Author Topic: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread  (Read 14554380 times)

Wolfgang, BrianInTexas, Vince and 24 Guests are viewing this topic.

Offline 0culus

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 3032
  • Country: us
  • Electronics, RF, and TEA Hobbyist
Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #22850 on: January 16, 2019, 05:56:59 pm »
This all kind of misses the point of PDFs though:

1. Vector graphics container
2. Print format
3. Searchable
4. Easily citable references
5. Simple one file per text container that doesn't need processing.
6. Portable across different devices.
7. Table of contents and document structure metadata.

PDF is mostly misunderstood. MacOS uses it for Quartz, their 2D UI stuff. One reason it doesn't look like boiled testicles on a high DPI display.

When you bundle scans into a PDF file it's a hack but it works. You can OCR and full text the content at the same time and make the scans searchable.

Also PDF is an open standard: https://www.iso.org/standard/63534.html ... RAR is not and the license is somewhat dubiously lacking.

^^this^^

PDF isn't always ideal, but I don't want to be tied to Windows and winrar to read documents either.
 

Offline Specmaster

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 14483
  • Country: gb
Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #22851 on: January 16, 2019, 06:23:13 pm »
PDF works on Android and on IOS.
Who let Murphy in?

Brymen-Fluke-HP-Thurlby-Thander-Tek-Extech-Black Star-GW-Avo-Kyoritsu-Amprobe-ITT-Robin-TTi
 

Offline mnementh

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 17541
  • Country: us
  • *Hiding in the Dwagon-Cave*
Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #22852 on: January 16, 2019, 06:46:39 pm »
Not sure if this is well known The Boat Anchor Manual Archive

Yup. Me & BAMA go WAY back; I remember getting manuals off there for my Hitachi V212 almost 20 years ago. In fact, when neo asked me what he owed me for that bracket I printed, I told him to pay it forward instead and just donate whatever he sees fit to KO4BB.com or bama.edebris.com. Good people. They've earned our support.  :-+
How did you manage to suck it from the site and make PDF's? All I get from the site is a small cover as a .JPG. I have Winrar as well but cannot see just how you get at the document in order convert it to a pdf. I cannot even see a document.

How big is the file you have? If it's a few K, you just saved a thumbnail image that served as a hotlink.
If it's a few MB, it's the full doc. With a small jpg prefixed to the archive. The beauty of Winrar (and 7zip) is that if you run them and tell them to open any specified file as if it is an archive, they actually try to search through the file for an archive.
So a 'RARbook' is a small jpg, prefixed on a rar archive, in one file, with a .jpg filename suffix.
Result: the OS displays the small image (which serves as a 'book cover'), while Winrar can extract the archived file contents.
You could change the suffix to .rar, but then the file won't display as the cover image.

It's far from ideal, but it's BETTER than PDF, in which the contained file subcomponents can only be extracted with great and tedious effort. PDF is designed to be an impenetrable container.

See also http://everist.org/archives/scans/RAR-books/_about_rar_books/


You can fiddle-fart around with your .pngs scattered loose in a folder like old Polaroids in the bottom of a drawer. I'll keep using dynamic formats like .pdf and .rtf, thank you.

I wonder if you noticed that there is a .html file in that folder. Did you try opening it? It seems not.
Viola! The whole document as a single entity. Using a browser to scroll and zoom, which works very well indeed.
The folder of images is just another form of wrapper, exactly as PDF is, EXCEPT that you have the option of easily looking at the individual pages and images if you want.
Using html for structure also gives vast advantages over PDF, in flexibility, structural visibility and how the content is presented, indexed and formatted. I just usually only bother to make a simple linear document.

And all of this, is because I expect there to be a decent, sensible and functional container format someday, and it will be a lot easier to convert simple, totally visible-structure html+images docs over, than from the dog's vomit of a format that is PDF.

To quote someone else's recent comment: "PDF is where information goes to die."

Incidentally another reason I prefer to keep the image files visible, is that while creating them I control the process of choosing encoding type, to best suit the images and optimize compression within limits _I_ choose. Rather than some braindead auto-PDF construction algorithm.

Yes, I noticed it. Good lord man... you think I don't recognize a bundled HTML document when I see one?

