Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[capt bullshot]

And today's date is......

Monday 25/1/21 7.52am 

1611514625

And it's truly easy to read:
> date -Iseconds --date='@1611514625'
2021-01-24T19:57:05+01:00

[Specmaster]

Gah, my AD584-M reference unit has just shat itself, does anyone actually have a schematic for these units at all that they could send my way?

All output voltages are now in mV's and D5 just by the on/off switch, next the inductor is cooking itself 

I've got 2 of these but sorry, no schematic. Wish I did. You might have to reverse engineer it. 

Edit, just for giggles try disconnecting the battery and power it from the USB.

Nah already tried it powered from the USB, the same result, I do have another calibration tool but that increments in mV and V from 1mV all the upto 10V and also does mA's from 0.001mA upto 24mA

[Robert763]

Anyone got some spare pocket money to spend?

https://page.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/x712051877

I'll check down the back of the sofa for some spare change...

Pah! There's another one really cheap:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/284157359616

...you just have to get rid off a tiny fatal failure to get it working again.. (for parts).       

I think I need to re-calibrate my "really cheap" standard, it seems to be way off what other peoples "really cheap" standards are.

McBryce.

It would have been nice if they gave a little more detail other than "Fatal failure" especially since you are dealing with radioactive material. My suspicion the problem IS the radioactive material. 

No radioactiive material in a Cs standard.

[Robert763]

Gah, my AD584-M reference unit has just shat itself, does anyone actually have a schematic for these units at all that they could send my way?

All output voltages are now in mV's and D5 just by the on/off switch, next the inductor is cooking itself 

I've got 2 of these but sorry, no schematic. Wish I did. You might have to reverse engineer it. 

Edit, just for giggles try disconnecting the battery and power it from the USB.

Nah already tried it powered from the USB, the same result,

Most likely the boost regulator has died. Check to see if you have 15V on pin 8 of AD584. If the regulator is dead I'd run it off a couple of PP3's and a 78L15 or similar linear setup.

[mnementh]

And I'm confused. Apparently this is confusion Sunday.

NOW i read "Three-letter abbreviation for month" not "day". My point stands. It is easier, and essentially locale-independent to sort numbers. And there's bound to be locale collisions, not to mention the small detail that already in German, an Umlaut is sneaking in. The part of the world that insist on 7-bit ASCII in everything as they sit in front of their  UTF-8 capable computers are clearly challenged here.

NMFP. The whole point of computers is to do this stoopit shit so we meat-bags don't have to. It is a programming problem which literally need only be solved once per language, which code then becomes a globally applicable library.

Allowing the machine to dictate to us on such a fundamental level as how we think aboot time is how we wound up with the Corporate Machine literally burning the world as fuel to keep it cool from the atmospheric damage caused by burning the world for fuel.

Fuck that noize.

mnem
Machine, adapt or DIE!

[mansaxel]

And I'm confused. Apparently this is confusion Sunday.

NOW i read "Three-letter abbreviation for month" not "day". My point stands. It is easier, and essentially locale-independent to sort numbers. And there's bound to be locale collisions, not to mention the small detail that already in German, an Umlaut is sneaking in. The part of the world that insist on 7-bit ASCII in everything as they sit in front of their  UTF-8 capable computers are clearly challenged here.

NMFP. The whole point of computers is to do this stoopit shit so we meat-bags don't have to. It is a programming problem which literally need only be solved once per language, which code then becomes a globally applicable library.

Allowing the machine to dictate to us on such a fundamental level as how we think aboot time is how we wound up with the Corporate Machine literally burning the world as fuel to keep it cool from the atmospheric damage caused by burning the world for fuel.

Fuck that noize.

mnem
Machine, adapt or DIE!

In Mandarin, the three last months are, FSVO translitteration,

shiyue, “ten months” [shr-yu-eh] (October)
shiyiyue, “eleven months” [shr-ee-yu-eh] (November)
shieryue, “twelve months” [shr-urr-yu-eh] (December)

Three-letter is unambigous, my ass. (apart from the fact that most people-with-a-computer in the alleged western hemisphere don't even know how to display the actual glyphs that are Latinised above. Hell, most of them can't even type my name properly. And that's 4 letters, the 2nd being "å". I once had a manager whose family stems from Estonia. We had some issues with typing his name, so I'm, mostly, lucky.)

