The Official Status Thread
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@Gribnit said in The Official Status Thread:
Wait. So can I get my computer to act as a Geiger counter? I don't care if an OS is running. I thought it was only caused by emissions from the chip packaging.
Yes, your computer can indeed work as a physics experiment. It helps if you've got lots of silicon (“helps”; it's actually a fucking pain in the ass) and the packaging does tend to block a lot so you're still better using a geiger counter if you really want to detect radiation, but it really does work.
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@dkf said in The Official Status Thread:
@Benjamin-Hall said in The Official Status Thread:
So now I'm sleeping on the floor tonight
That can be OK… if the mattress is thick enough.
You don't need much under a sleeping bag to be comfortable. And if you're on carpet rather than rocky ground, it's hard to go wrong.
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@dkf said in The Official Status Thread:
@Gribnit said in The Official Status Thread:
Wait. So can I get my computer to act as a Geiger counter? I don't care if an OS is running. I thought it was only caused by emissions from the chip packaging.
Yes, your computer can indeed work as a physics experiment. It helps if you've got lots of silicon (“helps”; it's actually a fucking pain in the ass) and the packaging does tend to block a lot so you're still better using a geiger counter if you really want to detect radiation, but it really does work.
I... think if I'm willing to forgo the OS, I'm willing to go ahead and break a bunch more stuff and take the case and shields out. Or are you talking about the chip ceramic itself, that I won't break.
D'you mean silicon as in non-ECC RAM? Does this work directly on display memory? That'd be easiest I guess. Maybe I could even keep the OS...
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Status: Almost feel sorry for the poor sod.
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@Gribnit said in The Official Status Thread:
D'you mean silicon as in non-ECC RAM?
The details vary with the exact design of the circuitry put on the silicon; some types of circuit are a lot more
vulnerablesensitive than others. I know that it's a particular problem for our (equivalent of) L1 caches at work, which has proved to be highly surprising and annoying; it mostly translates into occasional minor inaccuracies in the simulation results, but occasionally causes catastrophic crashes (when a critical bit of the stack or the executing code is trashed). We have a lot of silicon (an appreciable fraction of a football pitch!) of which most is cache-like memory, and get a bit error a few times an hour. Most of which don't actually matter. No idea what the background radiation levels in that room are, so we're talking something uncalibrated…
But with a normal PC? Quite apart from the fact that most of the memory in it is ECC in the first place, and so really unlikely to let you see this happening at all, the physical area of silicon involved is so many orders of magnitude smaller that you'll be very lucky to see an event in a year (unless you're setting up inside a nuclear reactor or something dumb like that). Physics is fun!
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@dkf said in The Official Status Thread:
@Tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
Windows claims 3.41 GB.
Properly, that'd be 3.41 GiB, but “gibibyte” sounds stupid…
I'm fine with the original prefixes changing meaning when prefixed to anything binary. Now they add ^10, and storage manufacturers don't get to shave the coinage as readily.
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@dkf I don't suppose there's any safe way to bathe my computer in alpha particles?
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Status: So yesterday was "fun". Health clinic in morning for blood tests, without breakfast as needed to do them on an empty stomach. Reacted badly and almost blacked out in the chair, then had to sit around for 15-20 minutes before I felt good enough to try and get up. Shuffled my way to the gas station opposite the health clinic to buy breakfast to eat on bus at way to work. Hands had a slight loss of feeling in them until late afternoon.
Came to work 10 minutes late due to bus delay and exhaustion. Spent 3 hours at work before going home, including a 40 minute lunch. Had one panic attack, probably related to stress from the blood sample. After work had to shuffle over to the carpet firm to pick out carpet and walls for my new bathroom. Then went home to parents, had dinner and then fell asleep from exhaustion. (At least causing a happy cat, as she loves to sleep next to me when I'm sleeping.)
And today is the last normal workday before the holidays as tomorrow is a Mandatory Fun Day to finish off the work year. This year it's a murder mystery, and I will be getting a role to play in it.