Yes, they're open. You can see every piece of the puzzle. But that is what's wrong with them; they are a puzzle that you have to put together to use. They are also a total clusterfuck, not at all intuitive to use and still don't offer half the features of the pdf FORMAT. And unless you're a savant who ENJOYS parsing raw HTML with your brain, there's no way you as a reader can be certain there isn't some poisoned link in that .html document, so it isn't even secure.

Again, you're blind hatred of everything Adobe is understandable; I loathe them viscerally myself. But the format is OPEN, scalable, and integrates EVERYTHING people want in a platform-independent portable document.



You may in fact be this guy; and you may be right. But so far, the day has not come, and the world's tiniest fiddle isn't playing, and the world's largest archival site still serves .pdf files 10:1 over all other filetypes combined. Even .mp3. And anybody still on FuckBook deserves what they get.

And that guy's "tiniest open-source violin" STILL isn't visible; NOT because it's so tiny, but because nobody has the effing extension installed that it needs to be viewable.

While you're busy busting your nuts trying to NOT use the de-facto standard in archival document storage, the rest of the world is carrying on, and I'm pretty sure that I'll be dead and buried long before the .pdf format is.

This all kind of misses the point of PDFs though:

1. Vector graphics container
2. Print format
3. Searchable
4. Easily citable references
5. Simple one file per text container that doesn't need processing.
6. Portable across different devices.
7. Table of contents and document structure metadata.

PDF is mostly misunderstood. MacOS uses it for Quartz, their 2D UI stuff. One reason it doesn't look like boiled testicles on a high DPI display.

When you bundle scans into a PDF file it's a hack but it works. You can OCR and full text the content at the same time and make the scans searchable.

Also PDF is an open standard: https://www.iso.org/standard/63534.html ... RAR is not and the license is somewhat dubiously lacking.

Thanks for bullet-pointing all the stuff I TRIED to explain a while back but had trouble quantifying. I know .pdf is an open format. I know it does all these things and actually works. Everywhere they have computers. You can even open a .pdf on a Raspberry Pi, FFS.

Again... the problem is NOT the FORMAT. It works. It is the file creation software and the dumbasses who use it wrong that suck.  :palm:

mnem

« Last Edit: January 16, 2019, 07:00:36 pm by mnementh »
alt-codes work here:  alt-0128 = €  alt-156 = £  alt-0216 = Ø  alt-225 = ß  alt-230 = µ  alt-234 = Ω  alt-236 = ∞  alt-248 = °
 

Offline bd139

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 23018
  • Country: gb
Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #22853 on: January 16, 2019, 06:55:02 pm »
Your last point is the main problem with people who have had horrible PDF experiences. A lot of people don’t know how to put a decent scan together and then everyone else suffers for this.

Usually it appears to be from “scanning factories” like mauritron and artek in this particular area of interest. Does my head in some of the shit. A lot of other scans came from usenet bin groups back in the 1990s where someone uploaded TIFFs multipart and then someone used some shitty windows freeware to stitch them together.

The biggest crime I have is “solid state design for the radio amateur” which appears on the CD that came with “Experimental Methods in RF design”. That is sooooo fucking awful that I bought the book and scanned it myself. I’m slowly adding TOC to it using Acrobat at the moment.

Note: I actually have an Acrobat DC subscription also because I write a metric ton of technical documentation although that’s going away slowly in favour of a thing I wrote called metagen (will publish this OSS at some point but it takes markdown in and renders it to PDF, html, ePub.
« Last Edit: January 16, 2019, 06:57:17 pm by bd139 »
 

Offline 0culus

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 3032
  • Country: us
  • Electronics, RF, and TEA Hobbyist
Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #22854 on: January 16, 2019, 06:58:39 pm »
[snip]

Again... the problem is NOT the FORMAT. It works. It is the file creation software and the dumbasses who use it wrong that suck.  :palm:

mnem


Yep. An example. For simple document creation, pdfLaTeX or XeLaTeX win every time for creating nice looking and SMALL document, even if you have a lot of pages. Microsoft word manages to make PDFs of simple text that are larger than the source document.  :palm: My go-to method of typesetting these days is writing Markdown and feeding into pandoc, which with the appropriate LaTeX template, gives me nice PDFs without having to deal directly with the TeX ecosystem.

https://pandoc.org/

Pandoc can do a LOT more than just md -> LaTeX -> PDF though.
 
