Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[Robert763]

The 34970A data logger arrived and all looks good 
Reading my 10V reference gives a sensible reading and the relays have not been hammered too hard. Just need to make up a breakout box.
I think some buyers were put off by the listing photo having the ERROR annunciator on. This comes on on power up if the unit was not shut down with the on/off switch.

[cyclin_al]

Learning how to Linux has been on my "to do" list since 2003. You know, one day... 

Learning Linux has been on my list since 1997.  Somewhere around the office, I have a shiny disk from back then with a Redhat distribution .... never used.
Anyways, due to this here group, I did my first install of Linux Ubuntu in July of this year.
My second was Xubuntu just 2 weeks ago.  Yes, you too can do it if I can.
The 7 year-old seems to have no problem with Linux; SWMBO has not even touched that computer yet, so we don't know yet.

A couple of things to check for bootable USB:
- BIOS updates of the computer
- USB 2 or 3.  Older computers may not recognize new USB 3 devices.
- size of the USB device.  In my link below for a different set of instructions to make a bootable USB, the partition size had to be 16MB  (yes, MB).

Instructions here are for a BIOS update, but almost half of the commands are for setting up the bootable USB using the fdisk command in Linux:
http://www.kegel.com/linux/aspireone-d250.html

Edit:  I too am making up a new shiny round disc to work on the mother-in-laws computer.  Likewise, the USB was not recognized as bootable, but has been used on newer computers.  I assume there is a BIOS update needed or support lacking for USB 3.  The trials and tribulations of knowing something about technology...

[nfmax]

BT Openreach staff gather together and put on their festive costumes for the traditional Halloween 'trick or treat' tour of our local cable ducting

Shortly after I took that picture an eleventh van turned up. Some sort of football-themed tribute to Nobby Stiles, perhaps?

When I came back a few hours later there were cable drum dispensers near some of the manhole covers: looks like they were putting in new ducting, dare I hope for blowing in fibre in the near future? FTTP = Fibre To The Promises

Took 3 years after they did that here. Don't hold your breath.

Just along the road today, what do I see?

Talked to some of the workers. Word Has Gone Out (and presumably, taxpayer's money has changed hands) and rural areas like ours are getting FTTP rolled out pronto. The PSTN will be switched off and the copper wire taken down. The fibre network should be going live in 'a few months'.

A pity, really, as the copper wires in the picture are only 3 weeks old. A 300+ year old oak tree came down and clobbered the previous pole, which is why the green is in such a mess. The tree was almost completely hollow inside.

[Specmaster]

Sadly, I don't think YT has a voice option for reporting channels. If nobody does anything, he could get mobs to start attacking 5G towers, destroying them and possibly leave some people without any phone coverage which could result in a life and death situation?

It doesn't, unless you know a Googler, and the only one I know quit last month.

Oh nothing regrettable. Just a metaphorical PEEK and a POKE in the right places...

Peek through a Predator UAV and Poke a Hellfire through his chimney ?

Nah much more insidious. I'm trying to get his credit file zero rated. Reference agencies take evidence for craziness and reckless behaviour. Use the gears of the machine rather than smash them.

If that isn't the subject of a BOFH column,it should be.

BOFH  is that

[bd139]

BOFH = Bastard Operator From Hell .... Column in The Register: https://www.theregister.com/2019/12/06/bofh_2019_episode_12/

[BU508A]

BOFH  is that

That's the colleague of the BAFH 

BOFH - Bastard Operator From Hell
BAFH - Bastard Administrator From Hell

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastard_Operator_From_Hell

[cyclin_al]

...Word Has Gone Out (and presumably, taxpayer's money has changed hands) and rural areas like ours are getting FTTP rolled out pronto. The PSTN will be switched off and the copper wire taken down. The fibre network should be going live in 'a few months'.

A pity, really, as the copper wires in the picture are only 3 weeks old. A 300+ year old oak tree came down and clobbered the previous pole, which is why the green is in such a mess. The tree was almost completely hollow inside.

Major jealousy!!!  I went and looked at your flag ... not North America, which explains everything.  Our government here make a big announcement after the last election to roll out high-speed internet to rural areas throughout the country.  Our neighbours just got DSL at 0.57 Mbps (same as us for the last 8 years); somehow that counts as high-speed.  How to we even count as rural here?  I pretty much drive past our national Parliament on my commute to work.... [/rant]

[Neomys Sapiens]

BT Openreach staff gather together and put on their festive costumes for the traditional Halloween 'trick or treat' tour of our local cable ducting

Shortly after I took that picture an eleventh van turned up. Some sort of football-themed tribute to Nobby Stiles, perhaps?

