Unlike most loaves which rise, Tortie loaves gradually stretch out longer and longer.
I’m loaf’d
Ford Explorers can have a little corrosion, as a treat.
This *was* a headlight connector and bulb, it all just disintegrated into weird gray ash and burned a few inches back down the wire. Oh gee where have I seen this before?
After months of neglect, I redyed my hair. Interestingly it seems like the blacklight at my workbench has become…. a dim purple light. The UV emission appears to be mostly gone. I’m not surprised as this has always been a common failure mode of uv led emitters. A lot of plastics that are common in other LED carriers will degrade from the UV and begin to absorb it, letting through only the visible blue/violet color, if much at all. The bulb has been on 24/7 pretty much ever since I started doing rainbow hair so it’s given a good service life. It occurs to me that one of my coworkers who just came back to the office today has never seen me with rainbow hair before, and he didn’t say anything about it…… but he suddenly decided he’s now tired of only wearing black clothing! Well then… I’m glad to be bringing more color to the world. :3
There are visible black spots on top of the LED emitters in the “filament” now. I don’t remember if they’re that way on these bulbs new but I’ll compare them when I get a new one. That is assuming I don’t just get some UV LED tape for my workspace where I sit and yell about things like these cursed faders in a JLCooper audio controller.
A lot of equipment with motorized faders has pretty similar faders, but these are all weird and look almost like a totally custom bizarro construction. They’re not Alps, Penny & Giles, or Midas, they’re just weird and we kill them every year and change. Uh, okay.
Gain? Oh I love their detergent.
The hardest part of having false hope is when it all falls apart. Here, I’d been told that the PowerCD transmitter that I lovingly call the Space Station Toilet was going to be replaced starting in April or so.
Oops. Turns out nobody has any of the required supplies for that project in stock anywhere and production isn’t expected until July at least with an estimate on replacement being maaaaaybe September… and every tiny setback adds another fortnight of business days to the backlog. Time to start making this thing as happy as possible to prolong its final year (or decade?) of service…
Another adventure at the Space Station Restroom standing tall in a field by the river… This is cabinet #1 of 3. Cabinet 3 was the one that gave me such elegant fits before when I did a grid scrub. Cab 1 wasn’t causing as much drama but it just wasn’t making enough power prior to the scrub and was occasionally arcing out, roughly once a day. Let’s gooooooo to the wash!
Yes, of course it keeps trying to flip back to BG Heat every few minutes so you just have to stand there in front of it and pwap the standby button each time. Annoying. I thought about just raising the filament voltage in BG Heat but realized that’d be a terrible idea as the cooling system shuts down when you’re in BG Heat! I can’t remember if the air blower eventually goes down, but the water pump definitely does.
As I prepared to do the grid scrub (which requires hooking up an external power supply to the ESCIOT tube grid and cathode), I went into the high voltage cabinet with some isopropanol and blue shop towels and did a, well, scrub.
What’s that now? Oily sticky gook…. just like I found in the other cabinet? Hmm. I’m beginning to wonder if this is ethylene glycol that’s been electrostatically precipitated out of the air, since this rig is known to absolutely REEK of Dowtherm SR-1. The recirculating pump/reservoir unit is far from airtight so it just outgasses.
And now, Deja Moo: the feeling I’ve seen this BS before—
Look at the upper left: this robot has seen some shit, man
Amazingly I did not find it necessary to readjust the grid voltage after the scrub, it just… Worked. I was not expecting this. Not out of this turdly transmitter.
Then came the surprise. I was walking past checking the coolant system pressure on the pumps for the other transmitter in the room (a rather boring solid state ULXT-80) when I saw one of its variable frequency drives blinking “OCL”. Interesting. I first foolishly decided to take the cooling fan cover on the TEFC pump motor off, thinking I was going to find a seized pump. I spun the fan and found no unusual resistance. Upon opening the cover over the drives I was greeted by….. toast.
Not sure what went first, the screw terminal or the crimp forked terminal that was stuck in it, but something got hot until it cratered the poor drive. Ow! And to make matters more fun, as is always the case nowadays…. nobody seems to have these drives in stock anymore. Luckily, GatesAir has them, for about the same price as a better quality Fuji Electric drive from Grainger. Hmm. Do I…? I’ll have to make sure the Fuji has the right I/O first before doing anything that daring. On a side note, if GatesAir is going to charge that much for a drive they marked up like 100% they could at least take it out of the box and program it for you. They do not do this.
Then again this is the same manufacturer that charged us about $500 for four small rubber washers that I strongly suspect were just pieces of EPDM rubber hose cut carefully to length.
H. HhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.
It’s my personal opinion that these Toshiba drives are built like damn toilet paper. They were only common in everything because they’re cheap and have tons of I/O options. Bad power will murder them in no time. It didn’t even get a chance on this one as thermal runway at the terminals Popped It.
