the Hearth @Felthry@awoo.space

electronics test equipment from before around the 60s or 70s is always so much more reliable than modern stuff
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i love the hp 6525A that we have at work

it's such a... Thing

weird box with dials on it on the bench with a couple wires sticking out

ridiculously heavy

makes a continuous ticking noise when plugged in (if the dials are set to anything other than 0000)

still works perfectly (if a bit out of calibration) when it's about 60 years old

they don't make things like that anymore
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@starkatt "dong bag" sounds like some kind of mixed insult. I'm sure we've seen people call people dickbags before
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@trysdyn three things that together mean not worth passing on, yeah

not judging or anything--was just curious!
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@trysdyn Why a sledgehammer instead of a goodwill or something, is it falling apart? or just too cheap to be worth passing on (which probably implies falling apart)?
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@tabitha@chitter.xyz this usually means the second window is either much smaller and in a corner (chat programs, text editor) or it's also in the middle but taller and narrower than the other main window (so you can click on the bits of either window that stick out behind the other)
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@tabitha@chitter.xyz having worked on a single screen for the vast majority of the time though, i think has given us some habits

we never fullscreen anything, for instance, and usually layer windows in a way that makes it relatively possible to click over to another one, particularly if there are two we're going back and forth between
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@tabitha@chitter.xyz ...so sometimes it feels cramped on the usual laptop, i forgot to finish the thought there
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@tabitha@chitter.xyz we use a laptop most of the time but have gotten used to two screens/ultrawide screen from our work computer and our desktop respectively
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@codl try finding a 1 GB SD card

or any SD card that's not SDHC or SDXC
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or ngspice i suppose, which is a bit more of a problem because that's the open-source spice (i almost typed open-spice source)
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it seems like all power MOSFETs, SiC MOSFETs, and IGBTs, where the manufacturer provides models for them at all, have subcircuit models that use things like if statements that cause discontinuities, which cause Problems with numerical stability and convergence

LTspice, at least, has built in models for VDMOS devices (which would cover power MOSFETs and SiC MOSFETs) and IGBTs, and if they had just used those you'd get much better performing models

they just wouldn't work in PSPICE
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also it's nice when things go easily and you don't have to fight with ltspice to get things to converge
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something we're learning (that we kind of already knew) at work is that we work a lot better when we enjoy what we're working on, and we *really* enjoy working on power supplies
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@NovaSquirrel what we would do, personally, is replace the chip with a socket and then a tiny PCB with a CR2032 and some other RTC chip
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@NovaSquirrel do you know what the battery-backed chip is? both RTCs and SRAMs were common; both can be replaced, but an RTC replacement will still need a battery whereas you can replace an SRAM with FRAM and avoid needing a battery
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@NovaSquirrel true in the case of the cdi, probably less true in other cases though!
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@NovaSquirrel it's not a great solution but i can see why they would have arrived at it, especially when no one was thinking anyone would care about this random computer thingy in more than the 10 year specified life of the battery
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@NovaSquirrel i guess the idea with those is that you replace the whole thing when you need to replace the battery. it takes up less space on the pcb than separate SRAM and battery, and I *guess* being able to take it out of the board and still have it keep its data could have been an advantage that was considered?

Dallas also made things that plugged in under a CPU and added an RTC to a PC-compatible motherboard that didn't support an RTC, and the constraints there kinda required a battery
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@Cabtcougalope how many people in the modern age are actually fluent in that, i wonder
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