What did you buy today? Post your latest purchase!

[Kjelt]

A DS218+ plus some WD Harddrives to put into it.

A very nice NAS. I have the 214+, 216+ and was waiting for the 219+, now the 220+ but they don't come 

[McBryce]

guys, don't forget to backup your NAS ... 8Tb on a ds218 ... if one drive fails, the whole data is lost. 5 years of hard drive working, it's the average lifespan. if your NAS has built-in test for the drives, use it once a week or once a month. with 4 disks you can have a raid 5 installed so one drive failing is recoverable. but beware. I've seen many customers lost so many datas ...

Everything on the NAS will be backed up on External USB Harddrives that aren't connected to anything.

McBryce.

The 218j I got in the middle of last year has been doing it's thing well sharing and backing up file sharing was a large part of my initial treason too. 2x4tB Seagates fitted and backed up to an external HDD monthly. I like the Black on yours better than my shiny white one 

It had to be black, just in case someone would mistakenly think that I had bought an Apple product!!

@Kjelt: I decided many years ago top stop waiting for the next generation of hardware to arrive before I buy. I can't remember what it was, but the new generation of whatever I was waiting for eventually came out... It was worse than the predecessor and then the older version was impossible to get because everyone wanted that version, leaving me empty-handed.

McBryce.

[jmelson]

Well, not quite today, but I bought a 25 x 25 x 10 mm chunk of Bismuth Germanate to use as a Gamma ray detector.  I already had a setup from a project at work to use a Silicon photomultiplier with scintillators.  So, I put it all together, and it works!  I have a small chunk of the orange-glazed Corelle dinner plate, and I get about 20 counts a second from that.  It doesn't clearly detect the Potassium in a banana, but maybe you need to count for a while to detect that over background.  I still need to tinker with the power supply a bit and make a box for it.

Jon

[richnormand]

"It doesn't clearly detect the Potassium in a banana"

Get a bottle of 100% "no salt" substitute for people on a low salt diet at the grocery store. The potassium 40 in that lights up my NaI detector very well with the 1.46MeV gamma.

[mansaxel]

Four standard resistors and one standard inductance, all 50+YO NOS, all but one old Eastern Bloc. 

[Red Squirrel]

Not today, but bought myself 2 28" 4k monitors recently.  Been wanting to go 4k for a while, was aiming for 32" but they are so expensive even several years of waiting so for the price of 1 32" I got two 28"!  Was a spur of the moment thing to facilitate working from home.  At work we have 3 4ks and pretty much need most of that space.  I did not want to start having to bring my monitors home then back to work as we still need to take turns to work in the office.  Long story short it led to me splurging to upgrade my setup.

I originally set it up like this:



Which was great for working from home, with centre one being primary, but not so good for being able to use it for my own personal use, so I switched things around once my monitor arms came in:


 
A bit of macguyvering going on back there:





I'm waiting for some DP to HDMI adapters to come in as the ones I have don't have 4k and my KVM needs HDMI, and work PC is DP and so is the secondary output of my GPU, and also waiting for 2 more monitor arms, then I will add the side monitors back.

Side monitors will be hooked up to a Raspberry PI that will be used for misc stuff like watching movies or whatever.  Basically stuff that I'm not actively working on and just want in the background.  For my work from home setup, one of them will act as the primary for the work PC for my email and so on.

At this moment the top 4k is running in HD since I'm actually running off DVI but once my adapters come in I can fix all that.

For anyone bored I did a vlog video on overhauling my setup .


As a side note, more electronics related, I was playing around with Kicad in 4k, and it's awesome all the real estate you have.  I can have an entire PCB visible on the screen and see everything.  Only thing I find zooming and panning is kinda choppy sometimes it flies off to some weird direction.  I'm on Linux Mint 17 which ships with a super old version of Kicad though so hopefully when I upgrade my OS to newer one I will get a newer version of Kicad too.