When I came back a few hours later there were cable drum dispensers near some of the manhole covers: looks like they were putting in new ducting, dare I hope for blowing in fibre in the near future? FTTP = Fibre To The Promises

Took 3 years after they did that here. Don't hold your breath.

Just along the road today, what do I see?

Talked to some of the workers. Word Has Gone Out (and presumably, taxpayer's money has changed hands) and rural areas like ours are getting FTTP rolled out pronto. The PSTN will be switched off and the copper wire taken down. The fibre network should be going live in 'a few months'.

A pity, really, as the copper wires in the picture are only 3 weeks old. A 300+ year old oak tree came down and clobbered the previous pole, which is why the green is in such a mess. The tree was almost completely hollow inside.

Trees are evil!

[Specmaster]

...Word Has Gone Out (and presumably, taxpayer's money has changed hands) and rural areas like ours are getting FTTP rolled out pronto. The PSTN will be switched off and the copper wire taken down. The fibre network should be going live in 'a few months'.

A pity, really, as the copper wires in the picture are only 3 weeks old. A 300+ year old oak tree came down and clobbered the previous pole, which is why the green is in such a mess. The tree was almost completely hollow inside.

Major jealousy!!!  I went and looked at your flag ... not North America, which explains everything.  Our government here make a big announcement after the last election to roll out high-speed internet to rural areas throughout the country.  Our neighbours just got DSL at 0.57 Mbps (same as us for the last 8 years); somehow that counts as high-speed.  How to we even count as rural here?  I pretty much drive past our national Parliament on my commute to work.... [/rant]

What only .57Mbbs, thats no good to man or beast, hell I'm getting 966.7 times that and that is even considered slow by some people. How long would it take you to download Windows 10 for christs sake?

[bd139]

Doesn't surprise me. Compared to here, the issue is that infrastructure is more expensive, the places are significantly more spread out and people expect prices to be low thanks to years of race to the bottom economics. The outcome is that you get shitty infrastructure and little motivation to invest in it. Eventually someone crazy turns up, throws thousands of chunks of debris into space as a solution because it makes more sense than running fibre on paper.

If it's any consolation I was stuck on 12mbits here until only a couple of years back due to some old nag complaining about them putting an "unsightly green box" on the side of the street. Had to wait until the flu season took her out 

Edit: Incidentally I discovered Mr Steele has already wrecked his own credit rating so not much to do on that front 

[cyclin_al]

...Word Has Gone Out (and presumably, taxpayer's money has changed hands) and rural areas like ours are getting FTTP rolled out pronto. The PSTN will be switched off and the copper wire taken down. The fibre network should be going live in 'a few months'.

A pity, really, as the copper wires in the picture are only 3 weeks old. A 300+ year old oak tree came down and clobbered the previous pole, which is why the green is in such a mess. The tree was almost completely hollow inside.

Major jealousy!!!  I went and looked at your flag ... not North America, which explains everything.  Our government here make a big announcement after the last election to roll out high-speed internet to rural areas throughout the country.  Our neighbours just got DSL at 0.57 Mbps (same as us for the last 8 years); somehow that counts as high-speed.  How to we even count as rural here?  I pretty much drive past our national Parliament on my commute to work.... [/rant]

What only .57Mbbs, thats no good to man or beast, hell I'm getting 966.7 times that and that is even considered slow by some people. How long would it take you to download Windows 10 for christs sake?

Windows 10 download takes all night; and that was the small 32-bit only version (for mother-in-law).

Actually a speed test is showing 2.56 Mbps at the moment, but that is very unstable with lots intermittent connection losses.
No sense in trying to work right now, as the VPN spends all the time reconnecting.
Slower and stable would actually be better overall.

Doesn't surprise me. Compared to here, the issue is that infrastructure is more expensive, the places are significantly more spread out and people expect prices to be low thanks to years of race to the bottom economics. The outcome is that you get shitty infrastructure and little motivation to invest in it. Eventually someone crazy turns up, throws thousands of chunks of debris into space as a solution because it makes more sense than running fibre on paper.

