Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[bd139]

I have decided that Amazon is an apology-driven business: do the minimum thing hoping it'll work then apologise a lot when it fucks up and pay out retainers. This is what happened with some AWS issues I had so I suggest that it is actually fully intentional that they operate in that way. That is quite frankly not how I want my future to be run so I'm going to start voting with my feet I think.

Exactly this. Amazon just pushed out "CloudWatch Synthetics Recorder" and convenient failed to offer anything like enough credit to the "Headless Recorder" project, that it is basically a fork of. On being called out on this Amazon go:

Via Twitter, Asay expressed concern about the handling of the CloudWatch extension launch and said he would look into it. And in a comment posted to Hacker News, he sounded similarly contrite.

"AWS uses a lot of open source, and we contribute a lot, both in terms of code (first-party projects like Firecracker and Bottlerocket, but also third-party projects like Redis, GraphQL, Open Telemetry, etc.), testing, credits, foundation support, and more," he said.

"But open source is ultimately about people and communities, and I personally feel we could have done more to acknowledge the great work Tim and his co-maintainers have done, and try to support their Headless Recorder work. We're talking with Tim now about this."

Almost a non-apology, front loaded with that "AWS uses a lot of open source, and we contribute a lot,..."

Ah yes I saw that.

At the same time you've got two options which may or may not be thrown upon the table. Firstly if you release stuff as Apache 2 license, then it's open season. Secondly, they have enough resources to just write it from scratch again. You can't win against them really so it's best to produce things that are of no value to them.

Amazon genuinely produce some fucking awful shit in the compute space though. Their Elasticsearch service is an example of a flaming shit show if there ever was one. I could write a book on that boiled anal wart of an implementation.

Edit: one fine thing I've found recently is the AWS certified Kubernetes monkeys don't actually know anything about Kubernetes. If I mention CoreDNS, CNI or any Kubernetes internals they glaze over and start saying things like "because it's got electrolytes" because amazon magics all this stuff away. Of course when it breaks they are as useful as a gallium tea pot. Lucky for these abhorrent turd garglers I actually learned by building clusters from scratch in virtual machines and breaking them.

[mnementh]

Gah, been right through the voltage control section lifting legs for measurement purposes and in some cases removing altogether, like caps etc and still no smoking gun has been found, it all checks out OK. I think I may have found one or two slightly dodgy joints, can't be sure that I didn't cause them in the process of lifting a leg up, anyway, will start the process of resoldering and I think I'll use the desoldering gun to suck out the solder at both ends of parts in that area and reflow them again with fresh solder and retest and will report a little later, I'm off to grab a bite and a cup of TEA 

Oh and yeah, check for any broken tracks 

   Not a bad thing redoing the joints. I had a couple of Thandar things which were cracked joints.

Yup... Diag 101: First, wring it out for rings! (look for ring cracks under bright light and magnification)

mnem
 

[mnementh]

I think I have become addicted to test equipment. It started out small, just a handheld multimeter here and there but now I have a Rigol and I am considering binocular microscopes and bench multimeters, signal generators, higher frequency probes and other costly stuff.

I am planning a lab redesign to reduce EM interference on the testing side of the lab.

I don't know where this will end. I see a lot of capacitors in my future.

Welcome here!   

Here we can help you feeling comfortable with your addiction..      

Welcome from the Great White North, ya hoser! 

mnem

[bd139]

Is it just me or is anyone else noticing that the forum seems to be running slow today? I trust it's not about to go belly up for a while 

Yes, but in my case I was putting it down to an update of Xcode running in the background - nearly 12Gb download FFS.

And then when you have downloaded you have to suffer with it.

I'm rebuilding my laptop so it is free of corporate slime. It's now downloading the contents of OneDrive which is not much fun...



But yes it's probably slow anyway.

[Specmaster]

Gah, been right through the voltage control section lifting legs for measurement purposes and in some cases removing altogether, like caps etc and still no smoking gun has been found, it all checks out OK. I think I may have found one or two slightly dodgy joints, can't be sure that I didn't cause them in the process of lifting a leg up, anyway, will start the process of resoldering and I think I'll use the desoldering gun to suck out the solder at both ends of parts in that area and reflow them again with fresh solder and retest and will report a little later, I'm off to grab a bite and a cup of TEA 

Oh and yeah, check for any broken tracks 

   Not a bad thing redoing the joints. I had a couple of Thandar things which were cracked joints.

Yup... Diag 101: First, wring it out for rings! (look for ring cracks under bright light and magnification)

mnem
 

Yeah, already did a good visual inspection under my illuminated desk magnifier before I started lifting legs etc and found nothing.