[cdev]

I also got a DER-5000 a few months ago and its been a lot of fun. Really couldn't pass it up at the online price. Still have not really learned to use it fully. I also got a Microsoft Kinect, the old kind, for $14 which is also a great deal. It works really well with open source software. Ultimately I want to put it on the end of my 50 foot USB extender cord and map my entire house in 3D. Like a cave.

[Mr.B]

I have an old Microsoft Kinect.
What is this open source mapping software you talk of?
It sounds very interesting.

[richnormand]

A new ESD mat to replace a 20 year old one with many battlescars...
Now lets see how long it takes for the first boo-boo, just when driving a new car off the dealership

[Cubdriver]

A new ESD mat to replace a 20 year old one with many battlescars...
Now lets see how long it takes for the first boo-boo, just when driving a new car off the dealership

The first scratch (burn, in this case?) is always the most painful.  Just juggle your soldering iron for a bit and get it over with - less painful anticipation that way.   

-Pat

[6h8c]

So Dallas has come the exchange time :-P

[jmelson]

"It doesn't clearly detect the Potassium in a banana"

Get a bottle of 100% "no salt" substitute for people on a low salt diet at the grocery store. The potassium 40 in that lights up my NaI detector very well with the 1.46MeV gamma.

I tried the "lite salt" stuff, presumably 50% NaCl and 50% KCl and was not able to detect a clear change in count rate.
I didn't put it on a counter and take a couple minute count.  I might try that after I get the thing into a more packaged form.

Jon

[richnormand]

"It doesn't clearly detect the Potassium in a banana"

Get a bottle of 100% "no salt" substitute for people on a low salt diet at the grocery store. The potassium 40 in that lights up my NaI detector very well with the 1.46MeV gamma.

I tried the "lite salt" stuff, presumably 50% NaCl and 50% KCl and was not able to detect a clear change in count rate.
I didn't put it on a counter and take a couple minute count.  I might try that after I get the thing into a more packaged form.

Jon

Ok. Here are some photos from a few years ago to give you an idea of the expected signal.

First one is using a program that reads the counts (tics) from the earphone output of an old Geiger detector. Left is background radiation and the step is when I put the "NoSalt" next to it.
Second is the K40 line from a NaI detector viewed on a Canberra MCA (energy vs counts). About half an hour acquisition time (don't remember accurately by now...It was several years ago.)

If you cannot see that signal then I would guess a banana will not be doable at this stage.

[technix]

TPLink is not just SOHO. It does have SMB grade gears. It doesn't tap into the real big gun business though.

TP-Link gracefully yielded to Huawei when coming to big gun stuff, and to Lenovo at computing equipment.

I went for 2x 4TB WD Blue. The "bang for buck" or price per kB seems to be best at 4TB at the moment and I also have no idea how I could need more than 8TB.

4TB WD Blue are ex-Greens. (WD scratched the Greens after that brand tanked, and rebranded them into the Blues. 1TB and smaller Blues are what they was - blues through and through, 3TB and above are ex-Greens, and at 2TB you have both genuine Blues and ex-Greens)

I'd suggest avoid those ex-Greens, well, for they are Greens after all. The Reds are just much more stabler.

[Kilrah]

I'd suggest avoid those ex-Greens, well, for they are Greens after all. The Reds are just much more stabler.

Well if you ignore the recently discovered mess of Reds undisclosedly using SMR and being buggy/often failing when resilvering arrays. Kinda stupid when they're sold as specifically made for use in arrays.

Meanwhile I have a bunch of Greens still running strong... but all my main HDD storage is on Seagates at the moment for capacity reasons.

[technix]

Well if you ignore the recently discovered mess of Reds undisclosedly using SMR and being buggy/often failing when resilvering arrays. Kinda stupid when they're sold as specifically made for use in arrays.

