Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[Saskia]

I really forgot to mention that one thing that could make a HUGE impact is the self driving car. You shouldn't need a licence.
 
Go google - you have about 20yrs to get it sorted for me!

If you read the wording of any proposed legislation on self driving cars, they all still require the main occupant to be defined as the "operator" and as such will require a license.

McBryce.

Furthermore they want to abolish cars over here so it's back to the donkey wagon.
Not everybody has a nuclear power plant nearby to charge the Tesla (or equivalent) we are required to buy if we want to maintain our mobility (hell, even the initial funding for that grab-asstic piece of amphibian shit is hard to come by). Not even considering the load on the lines when every asshole is trying to charge the car.

Need to find a workaround. Maybe the russians will sell a plutonium battery.

Or, just use Hydrogen as fuel, and fluorine as oxidizer ....

[tonyalbus]

And so it ends. This is where ham "radio" is going - comms over the internet. It's called an MMDVM hotspot.

I only got one because the friends I want to talk to all went there because of idiots and jamming on the repeaters. You can create a room on the server where only the people who know the room number talk. Other than the UHF simplex link from your HT to the hotspot it's all internet. Nothing much more than a glorified wireless mic.

 

Sorry i am a HAM, but com-on.. that can not be called a radio...pardon my french
it sounds like what we did in phone conferance calls before zoom and google meet... only peaple with that number could joyn the call

[xrunner]

Sorry i am a HAM, but com-on.. that can not be called a radio...pardon my french
it sounds like what we did in phone conferance calls before zoom and google meet... only peaple with that number could joyn the call

They do call it radio. I don't like it but that's where they went so I had no choice but to use it or make phone calls - hey which is radio too! 

[bd139]

This is a good high tech solution to repeater idiots, a problem we have here too . There are some local idiots, who are probably hams, who don't use callsigns at all and fuck up my local 2m FM repeater. Hence why I've given up on 2m. I don't fancy arguing with digital radio. Too much of a PITA. The one bit of joy I got out of amateur radio was a few odd CW contacts, because it takes a lot of effort to be a dick over CW, but nothing else of value.

On that topic, the QCX+ is built and tested. I bought the dev board with it and am proceeding to turn the whole damn thing into an FSK receiver. It'll pick up my beacon transmitter with about 6 foot of wire around the picture frame in the living room. It's a nice little CW transceiver to be honest, which fixes a lot of the physical flaws of its predecessor.



I replaced all the chinesium shit components (resistors and electrolytic caps) with some proper ones.

[mnementh]

And so it ends. This is where ham "radio" is going - comms over the internet. It's called an MMDVM hotspot.

I only got one because the friends I want to talk to all went there because of idiots and jamming on the repeaters. You can create a room on the server where only the people who know the room number talk. Other than the UHF simplex link from your HT to the hotspot it's all internet. Nothing much more than a glorified wireless mic.

 

Sorry i am a HAM, but com-on.. that can not be called a radio...pardon my french
it sounds like what we did in phone conferance calls before zoom and google meet... only peaple with that number could joyn the call

mnem
 

[tggzzz]

My eldest Son lives 20 minutes away and he does have a key and knows the location of important papers, etc. But one thing I have been remiss on is having a Will in place. I really need to do that.

Are there local equivalents of "my son can administer my money (and/or health) when I've lost my marbles", "do not resussitate if I will never regain my marbles"?

This is all becoming more relevant with my mother

Mine too. My sympathies.

She did say, and I quote, that she's "too fucking stubborn to move house" though which is probably good which means she won't put everything into a care home bill. That sounds horribly selfish on my part but it's a nasty trap in society here.

The stage beyond that is the frightening one.... If she needs to go for her safety and that of the house, but won't go.

I don't understand the routes through that, but I fear I will.

[tggzzz]

Naturally, since the school/university thing is behind me, I occasionally wonder about moving somewhere else. The problem is where would be better? Certainly not the Torbay Eastborne costa geriatrica. Aus/NZ wouldn't want an oldie; Costa Rica maybe?

Germany, Black Forest.

Brexit enough said, lesr our blood boils.

[mnementh]

I go looking for some cheap MOSFETs, figuring I'd replace that dragon-sized one in my 3DP with a IRFZ44

Where exactely you put them? To drive the hot bed?

I bodged one of these...



...in place of the hotend HEATER FET right in the middle of this board. I'll leave the result to your imagination.

mnem

[Saskia]

still need to dive thru that haul from  2 weeks or so ago
There should be a lot of mosfets in there ...

oh great joy of inventorizing the stuff.

Any of you with an idea for inventory mgmt ?

