That moment when you hit seek on your car radio, and it stops on a channel that should be vacant with a dead carrier with a strange warbling beep every second, followed by a voice screaming “¡DISFRUTA!” and then the carrier drops without a trace
I swear my hair is still standing on end
“Hello, Derp Island Broadcasting, may I help you?”
“Hi, I’m with Papa November Network, and I’m interested in an LMA from your site.”
“Okay. We’ll give you 250 watts ERP from our expertly maintained state of the art transmitter site. However, you may not install remote monitoring here, and if you try to visit the site, you will be run off by our management. But rest assured you’re getting your money’s worth.”
*click*
“Hey, can you go check on our station on Derp Island?”
I have screamed internally all I can and now I must shitpost
Oh. Look. A cool waterspout.
The one underlying rule of living in Southeast Florida:
If you can afford to make life difficult for everyone else, you are required to make this investment.
Examples of this include the pictured Stallonegate, countless ten foot concrete walls in residential areas, the building of condo towers in areas where the infrastructure can’t support them, the entire city of Golden Beach, people paying $14.50 a pop to further encourage the spread of Lexus lanes, etc…
Not only is it one of Florida’s most notorious police traps, but it’s also kind of literally useless. Last night they abruptly sealed off all traffic on A1A for over three hours to start checking vehicles… Guess the ticket quota was running behind.
But what even is Golden Beach?
Useless.
From 1981:
They are the poster child for shitty little beach towns, really.
Found this cast off in the garage here. This unit has less storage in it than the hard drive in my laptop nowadays, but boy, was it ever cool for its time, and the way it’s implemented is nothing short of amazing.
At center: The AIT tape drive. To the left, the loading assembly. At right (not visible) is a small motorized access door and LCD user panel.
Each tape has a barcode label, and this scanner flicks on to read it.
The tape cartridges and the library unit support R-MIC (REMOTE Memory In Cassette). 64 kilobytes of metadata are accessible via an RFID interface.
As the library queries these chips, it does a very strange and very slow little dance, rocking the wheel back and forth. I had no idea what it was doing at first. I suppose I could skip this by turning off R-MIC from the front panel. The barcode scanner works almost instantly, like, you know, any other proper modern barcode scanner 😉
Inside the AIT drive. I just thought its little tiny BLDC direct drive reels were kinda awesome.
The CPU board looks very… well, very Sony… all of THOSE capacitors… Also, the RAM and Flash were put up on that pluggable daughterboard, probably due to this same CPU board being used in a couple different units with different storage needs…
The motor and gear train that move the loader back and forth…
And the big motor that rotates the turntable. The turntable moves on a set of sealed ball bearing rollers, it’s very slick!
At left and right: IR emitter and detector. These just beam right through each tape slot to determine if a tape is in place.
The loader grasps a tape via the two claws at the front, which land in recesses in the back of the AIT cartridge. This allows it to grab the tape cartridge positively and securely for handling. The small metal finger directly to the left of the R-MIC logo on the cartridge is the write protect sensor; if the cartridge is set to write protect, it’ll fall into the hole opened up by the tab having been moved and the opto interrupter flag at the right side of the blue circuit board will clear the sensor to indicate the cartridge has been marked read only.
Load and make ready……….
Video contains loud and very unfitting music. You’re welcome. I want to make a better video of this but my phone is rebooting after about 30 seconds of video… It’s telling me “go buy that BlackMagic Pocket Cinema camera… you know you want it… MICRO FOUR THIRDS GOODNESS…”
May I take a moment to express my admiration to auto makers for not putting sight glasses or high side service ports on their air conditioning systems??
Sure, while having a gauge on the high side while charging and testing the system isn’t an absolute necessity, it helps a lot!! It can warn you if the system is overcharged, the orfice tube or thermal expansion valve is obstructed, or of bad cylinders in the compressor (wild gauge vibrations).
Excessive high side pressure can pop the compressor or even cause an explosion.
With only a low side port, you might as well just be using one of these stupid “pound my system in the ass” cans.
Believe it or not, I’d actually say the TOP of that can is kinda alright to use, if you have a one port system. Guilty parties I’ve seen this from to date: Mazda, Ford, and Volvo.
The problem is the can. These kits come with a can of pure death: the can injects additional compressor oil into the system as well as a “stop leak” compound.
The additional oil can really screw things up. It’s not compressible. There’s a sump in the bottom of the compressor that collects it and splashes it on the swash plate drive and backs of the piston rings. Overfill and it will enter the cylinders and cause liquid slugging which will bend and break parts. BANG!!!
Stop leak is just vile. The most common form is a substance that soaks into, swells up, and structurally weakens elastomer O-ring seals. There just aren’t that many in a car a/c system and they are easy to replace. The proper procedure is, if you have a leak, have the system recharged and a UV dye injected. This will make the leak glow and it can be detected with a blacklight. The o-ring can be changed after recovering the refrigerant. My own experience has been that a compressor seal failure tends to follow the use of one of these, leading to a slow expensive leak.
Okay, so if you still really want to use one of these goofy can top kits….
Do not use the can with stop leak and oil. Get a can of straight up R-134a ONLY.
Put a digital thermometer in a dash vent and place it where you can watch it while charging. If you observe a rise in temperature, STOP, turn off the ac system immediately, and go confess to your local actual professional what you’ve done.
NEVER TURN THE CAN UPSIDE DOWN. You’ll slug the compressor.
At least it’s clean
Did a double take at this, but it’s… Correct?!
There are two places I can think of that I’ve been to where I felt like a horrible match to the crowd there:
1. The Bal Harbour Shops in Bal Harbour, Florida.
I don’t think I’ve had enough starring roles in movies or television or been an old Russian mobster long enough to belong there.
2. A Tractor Supply Co. store.
Being the goth dude who walks in there in black leather …..
Well at least that wasn’t a total waste, I got to watch the little cheeplets.
And I laughed immaturely at these.
No! Not the metaphorical one. The real one!
Drum roll………..
Success! The lizard poop was not load bearing.