The following users thanked this post: bitseeker

Offline mnementh

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 17541
  • Country: us
  • *Hiding in the Dwagon-Cave*
Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #22855 on: January 16, 2019, 07:36:28 pm »


I like .rtf... the format fell into public domain ages ago, it makes small files and if you need them you can still incorporate medium-quality images directly from .bmp, .jpg, .tiff and .png files. I treat the slight inconvenience involved in copying pics to the document as a built-in "do I really need this?" filter.  ;)


Yes, all of these dinosaurs still roam the computersphere... and still do exactly the job they were made to do.

For document creation, I usually just use WordPad saved as .rtf. If I need more powerful editing, I use Word and save as .rtf and live with the few bugaboos it renders. If I need to send the file to someone, I print it as a .pdf using one of several printer extensions, each of which I know from experience will give me different biases of quality vs filesize.

If I still need to edit it as a .pdf, or need to create a document including large, hi-res image files, or I need to sign a document, I have a licensed copy of Acrobat 8 I bought bundled with XP when it was still the dominant lifeform and it STILL authenticates 15 years later. Say what you will about Adobe; they did not abandon this paying customer, even after about a dozen OS and/or HDD Upgrades/system rebuilds.

mnem
7 out of 10 docuvores prefer librarians.

« Last Edit: January 16, 2019, 07:38:02 pm by mnementh »
alt-codes work here:  alt-0128 = €  alt-156 = £  alt-0216 = Ø  alt-225 = ß  alt-230 = µ  alt-234 = Ω  alt-236 = ∞  alt-248 = °
 

Offline 0culus

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 3032
  • Country: us
  • Electronics, RF, and TEA Hobbyist
Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #22856 on: January 16, 2019, 07:46:17 pm »
Hey, if it works for you, that's all that matters.  :-+
 

Offline Martin.M

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 953
  • Country: de
  • in Tek we trust
    • vintage Tek collection
Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #22857 on: January 16, 2019, 07:52:31 pm »
More NIXIE beauty. edit:* Fluke 3482A

hmmmm..  yours Fluke is made by HP  ^-^
« Last Edit: January 16, 2019, 07:54:35 pm by Martin.M »
 
The following users thanked this post: Inverted18650

Offline Inverted18650

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 875
  • Country: us
    • Test Gear Addicts
Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #22858 on: January 16, 2019, 08:05:28 pm »
Hey I fixed it on the Buy/Sell tab... |O  it was late and I was dumb. :-+

Offline mnementh

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 17541
  • Country: us
  • *Hiding in the Dwagon-Cave*
Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #22859 on: January 16, 2019, 08:12:42 pm »
Your last point is the main problem with people who have had horrible PDF experiences. A lot of people don’t know how to put a decent scan together and then everyone else suffers for this.

Usually it appears to be from “scanning factories” like mauritron and artek in this particular area of interest. Does my head in some of the shit. A lot of other scans came from usenet bin groups back in the 1990s where someone uploaded TIFFs multipart and then someone used some shitty windows freeware to stitch them together.

The biggest crime I have is “solid state design for the radio amateur” which appears on the CD that came with “Experimental Methods in RF design”. That is sooooo fucking awful that I bought the book and scanned it myself. I’m slowly adding TOC to it using Acrobat at the moment.

Note: I actually have an Acrobat DC subscription also because I write a metric ton of technical documentation although that’s going away slowly in favour of a thing I wrote called metagen (will publish this OSS at some point but it takes markdown in and renders it to PDF, html, ePub.

Yeah... the biggest gripe I have with .pdf is users who create a form and don't even know they have the document locked... and then expect you to fill out the form and send it back to them. Then when you create an unlocked copy so you CAN edit it, they have a fit saying you sent them a virus because their Adobe Reader shits a brick because its unlocked or created with open-source software. ::) You have no idea how many times I've lived this EXACT scenario... enough that I have an explanation in one of those .rtf text files just so I can cut/paste it into eMails.  |O

Another is people who lock EVERYTHING they publish in .pdf. ON PURPOSE. Just because they're anal about THEIR WORDS.  :palm: So you can't even reformat the way it prints.  |O  |O  |O



I've read MANY horror stories about Artek... but I've bought many manuals from them, and as long as I don't settle for ones with small filesizes, I've NEVER been disappointed in the value for dollar. Maybe that's the key.  :-//

