Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[bd139]

That's interesting. Slightly pleased to see they're still going.

[Cerebus]

I've seen a new 48V Farnell telecom supply, exact same model as they were selling in the 80s within the last year.


Edit: I used to have a 40A 5V Farnell embedded supply that I used to use back in the day when it was quite easy for me to build up enough 5V TTL on a board that it wasn't ridiculous to be using that as a bench supply.

[BU508A]

if I was fed crap about that Ikea incident then I am sorry, that's what I read in the news.
Anyway
@Mounty
will test the content of the box probably tonite. I guess it's fine, but we'll see. Have you tested the PC yet ?

Will start to experiment with my Xilinx toolchain for that Zedboard and check if it comes to life and if I can trigger some output. Will also be a good test if the MSO mod for my scope has worked.

No, not yet. *sigh*
After work I had dinner and then slept on the couch until I've found some energy to go to bed ...
And today is a very special day. Some friends of mine and me will do a commemoration to a friend from us.
She passed away eight years ago at the age of 32 because of cancer.

[Specmaster]

Oh really? You are forgetting something. I sleep with a cop.

No, I'm not forgetting that. But what you don't get to do, that I have, is spend weeks at a time, sometimes for more than 24 hours straight inside a working police station. When you're there working with them, doing stupid things like working 24 hours straight to 'get the job done', you get treated as an insider, you become part of the furniture and people act naturally - they don't mind their Ps and Qs because there's a civilian present. It's access that a sociologist or psychologist studying the police (or any in group) would kill for.

What I've seen being treated as an insider while still having a hopefully objective point of view tells me that outsiders, and that includes spouses. lovers and civilian mates, get an edited version of what goes on inside. I'm not even saying that that editing is deliberate, although some surely is, much of it is that as a socialised insider (and this applies to anything, not just policing) there's stuff going on that you just don't notice because you're part of it.

Well I have been inside many a police station in my time mixing socially with loads of police and also professionally with different forces and I can honestly say that I have never overheard anything remotely like that. I'm not saying that it doesnt go on because Police like any other profession has good and bad types within their ranks.  But I would much rather have our police than most others and that includes the much fabled Mounties, there is a far greater chance of surviving an encounter with our police than there is with others that carry guns.

[factory]

I've only got two Farnell Instruments power supplies, the E350 for higher voltage and a TSV30/5 (30V 5A) that's been in the repair queue for a very long time, apologies for the crap picture it's in storage & I never took any of my own pictures. Note the lump of rust on the casing at the back, this is now a hole, will need some body filler & a repaint one day.


David

[Specmaster]

Just wondering... I always shrugged off Farnell powersupplies as rebrands/housebrand. Is there more to it? They seem ubiquitous in the UK... Actually have one on the bench right now...

Depends if they say "Farnell" on, or one of the other 'house' names. Farnell used to have their own power supply division, designing and building their own supplies and they were high quality. The power division got sold to Advance many years back, but still sold (and possibly sells) under the Farnell name.

They are now APS, some history of Farnell Instruments here;
https://advanceproductservices.co.uk/about-us/our-history/

David

Have been to the Gould Advance site in Bishops Stortford a few times in a previous role and it is sad to see some great names being swallowed into a bigger group etc. It is hard these days to know, who owns who.

This is the former site in Bishops Stortford where so many power supplies came from.

[factory]

Looks like I'm going to have to go through the Beckman counter pictures individually later, to find out which one is triggering the forum software error when I try adding the second post about it. 


David

[factory]

Just wondering... I always shrugged off Farnell powersupplies as rebrands/housebrand. Is there more to it? They seem ubiquitous in the UK... Actually have one on the bench right now...

Depends if they say "Farnell" on, or one of the other 'house' names. Farnell used to have their own power supply division, designing and building their own supplies and they were high quality. The power division got sold to Advance many years back, but still sold (and possibly sells) under the Farnell name.

They are now APS, some history of Farnell Instruments here;
https://advanceproductservices.co.uk/about-us/our-history/

David

Have been to the Gould Advance site in Bishops Stortford a few times in a previous role and it is sad to see some great names being swallowed into a bigger group etc. It is hard these days to know, who owns who.

This is the former site in Bishops Stortford where so many power supplies came from.

I imagine most or all of the archives for the older TE have been lost in the various moves, mergers & sell-offs, the history is very long & confusing.

