Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[Brumby]

BD - you're shameless.

[tautech]

BD - you're shameless desperate for bench of good gear.

Fixed ! 

[bd139]

Bored is the word. Need something to tinker with. Everything I've got works or is missing parts I can't get hold of at the moment.

Edit: also just outbid on an entirely untested Keithley 196 on ebay. Literally sitting there at £47. In last 10 seconds it went for £155 which is way over the limit for an unknown.  . I might have put that down for a 34401A in unknown shape as I could strip and sell parts worst case.

[grizewald]

If bd had been at the cal lab in Gotland with me, the amount of drool would probably have flooded the place!

[AVGresponding]

Me too!

Also, bah, just missed out on a Keithley 196, went for £155 + £11   

[bd139]

Hahaha you were on that one too then 

[tautech]

Bored is the word. Need something to tinker with. Everything I've got works or is missing parts I can't get hold of at the moment.

Know what you mean. Got bugger all stock and got roped into painting the house. 
29C here today and it was horrible so went for a drive (Aircon  ) to get stuff I needed for the farm instead then the youngest turned up after work with a 6 pack so he, mum and I cleaned them up ! 
Just past 11pm and getting a second wind when I should be  instead. 

[AVGresponding]

Hahaha you were on that one too then 

I should have known better than to try to win it on a relatively low bid (circa £100), but I'm holding back a bit as I'm going to tilt at something else from the US...   

[Specmaster]

Thank mansaxel, bd, horse, Cerebus and the others for the DNS discussion. I really enjoing it, sorry for the others who were annoied by that.

Temped to open a new thread just about that in the "Computing" section, this is so much value it can't be stay hidden in the TEA, or yes it must stay here 

I don't think many were annoyed by it at all, but I do think many, and I'm one who wonders why everyone needs this level of secrecy, it's almost as if there was some deep dark military secretive plot your all involved in. I can't for a single second believe that anyone is involved in anything even sightly illegal, therefore have nothing to hide,  just curious as to the reasons people seem to knocking themselves out, and costing themselves extra expense, doing what is already freely available. 

[bd139]

I don't give a shit if that is any help. I believe a lot of it is actually a self imposed distraction from other mortal risks. I prefer to concentrate on them

[AVGresponding]

So much for my "sleep day"...   

I don't know enough about Tek mainframes to know if this is worth bidding on or not:  https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Tektronix-7934-Storage-Oscilloscope/372968505656

The dent in the upper left rear of the case is slightly worrying, though these guys do pack for the apocalypse. Unfortunately they also use DPD, but you can't have everything...

[tautech]

So much for my "sleep day"...   

I don't know enough about Tek mainframes to know if this is a good deal or not:  https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Tektronix-7934-Storage-Oscilloscope/372968505656

The dent in the upper left rear of the case is slightly worrying, though these guys do pack for the apocalypse. Unfortunately they also use DPD, but you can't have everything...

I wouldn't touch a CRO that appears to be knocked around. 
This from the Repair thread:

[AVGresponding]

I wouldn't touch a CRO that appears to be knocked around. 
This from the Repair thread:

Holy drunken traces Batman!

That looks like it was drawn by someone sitting in the back of a Hummer being driven by Henry Rollins!   

[grizewald]

Thank mansaxel, bd, horse, Cerebus and the others for the DNS discussion. I really enjoing it, sorry for the others who were annoied by that.

Temped to open a new thread just about that in the "Computing" section, this is so much value it can't be stay hidden in the TEA, or yes it must stay here 

I don't think many were annoyed by it at all, but I do think many, and I'm one who wonders why everyone needs this level of secrecy, it's almost as if there was some deep dark military secretive plot your all involved in. I can't for a single second believe that anyone is involved in anything even sightly illegal, therefore have nothing to hide,  just curious as to the reasons people seem to knocking themselves out, and costing themselves extra expense, doing what is already freely available. 

It's more a matter of principle.

Your ISP has no right to create profiles of its users based on their browsing history and sell those profiles to Tom, Dick and Harry.
Even more importantly, your government has absolutely no right to treat everyone as a criminal and hoover up everything one does on the Internet and store it until it becomes useful to them.

[med6753]

Thank mansaxel, bd, horse, Cerebus and the others for the DNS discussion. I really enjoing it, sorry for the others who were annoied by that.

