Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[mnementh]

I'm in misery... I need company. The Mavericks install was pretty painless... took 20 minutes or so. Now, running the creatinstallmedia utility... that's another story. First off, anything that requires command line dickery from a terminal in an OS I just installed half an hour ago is not my idea of a fun first date. 

Secondly... this thing is sooooo slow creating the media... like 15 minutes to put 115MB of a 6GB or so image to the USB. Seriously...?

EDIT: Hmmm... this is looking more like some DRM BS fuckerization now; it suddenly jumped up to ~6GB on the USB, but no progress on the creatinstallmedia utility running in Terminal. Now it's been frozen at exactly the same ~6GB point for 30 minutes without progressing at all to the next step of copying boot files to the USB.

EDIT-EDIT: Hmmm-hummm-hmmmm... Another sudden burst of activity, and now it says "Copy Complete. Done." in the creatinstallmedia utility in Terminal, with all the expected steps in between.

The best part of OS X is that you can fix things the proper way, using a bunch of autistic CLI tools and an even more autistic text editor. One is never so close to actually talking to the machine as one is at the terminal.

Autism can be relieved by things like

Code: [Select]

treize:hp mansaxel$ iostat 10
              disk0               disk3       cpu    load average
    KB/t  tps  MB/s     KB/t  tps  MB/s  us sy id   1m   5m   15m
   19.14   29  0.54    66.30    0  0.00   4  4 92  1.85 1.56 1.53
   34.18    8  0.26     0.00    0  0.00   3  3 94  1.64 1.53 1.52
in another terminal.

Always have a spare interactive terminal for poking sticks at thar computerizer

Yeah, the install media USB it created didn't work. At all. And now I can't get the Niresh install to complete again, either. Def some DRM fuckerization going on here. Some "magic code" written to this HDD that survives even wiping the partition table, or maybe fuckerizing the firmware in the optical drive like Sony and MS did for a while back in the day...

mnem
grr.

[Cerebus]

Hi Ceberus,

during the last year I also played with different OCXO solutions for GPSDOs. I learned that it's better not to cover the OCXOs with foam because the heating-cooling-regulation needs the convection with free air.
It only makes sense to avoid direct air flow from a vent. All the professional solutions I have seen use the "naked" OCXO.

I have done this only one time since I had a OCXO without Vref output and I used a cheap TL431 for this. I put it at the can of the OCXO and covered it with foam.

I don't know why you'd think that. If the control loop for regulating the temperature of the OCXO was so badly designed that it needed some external cooling to be stable your point would be well made, and the control loop would not be. As it is I've never seen this and wouldn't expect to. If it needed a specific amount of convective cooling the data sheet would have to specify the amount of heat dissipation necessary and again, that is not something that I've ever seen. So I think you're a bit off with the expectation that "the heating-cooling-regulation needs the convection with free air".

In general most ovened things, be they XOs or voltage references benefit from having as much isolation from the local thermal environment as possible. Some ovened references go so far as to place the oven inside a dewar flask ('vacuum' flask). That you don't see it in many commercial designs is probably more likely down to being cheap than being about doing the job properly. Look at the old HP crystal ovens - dirty great things with loads of insulation inside the outer metal cans.

The OCXO from an HP 55300A GPSDO:

Hi Ceberus,

sorry I don't want to instruct or advice you, may be my english is insufficient to explain my point clear enough.
I don't mean that OCXOs need "cooling" but only the contact to free air.

I was nearly 2 years with the time nuts, there are infinite topics here and in the web. Starting with simple VCXO and later
OCXOs I now have several double oven OCXOs (TRIMBLE). With one I built the high precision time base for my HP53131A
and it keeps it's stability (against my GPSDO) in the limits of the self calibration (about 1mHz @ 10 MHz).

During my way I was in uncountable web boards, read many data sheets and project descriptions.
In the beginning I also expected an improvement by covering the OCXOs but I got the the advice to avoid it.
May be there are OCXOs that benefit from extra shielding but I think if this could help you find some advice in the data sheets
of the manufacturers. If the regulation benefits from some shielding it is done by design as you mentioned.

I run two professional UCCM-GPSDO (most of all china 10 MHz OCXOs and UCCM come from decommissioned
mobile phone stations) with SAMSUNG and TRIMBLE OCXOs but I never saw any extra thermal shielding.
And the fun starts if you try to test your OCXOs for phase noise/Allan deviation ...
But this are my 50 cents, if I was unpolite - sorry!

B.D.