David

[bd139]

Interesting historical note: As a young teenager I used to loot their skip regularly for parts as I lived in Bishops Stortford. That, nicking stuff out of BT vans and buying fireworks was all there was to do around there 

[25 CPS]

The EU law says that cars speedometer never show less than the cars true speed but it can show true speed + 10% + 6.25MPH or KMH. So whatever speed your car show your doing, it is going considerably less. Therefore your speedo could be showing a speed of 50MPH, but because of the legal tolerances, your true speed could be 40nph.

As to speed camera settings, over here they used to be set to the speed limit plus 10% + 1 mph but now they are often set to the limit+1mph..

I guess that applies if you're in the EU or are in the EU and haven't fully exited yet.

Interestingly, and this one is actually quite surprising, here in Canada, where EU law does not apply, Transport Canada doesn't have any regulations for automotive speedometer accuracy.  There's been a few newspaper articles about this situation but still absent government regulations enforcing some minimum standards, it's wide open which is one of the reasons why there was an uproar over the threshold being set so low when it's well known that ordinary automotive speedometers are all over the map beyond a 1 km/hr tolerance.

The other half is the blatant hypocrisy of the yokel chuckleheads on city council here who reject - loudly and rudely to anybody making deputations to council and they've been written up many times in the local newspaper for their behaviour towards constituents - any and all other sort of traffic calming on major roads and routinely got into a snit about the LRT line that was going to be built until the provincial government cooked the books to justify cancelling it because all of this interferes with the free movement of cars.

The speed cameras, even set up to be over-aggressive with the 1 km/hr threshold, unlike any other traffic calming measure get a strange exception from an incredibly hostile city council.  What difference might explain that?  Well, speed cameras generate revenue.  Speed bumps, bike lanes, LRT lines, strategically located planters, etc. don't.  The over-aggressive speed cameras make money.  Pure and simple.

[Specmaster]

Interesting historical note: As a young teenager I used to loot their skip regularly for parts as I lived in Bishops Stortford. That, nicking stuff out of BT vans and buying fireworks was all there was to do around there 

That explains a lot.

[mnementh]

You have no clue as to what the average police man or woman has to put up with and encounters on a daily basis. And 99% of them perform their duties with the upmost professionalism. You almost sound like one of those "defund the police" advocates who need to be thrown into the fire they just started while rioting in the streets.

Thing is, that defunding the police will be the natural thing to do, once

• Society realises that spending the money early, on social workers and schools, gives one order of magnitude better payback. (one of our larger insurance companies has a research trust that has spent 40 years examining this. The results are overwhelming.
• The current arms race between criminals and police, in no small part fueled by the reasonable suspicion that everyone has a gun in some countries, is damped
• The penal correction facilities correct instead of punish

All those are way hard for a society that's has a big gun fetish coupled to a pathetic lack of trust -- and a racist generalisation tendency for that extra dB -- in a big feedback loop that'd make one of BD's amplifiers green with envy 

But, of course, you can't do it on/off, it needs to be done gradually. And as in all research, you'll need extra funds to do the deployment, so perhaps "fund social work, make schools work, fix healthcare, then lower police budgets".

But, that would rob the churches and the insurance industry of their social testicle grip. Can't have that, no. (We of course call the absence of this action freedom, ie. freedom to perish.)

Both visions here are incorrect. med, for shame. I thought you knew me better than that. I've spent my time arm-in-arm with the local constabulary, and no matter what you think, things used to be a lot different. The entire us vs them attitude was not the norm; the sheriff was part of the community, he broke bread with us in our home more than a few times, and the attitude was definitely "keep the peace first" rather than "shoot first, lie on the paperwork later".

It wasn't Andy Griffith show for sure, but it damned straight wasn't the pseudo-military clusterfuck it is now.

It was that interaction at a young age with my local law enforcement that got me into the Fire Dept; I wanted to do some good. There I spent time similarly in the same buildings as our local Police... had my own share of fly on the wall experiences... and even then, it was very obvious that there were cliques in even our rural Police Dept. There were the peacekeepers... and there were the ones who were just in it to carry a gun and hoping for a chance to shoot something... or someone.

Move several decades forward, and living in Tejas; particularly working contract IT you again get those fly-on-the-wall moments, and some of the things I overheard on jobs would make your skin crawl. Houston... OMG. I lived in the districts where half of the cops get into it just to have an excuse to shoot black people, and that is what it was aboot. No other way to look at it.

