
fnord
Fnord! (you can’t see me)
fnord
But we won’t really
Not at all. No rush fixing that tower elevator, it’s not like anyone’s gonna need to go up there right? Hey, why are we stuck in foldback? Better call your tech and tell em you’ve got lots of reflect.
Measurements taken by Steve Wilde, SWE Services.
I forget if I’d mentioned just what fun it was to get this line separated and get the test adapter into place but uhhhhhh, it was a battle.
This thing is pretty cute. There’s a long wire that goes up its hoistway and the control panel in the cab, powered by a rechargeable battery (please don’t forget to plug in the charger!) inductively couples to it to send control tones to the box at the bottom and audio to the cab intercom. Somewhere in this system there’s a 2-way radio, I have no idea where, but the Morse code ID from the news department repeater sometimes blasts out of the intercom at the tower base and spooks the hell out of me because I never expect it.
Alas it doesn’t work because somewhere up the tower, a limit switch circuit broke. I’m not sure where but that’s finally supposed to be fixed this week, after which we can have a tower crew figure out what went arcy sparky 1600′ up. The fault is 1700′ from where the test equipment was connected, but that’s subtracting the 100′ or so horizontal run before it meets the tower and goes up.
So speaking of things blowing up, I love it when people send me pictures of PTek gear, it cracks me up to see, uh….
Not a watt comes from that whole stack. Conversely:
That’s a nice amount of power from an amplifier that’s turned off! Oh hi. #fnord
It occurs to me that someone, no one in particular, may look up my callsign and land here, so rest assured what you’ve found is pure silliness, as follows:
Thank you.
I’m pretty sure the nasty all in one would make the nice turquoise fade out to dead grass green, but I dunno. I have never let anything that foul touch my elegant rainbow.
I’m pretending to know what I’m doing with makeup, if this raises any questions please refer to the following meme
So everyone was preparing for the return of most of our staff to the office when senior management was in a meeting and heard an enormous bang….
That WAS a double pane window. Then a wild turkey in rapid flight came along, and both were no more.
I excluded the dead bird from these pictures. Do not continue reading this post if you don’t want to see it. I’ve included some unrelated safe images so you won’t see it accidentally.
Read more “BIRD STRIKE!!!”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.
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—
Two highly useful railroad signal memes.
I’ve seen at least one of these position light signal systems in use in Baltimore and I thought they were neat as heck.
Also the dwarf position light signals are cute as heck
This is a post about transmitter juice.
Seen here – the sight glass and automatic air vent at the high point of the system.
Until today I never gave too much thought to this cooling system, and it seems I should have done so more often as it was sitting there at zero pressure. Yikes. In fact… its pressure had gone so low that the janky little pressure gauges were doing this.
I have no idea how it managed to slip around to the wrong side of the pin, but it’s a really garbage tier gauge so I guess that’s no surprise.
Refilling the system is a matter of just opening the vent caps on the air vent valves, admitting fresh coolant to the system via that tap on the pump suction side, and creating backpressure in the system by closing the suction side valve partially. This causes backpressure to build up in the system and compress the air bladder inside that tank while making the pump draw more coolant in from the source. Once it’s run for a while you can close the vent caps on the valves so they don’t, uh—
yeah I wonder if this is why and where the pressure all got out — all the vent caps were open, and, ew
The instruction manual on this GatesAir system states that you don’t really need to worry about overfilling it because that spring loaded relief valve will lift and burp out the excess if it gets over the maximum of 75 PSI.
Both of the two transmitter cabinets in this installation have their own cooling system, and there’s a third for the glycol solution cooled RF loads. That one’s holding its pressure just fine.
Now for… uh… cursed things
Speaking of toilets— it was time to give amplifier #3 on the Space Station Toilet a new Barnstead filter. As I experienced previously, touching anything on the Barnstead led to leaking as the shrunken hardened gaskets started crumbling. I think I’d kinda vaguely alluded in a previous post to this filter holder unit having hilariously cursed input and output connectors, but I hadn’t gotten good pictures of the thing. I had, however, looked all over Thermo Fisher’s catalogs and webpage trying to find the proper gaskets for this thing and could never find the same series of connectors. Their current models of the Barnstead filter holders do not use this same stuff. This raises the question of which of the two is true:
1) Thermo Fisher switched suppliers for their filter holder assemblies at some point in time, the new manufacturer uses a different system, and they do not have parts in stock for the old system.
2) Thermo Fisher has realized this old system is complete garbage and does not even want to admit to having ever made it.
I’m leaning towards 2. Without further ado, here’s… this thing. The fitting can swivel a bit, but doing so tends to lift the two pins out. You can see their heads here.
Removing the pins releases the connection completely.
Looking down the bore at the weird gasket:
And finally, the connector itself, with BIG RAUNCHY MOLD MARKS THAT JUST MAKE LIFE DIFFICULT:
YUCKY STUFF AHEAD
So my coworkers had told me in the past about some kind of “carbon” that tended to circulate in the system on this transmitter, likely contributing to how it lays waste to the cooling water flow sensors. I was a little baffled, where would this come from? This system is just supposed to be full of PURE deionized water to maintain proper electrical resistivity and not clog things up. Well then, uh—
Imagine my amazement and horror when I dropped the Barnstead filter housing down and just saw it fill up with this inky yackage.
I poured it into a clear plastic water bottle for inspection. It looks like diluted India ink, and thankfully, smells like nothing. Coarse particles settled to the bottom, but even after sitting a couple hours, not everything settles out. I’m wondering if this is the result of the Barnstead filter just releasing small activated charcoal particles when the water flow stopped and reversed a moment, or if that’s really just… floating around in there. If so, where is all that coming from? Ew ew ew ewwwwwwwwwwwww
Greetings from the clouds…