the Hearth @Felthry@awoo.space

fluke's colors are so iconic and their meters so highly regarded that a lot of cheap multimeters use similar color schemes actually
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thing we find kinda neat: tech equipment manufacturers with really iconic color schemes

like fluke meters are always yellow and grey, tektronix oscilloscopes are beige and blue, you even get it in computing stuff--noctua cooling fans are brown and tan (which apparently a lot of gamers hate because it doesn't go with their case)
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what was that method to force your instance to re-fetch someone's icon again?
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also ping @starkatt and @Kyresti because i think you might find this interesting
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All semiconductors are photosensitive, and any light of energy equal or greater than their bandgap will generate free charge carriers--valence-band holes and conduction-band electrons. This is how photodiodes, solar cells, and even LDRs/photocells work (and how LEDs work in reverse).

But when this is undesired, it can cause problems. This is one of several reasons most electronics are packaged in opaque plastic housings and only the metal leads stick out, no exposed semiconductor. But plastic doesn't work for everything: metal is used for things that need to conduct heat out of them (and old parts that predate the development of plastics that are suitable for this purpose, and a few specialty parts that need to be metal for other reasons), and ceramics are used for things that need to work at high temperatures or withstand higher voltages or just have very repeatable electrical characteristics (too much manufacturing variance in plastic)

Metal and plastic cases, unless damaged or intentionally designed that way, are completely 100% opaque, at least as far as can be measured

most ceramic cases also are, but *this specific device* that we're dealing with is in a hybrid metal-ceramic case, and apparently the alumina ceramic used for it (chosen for its electrical characteristics for reasons we don't fully understand--that's not our area) is at least a little bit transparent to some frequencies of light--probably not visible light because you can't see through it, but possibly IR or UV

because we were measuring off-state leakage current in a FET, and noticed that when our hand was on the controls, putting our shadow on the device, the leakage dropped from about 300 nA to about 100 nA

then we turned off the lights, and it dropped all the way to 7 nA.

This is going to make measuring leakage currents Difficult.

until we get some better solution we'll probably have to cover parts in electrical tape for measurement, just to block the light

-F&A

so we encountered a really strange thing in the lab yesterday

we've brought up a few times to our coworkers that the lab's fluorescent lighting is going to be a problem when we get to doing tests on bare dice

well yesterday we were only working with packaged parts, and it was a problem anyway!

to explain why, let me go into a little detail on electronics:

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happy sataurday everyone

you're a taur now if you want to be!
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foxes cute
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my random polls are getting more and more esoteric and i'm surprised that someone voted on this at all, let alone for that one
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:

okay if anyone here has any opinion on this at all (other than like katt or someone) i will be immensely surprised
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apparently very few people who are on fedi at nearly 8 pm have opinions on magnets
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why is there no magnet emoji anyway here's another of our random polls
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@xenon @a_breakin_glass @monorail @IceWolf i mean i get the idea of having audio dip quieter so you can hear other things, that's fine, but having the entire thing just cut out repeatedly is horrendously obnoxious and gives us a headsache
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aaaaaaaa why do people put music on their videos with such... *painful* percussion

someone told us that the percussion sounds we can't stand are generally called 'synthwave percussion' and can someone please tell us why this is so popular when it's almost literally painful to listen to
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i wonder how frequently someone sees advice to clean something with IPA and then tries washing it in beer
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good morning friends

and i guess good morning enemies too but i don't think i have any enemies on here. they should still have a good morning though
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i just think they're neat
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