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

[mnementh]

Soldiers all in a row...



Sgt Dustbin: "Atten-SHUNN!!!"

mnem
Done for another year... :whew:

Just fall leaves ?
Excuse for a bonfire and have neighbors over for drinks.

Yeah, on the farm we'd have just baled it up with the scrubgrass for bedding. But I'm not living on the farm anymore; this is civilization.

The rules are a wee bit different, and honestly, my lungs won't take the smoke anymore. No wood in the fireplace neither; my throat and chest just clench up and I start to wheeze.

A misspent yout' of partying and drinking and smoking and carousing... now my body is having to honor all those check I wrote when I was young & dumb & fulla cum.

mnem
"A wasted youth is better by far... than a wise & productive old age." ~Meat Loaf

[tautech]

One of the reasons I hate deciduous trees, they down right messy fucks !
Neighbor over the road 'prettied up' his roadside with them darn messy fuckers for which their leaves get blown all over our place each fall/autumn. Thanks but I can make enough mess around here without any help from others !

[MED6753]

Something I read today that I suspect will be familiar to Anders and Graham, or anyone else who's regularly done any sort of site work on a construction site or similar.

"Fitter we used to work with used to just stand there and watch others doing the work, just casting a shadow ... so we called him 'Sundial'."

I love work: I could watch it all day.

Agreed. I love watching all the minions going to work to insure I get my Social Security check each month.

[MED6753]

Something I read today that I suspect will be familiar to Anders and Graham, or anyone else who's regularly done any sort of site work on a construction site or similar.

"Fitter we used to work with used to just stand there and watch others doing the work, just casting a shadow ... so we called him 'Sundial'."

Common sight with road crews. One guy in the hole digging and three guys standing around watching him.

[bitseeker]

I'm here now. It's taken some time, the main reason being that I was in a car accident a couple of weeks ago so I've been taking things slowly and haven't been doing a whole lot lately.

I did pick up a second HP 16C the other day so I can have a 15C + 16C pair on my bench at work as well as the bench at home.

Welcome back! Good to hear you're on the mend and you should check out the Calculator forum. It's getting more action than I expected.

[Zucca]

What bd was preaching since years....

Do you any experience with Proxomox?

BTW, I am smelling a Picoscope...

[Specmaster]

Something I read today that I suspect will be familiar to Anders and Graham, or anyone else who's regularly done any sort of site work on a construction site or similar.

"Fitter we used to work with used to just stand there and watch others doing the work, just casting a shadow ... so we called him 'Sundial'."

I love work: I could watch it all day.

Agreed. I love watching all the minions going to work to insure I get my Social Security check each month.

Amen to that

[Specmaster]

Something I read today that I suspect will be familiar to Anders and Graham, or anyone else who's regularly done any sort of site work on a construction site or similar.

"Fitter we used to work with used to just stand there and watch others doing the work, just casting a shadow ... so we called him 'Sundial'."

Not just site work either, my line manager was always putting on me, getting me to go to site with him to resolve problems that he had created, or come up with schemes for him, doing detailed quotes and schematics for him, and insisting on jumping ahead of everyone else, and then I later discovered that he even had the audacity to tell the company owners and directors that it was all his own work, bastard.

I now often wonder just how he faired now I'm no longer there doing his bidding, hopefully they rumbled him.

[Specmaster]

I'm here now. It's taken some time, the main reason being that I was in a car accident a couple of weeks ago so I've been taking things slowly and haven't been doing a whole lot lately.

I did pick up a second HP 16C the other day so I can have a 15C + 16C pair on my bench at work as well as the bench at home.

Welcome back! Good to hear you're on the mend and you should check out the Calculator forum. It's getting more action than I expected.

Yep, never underestimate the power of the calculator, I'm surprised really that there aren't more calculator forums around, they are becoming everyday workhorses as they become ever more clever in their ability.

[Zenith]

What bd was preaching since years....

If you you don't need low level I/O and you can connect to whatever devices you want via LAN or USB, second hand thin clients or USFF PCs can be a very good choice for a computer as a server, or monitoring, or just playing around with. Thin clients are typically £30 or less on ebay UK, but prices go a lot higher for the more modern ones.

They have a case, which you have to buy extra for a Raspberry Pi, and you can usually fit an SSD inside, but you may have to take it out of its case and use the bare board. Usually the RAM is DDR2 or DDR3 sticks, which you can get second hand. The power consumption on some can be a bit high for something left on all the time.

I have three thin clients which I enjoy playing with.

