Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) : Discussion and Group Therapy Thread

[mnementh]

You mean Unicode ones
?

The emojis that actually display appear (at least on my end) to correspond to the GitHub flavor variant.

Of course as always, take with a grain of salt big enuf to pickle a dwagon...

mnem
YMMV, DQMOT, IANAL, WTFBBQ, DILLIGAF?!?

[mnementh]

Rare as unicorn farts those.

Unicorn-wife farted at me just this morning...

mnem

Still the One.png

[bd139]

You mean Unicode ones
?

The emojis that actually display appear (at least on my end) to correspond to the GitHub flavor variant.

Of course as always, take with a grain of salt big enuf to pickle a dwagon...

mnem
YMMV, DQMOT, IANAL, WTFBBQ, DILLIGAF?!?

The emoji situation is a shit show quite frankly. They are Unicode but some OS vendors chose not to bother updating their platforms properly. Microsoft I'm looking at you in particular but Linux isn't much better. The only vendor that actually renders all of them correctly and with any reasonable visual integrity is Apple.

Obviously this leads to gaps in support so people are forced to rely on Twitter's CDN for emojis which is what you can see in the forum and probably GitHub (I haven't looked - I don't use them professionally).

https://twemoji.twitter.com

In an editable field you see your platform native emoji support.

The details are important when it comes to this stuff. Which is why most of the industry is a disaster. Details account for expense and only one company is spending.

[mnementh]

Yeah, I was just thinking:

"I mean, yeah... I guess it's all the same thing. Or am I thinking of the diff in appearance between how Winblows vs MacOS renders them...?"

OTOH, there's a reason I often just use Koloboks instead.

mnem

[bd139]

The best answer is to collect up your poo and send it to your favourite vendor until they implement at least Unicode 14.0 properly

(it should be vendor specific because the generic ones look like ass on high DPI displays)

[Zenith]

That reminds me of the time I ordered 100x 1N4004's from them as part of an order. The diodes arrived in a separate consignment after being delayed for 2 days. Each diode arrived in a separate small plastic bag. They were cut from tape. This was put inside another bag and obviously because by the time it got to that state it was too big to fit in a jiffy bag, it arrived in a bloody great big box with packing pillows in it.

I received 97 diodes. Three bags were empty.

Haha! I hope you complained about the missing three.

Some of their stuff is sold as single items "cut from tape". It shows a particular rigidity of thought to feel obliged to cut them from tape and bag them individually, rather than put the tape with 100 on into a single bag. They use a bloody great box with packing pillows at the drop of a hat. This is OK apart from that if no one is in when it comes, it's a pain.

They're like a lot of places, geared up to have the items in stock, and then things run smoothly - more or less. If it's an order for 20 or 30 items and some items aren't in stock, or part of the number ordered is in stock, it gets messy.

Ebuyer are another lot like that. Put in an order where some things are not in stock, and it can be held up until the final item is in stock. By then one of the items that was in stock has gone out of stock. They don't reserve anything against orders. You can also find that the price of one of the items on backorder has dropped, so strike it from the order and then put it back.

[Cubdriver]

I'll give you $25 cash for it.

Lucky dog......nice find.

Though I appreciate you making it, I'm afraid I must decline your generous offer.

If you wish, however, I could point you towards several examples on the Bay of Malcontent who's sellers are only asking between ~20 and 28X what you proposed.

Rare as unicorn farts those.

That's why it took so long for me to get one!! There are unicorn farts out there, but they are VERY pricy!!

-Pat

[mnementh]

The best answer is to collect up your poo and send it to your favourite vendor until they implement at least Unicode 14.0 properly

(it should be vendor specific because the generic ones look like ass on high DPI displays)

That all has a completely different context as I am right now prepping for a colonoscopy.

mnem
Before long, all they'll be looking at is scaly dwagon arse...

[bd139]

That reminds me of the time I ordered 100x 1N4004's from them as part of an order. The diodes arrived in a separate consignment after being delayed for 2 days. Each diode arrived in a separate small plastic bag. They were cut from tape. This was put inside another bag and obviously because by the time it got to that state it was too big to fit in a jiffy bag, it arrived in a bloody great big box with packing pillows in it.

I received 97 diodes. Three bags were empty.

Haha! I hope you complained about the missing three.

Some of their stuff is sold as single items "cut from tape". It shows a particular rigidity of thought to feel obliged to cut them from tape and bag them individually, rather than put the tape with 100 on into a single bag. They use a bloody great box with packing pillows at the drop of a hat. This is OK apart from that if no one is in when it comes, it's a pain.

They're like a lot of places, geared up to have the items in stock, and then things run smoothly - more or less. If it's an order for 20 or 30 items and some items aren't in stock, or part of the number ordered is in stock, it gets messy.

Ebuyer are another lot like that. Put in an order where some things are not in stock, and it can be held up until the final item is in stock. By then one of the items that was in stock has gone out of stock. They don't reserve anything against orders. You can also find that the price of one of the items on backorder has dropped, so strike it from the order and then put it back.

