totm nov 2023 Thread to discuss negative things in a very general way, just see where it goes y'know?

[munlander1]

Someone in my family tested positive for COVID-19. Today I am feeling a bit under the weather so I’ll be getting tested too I guess.

Edited December 5, 2020 by munlander1
English

[tater]

Tried to go to CostCo tonight. Was told by a friend that the line would be pretty much nonexistent. There's only a line of course because my Governor is a complete idiot.

Get there. A line existed, so I left. I called my friend to tell him it didn't work—he was actually there, inside. Said "it moved fast, only like 5 minutes." I told him that was about 4 minutes 50 seconds longer than I would ever wait in a line to get into a store. Stores should be open normally, period. All of them.

Was gonna add more ragey stuff, but it's a family forum.

[cubinator]

I have spent three years in class with the express purpose of learning how to make rockets and planes, and have spent three years learning nothing (in class) about how to make rockets and planes.

[richfiles]

I want to pick up an 0-80 SAE tap for use in both my model railroad hobby, and just so I can use small hardware on my projects, in general. For those who are not aware what a tap is, it's a bit that allows you to create screw threads in a hole. Drill the hole, then turn the tap in, and back it out, and you get properly sized threads in the hole. Given that my smallest SAE tap is 4-40, I decided I should look for a set to fill out that micro range of SAE sizes. I'm also wanting to do the same for metric sizes too.

I go on Amazon and do a search... Plenty of metric sets, between $10-14 for a 10 piece set... Nice. 
I then search for the SAE sets... and Amazon returns metric sets. 
I try to refine the search, nothing improves, so I use Google to search Amazon
I do end up finding a couple sets, but the first set is of abysmal quality... Like, I've never in my life seen a more cheaply made tap... Won't touch that garbage... 
Second set is good quality, but they package two of every tap, and toss in dies (I don't need dies), and charge 5x more than the metric set... I don't need that! 
Last set is only the 4 smallest SAE sizes (00-90, 0-80, 1-72, and 2-56... Nothing between 2-56 and 4-40 though)... But it costs 2x the price of the metric 10 piece sets. 

At this point, I am so frustrated with Amazon's awful search engine, and search elsewhere. I find a better SAE micro tap set that has all the smaller sizes I'm looking for (6 taps), but this is 3.5x more expensive than the 10 piece metric sets. Another source had exceptionally high quality bits, but each bit individually is 2-3x the cost of the whole metric sets. I only need to work with plastic and aluminum. I doubt I'll ever need to use these on steel or anything harder, so I don't need anything so high end.

I'm just really frustrated with how utterly impossible it is to find a good complete SAE tap set in sizes under 4-40, or for decent prices. Guess I'll just overpay.

[TheSaint]

Job Satisfaction Story of the Day:

User opens a ticket: "We are moving files around in our network shared drive, and somehow the folders we delete are being restored after we delete them." They send two screenshots, and I immediately notice that the screenshot with the "restored" folders is in the shadow copy backup screen. I verify that the folders in the actual share are as they are supposed to be, then send them a response: "The folders in the actual share are deleted as you want them to be. The folders you are seeing as 'restored' are in the backup software, which is by design."

Their response? "So, can you remove them from the backup software? They are producing confusion there with some of our users."

Actually, I can't. But even if I could: Sure. This is a good plan. Delete the folders from both the share and the backups, so then in a couple of days the users come running back saying, "OMG! OMG! We accidentally deleted something we needed from both the share and the backups! Can we restore it from the backup backup?"

(Amusingly, I actually do have a backup backup. But, a) I don't want them to depend on that, because that's not what it's for, and b) I don't want to have to go back to it on a regular basis, because it's a PITA to use. And if I told them about it, they'd probably ask me to delete the folders from there too.)

[richfiles]

I play Pokemon Go as an excuse to occasionally get out and move, and to collect a quarter century of older Pokemon that I never collected cause I didn't play the old games. Last year, I decided I wanted to use Pokemon Go to start collecting them for the (then) upcoming Nintendo Switch Pokemon game (which itself was a massive disappointment, that aside from laughable graphical and animation quality, actually cut some of those very Pokemon I'd just started to collect)...  Anyway... I only play casually, and in order to not spend money in the game, I try to do the bare minimum and put Pokemon into gyms to "defend". The basic premise, is you can collect up to 50 free "coins" per day by having pokemon defending gyms for a cumulative total of up to 8 hours. It used to be, that you could easily go out once and load up 20 gyms around town (the max you can occupy), and then just forget about it for a few days. A couple gyms would be defeated each day, and that'd usually cover you for a few days, so you could just ignore it.