See here for a survey of the cheaper thin clients available second hand. I've found it very useful when I've been tempted to buy a thin client on ebay and wondered what exactly its capabilities were and whether an SSD could be fitted. It looks as if collecting thin clients is his hobby.

https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/

[mnementh]

One of the reasons I hate deciduous trees, they down right messy fucks !
Neighbor over the road 'prettied up' his roadside with them darn messy fuckers for which their leaves get blown all over our place each fall/autumn. Thanks but I can make enough mess around here without any help from others !

We deliberately chose this location because it has three big reds and a corner lot. We knew exactly what we were getting ourselves into; we just consider it the price of having our home right in the middle of a fresh O2 factory.

*inhales deeply* AHHHHHHHH!!!

mnem
*pats slowly shrinking fat-dwagon belly with some small measure of satisfaction*

Chortle.png

Besides; it's not like I can't use the exercise.

[nixiefreqq]

Honestly, with the wind that was blowing like ice-dragon breath by the time we were done, I'm just glad they weren't rolling around in the street like shinys whut just raided a wine cellar.

mnem

ft knox! am betting all those WW2 wood barracks are long gone now.

cold in the winter and hot in the summer.

i miss them.

[mnementh]

What bd was preaching since years....

If you you don't need low level I/O and you can connect to whatever devices you want via LAN or USB, second hand thin clients or USFF PCs can be a very good choice for a computer as a server, or monitoring, or just playing around with. Thin clients are typically £30 or less on ebay UK, but prices go a lot higher for the more modern ones.

They have a case, which you have to buy extra for a Raspberry Pi, and you can usually fit an SSD inside, but you may have to take it out of its case and use the bare board. Usually the RAM is DDR2 or DDR3 sticks, which you can get second hand. The power consumption on some can be a bit high for something left on all the time.

I have three thin clients which I enjoy playing with.

See here for a survey of the cheaper thin clients available second hand. I've found it very useful when I've been tempted to buy a thin client on ebay and wondered what exactly its capabilities were and whether an SSD could be fitted. It looks as if collecting thin clients is his hobby.

https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/

Another source of cheap compute power is broken laptops on fleaBay. Particularly the fleet and "slightly upscale" models still have respectable horsepower... 6th-8th gen i5-i7, DDR3/DDR4; in some cases even NVMe and SATA3... and can be had very cheap if the screen or shell is borked; just remove the display and print a stand for the lower half or a bracket to hang it off the VESA mount of your monitor.

Or if you're really feeling froggy, design/print a case for the whole thing. Many of them now have MBs that are <220mm x 220mm (most common size of small cheap 3DP build plate) including cooling solution.

Another nice thing aboot laptop MBs is they almost always include a license burned into the BIOS that's good for Win7-Win10. Obvi, not with ChromeBooks, but hey... you should know better.

mnem
Reuse is the highest form of recycling.

[mnementh]

ft knox! am betting all those WW2 wood barracks are long gone now. cold in the winter and hot in the summer.

i miss them.

I miss OD fatigues at the Thrift... grew up in them on the farm. Nothing you could buy in the store was as soft as decades-old military cotton twill; and it wore like iron. The stuff you find now is crunchy and it rubs my nipples raw, on top of being that hideous digital camo shite.

mnem
*mnemories*

[Zucca]

If you you don't need low level I/O

I am wondering if there is something to cover the hole... a low level I/O gizmo for TC PCs.

[Cerebus]

I miss OD fatigues at the Thrift...

I miss proper army surplus stores. Proper navy greatcoats, all sorts of interesting electrical and electronic doodads (field telephones anybody?) and ammo boxes:



Piles and piles or ammo boxes in every conceivable size and shape.

I had an ex-paras camouflage jump/combat smock bought for next to nothing from the local army surplus that was warm, comfortable, had more pockets than you could shake a stick at, and whisper quiet that was conspired away by my mother and an ex-girlfriend (redhead). I miss that jacket.

[Zucca]

I miss that jacket.

My wife victims were my beloved cargo pants... I missed them as well.
Let's drink some Lagavulin together...

Yes, I am Italian but sometime whiskey is the only way to go.

[Specmaster]

I miss OD fatigues at the Thrift...

I miss proper army surplus stores. Proper navy greatcoats, all sorts of interesting electrical and electronic doodads (field telephones anybody?) and ammo boxes:



Piles and piles or ammo boxes in every conceivable size and shape.

I had an ex-paras camouflage jump/combat smock bought for next to nothing from the local army surplus that was warm, comfortable, had more pockets than you could shake a stick at, and whisper quiet that was conspired away by my mother and an ex-girlfriend (redhead). I miss that jacket.

Yep, we used to have one, (well it was Army, Navy and RAF surplus), in town years ago and another in Southend-on-Sea, I remember I used to buy shirts, shoes, jackets and all kinds of other cool stuff, loads of electrical bits and bobs, tools and everything Whatever happened to them, I haven't seen one in years now.

