The "I'm Such a Fecking Div" Thread

[Mrs Pingu]

Ah, that explains that.

[T42]

Please don't call audiologists Audis.  It gives the wrong impression.  Especially on a cycling forum.

Audi et odi?

I must confess to being a bit fed up with ours: there's no way to tie the back hatch down when you've got the last metre of a 2m40 length of wood sticking out the back.

As a German colleague of mine once said, that shouldst thou not to do want.

[barakta]

Please don't call audiologists Audis.  It gives the wrong impression.  Especially on a cycling forum.

Have amended my post for clarity. Audi(ologist)

[quixoticgeek]

I ordered €40 of gas for my blow torch.

It arrives for me to discover it has the wrong fitting on the bottle... *Facepalm*

I had also added some Boric acid to the order. Well I thought I had.

What I got was 800g of borax. Which is not the same thing...

Doing well here...

J

[T42]

'tis the heat, m'dear, the heat.

Meanwhile, the other day my BP gadget gave me two good readings in a row then told me I had moved when I tried for n° 3, and kept on doing it. Well, thought I, it's managed since 2008 so no harm to it, and I ordered a new one.  When this arrived I transferred the batteries from the old one (Mum was Scottish) put on the cuff and hit the button.  Got a reading consistent with the old gadget but noticed at the same time that the batteries were a bit, er, low...

So this morning I put fresh batteries in the old meter, put on the cuff and hit the button. Lo and be holed below the waterline, it puffed the cuff up merrily then started counting down and... stop moving, it said.

No a fecking div then?  Yes too a fecking div: I should have tried that to make sure the old one was kaput before ordering a new one.

Both units are from a bunch called Hartmann, BTW.  Can't guarantee you'll get 16 years of life out of one but 15's a pretty good bet.

Hell, I'm not sure I want another 16 years of life.

[mrcharly-YHT]

In 2021 a friend was organising a boat trip to a remote island, North Rona.

It sounded exciting, so MrsC and I signed up. Weather and other things put the trip off, until yesterday.

60-odd miles at sea in a small boat, at speed. Sizeable atlantic swell.

I'm prone to sea sickness. Guess what happened?

I lost 2kg in weight in one day.

[Mrs Pingu]

After spending all that money getting a secure garage door, I didn't lock it properly when we went out this morning. I know this because there was a parcel in there when we got home. Fortunately everything appears to be present, including the several grand of bathroom suite.

[Kim]

int64_t != unsigned long.  Wasted bloody hours chasing all sorts of gremlins before I spotted that.  FFS.

[T42]

int64_t != unsigned long.  Wasted bloody hours chasing all sorts of gremlins before I spotted that.  FFS.

It's a bit poor that nowadays when memory is measured by the gigabyte we still have to bother about the length of a variable. Unless you're bit-masking, of course.

Huh. I say "we" but the last time I programmed anything was over a year ago.  Don't even know if my development machine will still start.

[ScumOfTheRoad]

Well worth a discussion on variable lengths. I work in HPC where the Top500 performance in measured only in double precision floats.
However as you know the AI community make great proegress using less precision variables.

This means  (a) packing more compute cycles into these GPUs
And  importantly (b) saving energy per compute operation.

I am a Julia fanboy, and the type system in very rich in Julia.
Lets look t Posits then - in Julia you cn easily swap to different types for running computational models.
OK, no hardware implements Posits yet but have a look at

https://twitter.com/milankloewer/status/1068475294368100352

[Feanor]

We had a bug in our  code where it was crashing with one particular data set.

It was a divide by zero error calculating a Free Fluid / Bound Fluid ratio.
There is protecctive code to check the BF is non zero before doing this.

But... this code has been built over many years, and is a mixture of modules written in different langages and variable lengths.
The calling code was working with 64 bit floats.
This passed the non zero check, just. The BF was ver ver small.
Upon calling the calculation module, this was cast to 32 bit, where it became zero and crashed!