Queue spoofers.

Spoofers use apps to spoof GPS data and effectively travel in game without actually physically going anywhere. It's a ToS violation, but there needs to be some kind of proof to report it, and this person is known for still physically going out to gyms too, so there's always the "well you just didn't see me" excuse. There can certainly be "courteous" spoofers. People who just play casually and only spoof for some convenience. ToS or no, I legit don't care how people play, so long as they play nice... This woman does not play nice...  Everyone hates this woman. She is obsessed with this game to the point that she's had near violent scuffles with people, and has personalized license plates on her truck based on her username. She has *zero* courtesy for other players as well. I go out of my way to try to not defeat gyms that haven't been occupied for at least the full 8 hours. I've watched her camp a gym and take it out within minutes of it being loaded... She also doesn't stop at just one or two gyms... Nope! She'll go around and wipe out the entire town, loading 20 gyms, and leaving gyms she can't load empty. When she hits her limit, it's not enough to call it... She actively denies other users gym time!

It's not an understatement that most of the people in my town's chat group despises this woman.

Yes, I'm complaining about this toxic player, but I'm also complaining about our local chat group too... One of the two prominent players that helps lead the group is a high ranking player in my state (at one point, she was 13th ranked in XP across my state. Not sure where she stands now). The other player is an old friend of mine that I've known over a decade. Last year, I watched them drive a few players out of the group, and actively target them within the game, for spoofing... When I say spoofing, I don't mean this aggressive type of play that this woman I described above engages in... I mean very casual convenience play. For example, if a gym was already being defended by a fellow team member, they might remotely add another Pokemon into it to defend it. They were not actively battling gyms, unless they were present, that sort of thing. Convenience play, as opposed to predatory play. That was enough for these people. People I consider friends, to be completely cut off, banned from the group, shunned by the group's leaders, and aggressively harassed in game into being unable to actually make progress in the game. I had posts talking about my phone shaker deleted... Just simulating a workout, for the purpose of hatching eggs in game, was too much for them to tolerate... Mind you, they never cared about ToS when it explicitly says they couldn't multi-account... That detail is conveniently ignored...

The hypocrisy, is this top level player I mentioned... She's old friends with this aggressive spoofer, and has been constantly dismissive to us in the chat regarding this woman's behavior! It's beyond hypocritical. Last night, she had the absolute gall to actually complain about the frequency of complaint threads that pop up in the group... It inconveniences her, because her phone is exploding with notifications, and she thinks something actually relevant is going on... I have not been as livid as I was last night in a LONG time. The absolute gall of her to pass off this other woman's actions as nothing big, when she herself actively drove people out of the group and targeted their play, until they simply couldn't engage with the game anymore, for far less. The hypocrisy is so glaring... I honestly have no idea if she can't even see it at all, and just doesn't realize, or if she just don't care, and is fine being that hypocritical, because "them, not these" mentality. Honestly, the game is becoming inconvenient to play between lockdowns and aggressive spoofers, and apparently, we can't even communicate about the issue, because  oh no! ONE post resulted in a notification.  I'm just disgusted... It's garbage like this that makes me wanna just drop it. I only ever picked it up in the first place because I never did the Pokemon thing years before, and wanted to build up the collection from older games, so I could eventually migrate them... Ugh... And that's a whole other can of worms... Even migration to \other games has now been heavily monetized... The fact that Pokemon is the single largest grossing franchise of ANYTHING in history, and the absolute sad state of it's creator, and the gross monetization of it all, is proof that humans will raise mediocrity and greed up on a pedestal without even a second thought...

Edited December 15, 2020 by richfiles

[TheSaint]

What a freakin' day. I'm going to go play KSP now so I can pretend that I accomplished something useful today.

[DunaManiac]

I have an online course in astronomy on Coursera that I do in my spare time.

Anyways, I finished my weekly writing assignment and I peer-reviewed about 10 assignments.

Guess what?

I had to flag 6 of them for plagiarism.

The most stupid part was that 4 of them were from the same source, Our Solar System's Cousin? – Exoplanet Exploration: Planets Beyond our Solar System (nasa.gov).

It's the first result on a google search. Some tried to hide it by changing some of the wording hoping nobody would notice, but a simple google search incriminates them.

Seriously.

If you're going to plagiarize, at least do it more discreetly.

