Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[bd139]

I love the whole look & feel of the PCBs from that era FLUKE & HP gear. Very busy, very tidy, and not ashamed of the traces. They stand out loud & proud & shiny. 

mnem
 

Yeah. Honestly I really miss clear solder mask. Need more of that back. Makes it so much easier to debug stuff. Can’t get it anywhere though for a reasonable price.

Apparently, OSHPark is offering clear solder mask with their After Dark board.

https://docs.oshpark.com/services/afterdark/

Interesting. Thanks for the heads up!

[Kosmic]

Interesting. How does it look? It claims to be easy to debug.

Daniel from Keysight used it for his custom front panel.



Look pretty good.

[bitseeker]

Ugh! Got up this morning to check on the archiving of this thread. Looks like wget got tarpitted again, this time by farnell.com. It's been sitting for the past five hours at

Code: [Select]

--2021-05-03 10:42:09--  https://cpc.farnell.com/robots.txt
Resolving cpc.farnell.com (cpc.farnell.com)... 23.223.161.163
Connecting to cpc.farnell.com (cpc.farnell.com)|23.223.161.163|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response...
 

So, we only got up through page 935 overnight.

[bd139]

Ugh! Got up this morning to check on the archiving of this thread. Looks like wget got tarpitted again, this time by farnell.com. It's been sitting for the past five hours at

Code: [Select]

--2021-05-03 10:42:09--  https://cpc.farnell.com/robots.txt
Resolving cpc.farnell.com (cpc.farnell.com)... 23.223.161.163
Connecting to cpc.farnell.com (cpc.farnell.com)|23.223.161.163|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response...
 

So, we only got up through page 935 overnight.

Yeah there’s some options in wget to restrict host and paths. It’s difficult to get it right which is why I didn’t start with it.

[McBryce]

I see. A play on words for a condition in rabbits that I never heard of.

Shall I laugh now or later? 

Carry on.

I do recommend the basement for laughing. 

Oh, I didn't realise you are from Baden Württemberg?

I see. A play on words for a condition in rabbits that I never heard of.

Shall I laugh now or later? 

Carry on.

The only reason we know of the condition is because we were forced as kids to read/watch Watership Down. Nothing describes responsible parenting of the 70's better than forcing your kids to watch a graphic film about bunnies dying a slow and painful death.

McBryce.

[mnementh]

I just realised I've got a slightly older IdeaCentre left over. Might do something about that. I really like the tuner Cerebus posted about.

Edit: This is all about being able to ship off the old TV, and not have a rootkit replace it. No modern TV with a DVB-T2 tuner in is free from the spyware that turns into abandonware and more or less bricks itself on a 4-year cycle. Currently looking into digital signage displays to get something unencumbered.

Many of the cheap 2K & 4K TVs are "dumb". As they have no internet connectivity at all, probably reasonably safe from the Chinese peeping Toms.

I have a cheap (as in sub-$200 Canadian kopeks) 45" 1080P RCA we bought "just to get by" that is similarly unencumbered.

If I'm going to have my viewing habits observated, I prefer it to be with someone I actually have a contract with, who has some business interest in not excessively pissing me off; this is why the ROKUs/FireTV. Also, when we travel, I can very easily take all my favorite content in a pocketable package.

I haven't been paying for my ISP since we moved into the new place; one of the few advantages of this property. Even when I do pay for my own ISP, I do not include it in my entertainment cost. I am always going to have an ISP, and I am not willing to put up with any service not fast enough to support at least a couple HDTV streams at once, since that would mean my surf potato-ing would be glacially slow as well.

I run everything through my own router and treat the cable MODEM as a untrusted gateway. I have VPN for when I need to do personal business back in the US, and I also use that for my Hulu.

I pay a grand total of US$59/month for Netflix, Hulu/Disney+, CBS All Access/Paramount+, and PrimeVideo/Prime Music; and that includes my Prime membership.

Every month or three, I review these services to decide if they are providing me with value per dollar vs the assache. I've canceled/re-upped CBS like 3 times since I first got them to watch Picard. 

Nobody cares aboot the whiners who bitch aboot every penny but still give them money for cableTV; freeloaders and deadbeats who watch pirated content are the enemy, so they don't matter either. The people staying away in droves and paying for ad-free content, and showing the bastards that the ad revenue model is dead, they are the ones who actually matter.

It's all aboot getting the most ROI... and I don't mind paying for what I use, which includes rewarding those providers who actually deliver ad-free content.