May go to sis after work today too, as tomorrow they will take one of their cats to the vet a final time. She's old and become ill, and the treatment they got only had a temporary effect so they did the difficult decision.
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@Gribnit said in The Official Status Thread:
I don't suppose there's any safe way to bathe my computer in alpha particles?
Not really, but you might be able to get a small alpha source and try holding that directly against a chip. It's not exactly safe but as long as you don't ingest it, alpha sources are among the least worrying of radioactives as they don't penetrate the skin meaningfully, unlike beta and gamma radiation.
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@Gribnit FYI Some smoke detectors have alpha-emitting Americium in them, if you didn't know (but I think everyone knows that)
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@kazitor knew it was a radioisotope but didn't know what it was emitting. H'mm. There are easier ways to crash a computer but this seems like a fun way. Plus I might get superpowers.
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@Gribnit said in The Official Status Thread:
There are easier ways to crash a computer but this seems like a fun way. Plus I might get superpowers.
I've tried Radium (primarily Alpha) on a smartphone and got no joy at 1 mSV/h, which is as active as I'm willing to get near. You do get a nice show on the camera, I think I posted some radiation artefact pictures here before.
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After
bitchcomplaining loud enough, I finally got a second monitor. Now to see what else I can fix the same way.
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@homoBalkanus
The hazard with being the squeaky wheel: figuring out how much grease you can get before you get replaced
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Status:
Friday is a state of mind
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@Atazhaia said in The Official Status Thread:
After work had to shuffle over to the carpet firm to pick out carpet and walls for my new bathroom.
Carpet in a bathroom?
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@hungrier said in The Official Status Thread:
@Atazhaia said in The Official Status Thread:
After work had to shuffle over to the carpet firm to pick out carpet and walls for my new bathroom.
Carpet in a bathroom?
Only slightly less
than carpet in a kitchen 
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@hungrier
to look up the proper english name. A literal translation from swedish is "wet room carpet/wallpaper". I'm not paying the shitloads of extra that is getting a tiled bathroom, I go for the cheap and simple option which is just as good. Pretty much just an extra thick plastic floor/wallpaper that will keep moisture from wandering into the walls.
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@Atazhaia said in The Official Status Thread:
@hungrier
to look up the proper english name. A literal translation from swedish is "wet room carpet/wallpaper". I'm not paying the shitloads of extra that is getting a tiled bathroom, I go for the cheap and simple option which is just as good. Pretty much just an extra thick plastic floor/wallpaper that will keep moisture from wandering into the walls.Sounds like linoleum, laminate, or vinyl flooring, combined with a moisture-barrier wallpaper. If it comes in a single sheet, it's probably vinyl.
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Status: Hardware acquired without incident.
Secondary Status: It's only a bit of rain, folks. And this is Florida, rain is normal. Why are you driving as if it was the end of the world, or worse, SNOW?
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@Benjamin-Hall When I moved into my current flat, the toilet had vinyl both as wall covering and as flooring, which was hell to remove.
We strongly suspect the bathroom had it originally as well and it was tiled over.
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@hungrier said in The Official Status Thread:
@Atazhaia said in The Official Status Thread:
After work had to shuffle over to the carpet firm to pick out carpet and walls for my new bathroom.
Carpet in a bathroom?
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@Atazhaia said in The Official Status Thread:
This year it's a murder mystery, and I will be getting a role to play in it.
Volunteer to play the part of the body. That way, you'll have a legitimate reason to sleep at work.
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@izzion said in The Official Status Thread:
@homoBalkanus
The hazard with being the squeaky wheel: figuring out how much grease you can get before you get replacedNow note, there is no grease for contractors.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in The Official Status Thread:
Status: Hardware acquired without incident.
Secondary Status: It's only a bit of rain, folks. And this is Florida, rain is normal. Why are you driving as if it was the end of the world, or worse, SNOW?
