Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.

[TimFox]

-

[TimFox]

This is English, not Latin, grammar.

yep and it us english who  decide how its used  it,now go away and learn how to spell colour ,  labour and humour correctly

Only after you learn how to capitalize, space, and punctuate your English.
I assume you meant "it's we English" and "how it's used".
Please note that I did not use any of those three words in my discussion here, which concerns grammar, not spelling.

[PlainName]

This is English, not Latin, grammar.

But the derivation of George's quote is from the Latin. You know the Latin refers to die, whereas I haven't the foggiest. Thus the knowledge of Latin is important in determining whether die or dice is relevant.

[TimFox]

This is English, not Latin, grammar.

But the derivation of George's quote is from the Latin. You know the Latin refers to die, whereas [sic whereof] I haven't the foggiest. Thus the knowledge of Latin is important in determining whether die or dice is relevant.

Historically, King George stated in English, "The die is cast.", using the singular noun "die".  A well-formed simple English sentence.
I submit that that sentence would sound bad with singular "dice" in place of "die", "dice is cast", where a singular noun must agree with a singular verb in English grammar.
Full quotation:  "The die is now cast. The colonies must either submit or triumph."

It is sad that he went mad, but to be fair to him his native language was German.

[vk6zgo]

This is English, not Latin, grammar.

But the derivation of George's quote is from the Latin. You know the Latin refers to die, whereas [sic whereof] I haven't the foggiest. Thus the knowledge of Latin is important in determining whether die or dice is relevant.

Historically, King George stated in English, "The die is cast.", using the singular noun "die".  A well-formed simple English sentence.
I submit that that sentence would sound bad with singular "dice" in place of "die", "dice is cast", where a singular noun must agree with a singular verb in English grammar.
Full quotation:  "The die is now cast. The colonies must either submit or triumph."

It is sad that he went mad, but to be fair to him his native language was German.

In that case, "die" can mean something else, as in Sideshow Bob's "The Bart, the!"

[TimFox]

This is English, not Latin, grammar.

But the derivation of George's quote is from the Latin. You know the Latin refers to die, whereas [sic whereof] I haven't the foggiest. Thus the knowledge of Latin is important in determining whether die or dice is relevant.

Historically, King George stated in English, "The die is cast.", using the singular noun "die".  A well-formed simple English sentence.
I submit that that sentence would sound bad with singular "dice" in place of "die", "dice is cast", where a singular noun must agree with a singular verb in English grammar.
Full quotation:  "The die is now cast. The colonies must either submit or triumph."

It is sad that he went mad, but to be fair to him his native language was German.

In that case, "die" can mean something else, as in Sideshow Bob's "The Bart, the!"

Again, nonsense!
In the royal quotation, "die" is a noun and the subject of the sentence.  In Sideshow Bob's statement, "die" is a verb.
"The" is an article.

[Black Phoenix]

Peeves:  Getting "ignored" on an audiophile forum for describing how the master clock in I2S is just used a as the "CLK>" input for the I2S peripheral.

Actually that's probably not a peeve but an achievement.

Audiophiles

No just that.  Audiophiles in general.  This time, in particular is people trying to use a couple of raspberry PIs running on super capacitors to avoid master clock jitter, by creating a synchronous buffered, asynchronous FIFO.

The surprising thing is how many people are throwing money at this sh1t.  As far as I can determine the ONLY thing this setup achieves is creating really, really long buffers of megabytes in size and potentially hours in duration synchronising two streams they just make asynchronous.  It's baffling.  It has a net ZERO effect.

Then you have people claiming they can HEAR a difference.   Even when you point out it takes light longer to get from your speakers to your eyes than the maximum 180* phase shift on a masterclock!

I have to stop reading these audiophool forums or I'm going to end up insulting someone.

Not suprised since they believe in cables altering what they hear (it does not, if the cable is minimally well build any cable is transparent) and that cable risers, power plugs and specialist capacitors introduce "warm" and "Soundstage" and make records "sound better" than the original medium they are stored...

That is my biggest way to screw them, specially when they start with "Skin effect" theories and "stable voltage" plus "attenuation"... Kudos for the users than then post this link for this study:

http://boson.physics.sc.edu/~kunchur/papers/Interconnect-cable-measurements--Kunchur.pdf

But fail to understand what is show in the paper and that the changes is in a range of magnitude higher than the 20Hz to 20000Hz of our human hearing.