[tater]

3:1 honey syrup is 3 parts honey to 1 part water.

When that's the sugar in your sour cocktail, don't skip reading the recipe and use 1 part honey to 3 parts water...

[Lisias]

CD Project RED is learning the hardest and painful way that trimming your product to look good for the 20% of the users that owns beefy machines is not exactly the best way to sell the product to the other 80%.

 

[richfiles]

Aliexpress, the bastion of grade C Chinesium electronics, has the second worst search algorithm, after Amazon, bearer of irrelevant results from A to Z. 

Trying to see if I can ease my navball controller design by trying to buy a pre-made power inverter module that will take a low voltage sine wave, and produce the 115vac amplified output. Honestly, my specialty has always been digital design, and analog, while I have worked with it, is an area I have far less expertise. Most inverters simply generate a simple square wave at 50 or 60Hz and feed that into the inverter circuitry. Some feed an actual sine wave through. I'm looking for a module that lets me send in my own waveform, and have it amplify that.

I keep finding irrelevant results, and it's infuriating. I specify 115 volt, and I get 30x the results in 220v. It's just an exercise in frustration. I've had my navball for 5 years, and I want to finally bring it to life! These shoddy search engines are NOT helping! 

Edited December 20, 2020 by richfiles

[cubinator]

Today I got 50VAC in my hand because of a badly grounded electrical outlet. 

[Superfluous J]

1 hour ago, cubinator said:

Today I got 50VAC in my hand because of a badly grounded electrical outlet. 

At least it wasn't a 220 line. Man that hurt.

[Shpaget]

Another series of earthquakes shook us. Several foreshocks and a main (at least I hope it was the main event) of 6.4 magnitude brought quite severe damage in a nearby town Petrinja (about 50 km from my location). At least three fatalities are reported and multiple injuries. Structural damage in epicenter is severe and widespread. Dozens of aftershocks are recorded. Here in Zagreb, the damage is not as severe, but there is debris on the streets, public transportation is down, (some) hospitals are being evacuated. It's a mess. My house faired well with no obvious damage. I'm still waiting for my brother to get home and check his apartment.

I'm trying to find data, but the shake was quite long; I'm estimating about 15 seconds, seemed like it went on and on.

This follows the 5.3 magnitude quake from March that had the epicenter much closer to Zagreb center and caused significant damage.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/12/29/strong-6-3-magnitude-earthquake-hits-central-croatia

Edited December 29, 2020 by Shpaget

[Shpaget]

Update:

Unfortunately, the death toll is increasing. Seven are reported to have lost their lives, thousands injured.

Humanitarian aid is being organized, people are offering their houses to accept the ones that lost their homes, food and temporary shelter is being delivered, people are queuing up and waiting in lines to donate blood. It is assumed that there are still people trapped in the collapsed buildings.

Parts of the affected region are still without power.

There were several quakes during the night, thankfully no additional damage (4.8 magnitude the strongest one).

 

[RealKerbal3x]

Schools have been closed here in the UK. This is reminding me of March last year.

At least exams have been cancelled. I hate exams.

[Delay]

Right ear is completely gone since late yesterday. I can barely hear anything. The left ear is still perfectly fine, it's just extremely uncomfortable and, provided the sound is loud enough, a bit painful.
It's weird that the absence of sound could be a source of pain.

[Shpaget]

Oh that sucks. Some sort of inflamation?

Everybody, type on this side so Delay can't hear us.

[Delay]

10 hours ago, Shpaget said:

Oh that sucks. Some sort of inflamation?

Everybody, type on this side so Delay can't hear us.

Well, no. In fact it was nothing particularly major (in terms of cause, at least). The ear felt so blocked because that's what it was.
I'm just glad it wasn't something worse. Had an appointment today and cleaning the ear was literally all that was done.

So, in total, everything is okay again, actually a lot better than before. I should have done that much earlier.
But that was indeed the worst. That night was terrible with so much pressure on the eardrum.

[kerbiloid]

So, now we can type like always.

[TheSaint]

I want to kill every brain cell that remembers today....

[Delay]

I think my N64 overheated. I've been playing SM64  for around 6 hours (hence I think overheat) and it suddenly reset itself, which is apparently common.
...but could the console have picked any worse time to crash than the third stage of the final Bowser fight?