[mnementh]

...Dissipation factor and ESR are good. They all seem to be healthy. Maybe I should try to charge them with 500VDC or 120VAC ? 

Yeah, sure... just lemme pull up a rug & get comfortable first... 

mnem

[mnementh]

This place looks like someone tossed a hand grenade and shut the door.  I've got bench 2 all pulled out. Cleaning all the dust/dirt and prepping the walls for paint. Also re-doing the mains power distribution under bench 2. If I get on Discord at all later today it will probably be nothing more than a quick check -in.

You have a self-levitating plant! 

Amazing, isn't it? Just like Avatar. 

When med sez "Ahhh.... I'll just throw everything in the corner so I can pain here..."  He means throw AND everything... ...camera just caught it on the downward arc.

mnem
 

[mnementh]

I have decided that Amazon is an apology-driven business: do the minimum thing hoping it'll work then apologise a lot when it fucks up and pay out retainers. This is what happened with some AWS issues I had so I suggest that it is actually fully intentional that they operate in that way. That is quite frankly not how I want my future to be run so I'm going to start voting with my feet I think.

Exactly this. Amazon just pushed out "CloudWatch Synthetics Recorder" and convenient failed to offer anything like enough credit to the "Headless Recorder" project, that it is basically a fork of. On being called out on this Amazon go:

Via Twitter, Asay expressed concern about the handling of the CloudWatch extension launch and said he would look into it. And in a comment posted to Hacker News, he sounded similarly contrite.

"AWS uses a lot of open source, and we contribute a lot, both in terms of code (first-party projects like Firecracker and Bottlerocket, but also third-party projects like Redis, GraphQL, Open Telemetry, etc.), testing, credits, foundation support, and more," he said.

"But open source is ultimately about people and communities, and I personally feel we could have done more to acknowledge the great work Tim and his co-maintainers have done, and try to support their Headless Recorder work. We're talking with Tim now about this."

Almost a non-apology, front loaded with that "AWS uses a lot of open source, and we contribute a lot,..."

1 point of the profits (0.1%) generated from that specific function could go a long way towards reasonably rewarding the guy for all his co-opted hard work... and you can't tell me that AWS doesn't know exactly how much that project is worth.

mnem
 

[bd139]

[factory]

Got lucky on ebay. I snipped 3 substitution boxes for 20$   


The IET RCS-502 are really nice. They combine resistance (0.1%) and capacitance (1%) decades. The CDE CDB-3 is a lot older and only has only capacitance. Its also less accurate at 3%.

When received the CDB-3 was a bit inconsistent. I decided to open it up to clean the switches. The internal construction is somehow rustic with the piece of wood glued in the middle 


Also I never seen those capacitors before. Look like they are in ceramic. If radiomuseum.org is accurate, they were selling for 16.35 in 1965 (https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/cornel_dub_decade_capacitor_cdb3.html) In pretty good shape for it's age.

They look a lot like the paper/oil capacitors that often leak or fail in the "Shango066" radio or TV resurrection videos, hopefully I'm wrong and yours are a bit newer. 


David

Ouch it's oil-paper then. Capacitance is fine. I will check ESR later today.

Dissipation factor and ESR are good. They all seem to be healthy. Maybe I should try to charge them with 500VDC or 120VAC ? 

I usually check the for leakage using an analogue Megger (BM8 MkII), if it doesn't go to maximum on the resistance scale (at nearest range to rated voltage) then it's probably a paper based capacitor, don't forgot to discharge afterwards.

David

[Mr. Scram]

Random review: Amazon grocery deliveries are a shit show.

Missing 7 items from manifest and half destroyed. They have refunded the entire order of £68 and let me keep the stuff without question though. This ain’t Morrisons fault. Last mile delivery dude is the worst.

Now cleaning up milk and mess. 

I just had another item sold by a third party seller cancelled for reasons unknown, but likely because it was a scammer. It admittedly was a cheap offer, but the vast majority for many product groups is. Judging by the "this listing is a bit too cheap" criterium the vast majority of listings in many categories are scams and Amazon just keeps cutting them off before the scammers receive payment. It's unfortunate the money takes up to two weeks to reappear in my account. It all seems to coincide with your suspicions. They do the minimum required and don't give a shit because they aren't losing anything. Whenever it does work out they make a buck.

We know big tech companies are publically traded and we know they wield power many heads of state only dream of, and we definitely know power corrupts. Why we expect anything else than to be ruthlessly exploited by these companies, happily putting our secrets and livelihoods in their hands in these incredibly lopsided relationships is a mystery.

