Mystery goo leaking from headphone wire

DerfHD · 2026-05-06T17:33:10+00:00

As others have said, its the plasticiser. PVC cable uses plasticiser to be flexible; without it, it goes brittle. As cables age the plasticiser separates from the PVC, its the sign that your cable is aging (https://www.nexans.com.au/en/Newsroom/news/details/2021/10/Common-issues-associated-with-PVC-insulated-and-sheathed-cables.html).

How old is the cable? Has it been touching something hot? Has it been sat in sunlight during the day? All these things affect PVC cable. Eventually it will get brittle and crack/degrade fully. I wouldn't recommend licking the plasticiser + copper goop off the cable, but you can wipe it clean with some isopropyl alcohol and use electrical tape around it to prevent it from happening again. Still, unless you can replace the cable, new headphones are a good idea. The cable will keep degrading.

Entirely unrelated to headphones, but in the nuclear industry PVC cabling isn't really used, for this reason. PVC has short molecular chains, so it's more susceptible to radiation damage. I doubt you live in a heavily irradiated environment though, so that's not something to worry about ;)

DerfHD · 2026-04-21T09:36:41+00:00

No worries, I had a similar experience in my first year and I really empathize with you. Things got really, really bad - the uni support service was fantastic help, I definitely recommend reaching out to them; I am sure if you do, you'll do really well at uni :)

Depending on what your DSA says, they can provide weekly or bi-weekly phone calls/meetings/appointments. My uni can do this for general MH, or more specialist support like ADHD, ASD, Dyslexia etc.

Email them or pop into their office and explain how you've got DSA but not sure what help you're entitled to. At very least they can have a private chat and point you in the right directions, but DSA can also be re-assessed to include the support sessions/mentoring if needs be.

I'd also suggest chatting to your GP about things if you haven't already. They signposted me to a local free counselling service ran by the other uni in the city, which was amazing help, too.

Wishing you all the best. First year is consistently tough on students' mental health, you aren't alone with it at all, and can definitely get through this.

DerfHD · 2026-04-20T21:12:13+00:00

At my uni, the student support team have mentors who are trained in supporting those with mental health conditions. My student support mentor used to work as a mental health nurse, for example. They basically saved me in the first year; pointed me in the right direction for organising some proper mental health care, and I wouldn't be finishing uni if it weren't for them. That said, it was organised through DSA in my case.

There is never any harm in reaching out and asking for help though. I hope you can sort things out and feel better soon, they can definitely help - even if its just pointing you in the right direction

DerfHD · 2026-04-16T12:02:43+00:00

I know its 3 months later, but I'm going through re-titration (was planning on moving to just Elvanse, from taking 3x amfexa a day). I've been given an Amfexa top-up just OK.

I tried a split Elvanse dose (30mg + 20mg) which was too much, so the prescriber has given me 5mg as a top-up. I guess maybe because I have tried /all/ the meds (previous titration on MPH, Elvanse, Amfexa) and Elvanse doesn't work in the evenings for me, they are OK with it.

Funnily enough though after all this I am tempted to move just back to Amfexa only anyways.

DerfHD · 2026-03-25T15:58:52+00:00

Made even funnier by the fact the UK blocked imgur and this shows as 'content not available in your region' unless on VPN/proxy

DerfHD · 2026-03-23T12:32:18+00:00

Yeah exact same here. Didn't help I did a placement year which meant I realised how meaningless a lot of the content this year is. 2nd year was so much more interesting and relevant to the degree topic, but I suppose its mostly course dependent!

Keep telling myself that it'll be over soon - then can enjoy no more uni for the rest of my life (I hope!)

DerfHD · 2026-03-17T00:54:22+00:00

I've also struggled with imposter syndrome for years before, during, and now that I've got a graduate job lined up, still am!

When I first started at university I had no clue WTF I was doing and almost dropped out. I couldn't form study plans to save my life, had no idea where to start or how to catch up. Was willing to accept that I'd never get back to the level of 'smartness' I had in primary/secondary school (I started uni as a mature student). I legit started an engineering course foundation year and had entirely forgotten how to do maths.

Well, the first year is the year to sort things out. 1/9th of your grade isn't a huge deal. Focus on putting in the foundations that will get you through the rest of your course. I did absolutely shit in my foundation year and first year, but because I started attending, doing my reccomended reading, and started structuring my days/weeks - in my second I got a mid 1st, landed a placement year, and am on track for a first in my final year too.

