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

[FleshJeb]

On 6/24/2020 at 2:24 PM, TheSaint said:

We're actually a pretty positive bunch around here. We've been chastised by the mods on multiple occasions for not being negative enough in the Negative Things thread.

Which is doubly ironic because this thread was started as a sly protest to over-moderation of negative things. I still have the group PM that started it.

I think it's really good for the community to be able to just TALK and form bonds.

I had myself banned for two six-moth stretches because I was so irritated with the notion that having a public, human conversation was not allowed.

I'm sure the above violates a rule, but I REALLY don't give a flarp.

In an attempt to get back on topic: Work and life are going reasonably well, so I have nothing to complain about. Except that it was 103deg F last time I had fieldwork... I still had fun.

[richfiles]

9 hours ago, Delay said:

The way I understood it, from the programming side, is that first the inputs are read, then the LED is turned on, and then the process is repeated. This would cause the LED to flicker, but just like Charlieplexing with multiple LEDs on "at the same time", it's too fast to notice. So the naive way I see it, there should never be a conflict because input and output never happen simultaneously. Heck, if I'm worried about pinmodes I can sacrifice the cycles and make a function/macro dedicated just to setting all pinmodes to input.

Perfect, now I feel like the odd one out for only understanding half of what you guys are talking about.

Yup, in my example, I take the step of always initializing the pins as inputs at startup, and then always switching a pin back to an input after it's been used as a digital out for any reason.

Nerd stuff...

Spoiler

 

If you're having trouble with it being overly flickery, or laggy, you could further break the program up to alternate between keyboard scan and LED lighting on every other task. You could set up the LED lighting as a call, and run the keyboard scan as the main loop, where you tell what row to scan, and it scans just the ONE row, then you call the LED routine between every row scan and perform the crypto routines at the end of the key scan. I mean, theres different ways to do it, and none of them are really "wrong". Some might get you less LED flicker and higher overall brightness. I think calling the LED routine between each row scan step, and calling it between crypto routine steps gives the best results, in terms of overall brightness and reduced flicker.

Looking at the Enigma setup, You'd need a variable to monitor both what key is pressed (KEY is a value equal to 0 through 26), but also when any key is pressed and released too (KEYdown). On any key press, a non 0 value representing which key was pressed gets stored into KEY. You would call the crypto routine when KEY is non-zero, and when KEYdown is also = 0. The crypto routine performs the crypto stuff (I'm guessing lookup tables combined with step counters to represent each rotor wheel), and uses the results of the crypto process to store the high and low LED lookup table values for the LEDhigh and LEDlow variables. The Crypto routine would also set the KEYdown variable to 1. This tells the crypto routine to skip processing on the next call, and return to the key scanning loop. When whatever key was pressed is released, it should return a zero value and that should reset the KEYdown variable back to 0. So basically,

KEY = 0, and KEYdown = 0 -- Crypto routine gets skipped
KEY > 0, and KEYdown = 0 -- Crypto routine gets run, stores 1 into KEYdown
KEY > 0, and KEYdown = 1 -- Crypto routine gets skipped
KEY = 0, and KEYdown = 1 -- Crypto routine gets skipped , stores 0 into KEYdown

That gives you your keypress detection, so repeatedly pressing the same key still steps the encryption.

 

Don't feel like the odd one out... My last real programming was BASIC on a Commodore 128 and TI-BASIC on a TI-86 and TI-89. I hate how confusing all this programming stuff is... I'm used to the old style method of numbered program listings. I don't even know the first place to begin writing proper C code (whatever variant...). I only grasp the overlying program flow and logic/conditional operations, but not actually the actual proper code syntax itself. I wish I understood how to... but I don't. 

 

Edited June 26, 2020 by richfiles

[XB-70A]

My negative thing of the day:

Spoiler

 

 

 

Second time I've been hit in less than 15 months, but they have a common point... In both case, it happen while I was going to the National Seashore for an F9 launch from the 39A.