Bottom line is that society has changed for the worse on both sides of the thin blue line... no doubt. But don't get cause and effect backwards. The callousness behind the badge is not caused by the shit on the streets; it is the other way around. The shit on the streets is because of the us vs them attitude in law enforcement. It is because the Police are no longer our neighbors, they are a military organization in the middle of our homes. They aren't there to keep the peace, they're there to be the face of "Law and Order"; a complete and utter facade. There is no accountability for them, and every citizen... good or bad... knows it.

If anything, I advocate spending more on the Police... but not more on weapons. More feet on the ground, less tanks. Preferably, zero tanks. We have plenty of actual military organizations with feet on the ground in our neighborhoods with the various alphabet soup agencies, the Coast Guard and National Guard... that kind of action is what they're supposed to be doing. We need enough Police Officers patrolling that they become familiar faces... and that there are enough of them that they can get to know the people in a neighborhood personally, instead of their only interaction with the public being a fucking traffic ticket.

There are so many more people in every city; there needs to be a similar increase in the number of Police officers. And we need to be a lot more careful in how we choose them; so the ones just looking for an excuse to shoot someone aren't.

We need to spend the money training them to actually protect and serve first, and that shooting is the last course, not the first, and to be able to know the difference, even in a split-second situation. We need to spend the money on payroll... so that they can actually have humane work hours and not be working exhausted half the time.

We need to spend the money on education... so that kids grow up knowing that the Police are there for them, not against them. And conversely, we need to make that the truth, not just a pretty ideal we pay lip service to.

I know that's a lot of wishful thinking; human nature is to abhor actually changing anything, and especially to abhor spending money on people. It is to just keep your head down and do your best to get by. But we've grown in number to the point where we simply must grow as a society... or we will self-destruct. That means just plain hard work and change.

mnem
 

[mnementh]

Looks like I'm going to have to go through the Beckman counter pictures individually later, to find out which one is triggering the forum software error when I try adding the second post about it.     

David

I had a similar issue the other day; I think it was more a matter of server load and something timing out rather than actually anything security related. There were lots of people on at the time, and it was a 1.5meg pic. I resized the pic and it went right through.

mnem
 

[mnementh]

I win. You loose, you piece of garbage. You thought you could win from me, eh? Not booting from CD or stick, huh? WHO'S LAUGHING NOW, eh???!?



Uhm, wait, what do you mean "I can't find the HDD"? What? You can find any HDD except the one with the OS from this machine? Doesn't show up in the bios even???

So, you're telling me the drive chose *this* exact moment to cease operations??? Really??

Give you 50 bucks for it. 

mnem
 

[Specmaster]

I had the same experience a few minutes ago with a photo that was just 428Mb 

Edit I meant 428Kb

[Saskia]

if I was fed crap about that Ikea incident then I am sorry, that's what I read in the news.
Anyway
@Mounty
will test the content of the box probably tonite. I guess it's fine, but we'll see. Have you tested the PC yet ?

Will start to experiment with my Xilinx toolchain for that Zedboard and check if it comes to life and if I can trigger some output. Will also be a good test if the MSO mod for my scope has worked.

No, not yet. *sigh*
After work I had dinner and then slept on the couch until I've found some energy to go to bed ...
And today is a very special day. Some friends of mine and me will do a commemoration to a friend from us.
She passed away eight years ago at the age of 32 because of cancer.

my condolences. My sort of stepfather died a horrifying death of pancreatic cancer and the memories still haunt me.

[mnementh]

The more we militarize our Police, the more they feel and act like they're on a war footing with the people they're supposed to be protecting. It's no surprise silly little things like civil rights become transitive in their eyes.

Part of the reason that I have the utmost respect for most of your constabulary; they're out in the crowd, feet on the ground with their neighbors good and bad, and most of them without lethal weapons. Imagine that in the US, where most of the Police spend most of their time with a windshield between them and the public. And half of them with enough heavy metal in the trunk to neutralize a tank.

mnem
 

You have no clue as to what the average police man or woman has to put up with and encounters on a daily basis. And 99% of them perform their duties with the upmost professionalism. You almost sound like one of those "defund the police" advocates who need to be thrown into the fire they just started while rioting in the streets.   

Two things - one, the British police see the public through a windscreen nowadays, the days of the "bobby on the beat" are long gone.

Two, Med. I'm afraid you don't have an idea what the police do on a daily basis, even if you do do have an idea what some of them face. I've worked with the police in the past, been treated as "one of the lads", sat in incident rooms as statements have been written up, listened to the working conversations in the nick, and heard the real stories down the pub that you, "a civilian", don't get to hear.