A large part of what I do is parsing logs. If they're in proper ISO 8601 format, my work is easier. Seconds since the Epoch is also OK, but a bit boring to display. 

[nfmax]

In Mandarin, the three last months are, FSVO translitteration,

shiyue, “ten months” [shr-yu-eh] (October)
shiyiyue, “eleven months” [shr-ee-yu-eh] (November)
shieryue, “twelve months” [shr-urr-yu-eh] (December)

And in Latin, those are the 8th, 9th, and 10th months - octavus, novembris and, er, december. September is of course the 7th month. quinitilis got appropriated by Julius Caesar, and sextilis by his great-nephew, Augustus.

[Cerebus]

Anyone got some spare pocket money to spend?

https://page.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/x712051877

I'll check down the back of the sofa for some spare change...

Pah! There's another one really cheap:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/284157359616

...you just have to get rid off a tiny fatal failure to get it working again.. (for parts).       

I think I need to re-calibrate my "really cheap" standard, it seems to be way off what other peoples "really cheap" standards are.

McBryce.

It would have been nice if they gave a little more detail other than "Fatal failure" especially since you are dealing with radioactive material. My suspicion the problem IS the radioactive material. 

Using the word fatal in conjunction with a device that contains radioactive material was probably a bad choice of words. Especially as Caesium emmits gamma rays.

McBryce.

Natural cæsium is ¹³³Cs (isotopic mass abundance virtually 100% with a trace of ¹³⁵Cs). ¹³³Cs is a stable isotope and is not radioactive, in any way. ¹³³Cs is the cæsium isotope used in cæsium beam tubes for reference oscillators becuase, as we surely all know, the second is defined as "9192631770 transitions of the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition of the ¹³³Cs atom".

[Cerebus]

And HP 66312A done!



Turns out it was a piece of piss. Great instructions in the service manual, front panel comes off without disturbing anything else, all fasteners were civilised (i.e. Torx). The binding posts were bolt-in, didn't even need to get the soldering iron out.



Took 30 minutes while watching the TV, would have taken 10 minutes flat if I'd been concentrating on it properly.

[Specmaster]

Oh dear me, we now have armed police officers in the street where I live with about 6 or 7 police vehicles, and they are all centred on a house 5 doors down from me with the house bathed in floodlights, no idea what is going there. The police over the last few weeks have been to that house in force many times before, but this is something completely new 

[Specmaster]

And HP 66312A done!



Turns out it was a piece of piss. Great instructions in the service manual, front panel comes off without disturbing anything else, all fasteners were civilised (i.e. Torx). The binding posts were bolt-in, didn't even need to get the soldering iron out.



Took 30 minutes while watching the TV, would have taken 10 minutes flat if I'd been concentrating on it properly.

Nice job! 

[tautech]

And HP 66312A done!



Turns out it was a piece of piss. Great instructions in the service manual, front panel comes off without disturbing anything else, all fasteners were civilised (i.e. Torx). The binding posts were bolt-in, didn't even need to get the soldering iron out.



Took 30 minutes while watching the TV, would have taken 10 minutes flat if I'd been concentrating on it properly.

Not until a black marker pen does it’s job. 

[Robert763]

And HP 66312A done!

Turns out it was a piece of piss. Great instructions in the service manual, front panel comes off without disturbing anything else, all fasteners were civilised (i.e. Torx). The binding posts were bolt-in, didn't even need to get the soldering iron out.




Took 30 minutes while watching the TV, would have taken 10 minutes flat if I'd been concentrating on it properly.

Not until a black marker pen does it’s job. 

No, two red posts is correct. (note the replacements posts had remains of red and black wire.) I'd have sent a black if it was correct.

[Specmaster]

Correct, quite a lot of HP stuff uses red posts / sockets for everything. I have a 3466A which uses 3 red sockets.

[Cerebus]

Not until a black marker pen does it’s job. 

HP are really odd in that regard. Some supplies have red for both terminals of an output, some have black and red. If there's a scheme as to when and why they choose to do it one way or another I've never managed to figure it out.

It so happens that the 66312A is one of the ones that uses two red terminals, so Robert's "parts draw" donations have restored it to it's original state. Actually, they've upgraded it slightly as the old posts were nickel plated, the ones Robert sent me are full copper low thermal EMF ones.