Guess I will stop going there 

[StrandedonEarth]

38 minutes ago, XB-70A said:

Second time I've been hit in less than 15 months,

And that's why I bought (er, requested and received for Christmas) a dashcam. Not that I've been hit, but with one young adult driver in the house and another soon to get a learner's permit, I figured it was a good idea. That and the 100km/day I clock on the highway. I haven't caught anything worth posting on it, but there were some clips worth keeping. Like the dude who started to stop for a changing light, then blew through it as I was trying to turn left across his path. Close call there.

In hindsight, it would have been nice to get my own dashcam, as I probably would have gotten a better one. That's what happens when my wife buys me tech.

[tater]

1 hour ago, XB-70A said:

Second time I've been hit in less than 15 months, but they have a common point... In both case, it happen while I was going to the National Seashore for an F9 launch from the 39A.

Wow, do people not even look?

[kerbiloid]

Some people learn to pilot in MSFS, others learn to drive in GTA.

(And we have KSP for both of that, and for space flight training.)

Edited June 27, 2020 by kerbiloid

[StrandedonEarth]

9 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Some people learn to pilot in MSFS, others learn to drive in GTA.

(And we have KSP for both of that, and for space flight training.)

And I learned how to ditch a Spitfire in CFS3

[XB-70A]

9 hours ago, tater said:

Wow, do people not even look?

It's FloriDuh. I heard you earn your license in Kinder Joy candies around here.

Seriously though, the driver was around his 60's and said he thought I was going out to the station (my turn signals were off at this time). I can however believe it, because during the few years of driving to my credit (10 years only), I have already been surprised at two occasions when entering a road. In both cases I swear that I checked for the incoming traffic, that I estimated to have enough distance to be able to enter and accelerate to the speed limit in a decent time to not annoy other drivers, but ended up with someone tailgating me.

I don't think those drivers were coming that fast, but rather that my brain (too used to repetitive checks) had "failed" to take these vehicles into account. Pretty worrisome... 

 

10 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:

I haven't caught anything worth posting on it, but there were some clips worth keeping. Like the dude who started to stop for a changing light, then blew through it as I was trying to turn left across his path. Close call there.

In hindsight, it would have been nice to get my own dashcam, as I probably would have gotten a better one. That's what happens when my wife buys me tech.

In about three years of dashcam owning, I already got about 98 gb of clips on my hard drive   Most of the time they are minor infractions, but always with a slight touch of WTH?! 

I, too, bought a not-so-good model at first. It was a Garmin 45; decent but still not that "efficient" to its task. I'm now driving with a DR900S-2CH for two years and I'm pretty satisfy of it. However, it was and still is utterly expensive for what it is. I looked at some review and sample, and it seems the A129 Pro Duo 4K is now a decent competitor and for half the price.

[StrandedonEarth]

10 minutes ago, XB-70A said:

It's FloriDuh. I heard you earn your license in Kinder Joy candies around here.

Before British Columbia brought in graduated licensing, one could get their license from a Cracker Jack box

[StrandedonEarth]

Go to get the RV ready for the road, only to find that (I think it's) the hot water tank sprung a leak, lots of water underneath it. 

E: Yup, it's the tank. Apparently I managed to not drain the hot water tank when I winterized. Maybe I opened the drains after isolating the tank?

The trials of a rookie RV owner. First time winterizing a travel trailer FAIL!

On the bright side, it's 15 years old, when they usually only last ten, so I guess it was about that time...

Edited June 30, 2020 by StrandedonEarth

[kerbiloid]

Like a Starship.

[EchoLima]

Who's idea was it to make summer courses?

"Here's a fifteen week semester crammed into five weeks, good luck!"

But I finished the class (gen chem 1) today, so that's a relief.

[Superfluous J]

On 6/27/2020 at 11:12 AM, XB-70A said:

It's FloriDuh. I heard you earn your license in Kinder Joy candies around here.

My theory about that is that there are 50 states (and 10 provinces), each with their own wrinkles in both driving laws and common driving courtesies. And after you spend 50 years getting used to those and are therefore dead set in your ways, you move to Florida and refuse to adapt to ANYTHING NEW EVER.