No worries, no criticism inferred or implied. It doesn't hurt to kick ideas about and see what washes out.

The problem with time nuts, and volt nuts, and similar such groupings is that a lot of myths and old wive's tales circulate along with useful fact, as anyone who has actually studied motor vehicle engineering will tell you when listening to a bunch of amateur motoring enthusiasts pet theories about engines and vehicle suspension. If something comes from such quarters without a good solid physical explanation accompanying it, it's a good idea to be sceptical about it. That's all that's happening here. Don't take this the wrong way, but "a lot of people say" isn't a good scientific argument and that's what I want to hear along with the suggestion. The "I don't know why you'd think that." is sincere, it means what it says, it's not a rhetorical device.

[mnementh]

   Hmmmm... enigmatic little brown box from Asia... I can't even read the city of origin...

mnem
honestly... I'm a bit afraid to open it...

      

Oh... wow... it actually came, and it wasn't just a rock in a baggie. It's the parts movement for my NIXON digilog wristwatch. All of $3.88 Canadian pesos... w00t!

This watch uses modified version of this standard mov't; so I'll be trying to rebuild it with parts from the new mov't.

Should keep me off the street and out of trouble for a while. 

mnem
 

[Cerebus]

Yes congratulations. Definitely a better prize than the junk Mail I won 

Yeah, but my mickey taking of Daniel, as a direct consequence of that, now has the potential to come back and haunt me. 

[Cerebus]

Good luck deciding which chemicals to use to clean the contacts; I've never seen an answer I trust.  Looks like they have the "horn" that enables contacts to be made by dipping it in mercury.

And that would earn you brownie points nowadays with the local health and safety officer, or health and safety wife, not.

While on the topic. Has anyone got any reliable data on the magic ingredients in Deoxit and similar contact cleaners? A trawl of MSDSs (which usually spills the goods) has failed to turn these up, and I've not been convinced by what I've seen written here or other similar places on what they are.

[Cerebus]

I'm in misery... I need company. The Mavericks install was pretty painless... took 20 minutes or so. Now, running the creatinstallmedia utility... that's another story. First off, anything that requires command line dickery from a terminal in an OS I just installed half an hour ago is not my idea of a fun first date. 

Secondly... this thing is sooooo slow creating the media... like 15 minutes to put 115MB of a 6GB or so image to the USB. Seriously...?

EDIT: Hmmm... this is looking more like some DRM BS fuckerization now; it suddenly jumped up to ~6GB on the USB, but no progress on the creatinstallmedia utility running in Terminal. Now it's been frozen at exactly the same ~6GB point for 30 minutes without progressing at all to the next step of copying boot files to the USB.

EDIT-EDIT: Hmmm-hummm-hmmmm... Another sudden burst of activity, and now it says "Copy Complete. Done." in the creatinstallmedia utility in Terminal, with all the expected steps in between.

The best part of OS X is that you can fix things the proper way, using a bunch of autistic CLI tools and an even more autistic text editor. One is never so close to actually talking to the machine as one is at the terminal.

Autism can be relieved by things like

Code: [Select]

treize:hp mansaxel$ iostat 10
              disk0               disk3       cpu    load average
    KB/t  tps  MB/s     KB/t  tps  MB/s  us sy id   1m   5m   15m
   19.14   29  0.54    66.30    0  0.00   4  4 92  1.85 1.56 1.53
   34.18    8  0.26     0.00    0  0.00   3  3 94  1.64 1.53 1.52
in another terminal.

Always have a spare interactive terminal for poking sticks at thar computerizer

Yeah, the install media USB it created didn't work. At all. And now I can't get the Niresh install to complete again, either. Def some DRM fuckerization going on here. Some "magic code" written to this HDD that survives even wiping the partition table, or maybe fuckerizing the firmware in the optical drive like Sony and MS did for a while back in the day...

mnem
grr.

Nothing like that, it's just that officially supported booting from USB came rather late to the Apple world. I can't remember off hand exactly which of the various versions of the MacPro has which EFI quirks. I can say that the MacPro1,1 (because that's what I have two of) has the following quirks:

1) Won't boot from USB
2) Has a 32 bit EFI but will boot 64 bit operating systems if you have all the right things in place. For OS X they are built in, for other OSs you need a shim bootloader to deal with the 32 -> 64 bit transition.
3) They are inordinately fussy about the DVD media they boot from for double density DVDs (some times even single density). They will boot faultlessly from pressed disks, but booting from burned recordables is a wildly hit and miss affair. Net booting, if you've the wherewithal, is the way to avoid this pain, but that also has to be set up just so to be successful.

