the Hearth @Felthry@awoo.space

normally we expect better than this from a fan translation but this one's been a bit iffy for a while, it feels like one of those early-2000s fan translations
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this video game has four high-ranking evil minion people (not spoilers, they're never mentioned before appearing as a boss) named
- Balmod: Okay, fantasy name, makes sense
- Bejould: Is that supposed to be "bejeweled"??
- Boozoo: Uhhh, what?
- Belts: You can't just name your evil person "belts" come on

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thought of the day: two-bodied golden retriever who burns off steam by playing fetch with themself
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dielectric absorption is weird
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the first ever op amp

not much of an op amp by modern standards but it looks pretty striking with the two 12ax7s sticking out the top
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i want a k2-w

not for any particular use but just, to have one
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we went to red robin for dinner because craving a teriyaki burger and didn't want to make one, and then had an Idea

french fries are not the healthiest side, but we noticed steamed broccoli was an option for a side, and while broccoli alone isn't anything special, it's unsurpassed as a vegetable to put sauce on, especially with asian-style flavors

and since we were getting a teriyaki burger we knew they had to have teriyaki sauce of some type in the kitchen, so we asked for a side of some of that

so our side became teriyaki broccoli instead of french fries, which i think is probably a much healthier option on top of going really well with the teriyaki burger, much better than the usual fries+honey mustard
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what exactly are the characteristics of a "bond villain"? we've never seen a james bond movie
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Outernational
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i wonder if we could just ask Keysight (the modern company that is what remains of HP's test equipment department)

they might not still have it, but they also might
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actually, would anyone happen to be good at digging up old manuals? i feel like this one would be a fascinating one to go through but our attempts have so far been stymied by the fact that modern HP has reused the number for a printer
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that flyback transformer is the source of the ticking i mentioned earlier, by the way. under no load it operates at about 1~4 Hz depending on the set voltage, making a tick every time it switches, and as the load increases it ticks more, up to a maximum of something around 3~4 kHz (by our ear, anyway--we don't have perfect pitch so this is a very rough estimate)

it's quite something to look inside
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maybe we'll try to reverse engineer it sometime

it's not that complicated a thing; the dials on the front are just decade switches for resistances (and the 1s digit is a potentiometer for fine adjustment), that'll obviously just be a divider in the feedback network (probably a kelvin-varley divider?)

the converter itself is an enormous flyback--i do mean enormous, the flyback transformer is about the size of a box of tissues--running in a variable frequency mode
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it's a high voltage power supply, 4 kV/50 mA (max of 2 kV from ground, but the output is floating so you can do ±2 kV for a total of 4), and it's from an era where they advertised it being fully solid-state as a big selling point

and honestly that is a big selling point now, too; getting old equipment that uses tubes is always a pain because sometimes the tubes need replacing and sometimes they're ones that you can't get anymore

would love to have the schematics for it
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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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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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