[richfiles]

I went to my sister's place for fourth of July celebrations. She lives on the edge of a lake at the edge of my hometown, just a block away from where they launch the fireworks. Basically, it's a nice place to get an entire lakeside back yard to yourself, away from the crowds. I left something in my car, so I was walking out to the street to grab it. I forgot that the "curb" from her yard to the street is in fact not a curb, but rather, is a small retaining wall, about 1.25-1.5 feet tall (approximately 38-45 cm... I'm guessing, I never actually measured it). It was dark, and my eyes had not readjusted to the darkness, as I'd just looked at my phone screen. I just walked right over the edge, and my only thought was "not a curb!" 

I face planted into the asphalt. Bent my glasses, left road rash on my left upper cheek, and all down my left forearm and hand... Man, absolutely rekt my left hand... left my pinkie finger bleeding at two spots, and well beyond sore. I have not entirely discounted the possibility that I might have broken something in my hand or wrist. Not sure yet. Haven't gone in to have it x-rayed. Everything still moves okay. Between all my wiggly, dangly, fingery parts still working, Corona-chan being a meanie, and it being a holiday weekend here in 'Murrica!... I'm waiting to go to see a doc... Also dumb out of pocket medical expenses too... Not going to the ER for a non emergency. If it remains bad, I'll don an N95 mask and head into the bullpen... And by that, I mean wait around the clinic with the other sick people.

The face plant was actually my biggest concern. I've been knocked out by a head injury once in my life, back in 2014. I ended up with a small abrasion on my left upper cheek, and I hit hard enough to bend out the corner of my glasses frames, where the... ear thingy attaches. By some miracle, the lenses seemed to have survived unscathed. My eye smacked hard enough against the very smooshed glasses for me to see a "white flash". The miracle glasses are actually fully intact, and right back on my face. I was able to bend the frame back to almost the correct dimensions. It's still a bit skewed to one side, but it's not bad enough for me to bother tweaking it any better, for now. That's fortunate... 

But, oh boy... My hand and wrist hurts. My left forearm and side of my hand took probably most of the fall damage. Shoulder is a bit sore on the second day... Second and third days are always the worst for these kinds of injuries... The endorphins wear off, and you finally feel all the little aches and pains the other pain masked. Left hand is back to working well enough for me to type quickly, but I'm not planning to use any force on it, both as a precaution... and cause it hurts! I don't have any obvious deformations, or even visible swelling anymore (as compared to the right hand), and I'm able to move all my fingers. The wrist joint is very stiff, but still mobile. The pinky and the wrist hurt the most (those took the hardest impact with the street). As soon as the stores open tomorrow, I wanna pick up a wrist/hand brace for it. Wrapping it messily in ace bandages is... awkward, trying to do it with only the one good hand.

Aside from the injuries, my phone went down like I'd just chucked it straight down to the concrete. The back glass got pulverized. Cracks running all up and down it, three of the corners just utterly shattered. I'm just glad the screen didn't get damaged worse.

The greatest loss of all, though... 
When my frosty cool beverage, which I'd only had 3-4 sips of, hit the asphalt... It was like mixing diet coke and mentos... The nearly full contents just detonated out of the mouth of that can... 
...
Aaaaand most of it seems to have somehow managed to target itself a rendezvous right square on my... ahem... "aft fairings"... 
As if the entire incident wasn't already bad enough... I had to deal with not only the injuries, not only the damaged phone... but also a wet cockpit seat...... 

In the end, I got to do the hobble of shame... With a wet posterior. lopsided glasses, a phone of jagged glass, and my poor, abused body, addled with so much pain...

Edited July 6, 2020 by richfiles
NOOOOO! not my frosty cool beverage!!

[cubinator]

I bricked an SD card, or somehow let it brick itself. The only way to get anything out of it now is brain surgery-precision soldering, or dark magic. 

[richfiles]

I have watched, and even performed such dark magic before. In fact, I bought a stupid number of chips I have no way to use, but to perform such soldering witchcraft on... Oops!

Edited July 9, 2020 by richfiles

[TheSaint]

3 hours ago, richfiles said:

I have watched, and eve performed such dark magic before. In fact, I bought a stupid number of chips I have no way to use, but to perform such soldering witchcraft on... Oops!

No...you're not getting off this easy. Story time.