Temped to open a new thread just about that in the "Computing" section, this is so much value it can't be stay hidden in the TEA, or yes it must stay here 

I don't think many were annoyed by it at all, but I do think many, and I'm one who wonders why everyone needs this level of secrecy, it's almost as if there was some deep dark military secretive plot your all involved in. I can't for a single second believe that anyone is involved in anything even sightly illegal, therefore have nothing to hide,  just curious as to the reasons people seem to knocking themselves out, and costing themselves extra expense, doing what is already freely available. 

Not annoyed either but amused and confused because 99% of what's been discussed here for the last day or so I have been totally clueless. 

[med6753]

• "But it boots fast!" Like I fucking care.
  

That's the thing though: it doesn't!

My laptops (work and private) all run the latest Linux Mint as their base OS. With every release, the systemd mediated boot process becomes more and more inconsistent with boot times from "fast" to "what the fuck is it doing?!".

I'm seriously contemplating moving to Devuan.

Holy crap, something I can respond to. Recently installed Mint on an old desktop that was running Win7. It takes Mint over twice as long to boot and I was wondering to...what the fuck is it doing? I thought it was SUPPOSED to be a "light" and "responsive" OS.  [/list]

[Specmaster]

Thank mansaxel, bd, horse, Cerebus and the others for the DNS discussion. I really enjoing it, sorry for the others who were annoied by that.

Temped to open a new thread just about that in the "Computing" section, this is so much value it can't be stay hidden in the TEA, or yes it must stay here 

I don't think many were annoyed by it at all, but I do think many, and I'm one who wonders why everyone needs this level of secrecy, it's almost as if there was some deep dark military secretive plot your all involved in. I can't for a single second believe that anyone is involved in anything even sightly illegal, therefore have nothing to hide,  just curious as to the reasons people seem to knocking themselves out, and costing themselves extra expense, doing what is already freely available. 

It's more a matter of principle.

Your ISP has no right to create profiles of its users based on their browsing history and sell those profiles to Tom, Dick and Harry.
Even more importantly, your government has absolutely no right to treat everyone as a criminal and hoover up everything one does on the Internet and store it until it becomes useful to them.

I don't disagree with the points raised, but it still seems extreme. What happens when you go outside any and come under the surveillance of the CCTV networks in towns and around areas such as local shops? They have the same kind of potential for misuse surely? 

[grizewald]

Holy crap, something I can respond to. Recently installed Mint on an old desktop that was running Win7. It takes Mint over twice as long to boot and I was wondering to...what the fuck is it doing? I thought it was SUPPOSED to be a "light" and "responsive" OS.  [/list]

Glad to see I'm not the only one who has noticed this! I would look closer at what the hell it is doing, but systemd and its binary log files don't exactly make that a simple task.

One of the things I always liked about Linux was that the text log files and understandable log messages made it simple to see what was happening in the system if things were not working as expected. Systemd seems to be trying to make Linux as impenetrable as Windows.

[med6753]

And now for something completely off topic. 

I should be getting a boat load of capacitors today to start my latest mission to excise all the old electrolytics from my equipment. 

[AVGresponding]

Thank mansaxel, bd, horse, Cerebus and the others for the DNS discussion. I really enjoing it, sorry for the others who were annoied by that.

Temped to open a new thread just about that in the "Computing" section, this is so much value it can't be stay hidden in the TEA, or yes it must stay here 

I don't think many were annoyed by it at all, but I do think many, and I'm one who wonders why everyone needs this level of secrecy, it's almost as if there was some deep dark military secretive plot your all involved in. I can't for a single second believe that anyone is involved in anything even sightly illegal, therefore have nothing to hide,  just curious as to the reasons people seem to knocking themselves out, and costing themselves extra expense, doing what is already freely available. 

It's more a matter of principle.

Your ISP has no right to create profiles of its users based on their browsing history and sell those profiles to Tom, Dick and Harry.
Even more importantly, your government has absolutely no right to treat everyone as a criminal and hoover up everything one does on the Internet and store it until it becomes useful to them.

While I'd agree that they have no moral right to do so, sadly they have been allowed the legal right (one way or another) to do so.

The biggest danger for me is the use of these data to exert manipulative influence on the general population, 90%+ of whom lack the knowledge to understand even how advertising and traditional mass media can control their decisions.
Move it up to mass social media, and the influence increases whilst the number of people that are aware they are being manipulated decreases.

The realisation that we are living in the "post truth" age is quite disturbing.