Got to go and fight with the infected zombie hoard at the supermarket...

[mnementh]

The surgery continues...

      

New ceramic tweezers are 100% made of win here; so much better control than my stainless ones, even tho the points aren't as fine. I had to stop at this point and do something else; my fingers were getting numb from holding the tweezers and screwdriver "just so" as I assembled these tiny bits.

Getting old sucks. 

mnem
*toddles off to drain the lizard... again.*

[BU508A]

Getting old sucks. 

Nobody escapes the Second law of thermodynamics.

Nobody.

[bd139]

Good luck deciding which chemicals to use to clean the contacts; I've never seen an answer I trust.  Looks like they have the "horn" that enables contacts to be made by dipping it in mercury.

And that would earn you brownie points nowadays with the local health and safety officer, or health and safety wife, not.

While on the topic. Has anyone got any reliable data on the magic ingredients in Deoxit and similar contact cleaners? A trawl of MSDSs (which usually spills the goods) has failed to turn these up, and I've not been convinced by what I've seen written here or other similar places on what they are.

It’s usually just isopropyl alcohol, propellant and some marketing.

Difluoroethane, heptane and isopropyl alcohol are all that are in WD40’s variety of contact cleaner.

[xrunner]

Yes congratulations. Definitely a better prize than the junk Mail I won 

Yeah, but my mickey taking of Daniel, as a direct consequence of that, now has the potential to come back and haunt me. 

Congrats. I guess pics will be coming when you get it.

Post them once and only once though. 

[tggzzz]

Good luck deciding which chemicals to use to clean the contacts; I've never seen an answer I trust.  Looks like they have the "horn" that enables contacts to be made by dipping it in mercury.

And that would earn you brownie points nowadays with the local health and safety officer, or health and safety wife, not.

Yeah well...

In addition to the metrology equipment containing mercury and cadmium salts in thin glass envelopes, I've also got potassium chlorate (minus fire suppressor), potassium permanganate, powdered magnesium, and about a dozen 1cm cubes of sodium.

What should I do with them?

[bd139]

Mix them all together and see what happens of course 

[mansaxel]

Cerebus won the Keysight scope ! 

"ONCE and ONCE ONLY" What? That's what you said to post! 

WINNER WINNER CHICKEN DINNER!

Gosh! (As Olivia Coleman would say.) I've been buried in OCXO/GPSDO code fiddling so I haven't even opened my email today so this was the first I've heard of it. Just checked my email and, sure enough, I've got an email from Dave.

This is excellent and the scope could hardly have been more well deserved.

[Cerebus]

The surgery continues...

Getting old sucks. 

mnem
*toddles off to drain the lizard... again.*

It does, but I think I'm still ahead of the game. I had to desolder and solder my first ever 0603/0602 resistor by hand last night to move a link on the ST STM32F411 Nucleo dev board that I'm using. It was surprisingly trouble free. I still don't think that it's convinced me to drop my "specify nothing smaller than 0805 for anything that I'm going to have to populate by hand" rule though.

[Cerebus]

Good luck deciding which chemicals to use to clean the contacts; I've never seen an answer I trust.  Looks like they have the "horn" that enables contacts to be made by dipping it in mercury.

And that would earn you brownie points nowadays with the local health and safety officer, or health and safety wife, not.

Yeah well...

In addition to the metrology equipment containing mercury and cadmium salts in thin glass envelopes, I've also got potassium chlorate (minus fire suppressor), potassium permanganate, powdered magnesium, and about a dozen 1cm cubes of sodium.

What should I do with them?

Make a chemist's martini. Chuck 'em all in a pint glass, just add cheap gin or glycerol to taste, don't shake, don't stir, run like blazes... 

[bd139]

Surely you mean hand to the person on the top of your dislike list and then leg it with arched legs while sniggering vociferously? 

[ch_scr]

Good luck deciding which chemicals to use to clean the contacts; I've never seen an answer I trust.  Looks like they have the "horn" that enables contacts to be made by dipping it in mercury.

And that would earn you brownie points nowadays with the local health and safety officer, or health and safety wife, not.

While on the topic. Has anyone got any reliable data on the magic ingredients in Deoxit and similar contact cleaners? A trawl of MSDSs (which usually spills the goods) has failed to turn these up, and I've not been convinced by what I've seen written here or other similar places on what they are.

It’s usually just isopropyl alcohol, propellant and some marketing.

