Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[bd139]

RISC OS of course. We had 32 bit ARM desktops while everyone was barely crawling out of 8 bit land.

[bitseeker]

Cerebus has a little script that will generate a random email address, installs an alias for it and a note of what it was generated for on his mail server and spits out a random password. Cerebus then just cuts and pastes the email address and password into whatever site needed a new credential and leaves the rest to Cerebus' password manager. Thus no two sites share credentials and when the inevitable spam arrives, Cerebus knows who leaked his details, often before the news gets out publicly that such-and-such a site has been hacked and leaked n million credentials into the wild.

Bitseeker uses a similar methodology. This also helps reduce the effectiveness of data aggregators that build detailed profiles about your behavior since every account is based on a unique email address and, hence, a unique hash as identifier.

[bitseeker]

Good good. 2FA is still good because it kills keyloggers dead as you need a physical device external to the machine (phone / TOTP key etc). My father-in-law had his Halifax account emptied after someone keylogged his login details.

There have been successful attacks on bank accounts "protected" by using a phone as 2FA

Once they have your banking login/password, the mechanism is:

• your mobile phone number, stored/leaked from some other site, becomes known to the malefactors
• the malefactors contact the phone company and move the phone number to a SIM in their phone. SOP for the mobilr phone company, of course
• all 2FA stuff now goes to them

The only defense against that which I can see is to have a second mobile phone used only for banking.

Bit of a pain if you then need to carry two phones around, and you need to remember to use that phone occasionally to stop the number being recycled.

Yeah, that's the problem with sending SMS for 2FA. Bad idea. Even worse are companies that send their codes via email. 2FA should be done with at least a time-based one-time code generator (TOTP).

Unfortunately, eBay's 2FA only uses SMS or notification via their mobile app. Lost your phone? Oh, well.

[bitseeker]

I'd like to link this to the POI section. Which model is it?

Found and linked. (Thanks, Pat!)

[Cubdriver]

I'd like to link this to the POI section. Which model is it?

Pretty sure it's a 200CD.

-Pat

[worsthorse]

I'm jealous of all you guys who can speak and understand multiple languages. I have enough trouble just speaking my mother tongue. 

My younger sister was the linguist in the family. Fluent in French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. Unfortunately we lost her to cancer in 2002. 

Along the way, there were many failures too. I spent time in Hungary, Turkey, Belgium and Sweden (all more than a year) and attempted to learn those too. Swedish and Flemish got to basic level, but I failed miserably at Turkish and Hungarian. I currently spend a lot of time in Japan, so I've been learning that for the past few years with varied success, but leaning heavily towards another failure.

McBryce.

Language learning is, I think, training in humility.  Since 2008 I have invested thousands and thousands of hours in learning Tibetan. Eleven years later, I can translate classical Tibetan, slowly but well. I speak everyday Tibetan like a four year old (at best) and reading a Tibetan newspaper is still mostly beyond me. 

With a smaller but still significant investment of time, I learned enough Italian and German to get by during extended visits (having German and Italian girlfriends helped) and Czech (yes, another woman) to not get arrested. Twenty years later I remember little of any of them. My repeated attempts to learn French, which started in college, were dismal failures on every level; one of my French tutors said I was hopeless and depressing to work with and fired me.

Every couple of years I restart my so far unfruitful efforts with Japanese, usually in concert with planning another trip to Japan.  I can order food and make people laugh by answering, I am sorry but I don't speak Japanese in Japanese when asked but that's about it. I can't imagine even getting the basics down without an investment similar to what I have in Tibetan, which seems unlikely given how I spend my time these days.

[worsthorse]

Every couple of years I restart my so far unfruitful efforts with Japanese, usually in concert with planning another trip to Japan.  I can order food and make people laugh by answering, I am sorry but I don't speak Japanese in Japanese when asked but that's about it. I can't imagine even getting the basics down without an investment similar to what I have in Tibetan, which seems unlikely given how I spend my time these days.

Speaking of which, the 184 is on my bench and I am slowly decoding the schematic and figuring out how it works. It took me a few hours of puzzling over the power supply portion of the schematic to figure out what the pieces in the crystal oven symbol. Now that I understand that, I can continue tracking down the noise paths that are leaking the 10MHz oscillator into the DC rails. Though my guess is that one or more of the big honkin' filter caps is bad, it is kinda fun to follow things through, before I get there.

Plus it is a really interesting piece of gear. It turns out that generating a clean 500MHz signal when you start with a 10MHz oscillator and valves, discrete components, point to point wiring and a lot of switches turns out to be a hard problem, at least if money matters.  For example, power is distributed around the board using coax, but not everywhere. 

[mnementh]

RISC OS of course. We had 32 bit ARM desktops while everyone was barely crawling out of 8 bit land.

Yeah, but even that was a bit of a clusterfuck.

RISC sounded good on paper, and in principle you DID get more work done per instruction; but due to memory/controller architecture not really being 32-bit but a kludge of older hardware, and how the processor itself handled those instructions (like a command interpreter in the hardware, breaking that "symbolic code" instruction down into multiple iterations of simpler instructions which then were acted on in machine code) it never really got down to the "one much more complex instruction per clock cycle" they were always promising would be just around the corner.

What other OS did you actually have to "think" in terms of "nybbles" rather than "bytes" (okay... half a "word" rather than a whole "word", but you know what I mean) when considering memory management vs instruction set?