I like audio, I like to hear a good music on my system but no way in hell I would spend thousands in cables.

I build my cables using Mogami, Canare or Sommer wiring together with Neutrik or Amphenol connectors, including sleeving not because I believe that they will change my perception and improve my music analysis skills but because they are more robust by using good connections and proper copper and look good, even if after being connected I don't see them anymore.

I also use cable stands made by me using wood not because it increases "the soundstage" but because it is easier to clean the floor by moving them, while the cable gets less dirty and gunk up by not being on the floor

Over all I spent in all, with my soldering, way less than one speaker cable from AudioQuest, while looking as good as then and doing exactly the same thing: connecting the amplifier to the speakers..

Nothing less, nothing more...

There's some audiophool equipment that I think has artistic value. I'm not going to claim that it sounds better, but I'm sure a lot of it sounds very good, once you cross a certain threshold of quality that is not hard to achieve with modern technology, you can pretty easily get very good sound. The value of art is subjective, there are sculptures that are worth millions of dollars that you don't even *do* anything at all. I'd sooner spend $100k on a really unique looking turntable that I can use to play records than on a sculpture that just sits there.

Then I suggest the one I would love to own:

https://maglevaudio.com/

Not because I believe that my vinyl records will sound better than when they were pressed but because is a beauty to see it start up and work, and a excellent conversation starter to any person who visits your house.

https://youtu.be/rOtbBQJDLQg

[TomKatt]

Looking at the 5 digit pricetags of some IEC 'audio' mains cables, I'm surprised there isn't a bigger population of audiophiles powering their gear off dc battery power...   Because I suspect even a $10,000 IEC power cable still carries some noise... 

[themadhippy]

I'm surprised there isn't a bigger population of audiophiles powering their gear off dc battery power..

But then you've got the noise  of  the chemical reaction happening in the battery to deal with.

[shapirus]

But then you've got the noise  of  the chemical reaction happening in the battery to deal with.

That's excellent, because it opens a new market for audiophile-grade chemical-less batteries.

[TimFox]

Before they were banned for obvious reasons, we used mercury batteries (inside a constant-temperature oven) to get an essentially noise-free reference voltage.
Zener diodes have shot noise due to internal current flowing across a voltage gap.
(We did have to adjust periodically against a high-resolution differential voltmeter, but the load current on the battery was very low.)
Mallory would sell us custom batteries with a customer-specified number of cells to obtain higher reference voltage.
We used the Hg battery in the feedback loop to the virtual ground of a good op-amp (remember Analog Devices' square modules?).
For > 10 V, we could use a level-shifting amplifier (6AN5 with cathode degeneration or HV NPN transistor), or (more simply and less hum) an appropriate voltage "B battery" (dry battery originally intended for plate supply in a portable vacuum tube device).
These were used in laboratory systems, not commercial devices.

(Incidentally, my speaker cables are 12-gauge SO portable cordage.)

[paulca]

Stupid mistakes that cost me money.

Got new Lithium batteries for the solar setup.  Had a meeting cancelled in work, so went down, in haste to swap them over.

Forget the NEVER rule.  NEVER disconnect the battery while the solar panel is connected.

Now the charge controller is dead.  Could be a fuse, I will check.  Needed to upgrade it anyway and found the 40A version cheap on Ama.

EDIT:  Fixed it.  Randomly, simultaneously the battery dual pole isolator switch ground contact has clearly rusted up and was bad contact.

Old solar controller is happy on the new 105Ah LiFePO4 cells

I still need to upgrade the controller, I plan to start ordering some 330W panels next.

[PlainName]

Online only documentation.

And documentation that needs a Linux distro plus half a dozen strange utilities to generate readable output. Almost guaranteed to be a different set of utils, and skills, needed from some other project.

Surely it's not impossible to just compile to a pdf for easy distribution and 'read on anything'.

[Ed.Kloonk]

And documentation that needs a Linux distro plus half a dozen strange utilities to generate readable output.

I'll bite.

[PlainName]

Sphinx, asciidoc - those are the two most recent. There are others I've done my best to scrub from my mind.

