Month: April 2021

HHHHHHHHHHHHHHVAC

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This post contains large amounts of angry hissing and swearing. You’ve been warned.

hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

I was doing the weekly inspection checklist at the transmitter site when this….. Space Station Toilet….??? went thunk, plunk, and cycled out of Beam On. The display forlornly moaned of a low anode coolant flow alarm. I know the issue is with the flow sensor.

It’s in the middle of all this so I did not try to undertake the replacement single handedly. Look at this glorious mess!!!

those are certainly all pipes ‘n’ stuff. The sensor is in the horizontal block above the centrifugal blower on the bottom

But then my attention was drawn to the fact that it started getting warmer in the room… and it just kept getting warmer. Luckily, it was about 68 outside with a strong Delta Breeze, so I just opened all the doors and started to investigate the attempted thermal runway. On the roof I peeked into one of the large RTU (Roof Top Unit) air conditioners and saw a winter wonderland of ice. Hmm.

Hurrrfdongs

Not good. So why’s this thing icing up? It’s practically brand new! I called the HVAC company we have a service contract with and their dispatcher literally told me she was going to see if anyone felt like helping us out today. (No.)

Time to gather tools and investigate.

Ahhh! Copeland Popsicles!

Definitely a low head pressure situation… but why? Remember, PV=nRT even for insufficient levels of T[emperature], so maybe it’s just running too cold due to low heat input into the system. Let’s open up the other side…

Oh. You know, I don’t think that belt is supposed to be flopping around like a rubbery hula hoop.

Note three things in this photo: 1) motor sheave spinning. 2) fan sheave barely spinning. 3) harder to see but— water flying everywhere including spraying on that poor little ABB drive!

Click, power down, go gather more tools, climb up and down the ladder about a zillion times…

I set the thermostat below to system off / constant fan and properly tensioned the belt, which DerpCo HVAC’s techs do not know how to do… At all… then restore power.

No windy whirly. Just freezy fuckery.

The fan didn’t start. The little ABB drive’s cooling fan wailed, but it just wasn’t coming on. Why? Finally on a whim I twisted the red and green thermostat wires together and it ramped politely up to full blast with no slippage. Guess the thermostat just isn’t letting constant fan be a thing. That’s fine…

This economizer reminds me of that enormous gear Charlie Chaplin gets rolled across.

Slowly but surely, the room temperature started creeping down.

I always wonder if I’d get in trouble for naming and shaming DerpCo HVAC. They’re a large, probably national company, and are far more interested with their prime directives of union busting and bumping out any employees with seniority than they are with providing proper service to their customers. I hate dealing with DerpCo mostly, though they have *one* tech locally who actually knows what they’re doing.

Well at least you didn’t invest everything in WeWork stock

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This table has been back here sporadically on weekends ever since like 2018. The guys running it always give me such charmingly disgusted looks if I walk by it. Back when they first appeared they were more, uh, energetic and would give me impolite catcalls if I got near them while going into the Dollar Tree. Now they just look really exhausted and dejected.

My only guess as to why they’re still here: they blew tens of thousands of dollars on Trump 2020 crap thinking they were buying into a gold mine and have been trying to unload it ever since.

Your empire has burned to ash, just walk away.

Shhh, I’m hiding

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Apparently.

I haven’t looked at traffic stats on this site for ages, but I have noticed two stupid things: one, Facebook now thinks all links to it are spam (and Fucking Zucc’d everyone who ever posted or shared one, very nice and typical of them) and two, Google page rank is down in the low Fuck This Shit I’m Out tier.

I suspect the loss of Google rank is due to my removing the share buttons that were causing *LOTS* of extraneous scripts to run from Facebook and useless third party cookies to be set by Pinterest and Twitter. I hope turning off the share buttons wasn’t also what caused a lot of innocent Facebook users to potentially get lobbed in Facebook Jail. Then again, what doesn’t, that site is complete trash and has an advertising market which cheerfully allows stuff like this:

Facebook: Because We Care. No wait, we don’t. Huaghgaghgghggghhghllhglfllhlllgg.

Oh, also, enjoy your ransomware campaigns. The only saving grace was that the command and control server didn’t work at the time that the ads went live. You’d think Facebook would have maybe blacklisted fake Clubhouse ads just like they’ve blacklisted, you know, this totally harmless blog…. but of course not. There’s a definite double standard at work and FB Ads will cheerfully take content that’d get a normal user thrown in the Zucc Hole.

But enough about that. Here’s my cat being adorable.

It’s tortie bebby hours

From a distant time

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Oh gods 70s food detected. Run. Run far and fast

Transmitter sites used to be kinda different – it was not uncommon for them to be manned daily, if not outright equipped with an engineer in residence. Now they just tend to have weird ghosts and stuff. I’ve only ever seen the name O’keefe & Merritt on appliances in old transmitter site kitchens. Ok then?

A disused generator transfer switch for an old Onan softly sighing its way to dust
An old kitchen and what’s pretty clearly a can of R-12…!
IOT tube cart from a long departed Harris transmitter. Nowadays it’s all LDMOS devices.
Excuse me, I just stepped out of THE FUTURE and what is all this? Fnord.

Fontabulous

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Just when you least expect it, what’s basically a portable scalar network analyzer starts talking to you in THIS FONT and you start disbelieving your own eyes:

What even is this font?
Wonder if that’s from that Microsoft core fonts package that they made freely available years ago then pretended they didn’t
Oh by the way the antenna is …. Uh. It’s… not?

Root cause of that scary looking reflect plot was revealed by a quick walk up the stairs to the roof to be an almost completely disintegrated piece of LMR-400. My coworker assured me it worked perfectly fine five years ago……..

No just take it back

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It’s possible this was an April Fool’s post. But anyway…

Earlier today I posted a scandalous picture of a vacuum tube to Facebook and they immediately deleted my account. I hit the button to request a review and they gave it back… Now I can see that they’re selling ad space to this thing:

Yes, that’s apparently a pepper spray equipped Internet of Turds doorbell

Yeah uh I’ll thank you not to weaponize the Internet of Turds. This needs to be filed right alongside the CellMate dick locker in the IoT Devices That Should Never Have Been Hall of Fame.

In case you’re curious about that CellMate – Click here after preparing yourself to laugh very hard.

This post brought to you by the Premium Grade No-Pass Filter

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This is several kilobucks worth of hardware that was misapplied to create a special filter that…. nothing would pass. See if you can spot the issue!

Our IT director dropped a non working Wyse serial terminal on my bench. I don’t think he expected me to tear it open and try to fix it, I think it has an open diode or bad cap in the +5v supply. It’s gonna be the serial console for a Linux machine if I can get it glowing.

And then I was asked to come on Good Day, pose dramatically on a giant shoe, and discuss the a ridiculous goth house. Just because.

Various colorized views of an old Midland radio made by Hitachi Denshi
Useful cybergoth meme
Kittie was so boss
No U

This has been a elliptically polarized shitpost.