Re: Run wires
Yep, hence the "doesn't play well with", which I guess I should have worded as "is completely incompatible with".
508 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Mar 2015
Quabbin Wire makes DataMax Mini 6, which is under 5mm diameter.
Can handle PoE, and is pretty good stuff.
Designed for datacenter trunking/patching in racks, but can be used for backhaul.
The thing I dislike is the end connectors are difficult to find, and it doesn't play well with punch-blocks.
No affiliation directly, they just happen to be known in my industry.
On the subject of microwaves in the office...
Many moons ago (ok, ok, about 111 moons ago. Ish...), at a firm that's better unnamed, there was a wall of microwaves in the break room/cantina bullpen.
I can't remember the brand, but I know for a fact that opening the door the moment the timer ticked over to zero and the beeper started to bleat would brick them.
Just one long, sad, ceaseless tone denoting that it's dead, persisting through a power cycle.
There was also another microwave where we swear someone nuked a plumped up used nappie, the stench was as strong as bear attractant, and never went away fully.
So what happens when they put a fibre run through a gate valve, and roadworks shuts the valve while turning off others?
Because you know that will happen.
Or "That water main has been disconnected for years, water authority confirms, no problem if we cut it out."
Interactive plumbing is best left to the Blue Man Group imho.
Oh bother.
I hope it's not going to do the literal rollercoaster thing that the Apple Watch did, where it called EMS to report a crash when people rode a coaster.
If it means I need to dis-arm (Hah, pun!) my watch before I hop in the shower, then it could be very interesting indeed...
All joking aside, if rolled out properly, this could be a good thing for elderly or those with a heart condition, as a tertiary layer of check.
I remember a tool on Linux that would tell most ATA optical drives to limit their speed. I used it at one point to avoid vibration and subsequent bad data reads when a disc was off-kilter.
On a quick search, it was "eject -x N /dev/cdrom" where N is the "x number" that you want to limit to.
My only use-case for "AI" is having it barf up hundreds/thousands of words of slightly-better-than-Markov-chain hacker bunny stories for amusement at weird hours of the night.
And the occasional laugh when Dalle makes a frumpy rabbit doing something silly, or makes a goat with three heads when you request Cerberus Simulator.
It's also great at making fake executive orders declaring strawberries and alfalfa the national fruit and candy flavorings.
All of it gets blown out of the water by a real creative person though, and for that there's merch I happily purchase to show support.
I've been using a service called TripLog (Intended for fleets I think, but it's cheap enough for a single user), and while it's not "always there in the background" it does well.
The annoying thing is if I forget to "start" the trip manually in a rental car, then it doesn't log the route or mileage.
For personal cars it checks for a bluetooth connection to the radio/head unit, and starts/stops trips based on that connection and a speed threshold.
There's also a cheap BLE beacon dongle that you can use to auto-start a trip, which works OK, when I remember to plug it into the rental car...
I primarily used it to keep track of my fuel expenses, and mpg, but when Timeline got axed I fell more into using the mileage portion.
It's been pretty accurate vs the car odometer, well within a mile or two on a 1200+ mile trip.
No affiliation, just a happy customer for (checks account registration) Wow, it's been a decade...
We at least have official sanction from Rockwell to run their stuff in a sandboxed "unsupported by minisquishy" Windows 10 VM, after Windows 11 summarily barfed memory management bits and broke Studio 5000...
Might actually be able to get away with a dual-boot-and-VM situation that way.
my habit of having one coolant spray hose aimed at the door
Cheeky. I like it.
In an even more prior job, I was opening the door to a horizontal machining cell to do some inspection/maintenance task, and unbeknownst to me the operators had bypassed the door switch.
Got a face-full of soluble oil coolant when the timed washdown started up, since the controller did not sense that the door was open.
Safety glasses saved me from getting it in the eyeballs, but the taste lingered on the flavor saver the rest of the day. Had to change shirt as well.
Those were Hyundai-Kia and Mori-Seiki systems, doing some very interesting machining on things I still can't talk much about.
If it was a secondary line I'd have considered that, but I'm not changing a number I've had for decades because someone gave it out.
The difficulty of contacting literally hundreds of people/places/institutions and updating it on about as many official forms/documents/accounts outweighs the annoyance of the occasional call from a prior place that I don't answer anyways.
GDPR wasn't a thing when this happened, but I did kindly state that I would selectively no-answer forward all calls from the people who were given my number to certain other numbers (theirs) if mine kept being given out. That seemed to do the trick.
