Question for UK #solar people; what are the annual costs of maintenance like? Do you pay an annual fee to cover everything or just take it as it goes? Do they have to pull up scaffolding again to fix stuff often?
a race condition: Preliminary NATS report on the outage that took out UK air traffic control for a few hours - they had a race condition of some type where a higher priority task triggering during a normal squawk code allocation caused a corruption and it gently fell to bits over a few hours.
Full report ~month or so; prelim report:
The sun3/60 makes a pretty useful bench when debugging a 3/60. The chassis is built like a tank.
(On there we have a home built ESR meter, a capacitance meter, a general volt meter, a random fan and the PSU sitting on a erm...wallet folder).
Hmm, replaced 5 caps in one of my Sun3's PSU (all on the input side), although most read as within spec (one of the chunky 680uF was down at 618); but...now it trips a breaker (non-spectacularly). Hmph.
(If anyone has a schematic of a Matsushita ETX-593C10M or ETC-593C101M I'd appreciate it)
Huh, it's the right way around on Cheese, but flipped on Kamoso - I think this is it deciding that a face camera should be flipped; hmm I bet there's a USB descriptor somewhere for that.
Ooh, that's getting there.... This is a BBC B captured with the RGB wired directly to a PICO GPIO and advertising USB video; now hmm, wtf is it backwards. (It's yellow because I ahem need to put the blue pin in the right place). I've not properly done sync yet and it's not bad!
Got one of my Sun3's open - no life yet - but they don't look too bad; look at that BBC Engineering sticker; and they're neighbouring serial numbers on the machines - these are siblings! Few fun board bodges.
#retrocomputing #suntember
and it works! The old one was down to about 2.5uF; it needed some assistance from some wire ties since the old one had a slot mounting unlike this ones screw mount.
(The drier has picked up a mechanical squeek/squeal; I think it's the idler wheel after changing the belt. Not sure what the right fix is there)
My shiny new Ducati! Turns out they started off with electric components before motor vehicles.
Now, lets hope it fixes my dryer.
Ooh, found my dad's slide rule; I guess I have to learn how to use it now!
Great, power outage at one building affecting most NW #trains - resiliency anyone?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cwy0d0wgy4xt?post=asset%3A167269b0-c1b9-4a3d-9e8f-26af4548501f#post
My DAB radio seems to have got louder in the last few days; anyone else noticed this?
(Robert's clock/alarm/radio bought a few months back). Not sure if it's firmware updated, some change in some platform a lot of channels are using or what. Or just me.
I wrote up my hackery on the pair of Snapdragon aarch64 laptops I bought (with broken displays) and getting Linux running on them:
Toolstation sell M5 bolts in 25 or 30 packs; they sell the nuts in 100 packs. Grrr.
A family of local Coots. Hmm.
This years heatwave sin the UK being very windless is something that hmm, it's something I'd not thought of; I guess there must be a meteorological reason - but from the grid point of view, having almost no wind in the evening is not pretty while houses are still very hot.
I guess more storage might help; but it means every day is a huge roller coaster of low-carbon power.
I love that there's a Linux /sys file where you can tell which way up your USB-C connector is. Anyone know of anything that displays all that type of thing? Connector, USB mode, power delivery, etc etc?
Some more BBC B screen shots - I put my beeb on a TV via UHF and os now I've got screenshots here from Acornsoft {Snooker, Monsters and Snapper}, and as a Bonus, PMS Multifont - which I think was part of a 64k external 1MHz bus RAM box; which I must look at some day.
(Was UHF always this bad but our TVs were small enough not to notice?)
(My Beeb only started some stuff after I took it's lid off - is it's got some heat problems!)
#retrocomputing
#radio4 Does anyone know when Droitwich itself is being switched off - I heard it's 30th - but when?
I look forward to Starmer's inevitable book on discussions with Trump.