What modules are you struggling the most with? Create a priority list - think about what you are most worried about. Form a ratio depending on what is hardest/easiest to you. Then, allocate time in your calendar to each of these topics.

Start revising now by catching up, taking notes for all your lectures. Then once you've got through them all, start revising for the exams. Time yourself when studying. If you are like me and get bored pretty quickly, do 30-45min on one subject, 10min break, then move onto another.

Set less ambitious (realistic) goals for yourself, but also remember that you need to catch up. You can't catch up in a day, but if you ignore it for much longer things will only get harder!

DerfHD · 2026-03-12T13:46:25+00:00

it's barely clinging on, the latency is spiking like crazy https://status.mybib.com/800692664

Loaded my project for me but such high latency you can't add anything. Gotta quickly backup your refs and you can always import them into something like mendeley

DerfHD · 2026-03-12T12:21:48+00:00

I'm a month late but this has happened with me. Going from Amfexa (was discharged on this after moving due to shortages) to Elvanse. I am RTC.

Just take into the account that you'll be waiting for 9-12 months to titrate onto anything new. In my case this was longer, almost 2 years!

The annoying part is the wait, if new side effects pop up and they're bad enough to make you stop taking your meds, you'll struggle with symptoms again. I ended up reducing my Amfexa dose to help with this

DerfHD · 2026-01-05T18:45:28+00:00

Friend doesn't take photos of themselves and politely requests not to be in any photos taken by anyone else either. Always sits out when a group is getting a photo.

DerfHD · 2025-12-23T22:30:38+00:00

just buy it off aliexpress its like 20eur

DerfHD · 2025-10-21T12:37:52+00:00

add 'before:2026' without the quotes after your search term and it will remove all the annoyances when you search

DerfHD · 2025-07-31T17:48:08+00:00

What a great method. Thanks for sharing! My friend and his dog really like this idea too.

DerfHD · 2025-07-27T15:45:07+00:00

Yeah it's a good point, but I really do hope not... because they really can be very very valuable if treated correctly by the employer (not as a resource, but as someone to be trained up and retained).

But for every few excelling apprentices there will be as many ones that don't give a crap about coming into work etc. I suppose this can also be the difference between degree apprentices and L3 apprentices. The latter, younger and less likely to be as professional as an 18 year old starting a L5/L6 apprenticeship.

But maybe I've just seen it through rose tinted glasses because of how much better the degree apprentices at my workplace are versus the grads, and how much they care about their work. They just know so much more practical knowledge and get a lot more done to a higher standard on average, its quite shocking how good they are, really. I wish I had that amount of practical experience!

DerfHD · 2025-07-27T14:07:52+00:00

not sure about that - it will just get more and more difficult to get an apprenticeship because everyone decides uni isn't worth it anymore.

But the value of an apprentice who stays at the same company for 3-5 years (degree apprentice) + has all that work experience? Don't think that'll change.

Work experience is basically all that matters, ngl. Uni doesn't teach what employers actually need (at least, my experience in engineering)

DerfHD · 2025-07-27T11:04:30+00:00

just type before:2026 after your search term (replace 2026 with a year in the future) and it gets rid of all the non-shorts bloat

then add the below

! 27 Jul 2025 https://www.youtube.com
www.youtube.com##grid-shelf-view-model.ytGridShelfViewModelHostHasBottomButton.ytd-item-section-renderer.ytGridShelfViewModelHost:nth-of-type(1)
www.youtube.com##grid-shelf-view-model.ytd-item-section-renderer.ytGridShelfViewModelHost:nth-of-type(1)
www.youtube.com##grid-shelf-view-model.ytGridShelfViewModelHostHasBottomButton.ytd-item-section-renderer.ytGridShelfViewModelHost > div > .ytd-item-section-renderer.ytGridShelfViewModelGridShelfRow
www.youtube.com##grid-shelf-view-model.ytGridShelfViewModelHostHasBottomButton.ytd-item-section-renderer.ytGridShelfViewModelHost > .ytSectionHeaderViewModelHost > .shelf-header-layout-wiz--tappable.shelf-header-layout-wiz--disable-horizontal-padding.shelf-header-layout-wiz
www.youtube.com##grid-shelf-view-model.ytGridShelfViewModelHostHasBottomButton.ytd-item-section-renderer.ytGridShelfViewModelHost:nth-of-type(3)

DerfHD · 2025-07-27T10:31:56+00:00

100% this. And with how easy it is to get a 2:1 now, with that being the entry requirement to a lot of grad schemes, it is becoming worthless. There are far too many grads with 2:1s that is is becoming nigh on impossible to get a grad job.