It could become snow any second, though, and south of the Mason-Dixon line any precipitation is a major road hazard.
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@Gribnit said in The Official Status Thread:
It could become snow any second, though, and south of the Mason-Dixon line any precipitation is a major road hazard.
I've seen how hard it can rain in Texas and Louisiana; it most definitely is a major hazard as you end up not being able to see more than a few yards ahead of you. It's not usually as bad as a blizzard, not unless there's a hurricane blowing…
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@Gribnit rain can be a problem, sure. But this was just a gentle (for Florida) shower with no wind. You could see for dozens of feet!
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I've just seen a test report containing the line "pass percentage is still zero after 9 days of UAT"
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@Zerosquare said in The Official Status Thread:
@Atazhaia said in The Official Status Thread:
This year it's a murder mystery, and I will be getting a role to play in it.
Volunteer to play the part of the body. That way, you'll have a legitimate reason to sleep at work.
it's not me deciding the story. I know who the victim is and I have been given a role and some information to give out, so I shall spend the day sitting in the network lab shitposting on WTDWTF as I don't have to do any proper work during the mystery anyway.
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@Atazhaia
Wait, isn't this supposed to be a break from your normal routine?
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Status: just saw Spiderman: Homecoming.
Now I know, you're supposed to just suspend disbelief and accept some things because if you're critical of everything you won't enjoy any movies, but... my god, that movie has more plot holes than a pasta strainer.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
But, since it's just a zip file I suppose I can potentially reduce the size by just deleting shit inside it. Hmmm....
It depends. Zip files have a table of contents, and you can delete a file just by deleting the table of contents entry for it. That wouldn't reduce the size of the file by very much, because it'd leave the file's data intact. To remove that, you'd need to re-pack the zip file.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
@hungrier said in The Official Status Thread:
@Atazhaia said in The Official Status Thread:
After work had to shuffle over to the carpet firm to pick out carpet and walls for my new bathroom.
Carpet in a bathroom?
Am I seeing objects separated from where they belong?
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@kazitor said in The Official Status Thread:
@Tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
@hungrier said in The Official Status Thread:
@Atazhaia said in The Official Status Thread:
After work had to shuffle over to the carpet firm to pick out carpet and walls for my new bathroom.
Carpet in a bathroom?
Am I seeing objects separated from where they belong?
Who can say, maybe they belong there.
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@Cursorkeys said in The Official Status Thread:
@kazitor said in The Official Status Thread:
@Cursorkeys What's the hardware equivalent of a heisenbug?
Quite a lot of the time if incredibly weird things are happening in hardware and you can't catch it doing it then (changing) capacitance is involved somehow.
There's a story about a 'magic' switch that sounds to me like capacitance was the root cause:
Some years ago, I (GLS) was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's hardware hackers (no one knows who).
You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labeled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words ‘magic' and ‘more magic'. The switch was in the ‘more magic' position.
I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it's a basic fact of electricity that a switch can't do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side.
It was clear that this switch was someone's idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed.
Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but nevertheless restored the switch to the ‘more magic’ position before reviving the computer.
A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire connected to it, still in the ‘more magic’ position. We scrutinized the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn't affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch.
The computer promptly crashed.
This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and diked it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever since.
We still don't know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we'll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch was magic.
I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I'm silly, but I usually keep it set on ‘more magic’.
It would've been truly awesome if the switch itself was grounded and somehow was connecting the DC ground for the mobo to the AC ground for the mains power.
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@anotherusername said in The Official Status Thread:
@Cursorkeys said in The Official Status Thread:
@kazitor said in The Official Status Thread:
@Cursorkeys What's the hardware equivalent of a heisenbug?
Quite a lot of the time if incredibly weird things are happening in hardware and you can't catch it doing it then (changing) capacitance is involved somehow.
There's a story about a 'magic' switch that sounds to me like capacitance was the root cause:
Some years ago, I (GLS) was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's hardware hackers (no one knows who).
