Supercharged for Stunning Shitposting

I added more disk space and removed old junk on this virtual server so it’s no longer constantly trying to run out of space and hit the wall screaming and stuff

To celebrate here is some nonsense

Found this really silly housing development on a ridge near El Dorado Hills that has no actual redeeming things that’d make you want to live there… aside from this transmitter site!
This blower’s not just NLA, it is OFFENSIVELY UNAVAILABLE. I can’t even find much evidence anyone even sold them when they were in production.
The tread wasn’t really glued on great on these boots so I reglued them and used a Tektronix RFM151 and an old handheld CB to weight them during the drying. As you do.
ChyronHego is in competition with PTek to figure out who can pump out worse mission critical bullshit for broadcast facilities

OH NO NOT THE BLOCK EDITOR

everything’s all updated and happy and fresh on the server now but oh no i got the wordpress block editor because i forgot to re-enable the classic editor plugin thanks i hate it

also I apparently get enough traffic or something that if I turn off akismet I get big flowery comment spam at a rate of about 0.2 hz, WOW!!! they like me! they really really like me—- or something

Just cool it, FUCKWEASEL.

I should not have to be repeatedly giving attention to the innards of HVAC chillers, but here I am because everything fucking sucks significant amounts of elephant pisstube.

It’s hot and the air is barbecued toxic shit outside so I’m not going to bother taking exterior pictures of the chiller in question, but here’s its story.

It started out life as a perfectly fine York unit with four Copeland Scroll compressors, four inverted A-frame coils, and six axial fans on top to suck the hot air out after it’s moved across them.

Then someone decided, hey, Turbocor compressors are pretty boss, let’s swap it over to one of those. Okay.

Hey, let’s also try to give it variable speed fans, based on…. uhhhhhhh…

Whatever This Shit Is. Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh—-

Now let’s put a water misted cooling pad system on the air inlets and make it look like something that was field expediently whacked together in the back of a barn OH FUCK GO BACK NO

Here’s the end result. At some point someone cleared out the electrical cabinet of everything but the main disconnect and rebuilt it with……a mountain of weird shit. This is the left side where the contactors for the compressors and fans would have normally been. I don’t know what the deal is with that thing that looks like a transformer, it’s just an 3 phase “reactor” – an inductor.


Not particularly visible at the bottom: a set of current transformers on the Turbocor’s power wires that set off the water misters when it begins to spool up, and a pair of fans rigged in the bottom to keep the VFDs cool…ish. They’re powered through the barrier strip on the far right.


In the compartment which would have formerly held the logic board that controlled the old setup, the two relays to the left of the Turbocor interface board turn on the cooling fans at the bottom, and…. well, I have no idea what the second one does. I couldn’t trace this out and there’s no documentation left with it. In short, I have already run out of fucks to give.


Um, what the fuck happened to R12? Again, lack of fucks to give, the thing still runs ok. Not sure what the LEDs are indicating but when D5 through D8 flicker periodically.

I’m fairly sure the Turbocor must actually be capable of commanding variable frequency fan drives to cool the condenser, but oops, someone put that weirdass blue pressurestat in place instead. That thing is fucking weird. It sits there and does nothing until the pressure is like 4 PSI below setpoint, then the command voltage it sends just abruptly leaps up from 0 to 10v, making the variable frequency drives… not so variable…


Anyway the reason I had to mess with this thing is one of the drives lost a 24VDC cooling fan. Our HVAC contractor looked into ordering a new fan and found out that a replacement would be at least SIX MONTHS OUT. The original, an NMB 3110KL-05W-B50 (80mm, ball bearing, 24v, 0.15A) appears to be Fuck You NLA. In fact, almost all 80mm 24VDC fans appear to be unavailable. I begrudgingly, out of desperation, dug into my own supplies and grabbed a little switching buck converter that’d take the 24VDC from the VFD and step it down to 12V to run a fan that actually IS available and extremely common.

Now the dumb thing spits out cold water again and I’m not quite as mad. I’m still going to swear at the fucking bellend thing though.

Yes it smells like bubblegum

There are some things in the world you can’t change. For instance, you can’t always say we just won’t keep using horrible mistakes in technology that require nothing short of severe threats to keep them in service.

oh you keep that 6 GHz link working or you get Popuko’s hammer

I always used to want purple hair but was always too afraid of damaging it by bleaching so it’d show up, since my natural color was always kinda dark to medium brown. Later it started going silver at the temples and in a few other places and I just love that. I don’t want to do anything to hide that at all. Eventually I decided I’d try adding a few streaks of color. The first one I tried, well, I don’t really even know what to describe the resulting color as but it wasn’t really purple.

Mysterious.

Eventually that faded to a light brown somehow and I wanted to try a couple different shades so I started making an elegant mess again.

That weird but kinda neat looking orange blonde shade at which my hair refuses to continue to lighten
I made an honest effort to not paint my ears purple. This was not a success.

And after all that desire to have purple for so many years, it turns out I like the pink better.

This is all probably still less interesting than Tina’s snack handbags for hamsters, but it’s been a fun adventure too.