I did indeed complain about it. I decided it was the largest punishment for them to request them to refund the £0.03 because they'd have to fill in the RMA missing parts paperwork at their end which was complicated apparently. I only needed 4 diodes - it was just cheaper and sensible to buy 100 of them.

I've had the same problem when trying to recap stuff. They are the cheapest vendor of the Vishay axial electrolytics (ex BC / Philips lines) which are used in a lot of European kit. Unfortunately stock counts for each capacitor type are in the 3-10 items left levels usually. This results in problems as there is some numerical "noise" around 2 parts which means that it's between 0-2. Mostly because some chungfucket couldn't count previously. One capacitor lot took three deliveries and six calls for them to get right.

On a positive note I did actually get half of someone else's order once as well. It contained an SSD and some work gloves. I figured that I'd be honest send it back as it was an OCZ SSD and those were shit so I'd rather someone else suffered to save a tenner.

I never use eBuyer for that reason as well. Also their RMA process is shit. CCL are about the only half decent vendor left in that space. Oh and Amazon but again RMA issues. Unless you're a high rolling customer, Amazon don't give a monkeys about you.

[bd139]

The best answer is to collect up your poo and send it to your favourite vendor until they implement at least Unicode 14.0 properly

(it should be vendor specific because the generic ones look like ass on high DPI displays)

That all has a completely different context as I am right now prepping for a colonoscopy.

mnem
Before long, all they'll be looking at is scaly dwagon arse...

I am reminded of this for some reason:

[mnementh]

I 'spect things will be considerably more messy.

mnem
Bring a trowel. err, towel.

[AVGresponding]

Ok, I edited my fire alarm post to make normal sized pics, and added some description.

[Robert]

The total cost of ownership is too high and utility is too low to consider keeping it. I added the sum of all expenses together, took off the current value and divided it by the number of miles I've done and it comes out at £0.39/mile just for incidental costs of it existing. Add fuel at current costs at £0.15/mile and it's just not worth it. In context I'd have to use it more to reduce the cost but I don't need to.

To put it in perspective I need to go to Stroud in a couple of weeks. 200 mile round trip at .39 .15 + 200 * is £108. The train there is £50.60 and I get to sit on my arse and read a book at the same time. I am aware I'm going to miss radio rallies but eBay is working out far more productive at the moment.

Same with an upcoming trip to Edinburgh. £166 on the train. 4:40 each way. By car 7h each way and £440.

Nope it's going. Will get a trash bike for local use and use the busses.

I'm surprised at the per-mile costs you arrived at, that seems way more expensive than it should be. Also bear in mind that your incidental costs are not linear; the more miles you do, the lower the per-mile figure is.

It's probably cheaper still to fly to Edinburgh and back, probably via Amsterdam or something equally ridiculous. I certainly wouldn't fancy a 7 hour each way drive.

I've driven to Edinborough more than conce. A memorable one was a call from the ex-owner (he had sold it a few months previously) of the company I worked for asking me to come and look at an aircraft fault. Trouble was it was 7PM on a Friday and I was flying on holiday on Saturday. I lived on the south coast at the time. I declined, but he started talking about hiring a plane to get there (not going to happen at 7PM in 1989). So I let at 9PM in a work 1.6 NA diesel Ford Fiesta Van. I made one real stop, waiting for a fuel station to open and arrived at the aircraft hangar at about 7AM. Boss turned up at 8 to find me trying to get into the office. "what are you doing?" he says, "trying to get a coffee" He was upset tht I wasn't working on the sircraft andsomeone else wasn't getting me a coffee. I said "aircraft's fixed, took me ten minutes". It was a maritime search aircraft and the radar would not stabilise. A large contract hung on it flying that afternoon. Ferranti (local manufacturer of the radar) and the local engineers had not been able to find the fault. I looked at the systen and noticed that the "compass" on the radr operators console wasn't working. This was driven from the inertial navigation system that also stabilsied the radar. Both magnetic heading and attitude (pitch & roll) synchro outputs used a common 26V 400Hz reference. The compass indictor was powered from the reference supply. The indicator had shorted and blown the fuse.....
The lady at the BA ticket desk in Edinborough a ticket for a flight from Exeter. After a joke about along taxi ride I asked for a refund on those oand a new ticket from Edinborough. They wanted to just change the ticket but as the boss was paying for the new one I wanted a refund

[mansaxel]

it was not.

This is why my Fluke 123 sits on the bench. As soon as I'm even little in the vicinity of mains I'm poking with that one first.

[mansaxel]

If you are worried about being in the dark because of power cuts, or you just uses torches a lot, you could consider getting a torch with a Cree LED and a Li-ion battery.