THAT is the only way to change the paradigm in today's corporate-centric world; by voting with your dollars.

mnem

[BU508A]

I see. A play on words for a condition in rabbits that I never heard of.

Shall I laugh now or later? 

Carry on.

I do recommend the basement for laughing. 

Oh, I didn't realise you are from Baden Württemberg?

Jep, I am.  (Badener)

[bitseeker]

Ugh! Got up this morning to check on the archiving of this thread. Looks like wget got tarpitted again, this time by farnell.com. It's been sitting for the past five hours at

Code: [Select]

--2021-05-03 10:42:09--  https://cpc.farnell.com/robots.txt
Resolving cpc.farnell.com (cpc.farnell.com)... 23.223.161.163
Connecting to cpc.farnell.com (cpc.farnell.com)|23.223.161.163|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response...
 

So, we only got up through page 935 overnight.

Yeah there’s some options in wget to restrict host and paths. It’s difficult to get it right which is why I didn’t start with it.

Yeah, I've been doing that as it runs into places it can't get past. It's odd, though, because before I went to bed, I set all the timeout (option -T) to 10 seconds. So, I'm not sure what farnell is doing to hold the connection via robots.txt. Really weird.

Anyway, I'm abandoning wget's link rewriting, which only happens at the very end of retrieval, in order to avoid having to start over from page 1. I'll just have it focus on retrieval and worry about pointing elements locally some other time.

In other news, it's interesting to see how many places we source our images from to attach to our posts.

[BU508A]

Well, TEA is everywhere!

 

[bitseeker]

Yep! 

[mnementh]

That's the worst joke I've heard since the Tractor Fan joke.

Please tell, for, errm, science reasons. 

"Science" being the completely unethical psychological experimentation on children by subjecting them to an entire upbringing's worth of dad jokes. 

This from MASH is quite possibly one of the best/worst Dad Jokes ever; it borders on being a proper "Shaggy Dog Story"...

This guy owns a circus, and one day he's in there, checkin' out the big top and this scrawny little guy walks in the door. He walks over to the boss, and he says ''Are you the boss here?'' Guy says, ''Yeah. What do you want?'' He says, ''I'd like to join the circus. I got an act.'' The guy says, ''Oh, yeah? Well, let me see what it is.''

So this little guy goes over to the center pole and he starts climbing up the pole. And he goes all the way up. He climbs up and up and up. He goes all the way up to the very peak of the big top. And he looks down, and he takes a deep breath and he leaps off, and he starts flapping his arms.

And he starts flying! And he flies all around the big top! He goes all the way around the place. He goes around the center pole. He goes loop-de-loop through the trapezes. "Whooo! Whooo! Whooo!" Then he gets all the way up and he takes a nosedive right down to the ground. Flapping his arms like mad. And he lands right next to the boss. And he says, ''Well, what do ya think?''

The boss says, ''That's all you do? Bird imitations?''

mnem
 

[mnementh]

I love the whole look & feel of the PCBs from that era FLUKE & HP gear. Very busy, very tidy, and not ashamed of the traces. They stand out loud & proud & shiny. 

mnem
 

Yeah. Honestly I really miss clear solder mask. Need more of that back. Makes it so much easier to debug stuff. Can’t get it anywhere though for a reasonable price.

Apparently, OSHPark is offering clear solder mask with their After Dark board.

https://docs.oshpark.com/services/afterdark/

Interesting. Thanks for the heads up!

ooohhh... yummeh. 

mnem
 

[Robert763]

The small Bulgin mains connectors.

My Solartron DVM has one of those. Horrible connector, truly bad. Unshielded quick-connects would be worse, by a little bit.

They seem OK to me as long as you use the mains rated type and not the one found on older Weller irons,  the modern ones seem to be made less brittle plastic too.
They are used on several Racal counters, a Racal prescaler and some Marconi stuff too. The Solartron DVMs here either have a fixed lead or are newer & use an IEC.

David

The screwed together ones are better but as they don't carry any recognised 3rd party approval it would be hard to justify their use on new design consumer equipment.  I've used them for mains internally on professional equipment but only were a figure 8 or mickey mouse moulded one would not work.  Had an intersting converstion with a UL inspector bout a figure 8. it was inside the machine, behind a cover that needed a key to remove. The machine was a one off and having a individual on-site approval (in Cambridge MA). A previous inspector, working with our local rep, had failed the machine for various issues including thee lead not being UL marked. I was sent to sort it out. I bought a UL marked figure 8 lead from Radioshack (yes it was years ago). So a different inspector shows up and he complains about the poor quality of the lead, single layer insulation, no polrity marking.  He would prefer dual insulation. So I pull the old one out of the bin and say "like this?". Apart from the blue/brown insulation he liked that one. I pointed out (diplomatically, I want a pass) that the other inspector wanted a UL one which the replacement was. We also had a long discussion about the 254nm UV lamp and it's interlocks but thats another story. The UL lead stayed and we got a pass. I never mentioned the fact the lead is not polarised.