I don't use any drive that can not rebuild itself within six hours. Since modern hard drives can do about 1TB continuous write per hour, that means 6TB maximum per drive. This is well before SMR would come in play. My current storage arrays are constructed using 8x 2TB drives and 6x 3TB drives, in a mixed RAID-60 setup across two MegaRAID 9271-8iCC hardware RAID cards.

[6h8c]

The collection is growing       
just where to put it ?

[Kilrah]

I don't use any drive that can not rebuild itself within six hours. Since modern hard drives can do about 1TB continuous write per hour, that means 6TB maximum per drive. This is well before SMR would come in play

No that's the whole point, SMR used to be for large capacities and clearly marketed "for archival", but somehow they decided standard desktop and RAID-spec drives all the way down to 2TB that were previously conventional would now silently become SMRs, under the same branding and at the same price with no notice or any mention/change in advertised specs. They're at best 2x slower on writes than conventional, and cause some arrays to fail to rebuild on them, it runs for a while and aborts because once the CMR cache is full they essentially lock up for extended periods while they rearrange their stuff internally and the systems time out and cancel the rebuild (plus more issues depending on access patterns).

Saving pennies by removing a platter / pair of heads or 2... and when confronted try to hide/lie behind "we don't mention it becasue these are technical details consumers don't need to know" kind of stuff.
https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/14/wd-red-nas-drives-shingled-magnetic-recording/
https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/15/shingled-drives-have-non-shingled-zones-for-caching-writes/

I _was_ able to force the WD40EFAX to resilver – by switching off write caching and lookahead. This dropped the drive’s write speed to less than 6MB/sec and the resilvering took 8 days instead of the more usual 24 hours. More worryingly, once added, a ZFS SCRUB (RAID integrity check) has yet to successfully complete without that drive producing checksum errors, even after 5 days of trying.

I could afford to try that test because RAIDZ3 gives me 3 parity stripes, but it’s clear the drive is going to have to come out and the 3 WD Reds returned as unfit for the purpose for which they are marketed.

It's a total shitshow.

Seems the other drive manufacturers are doing the same lately but at least haven't denied it like WD did.

[rdl]

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/caveat-emptor-smr-disks-are-being-submarined-into-unexpected-channels/

Unbelievable almost that companies can be so stupid. Did they really think no one would notice?

[Kilrah]

Yes it's absolutely ridiculous. Seems some management bonehead had a bright idea to save almost nothing and somehow got greenlighted on the gamble... it deserves to blow back HARD.

[duckduck]

Pretty. Look at those caps "Made in the USA". Ha! That hasn't been printed on anything in ages. All that glass and point to point / tagboard wiring reminds me of a guitar amp. It has both input and output. One setting on the voltage range is 1MV.  What is that thing? Nice Pics. Thanks for sharing.

[beanflying]

Another $400 AU pesos worth of Nuts, Bolts, Rails and Drive gear for my Laser Build - Broke Bean Again. Time to start saving for the expensive bits now while the $ hopefully recovers a bit

[technix]

No that's the whole point, SMR used to be for large capacities and clearly marketed "for archival", but somehow they decided standard desktop and RAID-spec drives all the way down to 2TB that were previously conventional would now silently become SMRs, under the same branding and at the same price with no notice or any mention/change in advertised specs. They're at best 2x slower on writes than conventional, and cause some arrays to fail to rebuild on them, it runs for a while and aborts because once the CMR cache is full they essentially lock up for extended periods while they rearrange their stuff internally and the systems time out and cancel the rebuild (plus more issues depending on access patterns).

Unbelievable almost that companies can be so stupid. Did they really think no one would notice?

Currently all my Reds are the older WDxxEFRX variant that uses CMR. I'm noting this so I can specifically ask for WD20EFRX and WD30EFRX as my 2TB and 3TB replacement units.

[mansaxel]

One setting on the voltage range is 1MV.  What is that thing?

In the olden days some US vendors did not fully appreciate that SI units are case significant. milli and Mega must of course be discerned by case. hp was also responsible for such misses on some devices. 