[ch_scr]

There is "Partkeepr" https://github.com/partkeepr/PartKeepr which mostly works (allegedly). But I do not dare go there, because dragons it's powered by "PHP between 7.0 and 7.1"
They got locked into an "PHP Framework" that changed dramatically from the long obsolete version 2 they use to the recent version 5.2. But hey, it got cloud now...
If anyone has an alternative (the web gui and general idea of Partkeepr is lovely, just the implementation...)

[tonyalbus]

DHL International are bastard monkeys, they show up at the home door and ask all the fee and money they want. Cash only of course and no change back. 
Next time I tell them I have no cash. Bastard.

I have had no cash on me spare a few crowns for several years. All plastic and apps here now.  I get totally thrown-off every time I go to Bargeld-Land, ie. Germany. Naples is worse, though. Apparently the informal economy in southern Italy thrives on cash and not so much on credit cards.

Here, they know better than to show up like that. You get a slip in the mailbox telling you to pay an invoice, or a summons to go fetch the package at this or that shipping company representative (usually a nearby supermarket) at which point you can pay.  The remnants of the post office are very ruthless on this; I stopped buying things from China altogether.

i paid with an App...they dan't take cash...i would not pay cash... now it is registred i have paid.
there is an email adres where i can complain about the charges, so i did.
on the box was an ivoice of 35 Dollar, so 21% VAT of that can never be 35,70 Euro of tax... there administration fee is rediculous, but what can you do. so i complain about the VAT calculation and asked a refund.. lets see, it was to easy to just let it go...

Won the dispute with DHL-ww, i get paid a refund in full 53,-   

[dl6lr]

I have a local offer of a HP 6060B 60V/60A/300W electronic load for 350,- EUR.
Reasonable price? Should I risk trouble with my wife over it..?   

The one in  Salzgitter? I offered less money and he declined and asked for €350,-. Its on ebay for quite a while. And its in an undefined state and bad cosmetics style (OK, at least it lights up some segments and no error flags).

[tautech]

still need to dive thru that haul from  2 weeks or so ago
There should be a lot of mosfets in there ...

oh great joy of inventorizing the stuff.

Any of you with an idea for inventory mgmt ?

Maybe Defpom's app can help:

[Cerebus]

I've had native v6 here at home since my ISP was one that I also ran

If that had been the case for me, I'd made sure to make v6 a priority too.  I did work at the equivalent of JANET from 2000-2007, so did a lot of early v6 work, and drove that adaptation at later employers too, with varying degrees of success.

Today, it is not hard to do v6, not as it was 20 years ago, when VLSI was built with the assumption that an address would be 32 bits. (and even earlier, only subnetted on whole bytes.. But I don't think there was much hardware-assisted routing back then, those sins mostly were in assembler or C.)

And, having a globally unique identifier for every computer, regardless how "internal" it is, is a major deal. It is an enabler you simply don't want to be without once you've tasted it.

You've got to remember that when I was first doing this a peering or transit link wasn't going to be bigger than 100Mb/s (except in rare cases) so hardware accelerated routing wasn't really a problem. We used to run our peerings on 7206s with all our IPv4 peerings and the early/experimental IPv6 and native multicast peerings running on the same box. The only thing there that was a headache was ever increasing BGP table sizes.

The only issue we ever really ran into was the plethora of stuff that couldn't do IPv6 full stop. Finding IPv6 capable CPE for small sites was the problem, if the customer was rich enough for Cisco/Juniper type edge kit you were OK but if they wanted to pay less than, say, £1500 you struggled to find something. As it was, the majority of 'customers' for IPv6 were internal (e.g. me) and the few paying customers who wanted IPv6 were treating it as an experiment/early experience so it wasn't really that much of a headache.

The fun really started once you got to the era of trying to do IPv6 over broadband. In theory, all the middle layer was on L2TP therefore, in theory, it was no problem because, in theory, L2TP allowed transparent transport of layer 2 traffic; in practice it was a big headache as a lot of unnecessary and unwarranted assumptions were made by people who architected that middle layer which caused a lot of unnecessary borkage.

[Cerebus]

still need to dive thru that haul from  2 weeks or so ago
There should be a lot of mosfets in there ...

oh great joy of inventorizing the stuff.

Any of you with an idea for inventory mgmt ?

Just use Excel. What could go wrong? 

[SilverSolder]

I've had native v6 here at home since my ISP was one that I also ran

If that had been the case for me, I'd made sure to make v6 a priority too.  I did work at the equivalent of JANET from 2000-2007, so did a lot of early v6 work, and drove that adaptation at later employers too, with varying degrees of success.

Today, it is not hard to do v6, not as it was 20 years ago, when VLSI was built with the assumption that an address would be 32 bits. (and even earlier, only subnetted on whole bytes.. But I don't think there was much hardware-assisted routing back then, those sins mostly were in assembler or C.)

And, having a globally unique identifier for every computer, regardless how "internal" it is, is a major deal. It is an enabler you simply don't want to be without once you've tasted it.

