[X] My Assistant

Nice, I haven't really used an oscilloscope for two decades I think.


Man, AMD is good but kinda annoying. Trying to update my bios but for the past four months every bios release has had issues. Just waiting to hope if the latest one for my mobo is okay after the beta period ends.

The current bios is stable, but the voltage on the CPU is a little high, and the newer bios have some features where I can get slightly more performance with less heat.

Nice, I haven't really used an oscilloscope for two decades I think.
Man, AMD is good but kinda annoying. Trying to update my bios but for the past four months every bios release has had issues. Just waiting to hope if the latest one for my mobo is okay after the beta period ends.

The current bios is stable, but the voltage on the CPU is a little high, and the newer bios have some features where I can get slightly more performance with less heat.

That reminds me, I still wish that AMD or Intel would make an open source BIOS so everyone could tweak their machines to their fullest.

Yeah, coreboot and libreboot exist, but it can be hard to tell if your machine will work with them and they usually require special hardware to flash. Official manufacture support'd be great, but I suppose they'll never do that citing "security concerns" or something.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Apr 17 2021, 17:34

Official manufacture support'd be great, but I suppose they'll never do that citing "security concerns" or something.

How could they slip in [files.catbox.moe] "the botnet" if it's open?

How could they slip in [files.catbox.moe] "the botnet" if it's open?

"Then" column is missing "Internet of Things"/IoT.
But this is of course precisely the reason it'll never happen.

I just got a Suncom Tac-3 joystick for $8. It's not the Tac-2 or Competition Pro that everyone wants, but it still works massively better than my old Atari CX-40 sticks for my VIC-20/Amiga 500/Atari 2600 and I didn't have to order it online. I just finished opening it up, cleaning it out, and testing it.

It uses leaf contacts for input; pretty nice. Even if a Tac-2 would have been better I am now sold on the leaf contact design.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Apr 17 2021, 23:39

I didn't get that graphic card bug where the column(s) of pixels on the far right go berserk for a while.
I wonder if it got fixed in a patch, or if there was something specific I was doing that I stopped doing or doing less, thus making it not happen.

I didn't get that graphic card bug where the column(s) of pixels on the far right go berserk for a while.
I wonder if it got fixed in a patch, or if there was something specific I was doing that I stopped doing or doing less, thus making it not happen.

Which card? Nvidia did some tweaks to voltage limits for memory and the speed of the boost behavior that solved a lot of the stability issues with the 3000 cards (at stock frequencies). Some cards lost performance though.

That reminds me, I still wish that AMD or Intel would make an open source BIOS so everyone could tweak their machines to their fullest.

They rely way too heavily on security by obscurity, which is pointless these days because former employees get hired, entities that have NDAs get bought out or companies just get directly hacked.

They rely way too heavily on security by obscurity, which is pointless these days because former employees get hired, entities that have NDAs get bought out or companies just get directly hacked.

Again, yeah. I know it will never happen.

"Then" column is missing "Internet of Things"/IoT.

Yeah, the image is fairly old so maybe it was made before IoT truly became the abomination it is today. Definitely a noteworthy omission.

It's had the tubes replaced once with ones made by GE, and paint is a hair rough, but otherwise all original and not beat up. The front panel discoloration isn't visible with normal light, byt I suspect IPA would clean it.
Needs a new meter lamp, and I'm gonna do a partial overhaul of it- high voltage caps, and dome resistors and ceramic caps that are prone to damage by heavy handed tuning, or tied across the big caps. Nothing looks that bad though.
I can't find my dummy load, so I haven't tried keying it up yet.

That mic is a uniden bearcat CB mic I rewired to suit, until I get a better mic. The CB had it's Rx blown out by an 80W 2M radio with their antennas too close, and the channel knob is also broken. I listen to weatherband on it somtimes, with a small rubber duck antenna.

Some pics here recently make me think of the DeLorean, like "those things from the past you would find everywhere in a future somehow"

Terminal time. After 13 years using rxvt I finally gave up.

The problem
----------

For the past 6 years rxvt (and urxvt and other variants) coredumps often in a tilling window manager. Yes, they did not fix the bug for that long.

The Solution
-------------

The rxvt people decided to fix the problem by (wrapping rxvt and) forcing the kernel to only take the coredump of rxvt at exit - somehow rxvt just keeps working if you jump into the main select after a dump. This "fix" now freezes the kernel if anything else but rxvt coredumps.

My Predicament
-------------------

The funny bit is that rxvt would die only when switching desktops in a tiling manager. Hence if a program coredumps inside rxvt you can cleanup the dump, kill the zombies and hence recover. The problem starts when one writes ncurses programs, akin of myself. If something dumps when the terminal is in a bad state then one has two options - attempt to recover the terminal by magically figure out the correct binary input to recover the terminal functionality, or freeze the machine by opening another terminal.

My solution was to hack in a keybinding into my xmonad to open xterm instead of rxvt to recover if the program inside the rxvt coredumped. This was beyond silly.

My Solution
-----------

In the end, after 13 years of use I needed to switch to sakura, the smallest gnome VTE terminal i could find. xterm unicode support for CJK fonts in filenames is just insanely bad. You can configure one wide font in xterm but if you want both japanese and chinese (with full glyphs) you would need to change Xresources to see each.

I have proper B+ voltage- 950V, and I have a sane enough plate current- 90mA, both according to the internal meter. I do not, however, have any drive present. I can't get the meter when set to ALC off it's peg.
Radio was connected to a 20M dipole I just made and set to 18.3MHz. Antenna was a tad close to the ground and otherwise untested, but it can't be that far off.
Tomorrow, I'll open it up and douse all the rotary switches in CRC contact cleaner. Supposedly it made a QSO about a month ago. It's plausible the 12BY7A driver tube died in transit, but I'm advised by other hams with vacuum tube gear to check all the switches, the tube sockets, the pots, then caps and resistors first.
Tl;dr the finals/power tubes seem good at first blush, but I'm not getting any RF out of the radio.