[Zenith]

Another source of cheap compute power is broken laptops on fleaBay. Particularly the fleet and "slightly upscale" models still have respectable horsepower... 6th-8th gen i5-i7, DDR3/DDR4; in some cases even NVMe and SATA3... and can be had very cheap if the screen or shell is borked; just remove the display and print a stand for the lower half or a bracket to hang it off the VESA mount of your monitor.

Or if you're really feeling froggy, design/print a case for the whole thing. Many of them now have MBs that are <220mm x 220mm (most common size of small cheap 3DP build plate) including cooling solution.

Another nice thing aboot laptop MBs is they almost always include a license burned into the BIOS that's good for Win7-Win10. Obvi, not with ChromeBooks, but hey... you should know better.

mnem
Reuse is the highest form of recycling.

Yes, I've got nothing against SBCs and the Raspberry Pi in particular, and there are some things where they are an ideal fit, but I do think it's something of a bandwagon that people jump on without thinking about their needs, or being aware of the alternatives, in the form of NUCs, thin clients and laptops etc.

The first time I came across the Raspberry Pi when I found someone I knew was using one to monitor the temperature and humidity of his bee hives, about 6 years back. The sensors were connected through USB. The R Pi was £30 and the case was £5 and the PSU probably another £5. It really didn't need any computing power. A carefully chosen thin client (dirt cheap, because the CPU isn't fast enough for a pleasant desktop computing experience) would have been a cheaper and neater solution, and with about the same power consumption.

Something I don't like about the Raspberry Pi is the SD card and SATA HDD connected through USB, although I must say, it has caused me no particular problems.

[Zucca]

Yes, I've got nothing against SBCs

I hate SBCs, and there is a good reason why you do not see them in industrial production environments.
IMHO they are not reliable, good only to make some nerds happy and unhappy depending on the moon phases...

Thin Client are the way to go, NUCs seems a happy island.
Ah, a good thing is FreeBSD running on them.

Temped to install/try Arch linux on those little puppies....

[Zenith]

Yep, we used to have one, (well it was Army, Navy and RAF surplus), in town years ago and another in Southend-on-Sea, I remember I used to buy shirts, shoes, jackets and all kinds of other cool stuff, loads of electrical bits and bobs, tools and everything Whatever happened to them, I haven't seen one in years now.

In the 50s the armed forces were huge and were downsized over the next decades, so there'd always be a lot of stuff being sold off. I can remember a couple of shops in Worcester in 1970 with large amounts of ex-military stuff; clothes, razors, electronics. The last time I went to one was about 30 years ago and it mainly sold clothing. I'd guess that there just isn't the volume of stuff to get rid of that there used to be, so there isn't a shop in every town. H&S may play a part.

Anchor Supplies in Nottingham seem to specialise in ex-military stuff. I know people who've bought things from them and they've been happy with them.

https://www.anchorsupplies.com/

[Zenith]

Yes, I've got nothing against SBCs

I hate SBCs, and there is a good reason why you do not see them in industrial production environments.
IMHO they are not reliable, good only to make some nerds happy and unhappy depending on the moon phases...

Thin Client are the way to go, NUCs seems a happy island.
Ah, a good thing is FreeBSD running on them.

Temped to install/try Arch linux on those little puppies....

As I recall the Raspberry Pi was created as an educational computer, with the accent being on cheap. If you are going to design a course around something it has to be easily available new, and tolerably reliable.

The course could hardly start with Lesson 1 - Buy your second hand thin client off ebay.

From what I've seen, if you choose one with a halfway reasonable CPU - dual core and 1.5GHz at least - and especially if you make sure you have enough RAM and use an SSD, rather than the DoM thing that they usually have, you can run any version of Linux without much trouble. You don't have to go for one of the stripped down versions.

[Zucca]

BTW, I am smelling a Picoscope...

Probably I will get it, and I will try to run it on Arch linux on my new thin client PC.

I am trusting Robert on this one, I have high expectation from the PicoScope toy.... It will be my first one....

[mnementh]

The problem with pretty much all of Pi is that the whole thing is a kludge of crap slapped together literally by implementing the "example circuit layout" from MFR documentation and as little other consideration as possible.

As designed, Pi is not fit for purpose. Power supply faults, signal level mismatches that were ignored because cheaper, or just plain ignorant of the problem... there's a laundry list of design flaws introduced every iteration that's longer than the list of fixed bugs, too.

Seriously... almost everything I've read that isn't just fanbois gushing indicates it is complete amateur-hour stuff; Arduino is a paragon of order and foresight in comparison. I've seen many quadcopter flight controllers with better design consideration, and those are all designed by amateurs.

mnem
And cases that cost more than the board... there is a fundamental flaw in the logic there.

[Zucca]

How about a HPT630 ???

Slurp....