Edited January 16, 2021 by Delay
misremembered how long I played for

[richfiles]

If the crashing gets more frequent, you might find it's not necessarily overheating. 1990s electronics are reaching an age where the electrolytic capacitors are starting to fail, and even leak. This can cause all sorts of problems, from no audio or no boot in vintage computers, to outright corrosion on the circuit boards. I am actually dealing with two N64s right now. If you think it's indeed overheating, then it would almost certainly be due to dust buildup. The N64 definitely has some aluminum heat spreaders inside, but not outright finned heatsinks like you might see in a  modern system. If you are concerned, some compressed air might help to clear out dust. If concerned about the cartridge connector, put some isopropyl alcohol on some paper, wrapped around a piece of cardboard (cut to the width of the slot, to a smaller width if you work it across the surface. Insert and remove it several times, keeping the paper wet with alcohol. The paper is mildly textured, and will clean the contacts without actively abrading them, and the alcohol will safely evaporate. I recommend using 90% or higher, if you can find it. if using 70%, maybe give it more time to evaporate.

I can not stress this enough though... If you have 1990s era electronics, and you want to preserve them, you should consider at the very least getting a few tools to at least visually examine them. For an N64, you'd want a game-bit driver, easily bought for a few dollars online. You can examine circuit boards and visually inspect to see if the areas around electrolytic capacitors (they look like small metal cans) look wet, have any weird staining, green corrosion, or excessive dust stuck around them (dust can stick to leaking electrolyte, making it look like patches of dust). All these are signs of leaking electrolytic capacitors, and if left as is, will slowly eat away the copper traces of the circuit board, till it fails. If you have any kind of soldering skills, it can be very beneficial to preemptively re-cap a device before the old capacitors begin leaking (or before the damage gets too bad). N64 re-cap kits are pretty cheap. You might be able to find local repair shops or online providers that can provide this service, for a fee.

1990s electronics are exceptionally susceptible to electrolytic capacitor leakage and damage for a few reasons. The late 1980s and 1990s introduced surface mount technology to consumer devices. This had the double effect of making double and multi layered boards more common place, and introducing new SMD (surface mount device) packages for traditionally through hole components. The early electrolytic capacitors were made with round leads (like a through hole capacitor) that passed though a rubber like material on the bottom, with the can sealed around the rubber base. All the capacitor's functional bits, along with the electrolyte fluid are sealed in the can. Outside the can, the leads are flattened, insert through a plastic base, and are bent out and up at opposing sides. Those flat lead surfaces are the place where the capacitor gets soldered to the board.

The problem with these early capacitors, is they could only vent down, and after so many years, the rubber like seal degrades. Now add to this, the fact that all surface mount components are mounted to a circuit board that has traces on the same side of the board as the component, and not just the opposite side. A lot of commodity through hole boards seen in older devices were actually single sided boards, and the copper traces were on the opposite side of the component. SMD devices changed that be mounting the components directly to the copper traces, and that means those old leaky electrolytic capacitors are all pretty much ticking corrosion time bombs. Eventually, they will almost certainly leak, someday. Many already have. This is probably the most common reason for old N64s, among other 90s era tech, not working.

I can't stress this enough... If you wanna preserve old tech, remove batteries, and recap stuff before passing 20-30 years old. It's easier to replace a capacitor, than it is to rebuild the traces on a corroded circuit board, while still having to replace the capacitors.

Edited January 18, 2021 by richfiles

[Delay]

8 hours ago, richfiles said:

If the crashing gets more frequent, you might find it's not necessarily overheating.

30 or so minutes before I closed the windows on turned the heater up, which is only around 1 meter away from the console. Adding to that, the cooling is at the bottom, which is also kinda where the ground is.

So,  no circulation of air, heat coming from right next to the thing, generally humid air in my room and (apparently) very sensitive hardware. I wouldn't exactly be surprised if that contributed to a system reset.

But I might look around a bit, if things still look okay. Just looking for now.
The problem is that I really don't want to make it worse. I still want the console to work fine after I'm done messing with it!

Edit: I'm all over the place right now. Sorry.
Anyways, I opened up and took apart an old computer my dad for some reason kept. I want to practice soldering on/off that before even thinking about touching the N64 with that.
So... what am I looking for? Like, this is obviously a capacitor and it's not looking so good anymore:

But then, when I look up "smd capacitor" on Google, I get that pictures of these things:

...which the N64's PCB has quite a few of.

I'm not entire sure what I would look for when I do eventually open up the console.

Edited January 18, 2021 by Delay

[tater]

On 1/15/2021 at 5:11 PM, TheSaint said:

I want to kill every brain cell that remembers today....

The problem is it'll probably take liver cells with it.