[Kim]

int64_t != unsigned long.  Wasted bloody hours chasing all sorts of gremlins before I spotted that.  FFS.

It's a bit poor that nowadays when memory is measured by the gigabyte we still have to bother about the length of a variable. Unless you're bit-masking, of course.

Embedded systems are still pleasingly old-school in that respect.  I think the ESP32 has something like 512kB of RAM, which still feels like loads.

Anyway, it's basically a lesson in why you shouldn't copy & paste things that some other idiot^[1] wrote, simply on the basis that they work.


_{[1] In this case me, about 2 years ago.  Twas ever thus.}

[Mr Larrington]

No, poking that bit of the screen will not open the link no matter how hard or how often you do it, nor how prodigiously you swear at your fondleslab.

Because that’s a screenshot, not the actual page

[Jurek]

No, poking that bit of the screen will not open the link no matter how hard or how often you do it, nor how prodigiously you swear at your fondleslab.

Because that’s a screenshot, not the actual page

Ah!
I have, on occasion, touched the screen of my MacBook Air.
It doesn't feature a touch screen 

[Beardy]

No, poking that bit of the screen will not open the link no matter how hard or how often you do it, nor how prodigiously you swear at your fondleslab.

Because that’s a screenshot, not the actual page

Ah!
I have, on occasion, touched the screen of my MacBook Air.
It doesn't feature a touch screen 

You know you’ve been assimilated when you do a pinch zoom on a printed magazine 

[Diver300]

In the course of a few days I managed to blow two of the 440 mA fuses in my Fluke multimeter. £6.20 each from CPC is the cheapest that I've found.

The first time I was confirming that the smoke alarm battery was dead, even though it was over 9 V. I didn't think that a PP3, especially one that the smoke alarm thought was dead, would have a short-circuit current over half an amp, and I was wrong.

The second time I had set my power supply to limit the current to less than 200 mA, but I was working at 48 V and it turns out that the output capacitor of the power supply stores enough energy at 48 V to kill the fuse.

Down to no spares again.

[T42]

Cappuccino prep this morning: pulled the espresso then fitted the panarello, put a bit of kitchen roll underneath and blasted steam through to get rid of any residue from washing it; only I had neglected to hit the STEAM button first so immediately a jet of hot water soaked the kitchen roll and splashed about the worktop. <language>  Turned off water & hit the steam button, fetched another bit of kitchen roll and wiped up then turned on the steam tap to clear the panarello; only the machine had got fed up waiting and cancelled the STEAM order so immediately a jet of hot water dot dot dot. < more language>

Third time worked.

[Mr Larrington]

If you are creating the “keep for all time” backup of American Truck Simulator v1.47 it’s best to let it finish before you run the procedure that wipes all the old files (~34 GB) and replaces them with those from v1.48.

[T42]

Just now heard a delivery van outside, was having a gander out window when bell went. Turned swiftly, hooked banjo with toe and knocked it over on top of Fender, twang bang crash. No harm done - both instruments are sturdy beasts you could happily use for want of a bludgeon - but it scared the whatsit out of MrsT, who was still gasping when I came back upstairs with the loot.

[Mr Larrington]

Measure twice, drill once.  Still, they’re only small holes…

[sam]

I once put the cranks back on at 6 & 6 (or noon & noon, if you prefer). At least it didn't make it off the workstand.

[Diver300]

I once put the cranks back on at 6 & 6 (or noon & noon, if you prefer). At least it didn't make it off the workstand.

Garage 54 did that deliberately on a car:- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTWUcpHQfGo

[spesh]

Measure twice, drill once.

Hammer/shim to fit as required. 

[Mr Larrington]

Fortunately it’s wood.  A lot easier to fill.

[T42]

Damn. Just gave my waxed chain a wipe after coming home wet yesterday. A few rust flecks this morning.  Should've doused it in boiling water and stuck it in the wax pot. I'll maybe do that anyway - the rust is on the rollers and should grind off PDQ.