the Hearth @Felthry@awoo.space

aa i hope we didn't make them feel awkward or something

social is hard
-F

one of these days i'll figure out a poll topic that's so esoteric that no one will have any opinions on it and it will finish with zero votes

this isn't like a *goal* or anything i'm just pretty sure it'll happen
-F

@starkatt because if anyone we know on here has opinions about electrical connectors it'd probably be you
-F

now i'm wondering, @starkatt was it actually you who did the one vote on this
-F

love it when you're just doing stuff and then suddenly get to thinking that that person you were talking to who didn't reply to your last message probably hates you now

and by love it i mean hate it
-F

concept: goo shapeshifter who, when asked why they're always two-legged and two-armed and single-tailed and single-headed, just expresses their frustration at the clothing industry
-F

we did a websearch and got.... tons of sketchy websites
-F

so does anyone here know how to jailbreak a ps3
-F

ah, social anxiety
-F

?

i dunno if FLIR's solid black counts as an iconic color scheme

LeCroy does solid black for their scopes too
-F

fluke's colors are so iconic and their meters so highly regarded that a lot of cheap multimeters use similar color schemes actually
-F

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)
-F

what was that method to force your instance to re-fetch someone's icon again?
-F

also ping @starkatt and @Kyresti because i think you might find this interesting
-F

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:

-F

happy sataurday everyone

you're a taur now if you want to be!
-F

foxes cute
-F

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
-F