You've got to remember that when I was first doing this a peering or transit link wasn't going to be bigger than 100Mb/s (except in rare cases) so hardware accelerated routing wasn't really a problem. We used to run our peerings on 7206s with all our IPv4 peerings and the early/experimental IPv6 and native multicast peerings running on the same box. The only thing there that was a headache was ever increasing BGP table sizes.

The only issue we ever really ran into was the plethora of stuff that couldn't do IPv6 full stop. Finding IPv6 capable CPE for small sites was the problem, if the customer was rich enough for Cisco/Juniper type edge kit you were OK but if they wanted to pay less than, say, £1500 you struggled to find something. As it was, the majority of 'customers' for IPv6 were internal (e.g. me) and the few paying customers who wanted IPv6 were treating it as an experiment/early experience so it wasn't really that much of a headache.

The fun really started once you got to the era of trying to do IPv6 over broadband. In theory, all the middle layer was on L2TP therefore, in theory, it was no problem because, in theory, L2TP allowed transparent transport of layer 2 traffic; in practice it was a big headache as a lot of unnecessary and unwarranted assumptions were made by people who architected that middle layer which caused a lot of unnecessary borkage.

Our company's IT steering committee decided to by-pass all those problems by sticking with IPv4 until IPv6 becomes the mainstream option.   They are so not interested in leading that charge!

[Cerebus]

Those are the problems of 20 years ago, today it's a piece of piss, as long as you know what's what. But people, like your company, bury their heads in the sand and file it under 'too hard' meaning that nobody gets any experience of it, so that no one know how to do it. Instead, they get involved in a mess of NAT and necessary overlay networks because the IPV4 address space is exhausted and make their systems more complicated, more fragile and significantly harder to manage.

[FransW]

HP server psu's, here 2x1200W in their cabinet.
Fully fault tolerant, hot swappable and redundant.

Also available in  2x460W and 2x750W.
The fans are temp controlled and nearly silent, common slot psu's.
I'm running my IC-7300 & 9700 with 2x460W.
Without any detectable interference, noise, beeps, whatever.

Total costs: Euro 15.=

[SilverSolder]

Those are the problems of 20 years ago, today it's a piece of piss, as long as you know what's what. But people, like your company, bury their heads in the sand and file it under 'too hard' meaning that nobody gets any experience of it, so that no one know how to do it. Instead, they get involved in a mess of NAT and necessary overlay networks because the IPV4 address space is exhausted and make their systems more complicated, more fragile and significantly harder to manage.

It's not just a head-in-sand insertion issue.

The bigger reason is that other IT projects are considered to provide more tangible benefits to the company, and are therefore considered to be better use of the team's time.

In other words, this will never get done as long as there are "more important" projects competing for the same people's time - the can will be kicked down the road for all eternity.  At least our company realized this, and made the conscious decision to not do it for the time being, rather than keep pretending to be planning to do it! 

[Saskia]

reconfigured several docker networks, shifted around ~ 700 containers and upgraded one of my systems.
I need some hemp.
Not to smoke, a stairwell or some gallows will do fine, thank you ...

[med6753]

reconfigured several docker networks, shifted around ~ 700 containers and upgraded one of my systems.
I need some hemp.
Not to smoke, a stairwell or some gallows will do fine, thank you ...

Please don't.    We very much enjoy having you around. 

[med6753]

The Type 310A has been put away in the TEA closet to re-visit at a later date. It's sitting on top of the very rough Type 561B parts unit that apparently went through the battle of Gettysburg. 



Like Saskia I took the time to organize, inventory, and clean up the TEA closet. Now I won't be able to find anything. 

[mansaxel]

And so it ends. This is where ham "radio" is going - comms over the internet. It's called an MMDVM hotspot.

I only got one because the friends I want to talk to all went there because of idiots and jamming on the repeaters. You can create a room on the server where only the people who know the room number talk. Other than the UHF simplex link from your HT to the hotspot it's all internet. Nothing much more than a glorified wireless mic.

 

Completely meaningless, then. I've sort of been expecting this; the Internet is a very practical way to communicate, one on one or in groups. The HT and the gateway are just a pretext.

Here, the repeaters are quite calm and civil. If you want to, you can hold a long conversation on them. Noone objects.

[mansaxel]

There is "Partkeepr"
 ...
But I do not dare go there, because dragons it's powered by "PHP between 7.0 and 7.1"

I support your scepticism. I saw the requirements list and turned away muttering "Drat!"

PHP is not used on my computers. Period.

[mansaxel]

Maybe Defpom's app can help:

Code: [Select]

treize:tmp mansaxel$ unzip -l MyPartsBinOpenSource_V100.zip | \
    grep -qi php &&\
    (echo "worthless crap" ; rm MyPartsBinOpenSource_V100.zip )
worthless crap
treize:tmp mansaxel$