[Cerebus]

Is it just me or is anyone else noticing that the forum seems to be running slow today? I trust it's not about to go belly up for a while 

Yes, but in my case I was putting it down to an update of Xcode running in the background - nearly 12Gb download FFS.

And then when you have downloaded you have to suffer with it.

Yeeerrrrs. I haven't actually used Xcode in yonks - usually the update is just an exercise in keeping the command line tools up to date. I dislike IDEs at the best of times. I do find that Xcode is less painful and perverse than most.

Reason for the update was that I might actually use SwiftUI to build a quick and dirty suck-it-and-see prototype for something I'm thinking about writing. If I do and it looks a goer I'll actually write it in summat proper. I've used the Xcode UI builders in much older (cocoa based) prototypes before - you can get a very quick, very good looking "doesn't actually really do anything" UI up and running in Xcode with surprisingly little pain.

Just paused to check on supper before previewing this message. Cubes of spuds, parsnips, celeriac and butternut squash with a quartered onion roasting away - smells great. Another few minutes and it gets joined by a couple of pasties for another 20 mins. Then just heat baked beans and serve.

[Wolfgang]

This place looks like someone tossed a hand grenade and shut the door.  I've got bench 2 all pulled out. Cleaning all the dust/dirt and prepping the walls for paint. Also re-doing the mains power distribution under bench 2. If I get on Discord at all later today it will probably be nothing more than a quick check -in.

An example of the chaos occupying the bedroom. 

 

If I think this is a mess bench 1 will be a nightmare. 

Dont know what you have. It looks like any average TEA bedroom. Show me your kitchen 

[factory]

I accidentally bought that Beckman counter I was watching, as it went down to $30, shipping is still a killer on it though. 

What kind of display is this?

Until it arrives your guess is as good as mine, I couldn't find any info on it last time I posted about it when it was $50, I did find another (older?) version with neon number readout bulbs here; http://crasno.ca/articles/Beckman6148A.htm

David

Looks like a blue version of a panaplex to me, surely some sort of vfd at any rate?

I think your on to something there, I wasn't sure as they look to neat to be individual VFD tubes, could it be a multi-digit version of this (nearest to digit appearance)?


David

[tggzzz]

I await Amazon healthcare where you get free Prime for 12 months when they forget your nan's medication and she drops dead because it's statistically profitable enough.

An acquaintance, whose husband has a bad heart condition, uses an internet pharmacy.

They regularly get Things Wrong, apparently.

[Specmaster]

My wife has to have regular medication for the rest of her life, and she has arranged for the largest pharmacy in the country, you know the one, B---- to get her prescription monthly from the Doctors and prepare it for her so that she can collect it on way home from work. They have never once yet had the prescription ready for her, often running upto a week behind the due date, just as well that the medication isn't life-threatening if she misses it.

[Specmaster]

Just had this pop up in my suggested viewing window on YT. Looks like an excellent idea.

[tonyalbus]

Car Electronics is also Electronics,
and about the t-shirt... we know what it is... but the wife thinks it are the nazca lines 

[mansaxel]

My wife has to have regular medication for the rest of her life, and she has arranged for the largest pharmacy in the country, you know the one, B---- to get her prescription monthly from the Doctors and prepare it for her so that she can collect it on way home from work. They have never once yet had the prescription ready for her, often running upto a week behind the due date, just as well that the medication isn't life-threatening if she misses it.

Here, we've got free delivery on prescription meds, from some of the pharmacists. Same day, if you're ordering early enough.  Naturally, this works best with the common stuff, specials might take some time. It works for non-prescription items too.

[25 CPS]

@mnem: Re your PSU and radio usage .... Just think of the smoke a ham could get to come out of a radio by getting red and black mixed up with one of them 

I can't speak to ham radio operators but I can tell you that bad things happening from getting  red and black mixed up is one of the nightmares that anybody with protanopia type colourbliness has on a regular basis.

[Mr. Scram]

I threw some money at a somewhat sketchy Chinese company website. I received what I ordered in under two weeks and so far it seems to be fit for its intended purpose. This means a sketchy Chinese website is doing a lot better than Amazon. 

[bd139]

In the race to the bottom Amazon haven't got a chance 

After today and spending the last year pissing around in AWS I hope the light that shines twice as bright lasts half as long. (well at least until they've finished the next couple of seasons of The Expanse)

[BU508A]

Just had this pop up in my suggested viewing window on YT. Looks like an excellent idea.

[bd139]

That's a big problem around here suddenly in the last month or two. I'm tempted to set up a paintball grenade in one and leave it out there 

[mnementh]

I prefer to sit on the porch with a 12-gauge across my knees. Not for packages per se; just in general. 

mnem
Fun fact: PMS = Paul Must Suffer.