Here's a quick snap of the preReg section... this is the schematic I was referring to when I kibbutzed on your 2235. 10 years of shelf and use wear, blown up to 18" x 24" by a third party, and still crisp, clear, and totally legible.

mnem
alt-codes work here:  alt-0128 = €  alt-156 = £  alt-0216 = Ø  alt-225 = ß  alt-230 = µ  alt-234 = Ω  alt-236 = ∞  alt-248 = °
 

Offline 0culus

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 3032
  • Country: us
  • Electronics, RF, and TEA Hobbyist
Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #22860 on: January 16, 2019, 08:15:19 pm »
I've had good luck with Artek overall. Having the damn thing be searchable is a damn sight better than the sometimes awful scans Keysight provides for old HP equipment.
 

Offline mnementh

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 17541
  • Country: us
  • *Hiding in the Dwagon-Cave*
Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #22861 on: January 16, 2019, 08:24:03 pm »
Hey, if it works for you, that's all that matters.  :-+

Oh, yeah... what a person prefers is usually based on what they know. Fear of the unknown is the biggest motivator in human history. ;)



BTW... the image on that pandoc.org site you linked to... it is both beautiful in its primitiveness, and at the same time it makes my brain hurt on a visceral level.

Well done!  :-DD

mnem
*Back to the salt mines*
« Last Edit: January 16, 2019, 08:25:37 pm by mnementh »
alt-codes work here:  alt-0128 = €  alt-156 = £  alt-0216 = Ø  alt-225 = ß  alt-230 = µ  alt-234 = Ω  alt-236 = ∞  alt-248 = °
 

Offline med6753

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 11313
  • Country: us
  • Tek nut
Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #22862 on: January 16, 2019, 08:25:26 pm »
Geez.....the last few pages remind me of a bunch of old women complaining about their aches, pains, and husbands.  :wtf:  :-DD :-DD

I rarely have issues using PDF's....at least nothing that gives me a hot flash like what's been posted here.    :horse: :popcorn:
An old gray beard with an attitude.
 

Offline GregDunn

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 725
  • Country: us
Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #22863 on: January 16, 2019, 08:34:53 pm »

Sample image



OMG - that 3478A has the special anti-gravity "option G".   :-DD
 

Offline mnementh

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 17541
  • Country: us
  • *Hiding in the Dwagon-Cave*
Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #22864 on: January 16, 2019, 08:35:45 pm »
Geez.....the last few pages remind me of a bunch of old women complaining about their aches, pains, and husbands.  :wtf:  :-DD :-DD

I rarely have issues using PDF's....at least nothing that gives me a hot flash like what's been posted here.    :horse: :popcorn:

Thanks for listening to us kvetch!!!  :-DD

mnem
"Oy, gevalt!!!"
alt-codes work here:  alt-0128 = €  alt-156 = £  alt-0216 = Ø  alt-225 = ß  alt-230 = µ  alt-234 = Ω  alt-236 = ∞  alt-248 = °
 

Offline mnementh

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 17541
  • Country: us
  • *Hiding in the Dwagon-Cave*
Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #22865 on: January 16, 2019, 08:41:36 pm »

Sample image


OMG - that 3478A has the special anti-gravity "option G".   :-DD

Didn't you know? The FW on the 3478A is written in Python.  :-DD

mnem

alt-codes work here:  alt-0128 = €  alt-156 = £  alt-0216 = Ø  alt-225 = ß  alt-230 = µ  alt-234 = Ω  alt-236 = ∞  alt-248 = °
 
The following users thanked this post: GregDunn

Offline salvagedcircuitry

  • Regular Contributor
  • *
  • Posts: 184
  • Country: us
  • Electrical Engineer | Hobbyist | Camera Enthusiast
    • salvagedcircuitry
Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #22866 on: January 16, 2019, 08:53:12 pm »
I think I caught the disease  ^-^  :-DD
What do you guys think? 40mhz TTI 4 ch function generator for $125? I think I did pretty good this time  :-+.