[richfiles]

(Downloadable video)
https://i.imgur.com/raqzdRV.mp4 

Well, back in 2002, I built a two channel digital sampling oscilloscope inside a Gameboy cartridge. I built it from an Elektor "kit"... It only included the bare PC board and the pre flashed ROM chip. All other parts were self sourced. Around the time just after college, I wanted an oscilloscope, but didn't have a lot of spare cash back then. I'd seen the kit in a magazine, and opted for only the two parts I couldn't source back then, the unpopulated PC board and the pre flashed ROM, to keep costs as low as possible. I ordered chip samples wherever I could get away with it, again, as an attempt to keep my costs down... I know, I know... Yes, I would download a chip... Err, in this case, I sent in sample cards from electronics magazines and physical paper datasheets, requesting those sample chips. I can hardly belive the stacks of paper datasheets I kept in those days... Anyway, most other parts were discrete components... Pretty low cost from Digikey. The original design used 3.5mm audio jacks for the probes, and the magazine article expected you to make your own DIY probes. I had actually gotten a hold of some old proper scope probes from work. I also found a Kemco Top Gear Pocket cartridge for the Gameboy Color. It was used, for $0.99, and had a rumble motor and a compartment for a single battery. They were a perfect pair... I decided to take advantage of the extra space of the oversized cartridge to install proper BNC jacks, to use those probes, added large toggle switches, and took advantage of the battery compartment door to have easy access to the calibration trimmers.

The entire board was hand soldered. I botched the smallest pin pitch chip, breaking both the pin off and lifting a pad from the circuit board. I had to carefully grind into the plastic chip package to expose the broken pin, and solder a bodge wire between the 0.65mm pin pitch TSSOP chip and another part of the circuit board that connected to the lifted pad. You can just barely see the bodge in the image above, through the translucent plastic cartridge housing, third pin down the bottom-right most chip, left side of the chip. A TSSOP-20 is pictured below, on the prototype board example. A TSSOP-32 takes up the entire pad space.

 

For my Kerbal Instrument Panel project, I also had to solder an even smaller pin pitch chip to a circuit board, but the catch was that the chips needed to have a thermal pad soldered to the board as a heatsink. My options were to design a board from scratch, just to solder these chips to, or find a way to attach the thermal pad without... a thermal pad. My solution was to cut a slot in the center of the prototyping board... I used some desoldering braid to solder to the chip's thermal pad on the bottom of the chip. I passed the copper braid through the slot I cut using a Dremel, and scraped the green solder mask off the ground plane and soldered the copper braid to the ground plane of the circuit board to serve as a heatsink.

Spoiler

 

Things provided for size reference. Spoilered to mitigate beeeeg huge post.

 

Hmm... Other odd or crazy solder jobs... When I was a kid, my youngest brother jumped off a bed, and landed on a Casio keyboard. Split the main board in half. I jumped every connection between the two board halves and got it working again... No pics, as that would have been way back in the late 80s or very early 90s. Wasn't that difficult, but it was a very extensive repair, especially for a 10-11 year old.

Then there is the Xilinx XC9536XL BGA 48 packaged chips I bought in bulk many years ago. Thought I was getting a deal... Instead, I ended up with the chips below:
I can use these, but I will have to either really come up with a good custom circuit board design, and 99% have to pay the extra to do it as a 4 layer board, or I'll have to solder these "deadbug" style. That's where you flip the chip upside-down, and solder one wire at a time from each chip pad or pin to the circuit board. An example is also shown below. While the deadbug method is something I'm capable of, it is very labor intensive, and now that I DO know how to use KiCAD, It probably makes far more sense for me to just suck it up and design a proper circuit board, and just pay for the 4 layers.

Spoiler

Again, spoilered, cause long post.

 

Edited July 9, 2020 by richfiles

[Delay]

MilkyTracker / XM files are weird.
They have a vibrato function. So far, so expected, but how it works is anything but expected.

Now, just a quick explanation of what this entire thing is and how it works. MilkyTracker is your standard, FastTracker II-inspired music tracker and works very well as such. The way you make music in trackers is essentially broken down to filling out fields in a spreadsheet. Each column is one channel, each row is the currently played music bar/an arbitrary fraction of one. Who knew that boring office work could be this creative?