OK, pedantically you can do a Windows install, but actually you're just installing into a fake-linux environment. It surely wouldn't hurt, as I mentioned, to just provide a downloadable version of the stuff so the install of an entire ecosystem isn't needed for a one-off run. (Although, of course, it will be a several-off because it won't work the first few times, so there will be the usual fault-finding faffing about on top.)

[paulca]

No docker-composes available for a quick spin up?

Also most projects provide the generated output documentation online?

[pdenisowski]

Also, "datum" singular and "data" plural:  that distinction is very useful.

I'm always amused by people who (vehemently) claim that "data" should be plural in English, but then are amazingly inconsistent in their usage. 

If "data" is plural in English, then the following are "incorrect", right? 

- There's too much data ... (should be "There are too many data")
- The experiment provided less data than expected ....(should be "provided fewer data")
- The data speaks for itself ... (should be "the data speak for themselves")

I could go on and on. 

Just because something is plural in Latin (a language I read in almost every day), doesn't mean it has to be plural in English. 

If "data" is plural, then "agenda" should also be plural (since it's from ago -> agendum -> agenda, literally "things that are to be done").  So one could no longer say "he has a hidden agenda" -- it would be have to be "he has hidden agenda".  And one would also have to say things like "the agenda are still being finalized".

There are plenty of other examples (or should I say "exempla"? )

[PlainName]

Also most projects provide the generated output documentation online?

Yes, hence my peeve:

Online only documentation.

[PlainName]

claim that "data" should be plural in English

Good one. I'll run that past my partner (an editor) when I fancy a clout round the ear.

[pdenisowski]

- There's too much data ... (should be "There are too many data")

Here's some statistical data (from Google's Ngram): although prior to 2019, more people used "data are" (plural) compared to "data is", only about 1 in 8 people use the corresponding form "too many data".  [If it's plural / countable, then English requires many, not much:  too many oranges, but too much orange juice]

Although I personally find "data are ..." a bit ... pedantic ... I think it's fair to expect that if someone says that data is plural, then they should consistently treat it as a plural word.

[paulca]

Datum - an item of data.
The data - the collective set of datums
Different data.  Meaning different collective set of datums.

The rest becomes one of scope and context.  Today I called a struct a "datum", even though it contains multiple fields.  That is because the "thing" handling it does not see the contents and it is the smallest quanta of data it will operate on.  Other parts of the code consider the fields datums [sic].

If we want to continue the technical aspects of the definitions ... it's a long, long road through a whole degree in data engineering.

[TimFox]

I try to preface my nit-picking by saying "in careful usage", such as one datum in a set of data.
Another important distinction is between "data" and "statistic", where statistic is not the data, but a quantitative measurement on the data set (such as the arithmetic mean).

Many years ago, there was a scary sketch on "Saturday Night Live", with Steve Martin and Jane Curtin.
He played the jovial host of a TV game show, and she was the guest celebrity, playing Jeane Kirkpatrick (a political science professor and UN ambassador).
She chose "history" as the quiz topic, and the question was "What happened in 1215?".
She replied "the Magna Carta", but was buzzed wrong.
The correct answer, determined by a survey of US high-school seniors, was "the Gettysburg Address".
There were no Google statistics available then.

[Circlotron]

Messaging apps like Viber that only allow you to find a single occurrence of a word. There is no facility to find the next occurrence. 

[Black Phoenix]

Samsonite Bags.

I have a luggage from them, the old all plastic with triple latches also in plastic, without any TSA lock.

You go to see their new designs and all are with zippers. I don't know if all of you know but zipped bags are easy to open just using a ballpen tip (I worked in the airport and saw handlers doing that on the bulk of airplanes while loading them to steal valuables form inside the bags). That combined with the online available 3D printed files for the TSA keys is a receipt for stealing.

But nowardays they don't have anything latched only with rubber seal. It is or plastic with zippers or metal latched a lá Rimowa (with prices equivalent) that get scuffed and bruised on the first trip, looking like you had been in the war with it.

Also bags with rubber bottoms instead of full nylon, that with change of temperature and humidity will crack. I have a LowPro back pack that I had to buy similar fabric and ask someone to replace the bottom rubber insert because of that.

They are made to look premium but then they will not take a while to look like shit.

[rdl]

...
They are made to look premium but then they will not take a while to look like shit.

As is the case with so many things being sold these days.