Test Equipment Anonymous

A friend's cat. This is an evil bastard. It spent the entire evening nudging people off furniture that it clearly considered itself the owner of. Very cleverly it'd snuggle up behind them and then ratchet its way across the furniture slowly pressuring them into falling off

Couple of actual 10x8" prints from yesterday... (don't ask but it required eBay that puts TEA to shame )


This is like crack

Been a few years but thoroughly enjoying it!

tggzzz wrote: ↑Sun Feb 08, 2026 11:31 pm As you get older everybody really should come to appreciate Cassandra's plight more acutely.

Doing most things for the first time is more interesting than repeating experiences. But by the 10th time...

Oh totally agree there!

Once upon a time, within living memory, "computer" was a job title. The stuff that is tedious has changed, yet again. Yes. I think we built enough layers on top of the interesting stuff and surrounded them with enough bullshit to make them tedious again. On that note despite being a miser...

Showing them TNMoC will be a very useful demonstration of the antithesis of hamdom. Or of why a geek is not a dork nor a nerd. Yes that contrast is needed. There's a lot of romance around the whole radio thing but most of it was boring and writing card indexes. At least the computers took the tedio...

Event report... not worth a separate thread. So I organised a trip to Bletchley Park. Had a not insignificant horde of 26 people in total shovelled around in the site in the pissing rain and return transport issues. I did see some TE but this was Rigol and was during the visit to the NRC which got m...

Bugger colour dev and printing. I have 3 rolls of Kodak Gold 200 turning up tomorrow. I plan to blow one in the next month (after the roll of HP5 in the body) and get it developed locally. Then throw the other two at Berlin in March. I have a place lined up who will process it there already. No prin...

Bit further down the photography rabbit hole. We like rabbit holes here don't we?

Way too much eBay later we have .... a Durst 305 and a pile of chemicals and widgets.


Followed by a back ache and some swearing ....

As for printing, I have a little Canon Selphy printer that does 6x4" prints on dye sub as good as a professional print shop. That's a reasonable option. Laser printer, hmm not sure about that :) But yeah phone / digital cameras are good for documentation and utility. How often do you want a re...

Every single camera is crap, unless it is available and working when you want it. That's a significant advantage of modern digital compact cameras. Decent ones allow focussing down to 1cm, which is great for components and Tek 475 mechanisms :) https://www.eevblog.com/forum/repair/renovating-an-ear...

I wish 35mm Kodachrome 64 was still available. Then I could continue to take stereo photos with my Stereo Realist camera. They still make 35mm colour reversal film. It is quite frankly bloody expensive though. Stereoscopic needs the fine grain of 64ASA. Larger grain cannot be ignored by the brain, ...

Keep it. Don't lose it. Very handy things. Surprisingly film isn't even not even remotely dead. I didn't realise this until recently. There's a bit of resurgence I've noticed in separating activities from the mobile phone. This is a good thing. Makes people look and think and consider more. I've so...

A couple of years back I was walking down the street and there was a young woman about 20 with a Pentax film camera. I commented on it and she said this was real photography. It conjured up images of Cartier-Bresson, who thought cropping a photo in post capture was disgusting manipulation. He was r...

Good grief! Film is still available? I have an F4 (not that I've used it for years). I wish 35mm Kodachrome 64 was still available. Then I could continue to take stereo photos with my Stereo Realist camera. They still make 35mm colour reversal film. It is quite frankly bloody expensive though.

Will note how far down the rabbit hole this photography thing is going ... this was shot on Ilford HP5 on a Nikon F80 and developed at home :lol: DSC_0506.jpeg Yes, something has been lost with the almost passing of film photography. I remember the magic of seeing an image appear in the developer s...

A little off topic but I must inform bd139. Your heart throb buxom redhead Christina Hendricks is in a Netflix series "Good Girls" which is a pretty good watch in addition to the eye candy. And boy is that some nice eye candy. :lol: I don't know if that series is available on Netflix UK b...

I use a parser generator (I wrote one) for that and a proper language. The only way. Some of the stuff I see people parsing with awk/perl is horrifying. awk makes for a pretty powerful and always efficient parser if your file format is remotely decent. Latest thing I wrote for money in it is a thin...

IMHO the 4[6,7,8]x semiconductors and ICs are all pretty similar. Sometimes the mechanical construction of the 485 makes it a real pig to service, though. Standard Tektronix. The Perl of oscilloscopes. Write/Build only. Modify/repair is hell. Yeah :( I looked at PERL, thought thank the <deity> I do...

Here's one of the functional 485's on top of a 2235. The later series of portable TEK scopes tend to be much easier to service with the advent of LSI circuitry. Those 465/475/485's were still packed with discrete components. IMHO the 4[6,7,8]x semiconductors and ICs are all pretty similar. Sometime...

I've been in the room when it was running at TNMOC. It sure feels like 2.8kw!

That's a very unusual Farnell power supply; never knew they made a programmable version. In the 80s and 90s, Farnell LT30 supplies were ubiquitous in teaching and at the BBC. Wireless World was full of adverts for them from the 70s onwards. As mentioned, they also made quite reasonable signal gener...

Hey I used to get all my ripped off Cisco IOS firmware from .ru domains

Realism: you didn't say "find the faulty tant" :) Hey I did find it in the end. It was however disguised as a silver mica! post6_vJAH1z1_gpEbN.jpg The yellow bead one with the brown dot? Oh no that'd be too easy. Yes that is actually indeed a tant. post6_vJAH1z1_gpEbN.jpg

tggzzz wrote: ↑Fri Oct 03, 2025 10:09 am Realism: you didn't say "find the faulty tant"

Hey I did find it in the end. It was however disguised as a silver mica!

It's probably fine. Those things go off all the time like the paranoid crackies they are.

Good to know it was ripped off though.