Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[Specmaster]

Yep, thats a very nice piece of kit you have there and I think it deserves to be a keeper, I mean you even have the original manual holy crap, its a keeper for sure?

[bd139]

Yeah and the service manual as well now. If I can get hold of some decent probes for it (HP brand of course) and the logic tentacles I will indeed keep it.

If you were to buy the equivalent Rigol, the MSO1104Z you'd be down £871 so it's a no brainer to keep it. It's 80% of the way there for 14% of the cash 

Yes I know it's not 1Gs/sec but meh it works and has decent memory depth.

[Specmaster]

Downloaded that 383meg file in 13 minutes, just in case I went for one of those  , unlikely though but it was interesting to see how long the download was.

[bd139]

It's an interesting read. I need to process it and stitch together as PDFs and upload to BAMA. It's probably only 30 meg or so then!

[Specmaster]

Yeah, need to do that in photoshop and then you can also return the paper to white at the same time and increase contrast between text and drawing on the white background.

[bd139]

I have a lazy script that does it. Uses ImageMagick. Basically increases contrast, resizes to fit A4 bounding box and fills, exports to PNG then stitches and out pops a PDF

This was written about ten years ago to help someone who had to deal with a drum scanner output.

Only effort is rotating the images to start with if they are of odd orientations.

Well my evening is fucked. Windows 10 after the last update will no longer talk to my NAS. Mounts the share and then proceeds to hang. Still works fine over NFS on Linux box and the Mac. Grr.

[Specmaster]

I have a lazy script that does it. Uses ImageMagick. Basically increases contrast, resizes to fit A4 bounding box and fills, exports to PNG then stitches and out pops a PDF

This was written about ten years ago to help someone who had to deal with a drum scanner output.

Only effort is rotating the images to start with if they are of odd orientations.

Well my evening is fucked. Windows 10 after the last update will no longer talk to my NAS. Mounts the share and then proceeds to hang. Still works fine over NFS on Linux box and the Mac. Grr.

I had that problem when I switched to Windows 10, then they patched it overnight. You might find that it works tomorrow or in the very near future
What I find a problem is that it does not reckonise a USB floppy drive WTF.

[bd139]

I need I to work now and and every time 

USB floppy drive I can imagine. I bet they just don’t care about floppy device drivers now.

I want Windows 2000 back. That didn’t suck.

Edit: actually fuck it all. I’ve got a raspberry pi floating around. Risc Os time.

[Specmaster]

I need I to work now and and every time 

USB floppy drive I can imagine. I bet they just don’t care about floppy device drivers now.

I want Windows 2000 back. That didn’t suck.

Edit: actually fuck it all. I’ve got a raspberry pi floating around. Risc Os time.

Never used 2000 or had a Raspberry Pi, zero knowledge of them.

[Brumby]

I'm hanging on to Win 7 for as long as possible.

[mnementh]

I need I to work now and and every time 

USB floppy drive I can imagine. I bet they just don’t care about floppy device drivers now.

I want Windows 2000 back. That didn’t suck.

Edit: actually fuck it all. I’ve got a raspberry pi floating around. Risc Os time.

Never used 2000 or had a Raspberry Pi, zero knowledge of them.

2K was nothing more than a (really ugly) theme pack on '98 released solely to force Internet Exploder down people's throats; '98 itself was a bugfix release of '95. XP was the first version of Windoze with a proper filesystem and the last version where you, the owner, actually had control and ownership of your PC. Every version since has essentially been sandboxed /rooted AGAINST the owner/user for M$'s own purposes.

Of the currently supported versions Win7SP2 is probably the least offensive, as it has the broadest range of drivers for real hardware folks actually still use; however the blind following of Ballmer's jihad against open serial port devices (again, mostly devices over which the owner actually has control) has severely damaged their credibility regarding their motivations for everything they've done to the user in pursuit of "signed driver security".

That said... I was pleasantly surprised this afternoon when I dragged out a 15-year-old Dell laser printer from the back of a closet... plugged it into my Win10 desktop, and it installed itself in about 30 seconds, complete with shares. This is probably because I had it installed on the previous version of Win7 this install upgraded from; but that was at least 2 hard drives and 2 MBs ago.


mnem
*Toddles off to ded*

[mnementh]

...Built in Easter Egg and engineering credits. There's a game too but I didn't run that.

https://youtu.be/EIyixC9NsLI

I'll see your badger tattoo and raise you some weebls... 


mnem
You'll have to excuse mnem; he's very tired, and his associations have become rather loose of late...

[bd139]

Hat tip to the badgers. They taught me well. 15 years ago I was actually responsible for no less than keeping the front end and store infrastructure alive for that damn thing. I’ve had some weird jobs.

If you want an insight into what goes on behind those sorts of things, watch Nathan Barley. It is literally on the mark.

https://youtu.be/Rqfkuc5mawg

TEA goodies appeared. Any takers? I don’t have the room! https://rover.ebay.com/rover/0/0/0?mpre=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.co.uk%2Fulk%2Fitm%2F283070648429

[Specmaster]

Hat tip to the badgers. They taught me well. 15 years ago I was actually responsible for no less than keeping the front end and store infrastructure alive for that damn thing. I’ve had some weird jobs.