As to what it is, it is a valve voltmeter or "vacuum tube volt meter", VTVM for short. The classic model everyone else tried to copy is the hp 410b which is much more competent than this Eico. Not that the Eico is bad; the 410b is simply exceptional, with AC measurement up to 700MHz, with DC and resistance ranges to boot. 

Why was there such a focus on them being valve voltmeters? Well, for starters, the only electronic amplifier available was the valve. Very early VTVMs started appearing in the 30s, and were perfected in the early 50s. And, with the alternative being electromechanical meters like the Avometer or the Simpson, where, even in those quality instruments, there is a low resistance in the meter (affecting the DUT and the reading) and bad AC frequency response (most likely not above 20KHz, and even that was a stretch) it obviously was important to point out things like a DCV resistance in the range of 10MΩ and AC response up into UHF.

I've wanted one since I read the service instructions for 60s HiFi gear stating "you need a VTVM to get this right, don't try it with a purely mechanical instrument". As a consequence, a lot of gear was shipped with service manuals that said "if you're using an Avometer 8, this is the value you should be seeing at test point 46"

You can get a cheap one like the Heathkit VTVM for perhaps $50, with lots of variation in price.  I've got an ex MoD Marconi. Temperamental, but works.

[vk6zgo]

One setting on the voltage range is 1MV.  What is that thing?

In the olden days some US vendors did not fully appreciate that SI units are case significant. milli and Mega must of course be discerned by case. hp was also responsible for such misses on some devices. 

As to what it is, it is a valve voltmeter or "vacuum tube volt meter", VTVM for short. The classic model everyone else tried to copy is the hp 410b which is much more competent than this Eico. Not that the Eico is bad; the 410b is simply exceptional, with AC measurement up to 700MHz, with DC and resistance ranges to boot. 

Why was there such a focus on them being valve voltmeters? Well, for starters, the only electronic amplifier available was the valve. Very early VTVMs started appearing in the 30s, and were perfected in the early 50s. And, with the alternative being electromechanical meters like the Avometer or the Simpson, where, even in those quality instruments, there is a low resistance in the meter (affecting the DUT and the reading) and bad AC frequency response (most likely not above 20KHz, and even that was a stretch) it obviously was important to point out things like a DCV resistance in the range of 10MΩ and AC response up into UHF.

I've wanted one since I read the service instructions for 60s HiFi gear stating "you need a VTVM to get this right, don't try it with a purely mechanical instrument". As a consequence, a lot of gear was shipped with service manuals that said "if you're using an Avometer 8, this is the value you should be seeing at test point 46" e

You can get a cheap one like the Heathkit VTVM for perhaps $50, with lots of variation in price.  I've got an ex MoD Marconi. Temperamental, but works.

HP410C is my favourite!
We used them, back in the day, along with the hp coaxial sampler to measure power on lower power TV transmitters, using V^2/R.

The good thing was that the probe was a "sample & hold" type, so we could read the RMS value of the "sync tip" voltage, & directly calculate "sync tip power", as that was what the specification for vision/aural power was specified w.r. t.

I picked one up a couple of years ago at a Hamfest--- the "ac zero" pot was jammed, but a bit of "working " of it back & forth cleared the problem.

As is common with old ones like this, the centre spike from the DC probe is missing, but everything else works well, now.

As to using an AVO 8, both Tektronix & Marconi often built in voltage dividers to a test point, so that critical voltages could be checked with an AVO, Simpson, or similar VOMs.

A.T.E. tube type VHF point to point Radio links provided special test points so that grid & anode currents could be read with an AVO 8.

All good, except if you are trying to "peak the grid & dip the plate" at a minesite, where the primary function of the power station was to power an enormous machine which, every time it dug into the ore face caused the Mains to dip alarmingly.
You would be just approaching an anode dip, when the lights would suddenly dip, & the AVO would go crazy!

We had Stabilacs, but the voltage drop was too severe & too fast for them to handle.