" class="bbc_img resized" data-pagespeed-url-hash="3546894987" onload="pagespeed.CriticalImages.checkImageForCriticality(this);" style="cursor: pointer;" width="500

« Last Edit: January 17, 2019, 06:21:18 pm by salvagedcircuitry »
SalvagedCircuitry
www.salvagedcircuitry.com
 

Offline med6753

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 11313
  • Country: us
  • Tek nut
Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #22867 on: January 16, 2019, 09:01:33 pm »
I'd say you scored big time!  :-+ :-+ :o
An old gray beard with an attitude.
 

Offline salvagedcircuitry

  • Regular Contributor
  • *
  • Posts: 184
  • Country: us
  • Electrical Engineer | Hobbyist | Camera Enthusiast
    • salvagedcircuitry
Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #22868 on: January 16, 2019, 09:04:04 pm »
I'd say you scored big time!  :-+ :-+ :o

WOOHOO. Sweet. That's good news. Thanks  8)
I'll put a post on the repair process after I get it in the mail  ^-^
SalvagedCircuitry
www.salvagedcircuitry.com
 

Offline med6753

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 11313
  • Country: us
  • Tek nut
Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #22869 on: January 16, 2019, 09:11:41 pm »
Geez.....the last few pages remind me of a bunch of old women complaining about their aches, pains, and husbands.  :wtf:  :-DD :-DD

I rarely have issues using PDF's....at least nothing that gives me a hot flash like what's been posted here.    :horse: :popcorn:

Thanks for listening to us kvetch!!!  :-DD

mnem
"Oy, gevalt!!!"

Been busy all day and had no idea all this bellyaching was ongoing. Got an older Dell Optiplex 790 tower real cheap (Free) and spent the day wiping the Win7 Home off and installed my copy of Win7 Ultimate. 250 or so updates later and it's done. This tower is connected to the display at the far end of the new bench for schematics, manuals, etc. Also an additional backup repository.

All that's left is install the keyboard on slides (purchased) and mount it under the bench.


   
An old gray beard with an attitude.
 

Offline 0culus

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 3032
  • Country: us
  • Electronics, RF, and TEA Hobbyist
Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #22870 on: January 16, 2019, 09:23:12 pm »
Hey, if it works for you, that's all that matters.  :-+

Oh, yeah... what a person prefers is usually based on what they know. Fear of the unknown is the biggest motivator in human history. ;)



BTW... the image on that pandoc.org site you linked to... it is both beautiful in its primitiveness, and at the same time it makes my brain hurt on a visceral level.

Well done!  :-DD


mnem
*Back to the salt mines*


Yeah, it makes my eyes hurt too!  :-DD It's a nice directed graph. :)
 

Offline bd139

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 23018
  • Country: gb
Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #22871 on: January 16, 2019, 09:30:55 pm »
Look up graphviz. It is used to generate these things
 

Offline bitseekerTopic starter

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 9057
  • Country: us
  • Lots of engineer-tweakable parts inside!
Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #22872 on: January 16, 2019, 09:32:10 pm »
Fixed that by ordering an ADF4355 based signal generator*.    :palm:    :-DD

Perfect TEAmanship there, URI. :-+

Interested to see what processor and or software it might come with too? Or maybe if this software might recognize it? https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/adf4350-adf4351-based-oled-rf-source-generators/msg2123467/#msg2123467

Yes, let us know, URI, what all you get with it. I'm curious how the designs, performance, etc. differ between cheap and cheaper implementations.
TEA is the way. | TEA Time channel
 

Offline beanflying

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 7358
  • Country: au
  • Toys so very many Toys.
Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #22873 on: January 16, 2019, 09:32:39 pm »
Not sure if this is well known The Boat Anchor Manual Archive
Yes, I think it is, I often get manuals from this site.  :-+

Seemed strange last night was the first time I had run across it and it's luscious PDF's

Coffee, Food, R/C and electronics nerd in no particular order. Also CNC wannabe, 3D printer and Laser Cutter Junkie and just don't mention my TEA addiction....
 

Offline bitseekerTopic starter

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 9057
  • Country: us
  • Lots of engineer-tweakable parts inside!
Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
« Reply #22874 on: January 16, 2019, 09:33:37 pm »
A bit late but an old (of course working) HP SpecAn, surrounded by a Tek 545, HP 5245L and other HP and nixie goodness!



Such wonderful toys! Party at Rob's shack! :popcorn:
TEA is the way. | TEA Time channel
 


Share me

Digg  Facebook  SlashDot  Delicious  Technorati  Twitter  Google  Yahoo
Smf