If you want an insight into what goes on behind those sorts of things, watch Nathan Barley. It is literally on the mark.

https://youtu.be/Rqfkuc5mawg

TEA goodies appeared. Any takers? I don’t have the room! https://rover.ebay.com/rover/0/0/0?mpre=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.co.uk%2Fulk%2Fitm%2F283070648429

If I put that in my boxroom lab, I'd have to come out of it and then it'd cease to be a lab and become a storeroom [emoji852]️

[bd139]

I reckon you could perch on top of it

[Specmaster]

I reckon you could perch on top of it

Hmm, doubt it, I'm a big boy.[emoji6]

[bitseeker]

The printer is safe.  I don't often do things with critical dimension requirements - and this just reinforces the challenges.

Anyway, here it is.



It's not finalised yet.  I still have to seal it and affix it to the case (it's just sitting there at the moment).

Wow, that's quite pro. I like it. Bummer about the printer scaling up when changing to photo-quality mode. If I was a conspiracy theory kind of guy, I might think they were trying to make you use more ink.

Oh, you think you got the right size while saving ink in draft/normal mode? Just wait 'til you do a high-quality, heavy-ink rendition. Gotcha!

[med6753]

This appeared on local Craigslist this morning. I thought the price was a little high until I took a gander at Ebay. 

[med6753]

I have a lazy script that does it. Uses ImageMagick. Basically increases contrast, resizes to fit A4 bounding box and fills, exports to PNG then stitches and out pops a PDF

This was written about ten years ago to help someone who had to deal with a drum scanner output.

Only effort is rotating the images to start with if they are of odd orientations.

Well my evening is fucked. Windows 10 after the last update will no longer talk to my NAS. Mounts the share and then proceeds to hang. Still works fine over NFS on Linux box and the Mac. Grr.

I had that problem when I switched to Windows 10, then they patched it overnight. You might find that it works tomorrow or in the very near future
What I find a problem is that it does not reckonise a USB floppy drive WTF.

I'm quite happy with WIN10 once I got past one big initial issue. It absolutely refused to join my home network consisting of 2 other computers running WIN7. It took considerable hours to figure out what wasn't configured properly in the services.msc to get it to join the homegroup. But once I figured it out everyone is getting along just fine. File transfers, printers, etc. I don't understand why it wasn't properly configured to begin with and the average computer illiterate would never figure it out.

Now I don't use it for business or development use nor am I connected to anything more complex than a printer, external hard drives, and those 2 other computers running WIN7. So I'm not a good test case for it's connectivity/reliability.   

[Ero-Shan]

Yep, its 26C in my box room at the moment and it stayed at 24C upstairs last night, way to hot to get a good nights sleep, keep cat napping, even now.

Pah. I have about 28°C in my sleeping room. No problem. I actually love it - just don't use a blanket. 

[Ero-Shan]

I need I to work now and and every time 

USB floppy drive I can imagine. I bet they just don’t care about floppy device drivers now.

I want Windows 2000 back. That didn’t suck.

Edit: actually fuck it all. I’ve got a raspberry pi floating around. Risc Os time.

Never used 2000 or had a Raspberry Pi, zero knowledge of them.

2K was nothing more than a (really ugly) theme pack on '98 released solely to force Internet Exploder down people's throats; '98 itself was a bugfix release of '95. XP was the first version of Windoze with a proper filesystem and the last version where you, the owner, actually had control and ownership of your PC. Every version since has essentially been sandboxed /rooted AGAINST the owner/user for M$'s own purposes.

I think you're mistaking Windows 2000 for Windows Me. 2000 was the successor to NT 4.0.

As for me, I use any Windows only when there's no alternative. It's now Win10 and they still don't have a working focus-follows-mouse. Or let me decide the windows stacking. These make it mostly unbearable for me. Even at work I was able to get allowance for using a Linux box.

[Mr. Scram]

Does this forum havce a disproportionate amount of Windows haters or are they simply noisier?

[Brumby]

There are some versions of Windows that I didn't mind: 98SE, XP and Win 7.

ME wasn't worth the effort and I never ventured into Win 8 territory.  Win 10 is just too bossy.

[med6753]

Does this forum havce a disproportionate amount of Windows haters or are they simply noisier?

Not a Windows hater but there are certainly some versions that are on my "hate" list...

A misguided family member bought a laptop with the first release of Vista. What a total POS. Not only was it slow but it had all kinds of bugs with wireless connectivity. And the nag screens every time you tried to do something. 

I've worked on a few computers that had WIN8. I wanted to put my fist thru the screen several times. 

[Brumby]

Vista is the only O/S I know of that was sold with backwards licences for XP and then forward licences for Win 7.  That had me ROFLMAO on many occasions.  I'm also glad I never ventured anywhere near it.

A while back, somebody presented me with a laptop with an injured Win 8 O/S.  They didn't care for Win 8, so I nuked the drive back to the stone age, partitioned and formatted it and installed Win 7 with a spare licence I had.


I've never adopted a new O/S within a year of its release.  I prefer to sit back and see how much it stinks up the place - and let the first waves of lemmings find all the cliff edges.