[bd139]

@med6753 Why mint is slow. Once there was unix. It worked on really slow CPUs that cost 10x the amount of usual ones and lagged out all the time. Then along came the optimising compilers and stuff and faster CPUs and it became usable and productive. GNU came along and decided that all these tools were closed source and too expensive and built their own from the ground up but couldn't and still can't to this day throw a kernel together that works. Linus came along and threw together a kernel (Linux) and some clever folk glued all the GNU stuff to it. Circa 1998-2002 this was pretty good. It mostly just worked and was fast as the corporations left it alone and the hardware was simple. However GNU liked to do interesting work so they buried more and more features into these tools which eventually made them fat steaming turds.  Then along came Redhat and Freedesktop and decided to try and turn the entire thing into an every day usable desktop for the average user. This went through two major iterations of attempting to cram CORBA into it and adding layers of bloat to the top of Xwindows (Miguel now a Microsoft employee and pouring his fire into .net). Eventually Redhat managed to ship this turd as a desktop product, bought up all the Linux developers and now keeps them huddled away. Eventually someone in a boardroom and a whiteboard at Redhat decided that OSX and .Net was sexy and attempted to cram all that shit into the product. To do this they "standardised" on various bits of nasty which roughly emulated commercial software environments that none of their staff even looked at or understood, hired some LSD popping eejits to do the HCI side of things and kicked this out of the door. Now this was a tangled pile of shit so they thought "hey lets write a tangled pile of shit manager", hired the one guy who failed to produce an audio routing daemon that worked properly for a decade and now we have systemd. Due to marketing share the other religions had to comply with this or lose their food source so along comes Canonical and ships that pile of shit on top of their pile of shit and kicks out a more user friendly version of it "Ubuntu". Now because they were so big and successful they became targets for getting sued by people for shipping commercial software with their distribution so they don't bother and a lot of rough corners exist because they spent so long trying to reinvent another wheel for their brand of religion. So along comes Mint who try and smooth out all the rough corners and to do this they just shovelled more bloated turds on top.

So basically Mint is slow because as an engineering cultural phenomenon and not a cohesive operating system we threw 20 years of quality software engineering away to make something shiny because Apple and self interest by the developers but corporate overlords gave it to clueless tech personalities who just built more layers on top. So really we have a full whack orchestra of people playing with instruments made of mud, straw and shit under it all that no one truly knows how it works other than some guys at Redhat who everyone is now subject to and no one is able to fix the status quo. It's slow because it's bloated and poorly engineered.

[grizewald]

Thank mansaxel, bd, horse, Cerebus and the others for the DNS discussion. I really enjoing it, sorry for the others who were annoied by that.

Temped to open a new thread just about that in the "Computing" section, this is so much value it can't be stay hidden in the TEA, or yes it must stay here 

I don't think many were annoyed by it at all, but I do think many, and I'm one who wonders why everyone needs this level of secrecy, it's almost as if there was some deep dark military secretive plot your all involved in. I can't for a single second believe that anyone is involved in anything even sightly illegal, therefore have nothing to hide,  just curious as to the reasons people seem to knocking themselves out, and costing themselves extra expense, doing what is already freely available. 

It's more a matter of principle.

Your ISP has no right to create profiles of its users based on their browsing history and sell those profiles to Tom, Dick and Harry.
Even more importantly, your government has absolutely no right to treat everyone as a criminal and hoover up everything one does on the Internet and store it until it becomes useful to them.

I don't disagree with the points raised, but it still seems extreme. What happens when you go outside any and come under the surveillance of the CCTV networks in towns and around areas such as local shops? They have the same kind of potential for misuse surely?

Indeed they do and I'm glad I don't live in Big Brother country any more.

The UK's wholesale surveillance society gives me the creeps. Everyone has a fundamental right to privacy. If someone is reasonably suspected of being involved in criminal stuff, then monitoring sanctioned by a court can be appropriate, but to subject everyone to the kind of blanket surveillance that the UK has is extremely dangerous. Add some notoriously error prone AI systems trawling all that data and it's quite likely that you could get your door kicked in at 4AM by a bunch of military style police with machine guns and itchy trigger fingers. A false positive could get you killed (or given a heart attack).

Just because the technology exists, it does not give governments carte blanche to treat everyone as guilty unless they can prove their innocence. Maybe you believe that you can trust today's government. Even if you do (which would be naive), what happens when a truly terrible government gets their hands on the surveillance system? Good luck trying to form any kind of opposition to a bad government when they have tools like that at their disposal.
 

[bd139]

I don't disagree with the points raised, but it still seems extreme. What happens when you go outside any and come under the surveillance of the CCTV networks in towns and around areas such as local shops? They have the same kind of potential for misuse surely?

The ones around here don't work. Someone shot them 

[grizewald]

Wall of text.

Is your return key broken?

[bd139]

Wall of text.

Is your return key broken?

It's called a paragraph