[tautech]

Not until a black marker pen does it’s job. 

HP are really odd in that regard. Some supplies have red for both terminals of an output, some have black and red. If there's a scheme as to when and why they choose to do it one way or another I've never managed to figure it out.

It so happens that the 66312A is one of the ones that uses two red terminals, so Robert's "parts draw" donations have restored it to it's original state. Actually, they've upgraded it slightly as the old posts were nickel plated, the ones Robert sent me are full copper low thermal EMF ones.

My OCD would be seriously tested by that. 
Red = +, black = minus...period !

Just glancing at 2 red terminals would do my head in.

[Cerebus]

Oh dear me, we now have armed police officers in the street where I live with about 6 or 7 police vehicles, and they are all centred on a house 5 doors down from me with the house bathed in floodlights, no idea what is going there. The police over the last few weeks have been to that house in force many times before, but this is something completely new 

I bet they'll regret not having paid for their TV licence! 

From what I've seen of British coppers with firearms* it might be a good idea for you to get to the back of the house and get at least three brick walls between you and them.


I once stood by on a range and watched all the "authorised firearms" coppers from Uxbridge nick all hurriedly trying to get re-qualified as "authorised firearms" because someone had slipped up and let everyone's authorisations expire. It was generally concluded by all my fellow club shooters (we'd done them a favour and lent them the pistol range) that the safest place might be in front of the targets. This was in the days before full time specialised AFOs so hopefully they're a bit safer now, but it wasn't exactly inspiring.

[sb42]

And I'm confused. Apparently this is confusion Sunday.

NOW i read "Three-letter abbreviation for month" not "day". My point stands. It is easier, and essentially locale-independent to sort numbers. And there's bound to be locale collisions, not to mention the small detail that already in German, an Umlaut is sneaking in. The part of the world that insist on 7-bit ASCII in everything as they sit in front of their  UTF-8 capable computers are clearly challenged here.

NMFP. The whole point of computers is to do this stoopit shit so we meat-bags don't have to. It is a programming problem which literally need only be solved once per language, which code then becomes a globally applicable library.

So, problem statement for libnmfp-date: parse any (day, month, year) tuple ever devised by a human, in any order, with numbered or named months or days or both, in any natural language, possibly abbreviated in arbitrary ways, into an unambiguous calendar date.  You really think this is feasible?

Allowing the machine to dictate to us on such a fundamental level as how we think aboot time is how we wound up with the Corporate Machine literally burning the world as fuel to keep it cool from the atmospheric damage caused by burning the world for fuel.

Or, you know, accept that "how humans think about X" and "how humans communicate X to other humans" aren't necessarily the same thing - then the "how humans type X into a computer constructed by other humans" case is a natural extension of that idea.  There's nothing fundamental or universal in the way you think about time (and possibly many other things).

[tautech]

Oh dear me, we now have armed police officers in the street where I live with about 6 or 7 police vehicles, and they are all centred on a house 5 doors down from me with the house bathed in floodlights, no idea what is going there. The police over the last few weeks have been to that house in force many times before, but this is something completely new 

I bet they'll regret not having paid for their TV licence! 

From what I've seen of British coppers with firearms* it might be a good idea for you to get to the back of the house and get at least three brick walls between you and them.


I once stood by on a range and watched all the "authorised firearms" coppers from Uxbridge nick all hurriedly trying to get re-qualified as "authorised firearms" because someone had slipped up and let everyone's authorisations expire. It was generally concluded by all my fellow club shooters (we'd done them a favour and lent them the pistol range) that the safest place might be in front of the targets. This was in the days before full time specialised AFOs so hopefully they're a bit safer now, but it wasn't exactly inspiring.

Yes this, proven also in west Auckland.

We supplied the venue for a coppers vs fire brigade claybird comp where the fire brigade beat the coppers by a considerable margin !
The best bit though was yet to come which was the wager placed on the outcome which was the loser to wash the winners vehicles while in full uniform in the main street of our local town at 5pm rush hour on a Friday night !

Funny as fuck it was too with all the passerby's tooting horns at the coppers washing fire trucks !
After at the brigades social club was a memorable evening.   
Ah, good times. 