This post has been edited by Wayward_Vagabond: Apr 20 2021, 04:16

If something dumps when the terminal is in a bad state then one has two options - attempt to recover the terminal by magically figure out the correct binary input to recover the terminal functionality, or freeze the machine by opening another terminal.

I usually just blindly type 'stty sane ^J' and hope that does the job. It typically does.

My solution was to hack in a keybinding into my xmonad to open xterm instead of rxvt to recover if the program inside the rxvt coredumped. This was beyond silly.

My Solution
-----------

In the end, after 13 years of use I needed to switch to sakura, the smallest gnome VTE terminal i could find.

I use xterm or mate-terminal. I had to patch VTE to disable some really annoying keyboard bindings though (iirc they were ctrl-shift-home getting intercepted or something of that sort; I once in a blue moon use that combination in emacs for selection).

xterm unicode support for CJK fonts in filenames is just insanely bad. You can configure one wide font in xterm but if you want both japanese and chinese (with full glyphs) you would need to change Xresources to see each.

I use Unifont (actually, my own variant based on unifont; I'll PM you a link in case you're interested) to ensure I get all the glyphs.
And in my experience xterm actually scrolls faster than rxvt, funnily enough.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Apr 20 2021, 11:10

Ordered high voltage caps, a meter lamp, some resistors that commonly fail, a relay (this exact one is very hard to find, and a seller had them cheap- a spare won't hurt), and some plastic alignment tools. I have a service manual, and plan on compiling a list of all the low voltage caps for it.
The high voltage caps and resistors I ordered from a guy that used to restore them- I actually couldn't find caps with the correct diameter, and lower power resistors with the correct voltage rating on digikey or mouser.

@bp: I lack the skills and equipment to re-align the RF section myself, no way I could make something good from scratch...

Open Hardware Monitor can be so silly sometimes.
Like hell my "CPU Package" once managed to consume 3.6KW and my "CPU Cores" 3.4KW.
Well, my previous very similar-looking tool often said my CPU hit -127°C or something, so I guess they all have their burden to bear.

The meter parks at the center of it's swing instead of an end when unkeyed now, but otherwise no changes. B+, C-, and plate and grid voltages are where they should be at the driver tube. Driver tube has no shorts, and the heaters draw the correct current. Driver tube glows as if heater power is present in rig...

@bp: I lack the skills and equipment to re-align the RF section myself, no way I could make something good from scratch...

As a physicist I of course once designed an amateur radio. The only problem is that it was completely on paper, and I'm sure that it would not work in the real world. The radio had components that would never exist such as no-resistance cables and alterable resistors that could be changed without affecting any other part of the circuit. To be a theoretician does not help in building a radio either (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

-----

On terminal topic, after freezing my X11 a few more times I have learned of the UNIX Elephants and the use of the SysRq direct commands.

I built one back when I was into electronics. Tried soldering recently and failed.

Used to be much easier (probably not healthier) with lead solder.


edit: Wtf my computer has appreciated in value?? The CPU and GPU prices have gone up since January.

Maybe its the US hyper-inflation starting to hit.

This post has been edited by EsotericSatire: Apr 21 2021, 11:06

The meter parks at the center of it's swing instead of an end when unkeyed now, but otherwise no changes. B+, C-, and plate and grid voltages are where they should be at the driver tube. Driver tube has no shorts, and the heaters draw the correct current. Driver tube glows as if heater power is present in rig...

Finals have heater power and their heaters are working.
Meter reading is inversely proportional to the RF gain setting- RX seems to be weird too. Plausible suspect is the coax connecting the IF and RF decks/boards in the radio.

Parasitics in real parts make RF design border on an art sometimes. Nearly everything has a self resonant point (especially inductors) and the parasitics can screw with the Q and/or resonant frequency of the whole circuit.
HF is closer to audio design, but microwave stuff is dark arts.

Alpine edit: my workbench is leaded only, minus existing solder in stuff being reworked. I typically use 63/37.

Alpine edit 2: Alpine gets it's groove back:
Here's a pic of radio guts.

Final cage at front right. Top 3 shafts control the finals, the one below them is the band switch. The black cylinder with the little tit behind them is the driver tube, display board to it's left, and VFO underneath that.

Alpine edit 3: Son of Alpine: It lives! You can actually see the problem in my pic. Near the edge of display board, to thr right of another connector, is a 4 pin one that came unplugged in transit. Plugged that back in, now I have meter backlight and RF comes out in proper measure. My frequency counter says it's accurate within a few Hz, too.

This post has been edited by Wayward_Vagabond: Apr 21 2021, 23:25

I built one back when I was into electronics. Tried soldering recently and failed.

Used to be much easier (probably not healthier) with lead solder.

Protip: you can still obtain leaded solder. I still use it (make whatever jokes you feel like about that).
If using unleaded solder, your iron should be hotter than with lead and you should also use lots of flux.

edit: Wtf my computer has appreciated in value?? The CPU and GPU prices have gone up since January.

Maybe its the US hyper-inflation starting to hit.

Yeah; I think my 750 Ti actually appreciated in value as well.
Some guy I was chatting with on reddit offered to mail me an i5-3470 he just replaced in his machine, so I'll be getting a minor upgrade for my CPU (i5-3350p). In exchange I'm gonna try to fix up his GBA SP, or if I fail at that send him one of my own. I'm also getting a spare ivy bridge motherboard for my troubles. Here's hoping the CPU works on arrival.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Apr 21 2021, 20:08