Saigonauticon @ Saigonauticon @voltage.vn

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5

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453

Joined

2 yr. ago

Well, I had heard of someone that got a little amplification out of them at 3.3V and a weird configuration. It was a different tube, but I figured I'd give it a go at 5V.

My tube was old and originated from a junk pile in Japan. I figured it wasn't enough entropy to just use an unknown tube the wrong way, so I added some random scrap parts from the Soviet Union. The tube produced amplified output, but the output impedance was way too high when being used this wrong way (in other words, it couldn't drive a speaker). So I added some completely unknown Chinese amplifier IC as a buffer.

It's approximately pocket-sized. For a large pocket, anyway. The tube heater gets the whole thing warm. It produces hilariously distorted (but sort of cool) sound. I call it a 'themionic pocket warmer', arguably not so useful here in Vietnam. The audio function is secondary. I suppose if you are a half-deaf Antarctic explorer with a deep love of stovepipe hats, it would be a good hat-warmer as well. I guess that's the target market :D

I threw some photos up at voltage.vn. It was a fun way to spend a couple of hours.

None of them! Numbers are a poor way to communicate with most of my clients.

On the rare exception, it depends on the number of significant digits of the measurement I (for example) multiply it with. Digits past that don't communicate any useful information.

It would be inaccurate to take it as a literal quote :)

This is just what I wish I could say. Small talk annoys me greatly, and in practice I want to shift conversations in deeper directions as quickly as reasonably possible. I'd much rather exchange a few thoughtful phrases with a stranger than a large volume of nonsense. "Can you tell me something important about yourself?" is maybe a little less aggressive. Anyway, my Vietnamese language skills are not good, and immigrants are rare here in Vietnam, so conversation is... necessarily direct :)

I actually do want people to prove they are worth my attention! If they haven't learned or accomplished anything in a year (in their opinion, not mine), then I can't talk about things I've done or learned without it getting awkward, and I have nothing else to talk about (I spend essentially all my time either working or studying). I just don't have room in my life for many people, either. This isn't their fault or mine. My wife is the same way (and we certainly skipped the small talk when we met -- we went right to engineering schematics for something or other).

I'll share a funny story that might explain a bit of my frustration -- I live in Asia, so all my conversations are extremely scripted. How are you / how old are you / where were you born / are you married / do you have kids / why don't you have kids / you must silently sit here and listen while I go on a 10-20 minute rant on why you have to have kids, or I will tell everyone how rude you are. My wife and I get stuck in this conversation constantly. Sometimes so many times in a row, that we effectively do nothing but have this conversation over and over for 3-4 hours. At family events, it's the only conversation that happens for days. It's like a glitch in the Matrix or something, you really have to experience it to believe it!

Of course I still have to be polite, have mostly empty conversations, and so on. It's exhausting, and I don't remember any of their names, because I have learned nothing about them. It's not the lack of people (in Asia?) that makes me feel alone, it's this.

Well, the dumbest reason I've seen people get murder-y for is typically fighting over inheritance.

It's like... now there's even more inheritance to fight over. Then also you just paid for one funeral, and now you want to pay for another?

Ah, small talk stresses me out. Why can't people just open with "tell me something you accomplished or learned this year"?

Then we cut right to the things that matter.

I don't have ordered lists of favorites for trivial things like colors, integers, and so on. Also no ordered list for less trivial things. No favorite songs, movies, books, historical figures, etc.

I don't judge people (or myself) based on having or not having these lists, because that itself would be me creating a list -- my favorite thing would then become not having favorite things, and that would of course be silly :D

I found a neat set of old ink blocks from a famous manufacturer in China. It's technically worth a fair sum of money, I paid 8$. Also an old vacuum tube for 3$, got it working. Neither of those are useful though, just neat.

In terms of materially useful things? Well, someone taught me how to use old, no-electronics camera lenses. So I bought a used DSLR for 135$ and bought antique lenses for very cheap (again 8$ for something that was originally nearly 1k after accounting for inflation). Now I can do my own product photography, documentation, etc. and it cost me very little, but looks great! Also my vacation photos have skyrocketed in quality.

Prototyping. I just checked and my slide rule has a notch for pi. So, all of them.

It's predatory garbage -- I've had some VCs as customers and I guarantee that if the IPO was expected to do well, they would not leave a dime on the table for contributors. Generally if you don't know who the bag-holder in these schemes is... chances are it's you!

I still help out people on Reddit, because a lot of foreigners don't know how to do things in my country (e.g. find medication they need) and that's where they ask. If it vanishes tomorrow, I don't really care though, haha.

Well, they reached out to me (and many others on-platform) to buy shares in their IPO. Something-something contributor something.

Anyway, no VC worth half their salt will leave money on the table letting essentially the public buy equity at the same price as them.

So that's not a healthy sign for them.

Oh yeah, maybe so!

The world does need a bit less JS on websites :(

Oh man -- you need a blink tag on some of that text. Support for the tag has been removed from all modern browsers.

So you'll need to add it in with javascript that updates CSS or something.

I get this. I'm the director of a small tech company, market forces demand that I just do more work instead, but sometimes some trivial 2$ device breaks and it personally offends me.

So I re-engineer it so it's rated for 100+ years or whatever. I get the boards made in the factory, assemble with hot-air rework, and write the firmware myself. Sometimes it costs me a week, but it produces the things I'm most happy with.

Clients just want cheap stuff done poorly by tomorrow. If you want art, you've got to be your own customer :(

I cram study science or engineering.

It literally never occurred to me to use my newfound freedom for that!

I definitely knew a few facts that could land me in hot water, but not any jokes.

Me too. The D15 is great laptop and runs Linux really well. Fantastic build quality, hardware, and battery life... for USD 700$.

Besides, I get lonely if only the Americans are listening.

The librettos were cute little machines though!

Also there were those TransMeta Crusoe processors that came after them. Those were way before their time and didn't take off. Went bankrupt. Now we do that with Intel Atom, or RISC.

Haha yeah... I couldn't afford them either. Also the weird fancy Sony-VAIO things only in Japan.

I did eventually get a Panasonic CF-M34 though. It was a netbook before netbooks were a thing -- and you could use it to hammer in a nail, then boil it it in a pot of water to clean it. Without turning it off. Then set it gently on a table, and blow the table up with dynamite -- although this apparently caused a restart (someone tried it). That thing was awesome. You still spot it in movies sometimes.

AI model weights. Patches for MMOs (World of Warcraft famously used this to good effect).