The promise... oh, the promise it held... and how harshly the reality was beaten into us in most visceral fashion. *twitch... twitch... twitcha-twitch...*

mnem
*Juddering in the corner*

[Zucca]

With a smaller but still significant investment of time, I learned enough Italian and German to get by during extended visits (having German and Italian girlfriends helped) and Czech (yes, another woman) to not get arrested. Twenty years later I remember little of any of them. My repeated attempts to learn French, which started in college, were dismal failures on every level; one of my French tutors said I was hopeless and depressing to work with and fired me.

Amen bro!
I am fluent in four languages because of girls. The best method to learn a new language is the bed.

[mnementh]

I usually only learn enough to get my face slapped that way...

mnem
¡Vaya con huevos!

[BU508A]

RISC OS of course. We had 32 bit ARM desktops while everyone was barely crawling out of 8 bit land.

What was running on the Sinclair QL? Was a 32-bit iirc.

Edit:

[bd139]

16-bit with some pretend 32-bit features. Plus it was slow, ran QDOS and Sinclair was involved 

https://youtu.be/hrj-EEnsacQ

^^^ blew everything away instantly

Some TE and electronic manufacturing pron in that video too

[Cerebus]

Amen bro!
I am fluent in four languages because of girls. The best method to learn a new language is the bed.

[Tuts] Italians! Bloody typical! Greasy haired Lotharios, coming over here, stealing our women... 

[Cerebus]

¡Vaya con huevos!

[FX: sings] "How d'ya like your eggs in the morning?"
"Unfer-r-ti-lized."

[Cerebus]

What was running on the Sinclair QL? Was a 32-bit iirc.

Motorola 68008, if memory serves.

[khs]

I'd like to link this to the POI section. Which model is it?

Pretty sure it's a 200CD.

-Pat

sure?

[Cubdriver]

I'd like to link this to the POI section. Which model is it?

Pretty sure it's a 200CD.

-Pat

sure?

Not 100%, but...

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/test-equipment-anonymous-(tea)-group-therapy-thread/msg2790512/#msg2790512

-Pat

[med6753]

With a smaller but still significant investment of time, I learned enough Italian and German to get by during extended visits (having German and Italian girlfriends helped) and Czech (yes, another woman) to not get arrested. Twenty years later I remember little of any of them. My repeated attempts to learn French, which started in college, were dismal failures on every level; one of my French tutors said I was hopeless and depressing to work with and fired me.

Amen bro!
I am fluent in four languages because of girls. The best method to learn a new language is the bed.

OK, then answer me this....how come I didn't learn Espanol when I bedded a Pureto Rican? 

[Specmaster]

What was running on the Sinclair QL? Was a 32-bit iirc.

Motorola 68008, if memory serves.

Correct it was the 68008 running at 7.5MHz it was reasonably fast for the time, we have come a long way in those 34 years since its launch.

[tggzzz]

With a smaller but still significant investment of time, I learned enough Italian and German to get by during extended visits (having German and Italian girlfriends helped) and Czech (yes, another woman) to not get arrested. Twenty years later I remember little of any of them. My repeated attempts to learn French, which started in college, were dismal failures on every level; one of my French tutors said I was hopeless and depressing to work with and fired me.

Amen bro!
I am fluent in four languages because of girls. The best method to learn a new language is the bed.

My uncle would have disagreed.

Nobody knows how many languages he could read and write (but not speak); the best guess is in the region of 100. In his 80s he learned Gujarati so he could go and attend a wedding in a village in Gujarat.

His technique was to start from the modern day Rosetta stone, which has been translated into every language: the Bible.

[bitseeker]

Take another trip thrifting looking for an enclosure (among other things on my list); look at everything from a little redwood gift box (later given to my wife) to a little PC subwoofer enclosure with a 3" sub in it. Find some desk lamps and a couple Harmony One remotes; give up & go look through the crafty wooden boxes at the Dollarama. Everything is either just a hair too small or way too big or just too kitschy even for me.  Then I find this little steel mesh thing for CAD$1.50. Sold!

That's pretty slick! Like it was made for it.

[bitseeker]

I'd like to link this to the POI section. Which model is it?

Pretty sure it's a 200CD.

-Pat

sure?

Not 100%, but...

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/test-equipment-anonymous-(tea)-group-therapy-thread/msg2790512/#msg2790512

-Pat

Yep, looks like the one. Thanks, Pat. I missed that post.

[Carl_Smith]

I am fluent in four languages because of girls. The best method to learn a new language is the bed.

When I read this I thought of Trinity in The Matrix downloading knowledge of how to fly a helicopter and that somehow "interfacing" under the sheets would do something similar, allowing you do download the language the other speaks.   

[mnementh]

I am fluent in four languages because of girls. The best method to learn a new language is the bed.

When I read this I thought of Trinity in The Matrix downloading knowledge of how to fly a helicopter and that somehow "interfacing" under the sheets would do something similar, allowing you do download the language the other speaks.   

Naaahhh... it's both more fun and less fun than that.  Besides, you only learn the really good stuff when you've done something male stupid and she's bitching you out.

mnem
*Crusty old survivor-dwagon*

[mnementh]

Take another trip thrifting looking for an enclosure (among other things on my list); look at everything from a little redwood gift box (later given to my wife) to a little PC subwoofer enclosure with a 3" sub in it. Find some desk lamps and a couple Harmony One remotes; give up & go look through the crafty wooden boxes at the Dollarama. Everything is either just a hair too small or way too big or just too kitschy even for me.  Then I find this little steel mesh thing for CAD$1.50. Sold!

That's pretty slick! Like it was made for it.

Yeah; it was not what I had in mind when I headed out for the day's scrounging... but it fit with all the other scrounging and the more I work with it, the more I like the little beastie. A great little  low-wattage bench PSU for next to nothin'.

mnem