Well then, all that resolved, it was time for the last silly task of the day: go see why the surveillance camera up top was giving us no usable image….
Yeah, uh… That’ll do it.
iBoobs
This has been a shitpost.
Kitteh
Kitteh
For the want of a blue shop towel and some isopropanol
It’s done. It’s working. It’s……. perplexing as hell……
And I think it was just merely DIRTY!!!
So I was working on the Space Station Toilet again today. Over the past few days I had been gradually baby stepping it back up to normal output power from zero, and today after several crowbar dumps I almost entirely gave up on it before deciding…. hey, maybe that isn’t the tube, but something else. Something externally… arcy sparky? Anyway..
The first thing I decided to look at was the grid voltage setting. This is described in very short in the manual – you want to hook up a spectrum analyzer and adjust the grid voltage first so that you have less than 800mA cathode current with no drive, but then so you have the best possible shoulder attenuation without excessive cathode current once you have applied drive. In theory, it sounds like you should basically have a sweet spot in between the two. In practice…. I found that varying the grid voltage one step at a time allowed me to find a narrow peak. On one side I had excessively tall shoulders like some kinda wild vintage dress from the 80s, on the other side, the shoulders would abruptly pop back up accompanied by the amp faulting out on high collector current on collector #3 or #4, but without the cathode current being all that high compared to that on the other amps. Weird but, uh, ok.
So once I had the grid peaked up nicely, I decided to try running more power. I got to 100% of normal output and it was stable! Then I walked away and walked past the cabinet again and *BANG* *thump* *gronk* *screech* everything crapped out. It crowbarred and took down the whole UPS and caused the other two cabinets to stop and restart. A real fucko boingo, as they say UwU.
I tried bringing it back with the drive off. It thumped twice at the end of the quiescent verify stage and oopsie poopsied everything again dumping out its beamy weamy.
After about three cycles of not even being able to get into beam on with drive inhibited, I got very frustrated thinking the tube might have been damaged and kicked the cabinet. Now I was able to get into beam on again. Hmmmm…. Time to look around a bit. I shut off and grounded the rig for a look around. Now, this isn’t a picture of the same exact cabinet so you won’t see what I found but I’ll describe it…
The big silver suitcase looking thing is the “ISO Power Supply”. It is mounted on big insulating rails that look like they’re made of FR4 material or something similar. I was inspecting the high voltage leads above that go to the tube when my coworker and I noticed big oily sticky patches on both sides of the ISO supply case.
There was no apparent source for any oily substance to have dripped down onto the supply, so I pulled it out and opened it just in case I was missing something weird like a leaky oil filled cap that managed to get junk everywhere. The black plastic latch releases and it opens like a briefcase… Here’s what it looks like on a spare unit we have.
Left side — Top left: grid bias supply (up to about -300vdc, up to 50mA or so). Top right: filament supply (variable to at least 6.5v, uh– 20 amps?). Right side — left: ion pump power supply (-3.5kv, few microamps). Right: microcontroller with optical canbus I/O.
Well, on this one, something jumped out at me right away, and with that, the light came on.
The arc tracked layer of filth came off with a little careful cleaning. Where it was located, it would have been arcing right near the logic side of the grid voltage supply, perhaps glitching it out. Now, one of the things that varying the grid voltage does is to cause the cathode current to change.
The way the transmitter detects a damaging arc inside the eev ESCIOT inductive output tube is by looking for sudden noisy jumps in the cathode current. The supply wire runs through this big toroidal transformer on the “Spark Gap Interface” card.
The white object that looks like a big bottle stopper is a triggered spark gap tube. There are no power or signal connections to this card. All it does is if the current on the wire looped through the transformer at left, it rectifies the resulting ac current to DC, and uses the transistor hidden partially under the wire here to pulse the primary winding of the black trigger coil. This causes the spark gap unit to arc over, abruptly forcing the beam supply to ground and causing an ugly high current fault…. but protecting the tube from damage.
And what else could have been making the beam current dance and fire the spark gap? Yeah— a glitchy grid supply which would make the transconductance of the tube do the fandango.
And now the ridiculous beast is tame, running full power, big wattage, no whammies.
A sick, sad world.
Something really ridiculous just occurred to me after listening to a documentary on the Synanon cult and it’s one of those “glad that didn’t go anywhere” moments, and it hit me like a ton of bricks.
For various reasons I’ve suffered with anxiety and depression for a long time. I don’t know how much may be brain chemistry, how much may be environment (a LOT of it is definitely environment!) and how much may be dealing with past traumatic incidents. Back when I was attending Florida International University, they actually had a pretty good student health system that included mental health services that helped me out a lot for a while.
That is….. until the psychologist I was seeing was arrested due to involvement with Cuban espionage.