At a previous job, when I applied, I gave my personal number on HR paperwork at the application process (not having a work line at that moment).
Coworkers/etc got the number of the company supplied mobe.
HR then gave out my personal number to anyone who asked for it.
"We couldn't reach him on his vacation, do you have another number for him?"
I don't work there anymore thankfully.
I am reminded of the anecdotal "spray painting" incident, where a painter set his pot of ceiling paint on a handy busbar trio and it went poof.
We had the big long 480V plug-in style busses along the rafters at one site I worked at, you would slide back an access cover and stab on a breaker-box that would finger-connect to the 4 bars.
Lately with the cost of copper I've seen plants are going to 11kv/13.2kv/13.8kv to a distribution transformer in each zone.
Somehow the math works out that it's cheaper, likely because they can use smaller/cheaper aluminum feeders to the xformers.
My usual response if it's a late-in-week question: "Let me check back with home base to see if that is within the scope of this visit, and if it would need any PO changes."
You can never be too sure what the people higher up above you and your customer contact have talked about or agreed to after the fact.
Still annoying when the "One more small issue..." turns into an extra week, but at least they pay for it.
This is why I always bring up https://www.dotbun.com instead, when I see an unlocked workstation.
Always more fun, and gets the point across that an unlocked workstation will be invaded by The Fluffle.
Icon because every bunny knows they're innocent...
On the note of mysterious toothache, it can sometimes be sinus pressure on the roots of the molars.
Went to a suitable(1) decongestant and the "Oh goodness why do I feel like I have the start of a cavity!" feeling went away.
Icon because my dentist found that one with an x-ray, and, well, yeah.
1:Good old fashioned pseudoephedrine, even if I felt like I had to sign my life away to buy it.
The phenylephrine decongestant never did work for me, and people thought I was full of it when I informed them years ago that it was bubkis snake oil.
Last laugh was mine when it was found to be just that...
When I was a cable monkey doing CCTV/Door/Network runs, I used to use masking tape, a sharpie, and cellphone photos.
Saved a lot of time and heartache.
Icon because I was usually able to scoot to the pub after the cleaning crew was done and first (third?) shift was just getting the sheeting lines and VEMAG ballers up.
I have memories of shortening services that did advertising redirects back around the mid to late 2k's.
One of them was a bee themed one? You got sent to an advert landing page, then clicked "continue on".
I also have a very small tingle of it paying a portion of profits to the people who created the links, based on click-through/impressions.
Very weird idea back then, still odd now.
"Mind you, I can remember the days when the cooking of cabbage in Britain was timed by calendar."
The trick is a small amount of white vinegar in the water when doing a par-boil. Helps out immensely.
Pretty much required for Gołąbki, along with shaving down the thicker stem part of the leaf with a paring knife. The cut off bits are then fried off as a chef's snack...
Decomposed glowing cabbage on the other hand, see the icon...
I say, I rather love cabbage.
Dice up an onion fine, sweat off in some bacon fat in a cast iron pan, add sliced cabbage, cook till tender, and toss in an entire kielbasa sometime along the way at that magic time that it's hard to explain to people.
Another favorite is cabbage alfredo.
That one needs a par-boil in water after slicing, then you bake with jarred alfredo sauce and sliced kielbasa at gas mark 4/350F till it comes out al dente.
Then, of course, there are the sweet cabbage and the sauerkraut pierogi.
And coleslaw.
Now I'm hungry.
Icon because of course a pint goes good with cabbage!
There is a short story, God is an Iron by Spider Robinson, Omni 8 May 1979 , that is tangentially topical about brain stimulation and rewards.
An excerpt: The plug was snapped into a jack surgically implanted in her skull, and from the jack tiny wires snaked their way through the wet jelly to the hypothalamus, to the specific place in the medial forebrain bundle where the major pleasure center of her brain was located
A bit of warning, it gets more than a little deep in some very very dark corners of things, has a fair bit of "sticks with you" that you won't forget soon, and a serving of graphic mental imagery sprinkled.
Icon because it's really a "can't un-read".
They likely used a worm gear someplace in the actuator, and manually collapsing it will shear teeth.
Or, they used a leadscrew pitch that would allow someone to shear teeth.
Or, they forgot the flyback protection diodes to clamp the voltage generated by the linear actuator being driven backwards.
I can see a few things they could have overlooked/"just dealt with" to get it out the door.
Nothing absolves them from the whole "increase torque request till it shuts" methodology, that's just really bad design.