[mansaxel]

Almost forgot the German made hp 427A has one too. 

Mine has IEC. And, Option 01, of course.

[McBryce]

I see. A play on words for a condition in rabbits that I never heard of.

Shall I laugh now or later? 

Carry on.

I do recommend the basement for laughing. 

Oh, I didn't realise you are from Baden Württemberg?

Jep, I am.  (Badener)

I lived for a short while in F(r)ickhausen. So I learnt about having to run to the basement for laughter, unless of course it was "Kehrtag" in which case cleaning took priority.

McBryce.

[Saskia]

*sigh* MAAAANY years ago postmaster @uni-augsburg.de.
Then couple years in Biberach ...
The bad influence sticks.

[Kosmic]

Had a bit of a disaster with the Philips PM6645 counter I acquired this week, accidentality shorted the supply for the NIT* to the display logic. 
Before this it was sort of functioning, but seemed to have a problem with the decimal point, a possible faulty NIT, the lamps for the gate & frequency range are mostly blown as well, the only working one "kHz" is very dim too.

Before pictures of an approx 1MHz signal from a hp function gen & the correct reading from the 5245L.



Now it seems to be stuck in a reset state displaying zeros, apart from one NIT that is stuck on two.
The display board contain some obsolete 74 series 74176 & 74196 as well as standard 7490 that I usually find in frequency counter circuits, hopefully those are OK as I haven't got those, I do have some 7475 & 7490 & the NIT driver IC.

*term used by Philips in the "digital instrument course part 2" pdf that can be found on the web.

David

I have 3 x 74196 if you can't find any. I looked for 74176 but I don't think I have those.

[med6753]

I found this in the laundry today. I've never seen it before. You think she's trying to drop a hint? Should I be afraid? I don't get it, we had a good weekend together. I spoiled her like I normally do. Perhaps not enough. 

Inquiry sent for explanation. But trust me, I'm almost afraid to ask. 

Maybe it's just a warning in case I do screw up. 

[Saskia]

if you should happen to see her with red dyed hair, you should run.

[med6753]

if you should happen to see her with red dyed hair, you should run.

I've told her about my experience with a batshit crazy redhead. Maybe that was a mistake. 

[Specmaster]

I found this in the laundry today. I've never seen it before. You think she's trying to drop a hint? Should I be afraid? I don't get it, we had a good weekend together. I spoiled her like I normally do. Perhaps not enough. 

Inquiry sent for explanation. But trust me, I'm almost afraid to ask. 

Maybe it's just a warning in case I do screw up. 

Well unless I'm mistaken, I thought you had laid the LAW down to her when the pair of you got back together again that any more of whatever it was that she did would not be tolerated, maybe you should be dropping some equally big hints right back. 

[Specmaster]

Does anyone happen to know if the problem with the forum sending emails to anyone with a outlook.com address has been fixed yet?

[mnementh]

   I found this in the laundry today. I've never seen it before.

You think she's trying to drop a hint? Should I be afraid? I don't get it, we had a good weekend together. I spoiled her like I normally do. Perhaps not enough. 

Inquiry sent for explanation. But trust me, I'm almost afraid to ask. 

Maybe it's just a warning in case I do screw up. 

Well unless I'm mistaken, I thought you had laid the LAW down to her when the pair of you got back together again that any more of whatever it was that she did would not be tolerated, maybe you should be dropping some equally big hints right back. 

mnem
*wipes tears away from laughing so hard*

[bd139]

Does anyone happen to know if the problem with the forum sending emails to anyone with a outlook.com address has been fixed yet?

Not sure why but it's definitely broken. My forum account is relayed to outlook.com and I'm getting no email if I send myself a PM.

This sort of shit is why I am now smugly vindicated about why the hell I don't run my own mail server 

[med6753]

Well unless I'm mistaken, I thought you had laid the LAW down to her when the pair of you got back together again that any more of whatever it was that she did would not be tolerated, maybe you should be dropping some equally big hints right back. 

Nah, that was over 9 months ago. Although, perhaps you're right. Women have memories like elephants and will drag into a "discussion" something you did 20 years ago.