Example: down the pub with a DS (Phil), a PC (Ian) and a special (John) - Phil:"So lads, do you remember the first time that your Inspector dictated the contents of your pocket book?" (for those not in the know, a policeman's pocket book will be used as a contemporary written record of evidence, and as such carries more weight in court). Here are three working coppers discussing the first time that they were given the 'official' version of evidence, that they would later swear in court was their own testimony, not their Inspectors, and this was such a commonplace that there was a "first time" for everybody. This is the British Police, generally regarded as the least corrupt in the world - as in the old "ideal country" joke.

Nobody likes to hear it, but police culture is not good. If there's institutionalised conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, as above, then there's something deeply wrong. You can bet your bottom dollar that other undesirable institutionalised misbehaviours are as common in the police anywhere - racism, excessive use of force and so on. Sorry, but my experience watching coppers go about their daily work from the privileged position of an insider but without the years of socialisation to treat that behaviour as 'normal' and many documented cases bear that out.

There still are a lot more cops over there walking the beat than over here. Enough that you see them in people's actual photos. It's been decades since that was true on this side of the pond.

Agreed that Police Culture is unsane. no other word for it. We need to change that.

mnem
 

[Specmaster]

if I was fed crap about that Ikea incident then I am sorry, that's what I read in the news.
Anyway
@Mounty
will test the content of the box probably tonite. I guess it's fine, but we'll see. Have you tested the PC yet ?

Will start to experiment with my Xilinx toolchain for that Zedboard and check if it comes to life and if I can trigger some output. Will also be a good test if the MSO mod for my scope has worked.

No, not yet. *sigh*
After work I had dinner and then slept on the couch until I've found some energy to go to bed ...
And today is a very special day. Some friends of mine and me will do a commemoration to a friend from us.
She passed away eight years ago at the age of 32 because of cancer.

my condolences. My sort of stepfather died a horrifying death of pancreatic cancer and the memories still haunt me.

If your press is anything like ours then theres only 2 things that can be sure of as being factual, the day and date that they print on the front page.

[mnementh]

I had the same experience a few minutes ago with a photo that was just 428Mb 

I certainly hope you meant kilobytes... because what you wrote = roughly 60 megabytes.

mnem
*toddles off to feed the children... still haven't decided what to feed them to...*

[Specmaster]

I had the same experience a few minutes ago with a photo that was just 428Mb 

I certainly hope you meant kilobytes... because what you wrote = roughly 60 megabytes.

mnem
*toddles off to feed the children... still haven't decided what to feed them to...*

Yeah correct Kb

[Cerebus]

New cheapo crimp tool and a box of cheapo ferrules arrived. Produces a good solid crimp even on 22 AWG. Grand total including delivery £12.99. Really nothing to complain about, looks like Chineknipex is a winner this time around.



(Unedited, uncropped, unrotated photo because the forum's latest image bug seems to throw a wobbler if I do any processing - despite the fact that the same toolchain caused no problems in the past.)

[med6753]

What can Brown do for you? Right on...actually EARLY. 

[Cerebus]

Two things - one, the British police see the public through a windscreen nowadays, the days of the "bobby on the beat" are long gone.

There still are a lot more cops over there walking the beat than over here. Enough that you see them in people's actual photos. It's been decades since that was true on this side of the pond.

Those are really few and far between. The only place you'll see patrols on foot are pedestrianised areas of town centres and when they've been tasked to special events, from fairs (where it's as much a 'show some faces' exercise as it is actual policing) to events that might have some public order element, but are low key enough not to turn out the heavy mob. You won't see them literally 'walking the beat' the way you did years ago. I haven't see a patrol walk down my street in 30 or 40 years or more, only turning up in a response car. One clue is in the day's assigned duty, the default if you weren't doing anything specific like 'enquiries', 'custody' or other assigned duty was to be assigned to 'patrol' for the day, now the default is to be on 'response'.

Many years ago I used to know the local beat bobby to nod to in the street like I still do the postman, nowadays the local 'Safer Neighbourhood Team' is just a twitter handle.

[bd139]

Well fuck today as well. Another pile of immense pile of excrement to deal with.

Karma-wise I reckon I am owed a 34401A now at a £50 price point

[Specmaster]

Well fuck today as well. Another pile of immense pile of excrement to deal with.

Karma-wise I reckon I am owed a 34401A now at a £50 price point

Oh dear, another calamitous day then? I rather like the sound of a 34401A for around £50 though, tell where?