That's exactly why my current employer hired me. I have 30 years experience in my field in a wide variety of environments.
"It was a dark and stormy night when all through the abbey not a creature was stirring, not even a wight. The axes were hung in the armory with care, in hopes that some hapless enemy soon would be there."
Or something along those lines.
Actually, on the 14th of this month, I am starting a homebrew adventure for my Friday group.
How am I starting the adventure?
With a TPK of course.
Checks Bucket List:
Error 404: torture not found
Keychron.
I have the Keychron V6 QMK with Red keys and love it. I do a lot of typing, which the Reds are not optimized for, but once I got used to them I'm not going back. The build quality is top notch. The software works well, my only complaint is that it only works on Chromium based browsers.
The nice thing about mechanical keyboards is you can always change out the switches. Or even have different switches on various parts of the keyboard.
I have a love/ hate relationship with early 90's to early 2000's audio equipment.
This is an Adcom GTP-350, which a decent mid-range stereo pre-amp from 1993. I bought it off of Ebay for $80 and free shipping. It came to me with no left channel and scratchy to non-working pots. So several applications of Deoxit and working the pots they all came back to life. However, the left channel would just now work, EXCEPT for the radio. The radio played normally through both channels. That told me this unit has fallen to the curse of dry/cold solder joints. So I took about 30 minutes and resoldered all the joints in the signal path of both channels.
Then... I ran into my own stupidity... Sometimes I'm just and idiot and using an extremely flawed testing method and a defective external part (USB-C to 1/8" Stereo adapter) I thought I hadn't fixed it. After messing around with it for another 30 minutes, I discovered my mistake... Then discovered the adapter I was using to play music from my phone was defected (if you guess it would not play through the left channel, even on known good equipment you get a cookie.) So I figured all that out finally, as I said, I'm an idiot sometimes, and it's working great.
The plan is to run it for a week or so and make sure nothing else happens. I am contemplating recapping it, but we'll see. If it passes, then it will go up to my living room so I can get my main stereo back to working. Right now I'm running a Marantz receiver I fixed and while I really like it, I like my main stereo even more.
Here is a photo of the work I did today. I started at the inputs (top center of the photo) and just worked my way down. To the left in the photo is the radio section and it's working fine, so I didn't touch it. Also, we don't listen to the radio, so if something does happen to that section I'll just isolate it from the signal path and just leave it.
I am unable due to having signed an NDA.
But let's just say the world is still here. You're welcome.
A few years ago my wife and I decided to finish the basement. The first step was to clean it out, which involved going through all the junk that I had inherited from various family members. My mom always asserted that all of it was very valuable and CONSTANTLY checked that I still had it all and was taking good care of it.
I went through each item one by one and looked them up. Dishes, nick knacks, all of it. It took me hours. The highest value item was maybe $10. Several large and heavy boxes that I had been obligated to haul around to all of the places I lived for the last 30 years, as my mother constantly asked me about them. It was all worth maybe $100, if I made the effort to attempt to sell it. Which would have taken a lot of time as we're talking dozens of fragile things. It just was not worth it.
I shoved it all into the trunk of my car and took it to the dump. My Mom died in 2011, so she wasn't around to check up on all that crap.
God damn I was so pissed. 30 fucking years of hauling that worthless junk around probably cost far more than it was worth. My mother was so insistent that I even had it sitting around taking up space in my basement 12 years after her death. Just another one of her little power plays.
WARNING: In this post I talk about working on HIGH POWER electrical circuits. DO NOT DO THIS UNLESS YOU HAVE BEEN TRAINED... PERIOD! The capacitor in the final photo is quite easily capable of KILLING YOU if you discharge it through yourself. The amp uses TWO of those in its power supply.
As a hobby, I pick up distressed amplifiers, receivers, and other audio equipment and attempt to bring them back to life. This has netted me some spectacularly great pieces for pennies on the dollar, to outright free.
This photo is a receiver I picked up locally for free. Both main channels were "out". It wasn't the internal amplifier that was the problem though, rather the input board had some dry solder joints. About 3 hours of soldering netted me a perfectly working receiver, which has been in my living room for the past two years working perfectly. If you want photos of when I took it apart, just let me know.