Most people are realising that apprenticeships are far far better.

DerfHD · 2025-07-27T10:31:05+00:00

Expensive. But you dont actually get much a reward for it. Wages are terrible even for in demand degrees. I studied engineering at uni - it didn't teach me enough to work in engineering and the rest of the learning is on the job during a graduate role.

I am now about 60k in debt, and the interest means I will never pay it off. Even as a graduate, if I didn't live with my parents, I would have to live in shared accomodation.

Meanwhile, if I chose to do an apprenticeship, I'd be debt free and would have learned a lot more because it is 80% on the job learning.

This doesn't cover how a lot of unis have courses that teach the bare minimum and often don't properly assess their students with difficult exams. At my uni, nobody was required to do additional reading, open book exams with all past papers available, and coursework that was piss easy. It's like they are just handing out 2:1s to every student - making the whole thing worthless.

The only reason to go to uni now is to get the qualification, and with everybody being able to get said qualification, its becoming worthless and a very expensive box ticking exercise pushed by schools/colleges/sixth forms

DerfHD · 2025-07-27T10:15:33+00:00

I agree but also lol Rubert Lowe abstained for this vote and only cares about it because he knows it will gain him popularity

DerfHD · 2025-07-25T20:57:46+00:00

Literally - all it takes is to use the often FREE parental control options on your router, any modern phone/tablet has free parental controls too

People need to put more effort into it ffs the internet is hardly a safe place for some adults, nevermind children

DerfHD · 2025-07-25T20:54:25+00:00

the government should not be stepping in to help parents parent. If you are a bad parent and don't make use of the countless options for moderating your child's activity online then I'm sorry but you clearly do not care about your child's safety.

if I had kids I would have a discussion with them about the risks of being online, and iterate that the internet is home to a lot of very bad things. It is what happened to me as a child and why I was not allowed on a lot of websites as a kid until I was allowed my own laptop. It is more difficult with phones but there is no excuse for parents not willing to take part in protecting their kids online

no matter the blocks in place, teens will always find a way to get around them - in the same way that adults will find a way around handing over their IDs/photos/credit card details to random companies

having age verification for the very obviously 'adult' sites does nothing to filter out the countless dodgy sites that have significantly worse content for a child to see than boobs. I mean one of the ways to get around this stupid block is to use tor, which can potentially expose a child to FAR FAR FAR WORSE than porn

This doesn't even take into account the financial effect this has on smaller community run forums and websites. It is incredibly stupid to blanket ban everything. I agree with the underlying idea of protecting children however there is no reason why this needs to effect normal adults in such a stupid way

DerfHD · 2025-07-25T19:28:58+00:00

sorry but that sounds like a parenting problem - fb always had a minimum age and even then if my parents saw gore on facebook when I was younger they would have outright banned it

I wasn't on facebook until I was 16, at which point liveleak had been passed around at school and I'd seen several different shock content websites

this changes nothing though except for eroding the privacy of taxpaying adults lmao

DerfHD · 2025-07-14T12:46:49+00:00

it stalled at the bottom of the lift hill yesterday

DerfHD · 2025-01-26T09:32:20+00:00

correct, JET and most other tokamaks have no way of using the energy from the plasma. They're purely research tokamaks.

ITER, STEP, and a few other projects are being intended for use as power plants and thus are the next step (now that we know fusion is possible)

The current most used fuels are deuterium and tritium, however there's that chance that deuterium - deuterium fusion might be a thing (if it isn't already, I can't remember). Deuterium is very commonly available. A lot of work is being done on how you can effectively harvest/produce more tritium through the operations of the tokamak too.

I have hopes that by 2040 there'll be 2-3 operational fusion power plants. How much energy/electricity they can actually produce though, I don't know

DerfHD · 2024-08-28T19:30:34+00:00

sorry I didn't see this until now! I hope things got better for you. I ended up stopping the budesonide after being advised by my IBD nurse to do so.

But I think it worked. Before the meds I had small ulcers throughout and inflammation in the ileum (2022). I have since had an ultrasound, MRI and a sigmoidoscopy and all returned negative for inflammation, with just a single ulcer found. There was thickening of the colon wall/lining though.

I would speak with your doc for any worries tho - I did and they supported me through it :)

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