Of cats, sticks, and ignoring instruction manuals

November 28, 2020November 28, 2020 kg4cyxLeave a comment

Gingy would like to remind you every time is the right time for petting your feline assistants.

Good meowing! Today’s weather is going to be sunny with chance of bööps.

The cool looking radar is sadly no longer in use. Anyway, as for the title, we’d been having issues with the big transmitter here for months and it just wouldn’t run on all three cabinets. Its intermediate power amp had been giving issues on one cabinet and our other engineers had been over the manual and talking with tech support for months, it just wouldn’t make wattage.

This thing has vacuum tubes AND fecking JAVA. Run. Fast. And far. Run.

Finally the solution was to not trust the manual. It said the arbitrary “IPA Gain” number was supposed to be between 100 and 450. It was set on 100 and that led to only 9 watts drive to the IOT tube — 150 was needed. The solution in the end was … set the gain to about 520 or so. Amusingly, it only raised up from 9 watts once I went past 420.

420 blaze it

One of the other engineers had this Printrbot Simple Metal that he hadn’t gotten working so I took it back to play with it through the boring Thanksgiving morning shift. Despite it being a SOLID chonker, the carriage plate was bent up causing the hotend to hang at a weird angle, and some screws were loose or incorrect, so I fixed that and got it extruding. The only thing I wasn’t able to do which bugs me was to get a bootloader onto the Printrboard in there and load it with a newer version of Marlin supporting mesh bed leveling. This one is old and appears to take no parameters to G29 – it probes only three points. Weird. I couldn’t get Atmel’s FLIP utility to work and had issues with building Marlin for that particular cpu — it seems like you either have to use the toolchain for the Teensyduino++ or use PlatformIO, neither of which wanted to cooperate. Thus, it remains on old firmware.

Important:

November 3, 2020November 3, 2020 kg4cyxLeave a comment

High Thoughts

September 7, 2020September 7, 2020 kg4cyxLeave a comment

Turns out I finally found a way to enjoy the wonders of THC without it totally knocking me out. The magic seemed to be a tincture mixed into strong iced coffee. Sure, why not. Wonder if anyone’s ever tried that with Cuban coffee? It’d probably break the universe.

High thought #1:

I’m gonna start at least internally calling that specific kind of crazy logic-resistant insanity that’s all the rage “Chicken and Stars”.

High thought #2:

This picture of Cassie makes her look a lot like a super happy friendly cat in a Miyazaki world.

I mean just look at this face.

Look at it.

Also I generated this look alike in the e-girl doll maker.

I need more short skirts and fishnets in my life. I’m so divided though because long dresses look so awesome on me.

be that cryptid in the checkout line you always wanted to be

Current weather is too hot for the delightful shiny PVC looks. Come on fall

Colorful silliness and kitties

September 2, 2020September 2, 2020 kg4cyxLeave a comment

I figured out an important piece of cat logic today: the tail pops out once she’s full

Getting ready to launch!

Gingy is getting really affectionate lately and asking me to pet her… Always. She’s following me around again, isn’t she? I had also called her Sandy Beach in another post which is very cute and she seems to answer to that too.

As I walked into the core to figure out why I was observing what I thought was an unwarranted audio delay, and went to have some words with the Optimod 8685, it occurred to me I have no idea what my hair looks like from the back so I took an action shot of this vital conversation with said machine and it was grand.

It’ll be even more grand soon.

I’m just gonna turn entirely into a rainbow out of THE FUTURE okay

I think people are getting confused and trying to force nachos down those BNC connectors instead of the cheese sauce can.

Supercharged for Stunning Shitposting

August 30, 2020August 30, 2020 kg4cyxLeave a comment

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

Look at this happy little boop

August 12, 2020 kg4cyxLeave a comment

Hmmm……..

YAAAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Yes I’m a happy floofle

Hmmm… Belden 1855A… I think it works everywhere from “purr” to 3 Ghz.

I should have known better.

May 7, 2020 kg4cyxLeave a comment

Well, I made this silly image one day while taking back to back horrible viewer calls over issues with rescanning their TV sets…
Now everyone’s disappointed that every fader cap in the building is not already a small plastic kitty loaf. They want them all to be kitty loaves.

I also want them all to be kitty loaves.

In other news, Facebook blocked me for 24 hours for posting a gif of a cat in a windowsill, claiming it violates their standards on nudity or sexual content. Well, I mean, the cat isn’t wearing any clothes, but then again, most aren’t. I find this fault of machine vision hilarious.

Creatures

April 19, 2020April 19, 2020 kg4cyxLeave a comment

Hey, where’d everyone go?

While the humans are social distancing and working from home, the turkeys are trying to take over…

Don’t Let The Turkey Drive The Truck!!!

A previous attempt to take this picture led to a weird little toast popup on my phone that said something about saving the photo, I didn’t catch it. Apparently what happened was it got glitched! Excellent.

I actually kinda miss this. I used to have a weird HTC device that’d do this often and it was kinda excellent.