Difluoroethane, heptane and isopropyl alcohol are all that are in WD40’s variety of contact cleaner.

"Teslanol Oscillin" is the witches brew I swear by, and that definitely has more of a petrol carrier. But the MSDS also doesn't tell what the magic ingredient is...
Edit: I chose it because it cleanes and preserves in one product and is reasonably priced. The same brand also has "Polarin Forte" cold spray

[Robert763]

Good luck deciding which chemicals to use to clean the contacts; I've never seen an answer I trust.  Looks like they have the "horn" that enables contacts to be made by dipping it in mercury.

And that would earn you brownie points nowadays with the local health and safety officer, or health and safety wife, not.

While on the topic. Has anyone got any reliable data on the magic ingredients in Deoxit and similar contact cleaners? A trawl of MSDSs (which usually spills the goods) has failed to turn these up, and I've not been convinced by what I've seen written here or other similar places on what they are.

You need a EPP licence to have mercury in the UK these days.

[mansaxel]

Always have a spare interactive terminal for poking sticks at thar computerizer

Yeah, the install media USB it created didn't work. At all. And now I can't get the Niresh install to complete again, either. Def some DRM fuckerization going on here. Some "magic code" written to this HDD that survives even wiping the partition table, or maybe fuckerizing the firmware in the optical drive like Sony and MS did for a while back in the day...

Have you tried to clean the drive properly? Not with hand-holding safety-belt code like "fdisk" or "parted" or such, but the heavy stuff, that is "dd". Something like

Code: [Select]

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdisk19 bs=512 count=1024
(for values of "19" that actually correspond to the piece of spinning rust you're trying to unfuckerize)

If you can get far enough that you have a OSX CLI prompt, there might be value in pouring "holy water" on the appropriate disk/partition/directory/file via the little utility "bless".  But, that should probably be done to a non-booting install, not on a cleaned disk.

The thing I suspect you're banging against is that the firmware has an idea of where the bootable disk with the root file system is and that place is not where the drive you installed on is. Some firmware incantations might be useful here.

Some discussion on the subject. I might add that I've never tried this, because all my OSX computers have come in a working state and have stayed that way :-) Yeah, cheating.

OTOH I installed OpenBSD on a spare machine at work the other day, because I had to have a physical sniffer machine in place, and OpenBSD hurts the least. They also have a nice privsep mechanism in their Wireshark port which is super clever. Anyway, the machine was set up with Secure Boot and other Microshit, and it took two trips to helldesk to unfuck that (I do not possess the BIOS password, which of course was set) before I even could start breaking it for real..  PC booting is equally conflated, but in other ways. At least since after MS-DOS 2.0.

[tggzzz]

Surely you mean hand to the person on the top of your dislike list and then leg it with arched legs while sniggering vociferously? 

I'd want to figure out a time delay fuse. It might involve leaving only a thin layer of oil on the Na, and then allowing it to drain off.

[mnementh]

The surgery continues...   

Getting old sucks. 

mnem
*toddles off to drain the lizard... again.*

It does, but I think I'm still ahead of the game. I had to desolder and solder my first ever 0603/0602 resistor by hand last night to move a link on the ST STM32F411 Nucleo dev board that I'm using. It was surprisingly trouble free. I still don't think that it's convinced me to drop my "specify nothing smaller than 0805 for anything that I'm going to have to populate by hand" rule though.

Yup... 0602/0603 isn't too bad; I do resistors that size all the time, sometimes even dead-bug. But I prefer to work with 0805 or even 1210 size if I can get away with it, same as you.    It's really heat-sensitive stuff like 0402 LEDs that fuck with my head... often takes me 2 or 3 tries to get one down on the PCB without scorching it to death.



what sucks most is I used to do this kindof thing with naked eyes and a couple toothpicks. And more often than not, I was successful.

Today... not so much. Operation was a success, but the patient suffered heart failure post-op. I had the movement all together, saw it working... (Jeebus, but that stepping motor rotor is tiny) but some time while assembling the thing in the case I must've nicked the motor coil; it tested open after I noticed the watch had stopped working. 

Switching tactics, I managed to dismantle the "hands" and face from the movement without too much damage; I have another couple of movements on the way from the same vendor.

I'll try using the complete movement this time; see if that improves my odds.

mnem
*toddles off to suffer some more with my cheese grater Mac*

[Cerebus]

For dinner/supper (depending on where you come from) I've allowed myself to be inspired by Snackmasters off the TV, where Michelin starred chefs are challenged to come up with their own identical version of some well known commercial snack or fast food product. Last week it was the KFC Zinger burger, which in my experience is one of the better things one can buy in the way of fast food on the high street.