If it's any consolation I was stuck on 12mbits here until only a couple of years back due to some old nag complaining about them putting an "unsightly green box" on the side of the street. Had to wait until the flu season took her out 

Yes, the geography is spread out, but it is certainly nowhere not the low prices of our neighbours to the south.
We are paying $170CAD a month for this snail in a wire.
I agree that there is no motivation to invest in it.  Yes, once again, someone is proposing to throw more junk into space.  The space junk always comes with small print that the internet speed is as advertised only if no one else in the world is using it at the same time.
More people at home complaining all day long is causing some hot air on parliament hill, but as usual, no action has come of it so far.

[nfmax]

If it's any consolation I was stuck on 12mbits here until only a couple of years back due to some old nag complaining about them putting an "unsightly green box" on the side of the street. Had to wait until the flu season took her out 

I currently get ~5Mbps on VDSL here, about 6.5km from the exchange, and 3km from the cabinet - which is actually not bad for that distance.

[bd139]

That's pretty good for 6.5km range.

[cyclin_al]

   I know I have 2 packages of metal electrical boxes of 6 each, with only 1 box used so far (11 boxes in total).
Of course, I cannot find them when needed.
Since I can't work with unstable internet, I was going to at least wire in a couple more receptacles in the office room.
The house wiring is terrible with most of the loads on only 4 branch circuits and the other circuits mostly unloaded.
One branch circuit supplies the living room (tv, etc.), the hallway (dehumidifier) and the office (computers, printer, router, switches, etc) and must be 110% loaded.  I wanted to run another branch circuit to better distribute some of the load.  I guess the opened ceiling tiles and hanging wire will remain until I go buy more boxes.
Of course, I will find the boxes when I arrive home from my shopping trip to buy more....

[mansaxel]

I pay ~40€ per month, and have 100Mbit over fibre. The link is at 1Gbit. I'm just too cheap to upgrade, but when I switch providers I will probably change that.

[BU508A]

About the Balver Zinn:

I've ordered the 5 rolls of the Balver SN100C 1mm diameter.
3 rolls are reserved, 2 are available if someone in Europe is interested.

[Cerebus]

Learning how to Linux has been on my "to do" list since 2003. You know, one day... 

Learning Linux has been on my list since 1997.  Somewhere around the office, I have a shiny disk from back then with a Redhat distribution .... never used.

Somewhere I have a grubby floppy disk that says Linux 0.026 or 0.027 on the front. Installing that was a completely manual operation. Boot from the floppy, mkfs on a hard disk, mount, copy by hand ("cp -rP /bin /mnt/bin" etc. etc) and install the bootstrap.

I had a box under my office desk at PC Magazine UK running that circa '91/'92. It had a public open source archive from one of the US universities (I forget the name of the archive, it was a commonplace at the time) read only NFS mounted on it that I played with when I had some spare time - yes, I had a desktop Ethernet Internet connection back in '91/'92.

[tggzzz]

Edit: Incidentally I discovered Mr Steele has already wrecked his own credit rating so not much to do on that front 

How did you discover that?

Shame there's less opportunity to cause him pain.

[med6753]

I pay ~40€ per month, and have 100Mbit over fibre. The link is at 1Gbit. I'm just too cheap to upgrade, but when I switch providers I will probably change that.

$81 USD/month for 60Mbit (typically actually get 80Mbit) over copper. I could upgrade to 200Mbit for about $10 USD more per month but don't need it and besides.....$81 for 60 is a rip off.

Fiber here? Yea, right. 

[bd139]

Edit: Incidentally I discovered Mr Steele has already wrecked his own credit rating so not much to do on that front 

How did you discover that?

Shame there's less opportunity to cause him pain.

Fairly easy. I own a limited company and access to credit data. I paid the £8 to do a reference check via bulk provider interface. Usually takes 24 hours but this came back fast (always a bad sign). Already have his details from the last shit show. This is usually used for vetting clients and suppliers but works for individuals as well.

[mansaxel]

yes, I had a desktop Ethernet Internet connection back in '91/'92.

I didn't have that until 1995, and then only at work. About the same time I started running Linux, which lasted a few years until I discovered Real Computers with expensive operating systems and, of course, the BSD flavours -- I've run most of them, and the only one I haven't got running now is Net.

[bd139]

Surely your toaster should be running NetBSD 

[Specmaster]

Edit: Incidentally I discovered Mr Steele has already wrecked his own credit rating so not much to do on that front 

How did you discover that?

Shame there's less opportunity to cause him pain.

There is, you interact directly with him on YT and troll him etc.

[mansaxel]

Surely your toaster should be running NetBSD 

It's a 555 circuit, tops.

Port NetBSD to NE555, what an idea...

[bd139]

Think that might be a struggle with 1 bit of RAM