Test Equipment Anonymous

Question for my fellow Brits. I noticed that most British homes have a Yagi type antenna on the roof. Is this for local HD broadcasts? And if so, why not over the net instead? Roof antennas on this side of the pond are a unicorn today. In the days of analog TV and before cable TV they were on every...

Yeah :( I remember chemistry lessons where we were given mercury, others where we were issued with a small lump of sodium, and many many lessons where we demonstrated the presence of hydrogen using the squeaky pop method. I know they don't do the latter anymore, since I demonstrated it to my daughte...

Ah yes, McMichael last year, held on the bumpy field with serious pot holes, is one few will forget. It was as if the ground had been undermined by badgers. I wonder what the tally of broken ankles etc was. I've just looked on the https://geologyviewer.bgs.ac.uk/ That field is "London Clay&quo...

Yeah but what would you do in my position ? ... Turning a blind eye has been my MO and they keep coming back for more products having saved a few bucks not needing to purchase options. There's nothing preventing a user modifying any equipment. Noticeable problems arise if there is a warranty claim....

No doubt some pro's hack but they're normally one man bands with shallow pockets whereas the real pro's cough up for the BW and optional features they need. That's what I suspected. Startups and very small companies might sail close to the wind, but established companies, the military and governmen...

And then there is moving devices to new processes. Usually that won't matter, but modern 2N3055s can oscillate due to higher bandwidth https://www.eevblog.com/forum/blog/eevblog-1752-wtf-texas-instruments-big-ne5532-changes/msg6276104/#msg6276104 some op amps have had the input offet control pins re...

Was it only me, or was it impossible to get into the forum over the last couple of days? I had problems too. There has been "strange traffic" observed elsewhere e.g. "For some reason this thread has become super active again in the last 24 hours :-// We are supposed to be blocking AI...

A privately-owned computer museum I hadn't come across before, in the Yorkshire Wolds. From https://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/whats-on/whats-on-news/i-went-englands-least-visited-9450159 "I went to England’s least-visited tourist attraction and had a major surprise in store" there is a link ...

Tektronix and HPAK have been doing it for decades. I bought my Tektronix TDS3032 oscilloscope in about 2000 and on one of the firmware updates I discovered it was sampling at 5GS/s rather than maximum of 2.5GS/s that I'd paid for. The next firmware update "corrected" that. ... but it rais...

Just so.

I was just about to write up some timenuts-style notes, based on 198kHz, OCXOs, "frequency microscope", and a GPSDO Zenith loaned me.

Then Events/Eventualities happened, to use the Harold Macmillan / gliding terminology.

Ought to get out of my bed chair and write them up.

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...