Test Equipment Anonymous

Oh dear.

I presumed that was a poor translation, or somebody railing against LLM emissions

Nope; it is far too literal

BTW, the Germans I have known have had a perfectly good sense of humour!

One of the few things I've learned is that shit happens, and will always find a way to happen.

An interesting question is to what extent we should try (and often fail) to wrap our dependents (of whatever species) in cotton wool.

There is no right answer to that question.

That doesn't sound good. Although we have a road going past our back garden, it's pretty quiet, so our previous cats died of old age. I worry a bit about Heidi because there's not a lot between her ears, but she's 7 now, so she probably knows what she's about. I hope. Daughter's worry about her dog...

I hope all you left pondians enjoyed your celebrations, and that they concentrated on what brings Americans together to create a special country.

nixiefreqq wrote: ↑Sat Jul 04, 2026 12:01 pm ps whooooops! wasn't the dragon originally from pittsburgh? have not heard from that young fella' in a while.

I spent 17 months in Pittsburgh. From 8 weeks to 18 months old.

Don't remember it!

Accurate time to within a minute across the whole of the country wasn't a serious requirement until the coming of the railways with timetables to be kept. Railway tracks had telegraph and later telephone lines and so the infrastructure would be there. Another thing to look up, rather than rely on h...

There have, of course, been many Sherlock Holmes derivatives - almost all ignorable. I suspect they are popular since they reduce the need for all the elements to be introduced before a mortal puts the pieces together. Having an omniscient being makes life easier! There is, however, one modern varia...

And we've just discovered a new copy https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/202 ... k-archives

I hope most people manage to make the celebrations more about themselves and less about one particular narcissist.

I remember my neighbours cat throwing a mouse across the driveway, then chasing it and catching it. Rinse and repeat.

Never seen a dog be that cruel. Although daughter's dog has a string prey instinct, it hasn't caught anything yet. I suspect ragging would end any critter sharpish.

Like it or not, the net won. Because it is modular. I remember 30 years ago chewing the cud with colleagues while having lunch. There were two predictions... If this Internet shopping thing ever took off, there would be oodles of money to be made in support services such as logistics. Bit of no bra...

Splitting anything across multiple organisations encourages finger pointing and wasteful legal activities.

The BBC is definitely under financial pressure now.
Some would say it has been for 40 years.

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/ai-economics-for-dummies "As AI companies get ready to go public and we get a deeper look at their inner workings, it’s only natural to have questions about their finances, like “Do they make money?” and “How?” Here are a few examples to help the average layp...

tggzzz wrote: ↑Thu Jun 18, 2026 4:40 pm ... a shift of 2mHz.

Still drifting steadily upwards (about 5mHz in total), despite a vaguely constant room temperature over the past 6 hours. Will see what it is tomorrow morning

No idea what's happening to the other orientations.

... and then there's the linearity of the microphone, and loudspeaker plus room acoustics to consider. We'll ignore the the linearity of the ear-brain combination. Plus, what is the correct sound anyway, doubly so when the mixing and sound engineer's job is considered. Start by comparing the loved o...

There is no simple obvious way in which the cable could affect the frequency. I can dream up several convoluted "movie plot" mechanisms, but the problem is associating cause and effect. Im using "movie plot" in the same sense as Bruce Schneier: convoluted brittle and entertaining...

As with all data, it's important not just to look at the final result, but also how it got there. Histograms are a case in point because random additions (as described) are what you want to see, not a gently changing line of changes (usually due to temperature slowly changing). This afternoon's cas...

I've been seeing some unexplained variations in the measured stdDev, so I'm reluctant to give figures at the moment. Those measures were very fast; 100 samples over 50s per orientation, with maybe 30s rest after changing orientation. On returning to the "0" orientation, the frequency and ...

Interesting stuff. Some numbers on the noise in different orientations would be nice, although the visual comparison is good. I imagine the instrument has cursors, so it should be possible to measure the width of those peaks at half maximum amplitude (FWHM). I would expect the noise in all orientat...

A few more "that's funny" results using my 53310a to measure my 10811. The latter is in a diecast box, the PSU is bench28V -> capacitance multiplier -> 723 -> 10811 with the odd three terminal RF capacitor and smoothing capacitor thrown in. The (electronic) frequency control is hardwired t...

Useful info, but I'm not breaking and entering since the 10811 is working well

I'm just being ridiculously fussy. I'm prompted by the most interesting words in science: "that's funny", not "eureka".

I'm going to have to look inside the box containing the OCXO :( I suspect it works as well as it ever did and I suggest you'd be better off not messing with it. If it was clearly faulty, it would be different. My statement was ambiguous. I meant the box into which I put the 10811 plus PSU. Going in...

Yes and yes. Inside the 10811 the output is pretty well "disconnected" from the oscillator. tmp.png The Vcc is stable to 1mV in 11V, i.e. 10 -4 . That's much less than the 1%->10 -10 frequency change mentioned in the manual. I realise it is a reasonable presumption that the cable won't cha...

Or in Hz with commas added so as not to get lost in a string of digits, and assuming I've not made mistakes. 10,000,000.015,187,1 1.81 _9,999,999.992,451,8 1.36 _9,999,999.971,804,0 1.65 _9,999,999.995,544,2 1.25 _9,999,999.995,321,8 1.23 Essentially comparing two HP 10811-60111 OCXOs, one in the M...

Playing around with my HP/Agilent 53310A and various types of frequency source. Measuring an HP 10811-60111 OCXO I've got to the point where I'm having difficulty getting the right number of 9s when I transcribe the frequency the box's orientation matters; mean (MHz) and std deviation (mHz) for each...

Plucks "Most Secret War" off shelf, opens p532... Range determined by airscrew cutting off fuel. I don't believe believe the video claim of moving the elevator. Proposed feeding Germans the correct point of impact for bombs with a longer than average range, coupled with impact time for bom...