Re: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) : Discussion and Group Therapy Thread
Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2022 2:36 pm
Test equipment addicts, unite!
https://teanonymous.com/f1/
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.
Haha! I hope you complained about the missing three.bd139 wrote: ↑Tue Nov 01, 2022 2:19 pm
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.
Though I appreciate you making it, I'm afraid I must decline your generous offer.
That's why it took so long for me to get one!! There are unicorn farts out there, but they are VERY pricy!!
That all has a completely different context as I am right now prepping for a colonoscopy.
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.Zenith wrote: ↑Tue Nov 01, 2022 3:19 pmHaha! I hope you complained about the missing three.bd139 wrote: ↑Tue Nov 01, 2022 2:19 pm
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.
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'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.....AVGresponding wrote: ↑Mon Oct 31, 2022 6:07 pmI'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.bd139 wrote: ↑Mon Oct 31, 2022 2:49 pm 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.
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.
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.
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.
Yup. Caledonian Sleeper. 23:50 from Euston, 07:30 in Edinburgh. Not cheap.
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.
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 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!