I mean— this was Miami, so could anyone be surprised? That’s a hell of a gray area. As various federal agencies came in performing parts of the investigation they COMPLETELY TRASHED the counseling and psychological services department of the student health and wellness services. Student and employee files were all seized and never returned, employees AND PATIENTS were all placed under ridiculous amounts of surveillance (yes, to the point that patient confidentiality was compromised), and most of the staff quit over it. This all basically happened over a summer semester when I wasn’t taking any classes at the university, and I came back not too long afterwards to try to see someone.
Well, that didn’t go great.
I was invited instead to join an “experimental, unstructured group therapy” model they were working on.
So this is where Synanon comes in, sadly. One of the tools the Synanon cult used for mind control and “treatment” of their members was something they called “The Game”*. This was a system of attack therapy in which participants were encouraged to confront one another and target weaknesses in an attempt to ……. improve aspects of their personalities and thinking? I don’t even know. I’m sure someone must have some bullshit non-peer-reviewed academic preprints on how this is actually supposed to *work*, but all it turns out to be is a massively traumatic experience, at least how we came out from it.
I remember of the two sessions I attended, there was no attempt whatsoever to guide the direction away from this – it was pretty much me and four other people in the group eventually just wanting nothing more to do with it as three others got very confrontational and the rest of us wondering what they were even there for.
One of the unusually bizarre aspects of this was that we were required to have no contact outside of these sessions, and it was quickly proven that we were being observed outside of them by other members of staff and clients who had been put to the task… so those of us who actually did feel any sort of connection and tried to speak outside of that first session were torn down for it at the next.
And this shit happened in a public university, of all places, which was trying to branch out into being a school of various medical disciplines. Glorious….
Needless to say this was a COLOSSAL failure, but worse, it made me feel like I couldn’t turn to anyone for help in the next few years because I was seeing a lot of private practices around the South Florida area turning to group sessions…. primarily because they were, unsurprisingly, more profitable to run. I couldn’t really imagine this going much better.
I’ve had pretty much zero luck with trying to seek any assistance since then. Usually I’ll find someone whose private practice is covered by my insurance, wait a number of months, and find that either they decide to stop accepting new patients and cancel on me, or I’m able to go in for an initial consultation after 4-7 months only to have the practice cease to exist shortly after that initial consultation. The best to date was the practice in Jupiter, Florida, which blinked out of existence due to Donald Trump’s “Winter White House” claiming its office space for Secret Service detail and a failed office move to an abandoned tapas bar. You can’t beat that for being a classic South Florida Sucks tale, can you? Unfortunately I’ve had nothing but similar false starts since I moved to California, it just seems to be the normal state of healthcare services in America.
* Not to be confused with a particularly annoying and content-free meme from a few years back. Trust me, it’s dead and you’re all free from it now.
Capyposting Huppily
In a previous post I accidentally dropped in a link to a Tiktok live stream that had ended. Unfortunately, live videos on Tiktok work differently than they do on Facebook or Youtube – they’re ephemeral things that don’t play back from archive… and I say unfortunately because the video in question was a bunch of very happy capybaras hanging out in a bath.
So, to make up for the lack of capybara content, here are some adorable giant rodents.
First stop on the Hup! Train: Nagasaki Bio Park’s TikTok – this is where the live video was from. Follow them for more, they quite routinely put up lives of the capybaras as well as some very cute birbs and other creatures.
An adorable neighborhood landscaping crew in Argentina:
CapybaraCountry on Twitter. Hup!
The HUP! sound is quite clear here and it’s adorable.
Yellow-headed caracara taking a capybara ride, captured by Charles J. Sharp.
Oh, to be a capybara with an orange on your head—
¡Atencion! Esto es un post de mierda.
Yeah so now I know why nobody ever does the grid scrub / ESCIOT outgassing procedure on this thing– it makes it nigh fucking impossible
Yeah sure just leave it in standby while ramping up the grid voltage aaaaaand I’m just going to keep repeatedly kicking out into BG Heat and reducing the filament voltage to make your life interesting.
So yeah after I managed to get the dumb thing through the grid scrub and tried to put it back on air I experienced a very loud and through “oops I’m crowbarring and taking the whole plant down with me as I go” incident due to an arc in the tube at just 8 kilowatts output, it really isn’t ready to go back to work and is being a spicy little electron box.
Chomp!!!
Me: “how could the Space Station Toilet need a new flow meter on the HPA 2 collector loop after less than a year?”
The Space Station Toilet: “hahaha MONCH, have fun with this!”
The ceramic shaft was completely cut through on one side and visibly contaminated by metal debris on the other, likely from the tube body cooler.
What am I going to use as the subject of angry hissing on this blog after the Space Station Toilet gets replaced with a boring new rig in April or so??