[Robert763]

Not TEA, but bought a used car part on ebay earlier. It was £1 BIN with free postage. I's been marked as dispatched but the seller wants me to pay another £35 plus shipping.  IT wasn't the usual "breaking Ford xxxx" and a description saying it was for a screw. There was something in the description about paying market price, but he's set the market price at £1 right? 
We will see how it pans out, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for a package.  He's clearly avoiding ebay fees and reducing liability on any claim through ebay.

[Specmaster]

Oh dear me, we now have armed police officers in the street where I live with about 6 or 7 police vehicles, and they are all centred on a house 5 doors down from me with the house bathed in floodlights, no idea what is going there. The police over the last few weeks have been to that house in force many times before, but this is something completely new 

I bet they'll regret not having paid for their TV licence! 

From what I've seen of British coppers with firearms* it might be a good idea for you to get to the back of the house and get at least three brick walls between you and them.


I once stood by on a range and watched all the "authorised firearms" coppers from Uxbridge nick all hurriedly trying to get re-qualified as "authorised firearms" because someone had slipped up and let everyone's authorisations expire. It was generally concluded by all my fellow club shooters (we'd done them a favour and lent them the pistol range) that the safest place might be in front of the targets. This was in the days before full time specialised AFOs so hopefully they're a bit safer now, but it wasn't exactly inspiring.

They had the road blocked off, but have now opened the road, many police cars driven off, floodlights removed but there still remains at least 1 marked 4x4 and 2 unmarked 4x4s in the street, and they allowed my neighbour to pass down the street to their driveway. Still not sure if they arrested anybody or not as I didn't think it wise to be nosing out of the window too much in case there was going to bullets flying around, so have been towards the rear of our house with walls between them and us  .

Maybe one day it will be revealed what was going on as SWMBO works in the local Crown Court.

[Specmaster]

Not TEA, but bought a used car part on ebay earlier. It was £1 BIN with free postage. I's been marked as dispatched but the seller wants me to pay another £35 plus shipping.  IT wasn't the usual "breaking Ford xxxx" and a description saying it was for a screw. There was something in the description about paying market price, but he's set the market price at £1 right? 
We will see how it pans out, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for a package.  He's clearly avoiding ebay fees and reducing liability on any claim through ebay.

Have you reported it to eBay as it is blatant breaking of their rules.

[Saskia]

as for cops and shooting skills, I once participated in Talk im Hangar (Servus TV) about citizens being armed.
We were somewhat evenly matched, a lawyer (pro), a gun designer (pro), myself (pro, but crime victim), a police major general (contra), and a german anti gun snowflaky psychiatrist.

The major general was stressing that certain minimum skills were required, and the quite famous lawyer blurted out: Mr major general, I know her, she is a better shooter than 95% of your police force.

The general's face somewhat derailed and we had a discussion after the live show in which he said that in his view I would qualify for a cc permit. He also looked a bit strange when I told him that I did shoot clay pigeons with my SIG 551 carbine ...

[Specmaster]

Update on the CPC order with the shorted PP3 batteries, a while ago, today, I received an email from them saying that they are arranging for another box of 10 PP3's to be sent to me. I have another order that I placed with them over the weekend, so I replied to them suggesting that they combine the order and the replacements in the same delivery and save on carriage costs. They replied and thanked me for the suggestion but declined as they said the replacements were coming from a different dept, and they could not therefore combine the two. Oh well, at least the thought was there.

[tautech]

as for cops and shooting skills, I once participated in Talk im Hangar (Servus TV) about citizens being armed.
We were somewhat evenly matched, a lawyer (pro), a gun designer (pro), myself (pro, but crime victim), a police major general (contra), and a german anti gun snowflaky psychiatrist.

The major general was stressing that certain minimum skills were required, and the quite famous lawyer blurted out: Mr major general, I know her, she is a better shooter than 95% of your police force.

The general's face somewhat derailed and we had a discussion after the live show in which he said that in his view I would qualify for a cc permit. He also looked a bit strange when I told him that I did shoot clay pigeons with my SIG 551 carbine ...

Not hard to be.

A little story from a cop mate (a real shooter) that was doing his compulsory twice annual refresher course where a lady cop (no ref to JoAnne Med) kept pressing the mag into the butt of her Glock for it only to fall out onto the floor every time she tried to fit it.
The instructor commanded her to take her finger OFF the mag release !