I forget who made that glorious image but I suspect it’s Duffy Toler.
Anyway, that’s there because it started raining here in Northern California. Duckies would be very happy with this. Quack.
The rain has helped damp down the Mosquito Fire threatening the communities up in the Sierra Nevada foothills. It’s been really nice, even when it got blindingly thick on the Delta, and came down hard enough one morning to make my drive to work slow. I got there late and found the whole facility in headless chicken mode as an unusual combination of issues with how we procedurally handled breaks on streaming only newscasts caused a big ugly failure on air. We’re producing more live programming for television and streaming than ever and the engineering staff keeps getting smaller and more overstressed and something’s gonna break down eventually. Meanwhile, I was exhausted because I’d been down at the transmitter site late in the evening trying to fix the transmitter side of this hot mess, and I experienced a SMOKE TORNADO as one of the power supplies blew up. Impressive. Seriously impressive. Pictured here: the slowly growing heap of transmitter parts that need to be repaired or replaced.
I continue to be approaching the level of burnout this power supply managed. We had a meeting with local management today and got to express our concerns. Will corporate listen and take action so we don’t just wind up in a downward spiral of cascading failures and increasing understaffing? We can’t just hang on like this forever. This blows serious capaci-smoke.
Big thanks to Dan at GatesAir for offering me useful guidance with this transmitter. His biggest piece of useful advice on the ULXT series: once it’s up and running and fully stable, don’t mess with it, just let it run! Well, I guess we broke that rule of guidance. Really the biggest issue is that the antenna system is unhappy SOMEWHERE, I’m waiting on a tech to come by to sweep it and find the distance to the fault.
What follows this is a big ol’ image dump. Click to be, uh, dumped at I guess.
I swear that thing is secretly some kinda Honda engine.
The Turbocor stopped working due to a failed bearing position sensor, so this chiller is being rebuilt around a new one. This is the same one that has my spicy little annotation commenting on the state of the world and the electronics supply chain stuck inside it now. I can’t find a picture of it but it’s a label that says something like “FAN MOD INSTALLED … BECAUSE EVERYTHING IS FUCKING HORRIBLE”. I hope the crew working on the chiller appreciates this.
Speaking of fans—
We had a drone get crashed and I stole the less wrecked of its rotor blades and stuck them in my hair at one point. I like this a lot… very, uh, Gundam. 😀
Also, this is me when not being assaulted by evil daylight.
Here’s another cool angular little plastic clothed object: the Flipper Zero. I preordered one of the late summer production run and I’m having fun exploring stuff with it. This is what I used to grab those PrimeView monitor remote codes, among other things. It’s adorable and the user experience of using the thing is reminiscent of an old Nokia phone including it having Snake!!! It does so much more though, and doesn’t unexpectedly ring or anything. It’s great. I still have yet to try out the GPIO headers on it, interestingly the data on their site shows it feeds the STM32(something or other)’s ADC inputs too so you can even take analog voltage inputs. I love how freaking adorable the graphics are. One of the wallpapers that comes up even has an anime style sequence of the dolphin swimming with shiny bubbles and it talking in kana. There’s another where it’s reading a book and a shelf of books is visible, including a copy of “C For Dummies”.
One more odd thing. we have an ancient F250 at work that engineering uses, and it has this odd DARK ABYSS HOLE in the headliner.
Is it:
or…