So, here's my attempt at the same, crispy chilli chicken, redubed Poulet à Biohazard because food always sounds fancier in French and it accurately describes my response to the marinade once I'd mixed it ip.



The purple nitrile gloves are not a fashion statement, that marinade is 70% chilli, 25% oil and 5% garlic powder, you don't want to get that under your fingernails when it's been marinading for 24 hours.

The result after flouring and frying.



Not bad. Tasty, crispy, moist, tender. Needs even more heat, it's merely mildly warm, no Zing worth mentioning.

[mnementh]

Always have a spare interactive terminal for poking sticks at thar computerizer

Yeah, the install media USB it created didn't work. At all. And now I can't get the Niresh install to complete again, either. Def some DRM fuckerization going on here. Some "magic code" written to this HDD that survives even wiping the partition table, or maybe fuckerizing the firmware in the optical drive like Sony and MS did for a while back in the day...

Have you tried to clean the drive properly? Not with hand-holding safety-belt code like "fdisk" or "parted" or such, but the heavy stuff, that is "dd". Something like

Code: [Select]

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdisk19 bs=512 count=1024
(for values of "19" that actually correspond to the piece of spinning rust you're trying to unfuckerize)

If you can get far enough that you have a OSX CLI prompt, there might be value in pouring "holy water" on the appropriate disk/partition/directory/file via the little utility "bless".  But, that should probably be done to a non-booting install, not on a cleaned disk.

The thing I suspect you're banging against is that the firmware has an idea of where the bootable disk with the root file system is and that place is not where the drive you installed on is. Some firmware incantations might be useful here.

Some discussion on the subject. I might add that I've never tried this, because all my OSX computers have come in a working state and have stayed that way :-) Yeah, cheating.

OTOH I installed OpenBSD on a spare machine at work the other day, because I had to have a physical sniffer machine in place, and OpenBSD hurts the least. They also have a nice privsep mechanism in their Wireshark port which is super clever. Anyway, the machine was set up with Secure Boot and other Microshit, and it took two trips to helldesk to unfuck that (I do not possess the BIOS password, which of course was set) before I even could start breaking it for real..  PC booting is equally conflated, but in other ways. At least since after MS-DOS 2.0.

Yup, imageUSB does that; will even unfuckerize a memTest86 USB. zero the USB, then straight to the Mac and erase/format from Disk Utility as Mac OS Extended, per the instructions from the page on Apple.com.

Right now I've decided to risk wasting a DL DVD and just burn the .dmg; if that doesn't work, I have a tertiary solution in the form of using an extra HDD as the install media. There's another page on Apple.com which says it should work with createinstallmedia from the command line as well. 

mnem
 

[bd139]

IT issues evening here as well  . First post coming from the T495 finally. Upped it to 24Gb RAM, reinstalled the whole thing without all the Lenovo shite on it and so I don't have to upgrade from windows 10 1903, run all the updates in, turn on bitlocker, installed all the shit, fucked around with HP printer drivers for 30 minutes and sync'ed my onedrive to it. Job done.

[bd139]

For dinner/supper (depending on where you come from) I've allowed myself to be inspired by Snackmasters off the TV, where Michelin starred chefs are challenged to come up with their own identical version of some well known commercial snack or fast food product. Last week it was the KFC Zinger burger, which in my experience is one of the better things one can buy in the way of fast food on the high street.

So, here's my attempt at the same, crispy chilli chicken, redubed Poulet à Biohazard because food always sounds fancier in French and it accurately describes my response to the marinade once I'd mixed it ip.



The purple nitrile gloves are not a fashion statement, that marinade is 70% chilli, 25% oil and 5% garlic powder, you don't want to get that under your fingernails when it's been marinading for 24 hours.

The result after flouring and frying.



Not bad. Tasty, crispy, moist, tender. Needs even more heat, it's merely mildly warm, no Zing worth mentioning.

Not a bad looking attempt actually. I'm quite impressed at that. I might have a go at similar things when the arsedness finally returns on the cooking front.

I have always suspected only 20% of the KFC experience is the recipe and 80% is the scenario in which it is desired or consumed. The big marketing con is that it is the recipe which is heavily marketed.

I actually had a KFC this evening ironically which was a fillet tower burger box meal. Because after the last couple of days I can't be arsed with the whole cooking thing, thus proving my point with the scenario.