I have a Led Lenser T2 in a belt pouch constantly. It saves me frequently. As I went to work in the "glamorous entertainment business" in the early 90s I bought my first Mini Maglite and kept it in a belt holder too. I also have a now pretty dated Petzl head lamp, which still is useful, but the light levels are a joke compared to the T2. I remember how powerful I thought it was as I wore it for my first 4000 meter peak in the Italian alps. (you start walking about 4:30 in the morning, in pitch black, so that you reach the peak about midday and have plenty of daylight to get down.) These days, not so much.

For power cuts, I have a kerosene lantern. And a Trangia. (which soon needs a new butane/propane can, btw. Still perhaps one meal worth of in the can. )

[mansaxel]

Is there a sleeper service to Edinburgh, as there is to Glasgow?

Yup. Caledonian Sleeper. 23:50 from Euston, 07:30 in Edinburgh. Not cheap.

[bd139]

Sod that. 4h40m on LNER. I can sit still that long and my laptop battery will still be at 75% at the end of it

[mansaxel]

Sod that. 4h40m on LNER. I can sit still that long and my laptop battery will still be at 75% at the end of it

Basking in the glory that's ECML. Yes, I'd do it. I'd not, OTOH, take Avanti on the more westerly route. You will not likely arrive in time, and not even get to travel on the Settle-Carlisle line.

[mnementh]

The latest installment of "Audiophoolery for Fun & Profit!"

Shut up, bd... even you can cut Linus some slack on this one.

mnem
We prefer "reptile lubricant", BTW...

[mansaxel]

even you can cut Linus some slack on this one.

Even I can. These people (the 'phools) have never heard of (or at least never understood) TCP checksums. And being consumers they will never run anything but TCP. Because the dudes who pretend to be brogrammers today don't understand anything else than HTTPS over TCP. Or QUIC, but that's really only a variant of UDP with retransmissions.

If you're running low-latency Audio over IP using AES67 or similar, you're in for a ride when buying switches, though. We don't use anything less than a Cisco Nexus 9348, list price US$17,545.00 to do that. Nobody pays list, of course.

This is mostly to enable timing transfer, another problem the 'phools have ignored. Because the 10$ XO in the CD player that controls sample frequency is good enough for them. I'd like to see CD players with a Word Clock input, and 'phool style GPSDO with Word Clock out. Such devices exist; i have 2 at work, for this very purpose.

[vk6zgo]

mnem
YMMV, DQMOT, IANAL, WTFBBQ, DILLIGAF?!?

" IANAL?"---we know you're "anal", what else is new?

[bd139]

Shut up, bd... even you can cut Linus some slack on this one.

I still want to punch his face. It's just so punchable.

[bd139]

Sod that. 4h40m on LNER. I can sit still that long and my laptop battery will still be at 75% at the end of it

Basking in the glory that's ECML. Yes, I'd do it. I'd not, OTOH, take Avanti on the more westerly route. You will not likely arrive in time, and not even get to travel on the Settle-Carlisle line.

If you want misery, the Midland Main Line running the old class 43 HST sets was the worst. Slow, unreliable, bumpy and you end up in Nottingham at the end of it!

[vk6zgo]

A few OT ramblings:-

Of late, I have been doing a few things that gentlemen of my age & degree of decrepitude probably shouldn't be doing.

I farted around on top of a stepladder, trying to remove a piece of galvanised pipe supporting a ham radio 2m vertical antenna, with zero success.
The next step was to teeter on the stepladder with an angle grinder, so I left that for later, & went to #2 on the agenda, which was cutting some previously salvaged "Medium Density Fibreboard" to size to make shelves for a rack.

The device of choice for this job was my antique Makita circular saw, the blade of which, had seen better days----it would probably work, but I thought to myself, "You doddering old fool, it will kick back, & you'll end up cutting part of your person off!".
I resolved to "leave it for tomorrow", when I could buy a new blade.

Today is that "tomorrow" but before going to the hardware store I needed to shave & shower.
As I needed hot water for my shaving mug, I did what I normally do---make a cup of instant coffee, drink it, then use the remaining water for my whiskers.

Grabbing the kettle, I set off to the bathroom, where I discovered a large, dead fly in my shaving mug----Yuk!
Placing the kettle on one of the shelves of the bathroom cabinet, where it seemed quite stable,I started vigorously cleaning the mug (in the back of my mind there was a bit of a "niggle", but I thought "What can happen if it does fall?---- After all, the water isn't scalding any more.")

Of course, the kettle did fall, not on its side as I expected, but base down, hitting the top of my right wrist.
The bottom of these "cordless" kettles is mostly smooth plastic, with a small set of concentric contact rings in the middle, which gave me a couple of nasty gashes on the point of impact.

It wasn't a major drama, a big Bandaid covered it, but it is a bit amusing how I worried about possible injury for jobs where it seemed an obvious possibilty, then did something dumbarsed during an activity which should be hazard free!

I decided I wasn't up for anything today, but arguing with other OFs on the Internet.

[Robert]

Who are you calling an OF.
Just been fitting a bit of plasterboard while over-reaching on a small stepladder.....