You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labeled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words ‘magic' and ‘more magic'. The switch was in the ‘more magic' position.
I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it's a basic fact of electricity that a switch can't do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side.
It was clear that this switch was someone's idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed.
Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but nevertheless restored the switch to the ‘more magic’ position before reviving the computer.
A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire connected to it, still in the ‘more magic’ position. We scrutinized the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn't affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch.
The computer promptly crashed.
This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and diked it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever since.
We still don't know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we'll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch was magic.
I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I'm silly, but I usually keep it set on ‘more magic’.
It would've been truly awesome if the switch itself was grounded and somehow was connecting the DC ground for the mobo to the AC ground for the mains power.
I suspect had this been the case, the computer would not have so readily worked again when the switch was restored. But, I can only suspect this.
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@Gribnit I'm inclined to agree with you.
Still would've been awesome.
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@anotherusername said in The Official Status Thread:
@Tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
But, since it's just a zip file I suppose I can potentially reduce the size by just deleting shit inside it. Hmmm....
It depends. Zip files have a table of contents, and you can delete a file just by deleting the table of contents entry for it. That wouldn't reduce the size of the file by very much, because it'd leave the file's data intact. To remove that, you'd need to re-pack the zip file.
Yeah, looks like 7-zip repacks it.
Next problem: The stub loader thing checks that the size of the file is correct. FML.
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@kazitor said in The Official Status Thread:
@Tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
@hungrier said in The Official Status Thread:
@Atazhaia said in The Official Status Thread:
After work had to shuffle over to the carpet firm to pick out carpet and walls for my new bathroom.
Carpet in a bathroom?
Am I seeing objects separated from where they belong?
What objects are you seeing?
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@Tsaukpaetra bottles and cans lying around
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@kazitor said in The Official Status Thread:
@Tsaukpaetra bottles and cans lying around
Then yes. Those don't belong there. I think I've mentioned before that my household goes out of their way to avoid putting stuff away, right?
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@Tsaukpaetra yep, hence I said that.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
Next problem: The stub loader thing checks that the size of the file is correct. FML.
Um, it's not?
Why is the size of the file not correct?
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@Gribnit said in The Official Status Thread:
I suspect had this been the case, the computer would not have so readily worked again when the switch was restored. But, I can only suspect this.
Ground loops can cause non-destructive problems that go away when proper grounding is restored. (Think of the occasional 50/60 Hz humming in audio amps, for example.)
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@anotherusername said in The Official Status Thread:
@Tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
Next problem: The stub loader thing checks that the size of the file is correct. FML.
Um, it's not?
Why is the size of the file not correct?
Because I modified it.
Anyways, patched the codes, compiled, and deployed. and.... Huzzah!
...
... But I only get ~50 FPS, in the main menu. Goes down to 30 or less when my phone actually gets hot
And since no controls for the on-screen built-in things were mapped, I can't move or actually test anything either.
This is in an area where I'd typically see perhaps 400 FPS on a GTX 960.
And I'm not even rendering stereoscopic.
Edit: pics cause it did happen!
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@TimeBandit said in The Official Status Thread:
@Gribnit said in The Official Status Thread:
I have no resistance to offer to exporting via capitalization.
Here, take this one
350MΩ (±5%). That's a lot of resistance.
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@dkf said in The Official Status Thread:
We have a lot of silicon (an appreciable fraction of a football pitch!)
I'm rather at a loss for words... That is not a scale I'm accustomed to using when thinking about chips.
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Status: Mandatory Fun Day over and I can head home with the next bus. Early on in the murder mystery game there apparently was a rumour going on which had a couple of the groups making guesses that I would have murdered the victim over she taking my meatballs during lunch. The victim is a vegetarian, so I dunno why she would steal them from me in the first place, but...
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STATUS My watch has decided to update itself. I'm skeptical that it can be relied on to tell the time anymore.