Below is an 8 channel McIntosh MC7108 that I bought off of eBay listed "for parts". While what I paid for it probably doesn't fit the definition for "budget", it was less than a quarter what the amp is worth... So maybe budgetish? It's works great, but I ended up not really fixing it. It actually worked for about a week after I bought it. I thought I had really scored, until it started up with a horrendous buzzing noise that came from inside the cabinet. The protection circuits also kicked in and the amplifier would not power up. Some investigation, again photos are available if you want to see them, revealed that buzzing came from a bad capacitor and relay in the on/off switch circuit. As I didn't care about the on/off switch, I simply bypassed it. Now, if the amp is plugged in, it turns on. I control it using a Zwave outlet (look at the power outlet and you'll see it) and that is what I use to turn on and off the entire stack you see.
Below the McIntosh is a Carver TFM-15B that needed the input pots cleaned and new meter lights. It's not a well built amp, but I've always loved Bob Carver's work and it sounds very warm. Bob was known for is ability to copy the sound of much more expensive amplifiers in his design, which he called "Transfer Function." In the case of the TFM-15B is copies the sound of a Classe amp, although I don't remember which one.
Below that is my wife's old Soundcraftsman amplifier that I put new power supply capacitors in. The caps in that thing are the size of coke cans.. Don't believe me? See the last photo...
At the very bottom is an old HTPC I built many years ago. It is retired as an HTPC and is currently serving as a low power server for my house.
Big honking Capacitor:
Sorry for the bad image quality.
The image is of the top of piston 4 and the cylinder wall in a Toyota 2AR-FE with 162,000 miles. All Toyota recommended maintenance was performed throughout the engine's life. I have the feeling those recommendations were written by marketing people and not the engineers.
Based on what the image shows, the engine needs a short block. Am I correct?
Wisconsinite here where the badger is native and the mascot for the University of Wisconsin is the Badger.
This meme is inaccurate.
The American Badger will also remove your kidneys and sell them on the black market as well, to support their meth habit.
And where...
THE FUCK...
Is the FBI?
If that's not a terroristic threat, then what is?
Over 150 Major Incidents in a single month.
Formerly, I was on the Major Incident Response team for a national insurance company. IT Security has always been in their own ivory tower in every company I've worked for. But this company IT Security department was about the worst case I've ever seen up until that time and since.
They refused to file changes, or discuss any type of change control with the rest of IT. I get that Change Management is a bitch for the most of IT, but if you want to avoid major outages, file a fucking Change record and follow the approval process. The security directors would get some hair brained idea in a meeting in the morning and assign one of their barely competent techs to implement it that afternoon. They'd bring down what ever system they were fucking with. Then my team had to spend hours, usually after business hours, figuring out why a system, which had not seen a change control in two weeks, suddenly stopped working. Would security send someone to the MI meeting? Of course not. What would happen is, we would call the IT Security response team and ask if anything changed on their end. Suddenly 20 minutes later everything was back up and running. With the MI team not doing anything. We would try to talk to security and ask what they changed. They answered "nothing" every god damn time.
They got their asses handed to them when they brought down a billing system which brought in over $10 Billion (yes with a "B") a year and people could not pay their bills. That outage went straight to the CIO and even the CEO sat in on that call. All of the sudden there was a hard change freeze for a month and security was required to file changes in the common IT record system, which was ServiceNow at the time.
We went from 150 major outages (defined as having financial, or reputation impact to the company) in a single month to 4 or 5.
Fuck IT Security. It's a very important part of of every IT Department, but it is almost always filled with the most narcissistic incompetent asshats of the entire industry.
My family watches several Youtube channels on the main HTPC. It had Chrome for them to use, as that is what the kids and my wife are familiar with from school/ work. Then this BS started. I use Firefox on my personal PC and have yet to have a problem.
So I dumped Chrome off of the HTPC.
It would be amusing if Chrome lost a ton of market share to Firefox and other browsers.
Flip Over Read Directions
Home Despot
Blood Bath and Beyond
Wally World: But not for Walmart. When I was a teenager I worked for a garden center called "Walnut Ridge" and everyone that worked there referred to as that.