More entirely unrelated images.

First off, here are the innards of a MRC Variable Rate Modem – it uses one to four QAM carriers to send high speed data. The I/O on the back supports some kinda T1 circuit stuff that— let’s just be glad it predates me or something— and ASI streams for video. The four identical boards are the individual modems for each channel. Thing’s hardcore, and it still works, I just had to change a memory backup battery and reload some settings and send it back up to the mountaintop to work for another 15 years.

Its input and output are a common 70 mhz IF frequency that, in this case, is passed through MRC DAR radios on 7 ghz.

Isn’t it just unusually cool?


The looks on everyone’s faces in the studio when you blast K.K. Slider songs through the overhead speakers is precious.

There are flattering angles from which you can take a photograph of someone and this is not one of them:


What happened when I tried coloring part of my hair purple. It wound up a kinda deep plum color, then maybe dark burgundy, then a dark blonde as it faded. It was a really nice strawberry blonde for, oh, a day or so.

Also a small plasma ball on which I was pondering the fact that a persistent leader of the discharge goes down that hole at the bottom and terminates in the sealing pip. Look to the left of the center column.

U-Matic Shitpost

welcome to the dimension of glazed rubber parts

“friction is not yours”

You can pop the tire off, but where the hell can you get a new tire?

BVU-800, I would love to know why they bothered with those slip ring contacts since this deck is NOT dynamic tracking equipped – it’s just a 4-head player.


the hell is this thing, a wannabe corvair?

An example of a U-Matic cartridge. It’s actually pretty much as small as it could possibly be for the amount of tape it holds. This is mighty 3/4″ wide tape, but the image quality looks like you recorded your footage to Scott toilet paper.

MII: Thanks I Hate It Already

In 1986, Panasonic felt the desire to launch a competing format to Sony’s Betacam SP professional videocassette system.

By 1990 it was all but entirely gone, a commercial flop, guilty of trashing so much footage entrusted in it with massive tape dropouts.

It’s bizarre. It uses cartridges that look a lot like VHS, and it’s in fact possible to stick a VHS tape into the MII deck— and get it jammed there because it’s not exactly compatible with the loading ‘elevator’ and tape transport. It’s actually kinda more like S-VHS, but… terrible.

Apparently my station is lucky enough to have been one of the few that used the format for a while, and still has one working deck to access video on it.

The only thing I like about it is that this deck has a really cool display and the firmware will actually report to you in plain English when something’s wrong. It also uses the same reel speed ratio trick to tell you approximately how much tape is left, which Sony has had on pretty much…. every one of their professional formats, ever, so that’s nothing special, but it’s cool that it stays on the display all the time. In the photo below of the transport, you can see a roller to the left of the yellow cadmium plated elevator motor. It’s got a slotted encoder on its base that lets the deck sense the actual tape travel speed for this calculation. Interestingly, this one also leaves the tape threaded in fast forward and rewind, so you can see the timecode spin away, but on a fresh unused tape that’s never been “blacked” or used before, these sensors are the only way it’d be able to calculate the time remaining.

I’m suspecting that’s a 40×2 char VFD under the plastic there.


When I first got the deck powered up, it said “ERROR: LOADING MOTOR” or something along those lines, because the threading ring motor’s belt had lost its elasticity and grip. I was lucky enough to still have a couple of belts that fit it.

Yes, it’s got a VHS looking cartridge and a threading ring……. believe it or not that’s not the only time that nonsense has happened, there was actually a VHS transport that threaded up that way. Oh, you’d think with a name like “MII” it would use M-shaped threading like a VHS, DVCAM, or DVCPRO transport, but that wouldn’t have been AWFUL enough.

hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

See that spinning thimble to the left of the head drum in this photo? That’s the top of the capstan. That’s the only other thing I LIKE about this powerfully cursed device: you can hold an isopropyl alcohol soaked shop towel against the capstan and turn the thimble to scrub the crappy oxide off it.

It’s got two linear audio tracks (like standard VHS) and two FM multiplexed helical scan audio tracks (like Hi-Fi VHS) – channels 1 and 2 are linear, 3 and 4 are helical. It’s like someone decided to use the worst of both worlds. Fabulous.

So if you’re wondering why I love this thing enough to have put the little drawing of Popuko on it, this deck also has the nastiest weak rack slides accompanying it, which broke and turned into a horrible ski jump while I was trying to pull the deck out of the rack to clean its heads. I was sitting on the floor and all 80 pounds or so of the thing came flying out, landed on my lap, arm, and leg, and generally left me wanting to yeet it off the roof. I’ve never had a rack slide fail in the same way these did— the mounting ears just snapped off at the screw holes like some kinda Twix bar.

It will now remain on the CART OF SHAME until it’s eventually fecking e-wasted where it belonged in the first place.

I wonder just why Panasonic even bothered with this. Everything about the system feels like they had intended to be able to create a competitor to Betacam SP that would have had a higher profit margin, BUT—- then they took every step possible to make the damn thing insanely complex and difficult to produce ????

the white balance is very wrong here and i’m beyond caring