Like any other tracker, MT has a speed and a BPM value. The speed value describes how many... let's call them "subrows" each row has, basically a subdivision of each row that a lot of effects are based on, like volume slides. The BPM value is a bit misleading, rather it describes how fast each row is played (given different speed values, they can pass at different speeds, but with the standard speed of 6 the BPM is truly a measure of beats per minute).

So far, so good. Like I said, this entire row subdivision thing has a lot of effects based on it. Halfing the speed translates to halving the effect. Volume and pitch slides, arpeggios, etc. work this way....
... but NOT vibratos, they follow their own rules!

Changing the BPM does the expected thing - doubling that number will result in a vibrato twice as fast. However, halving the song speed, doubling the BPM and adjusting the effect speed by "old song  speed/new song speed" (these actions should - and on any other effect, do - cancel each other out) leads to a vibrato that is much faster than the original. I don't understand how or why this doesn't scale linearly like everything else, and it's extremely annoying because depending on what you're making, this song speed will jump up and down throughout the song.
Because having a consistent vibrato can be sort of important, I decided to make some tests and empirically guess an equation that correctly describes vibrato speed within reasonable accuracy. It's nowhere near as simple as the other effects, for a start the equation I came up with has two logarithms.

I even checked the source code for MT and an FT2 clone before I did all that in the hopes of finding some sort of documentation of how the effect is calculated, and how every other one is so I could have a comparison. Found none.
And there went, like, a few hours I'm never going to get back that I could have spent on other things.

[StrandedonEarth]

Time to maybe pay attention...?

 

[FleshJeb]

Grant Imehara (Mythbusters) just passed away from a brain anuerysm at age 49.

Seemed like such a good dude.

EDIT: Somebody already covered it, never mind.

Edited July 14, 2020 by FleshJeb

[Shpaget]

TIL about "running W".

Basically they tie ropes around a horse's legs and tighten them when they want to force a horse to fall. They used it in movie making to time the fall of the horse by tying the rope to a fixed point and galloping the horse by the camera. When the horse reaches the end of the rope, its legs are pulled up and it collapses. Basically every western movie has a scene or couple of them when the rider is shot and the horse falls as well (something that never made sense to me, but never thought twice about). This would often lead to horse being injuries and/or maimed.

This liquides me off. 

[YNM]

Took me 4 days to update an old Windows 8.1 machine that I last used in 2016 or something. Part of it is my own error (trying to revert everything back to the factory state, which means that I have to catch up even further back), but I expected it to be easier...

 

Still not finished as I do want to put in Lubuntu into it (unless someone have a better suggestion of lightweight linux distros - the machine only have 2 GB of RAM and it's x64 for some reason - that won't confuse me too much, I have experience using Ubuntu and Kubuntu only XD) - EDIT : if it wasn't clear, I mean dual boot. Just for backup.

Edited July 16, 2020 by YNM

[IncongruousGoat]

7 hours ago, YNM said:

Still not finished as I do want to put in Lubuntu into it (unless someone have a better suggestion of lightweight linux distros - the machine only have 2 GB of RAM and it's x64 for some reason - that won't confuse me too much, I have experience using Ubuntu and Kubuntu only XD)

Suggestion for "less cruft/bloat than Ubuntu, but also kinda similar to Ubuntu": Debian, with something lightweight like XFCE or LXDE for the desktop environment.

[YNM]

5 hours ago, IncongruousGoat said:

Debian, with something lightweight like XFCE or LXDE for the desktop environment.

Well, given that Ubuntu is based on Debian...

Xubuntu was another one that I considered; I also tried LXLE but I found it a bit too few for my liking. Problem is that I heard LXDE has been abandoned, and they've moved on to LXQt; with KDE also being based on Qt I kinda felt that Lubuntu (now based on LXQt) would be somewhere on the sweet spot. -Ubuntu version 20.04 is also really easy to use, given my experience with 18.04 (though part of that had to do with the terrible OEM support, I've changed hardware now).

Will try to look on Debian first I suppose. - EDIT : Alright, XFCE is made by Debian community so I guess the other option is Debian w/ XFCE.

Edited July 16, 2020 by YNM