymore why they have so much solder splatter and the joints are cold solder balls. Horrendous.

Granted, soldering at hobby pace isn't conducive to production scale, but their "technique" goes to the opposite extreme.

[tggzzz]

Went for reds. Keyboard very nice apart from one really flipping annoying "feature" and that is the cherry lock function. Perfect for games but when in office mode, which honest is what this keyboard will be spending most of its time in, it has the scariest bright white LED under the windows key that you've ever seen.

It is rather a torch, isn't it! Mind you I quite like the "turn off capslock you dingbat" searchlight.

I have a suspicion that one of the cherry downloads allows you to update the firmware[1] to

Version 1.03: Add brightness values for dim of the modifier status display:
The status display (Cap-Lock, Scroll-Lock, Num-Lock, FN-Lock and Gaming-Mode) will dim from 80 % to 30 % of the button illumination. The brightness of 30 % is the darkest value for the active status display.

Since I don't have Win>XP, that's useless to me....

I'll desolder that LED this evening as it appears no warranty stickers are obscuring any screws

... so I inserted a bit of a post it note to make it a dimmer lemon yellow.

[1] firmware in a keyboard?! WTF

If you install virtualbox, then install virtualbox extensions pack, then install a suitable version of windows, you can pass through the USB device to the VM to upgrade the firmware.

And there's the problem: WinXP isn't on the list.

Unfortunately the only Windows that MS would sell me (when I was last looking) was the excessively new Win8 with the GUI widgets/style that had been abandoned as crap as long ago as the 1980s. I would have bought Win7, but they wouldn't sell it to me.

Liking this keyboard a lot - thanks for the link again

Edit: much boredom. Nothing on ebay at the moment. Have however bought a graphics card. So I can't expense anything with "gaming" in the title without causing trouble so I had to pay for it myself and that means no RTX because I'm a cheap arse. So I got a Gigabyte GTX 1660 w/ 6GB of RAM. It'll do for 1080p stuff and fan is off when idle / 2D which is important as it's a silent build. I couldn't get on with TensorFlow after playing with it anyway so meh and I wasn't really that impressed by the difference ray tracing made to games. CUDA on the other hand is fine and that has enough grunt for that.

I got a GTX 1650. Not sure if I have anything that will make use of it, thoughj.

[bitseeker]

Now I have a hp tower 

That's a nice tower! Amazing the gears in the 8640 sig gens are all OK. Winner!

[mnementh]

...Well, now I'm out of anything to clean electronics: wife took all of the IPA, I used my last can of contact cleaner on Jr's bicycle, and I just used up the last of my DI H20. I'm going to have to leave the house now.

Go to your local hardware store. Buy methyl hydrate.  Research the difference in plastics/paints that are methanol safe vs those that are isopropyl safe. Find SMDS, refresh yourself on safe handling & avoid direct dermal contact as methanol has a certain atavism.

Rejoice that you are smarter than all the 1d10ts who make face masks out of coffee filters stolen from med's Amazon delivery driver.    I just got a gallon for $11 to replenish my bench; they had oodles.

mnem
 

[bitseeker]

Your way out is Debian...

I second that. Debian has been getting quite good recently. Been using Debian forever. KDE works well enough. Avoid LVM like the plague. I actually like snaps on Debian, but only to run the latest Firefox. I wouldn't want it for everything. Can't imagine that.

Yep, I'll be going back to Debian after Xubuntu 18.04. Clean install of the base and then add the desktop environment. Not sure which one, yet. Maybe check out what KDE or MATE are like these days.

[Specmaster]

SNIP

Edit: much boredom. Nothing on ebay at the moment. Have however bought a graphics card. So I can't expense anything with "gaming" in the title without causing trouble so I had to pay for it myself and that means no RTX because I'm a cheap arse. So I got a Gigabyte GTX 1660 w/ 6GB of RAM. It'll do for 1080p stuff and fan is off when idle / 2D which is important as it's a silent build. I couldn't get on with TensorFlow after playing with it anyway so meh and I wasn't really that impressed by the difference ray tracing made to games. CUDA on the other hand is fine and that has enough grunt for that.

I don't know what your after, the GTX1660 is a very capable card and will piss all over your 1080 seeing as its capable of resolutions up to 7680 x 4320.

I only  have an old (now) GTX 960 with 2GB DDR5 and all the games I've thrown at it, are handled very well indeed, including the GTA V and is extremely playable on it at its max 1920 x 1080.

[mnementh]

Yeah, at what... 30FPS...?

mnem
 

[mansaxel]

Your way out is Debian...

I second that. Debian has been getting quite good recently. Been using Debian forever. KDE works well enough. Avoid LVM like the plague. I actually like snaps on Debian, but only to run the latest Firefox. I wouldn't want it for everything. Can't imagine that.

Yep, I'll be going back to Debian after Xubuntu 18.04. Clean install of the base and then add the desktop environment. Not sure which one, yet. Maybe check out what KDE or MATE are like these days.

I stand fully behind my ongoing recommendation of Devuan with something like Fluxbox. It's got the Lennart pieces hard to avoid, ie Pulseaudio, while it's rejecting all the other shite coming from the DeadRat / Gnome dung heap cabal, most importantly so systemd.

But, of course, Devuan being Debian/conservative (And Ubuntu is known as Debian/broken) you need to be running Devuan/testing to get even remotely recent software.

The older I get the more I appreciate the "predictable" aspect in computing. And if I need to run Linux (which I'd rather not because any BSD is ages more mature and grown-up) Devuan is pretty much fulfilling that need.

[tautech]

Some may remember this, a 5 GHz data distribution installation for locals needing better internet:



Well due to its popularity it needs be upgraded with an 11 GHz backhaul link for higher data throughput.
And the HW has just been dropped off for the Thursday upgrade where we need a crew at each end to swap in the new preconfigured HW quickly without too much disruption to customers service.

800mm Ubiquity dish and 11 GHz airFiber 11 radio with up to 300km range ! 
Seems a waste to point to point 2 of these over only 10.2 km but 1.2 GB/s wireless is pretty cool.
https://www.ui.com/airfiber/airfiber-11/





I'll grab some more pics when it's up and running.

[AVGresponding]

Does it still work when the gas runs out of the lighter..?