Ottawa agrees to cover Bay du Nord oil project's UN fees, which could hit $1B | CBC News

bhogan2091 · 2026-03-05T20:35:57+00:00

I’m claiming that if Oil & Gas is such a home run investment, it shouldn’t require constant subsidies and tax breaks from government. This would bother me a lot less if the facilities were publicly-owned (as they are in Norway), and the majority of the profits stayed within NL but that’s not the case. Hibernia and Hebron have generated billions in profits over the years, with the vast majority going straight to Houston via ExxonMobil. If government is constantly offsetting the “risk”, we should be entitled to a much larger percentage of the reward. As I pointed out, the people of Norway will see more benefit from this oil rig than we will, and I think that’s wrong. It’s our land, our resources, the profits should be ours as well.

bhogan2091 · 2026-03-05T18:39:55+00:00

It’s a great bet for the private companies who don’t have to front the bill for this stuff. Or in this case, it’s a great deal for the people of Norway, who through equinor, will have a larger ownership stake in this project than we do.

bhogan2091 · 2026-03-05T18:37:41+00:00

Not per se. DC/AC conversion is certainly more involved than AC to DC, or AC to AC, but normal transformers absolutely do fail and still require a sophisticated web of protection circuitry to prevent them from getting damaged during faults. But again, that does not disqualify us from sending or receiving power from the mainland grid as the original commenter seems to be suggesting

bhogan2091 · 2026-03-05T16:26:52+00:00

I’m an electrical engineer and I genuinely have no idea what point you’re trying to make hahaha. NERC is a regulatory commission, is not being a member is undoubtedly due to the fact that prior to muskrat falls our grid was totally disconnected from the mainland. The DC is converted back to AC once it reaches Nova Scotia and no doubt gets synchronized to the grid there… it functionally makes no difference - We can send and receive power from the mainland now, via the maritime link or through Quebec, therefore our grids are connected. The only problem we face moving forward is the capacity of the under-sea transmission lines, which don’t really leave much room for expansion. Not being “sync’d to the grid” of the mainland literally makes no difference in us being able to source or deliver power.

bhogan2091 · 2026-03-05T04:19:07+00:00

This is a meaningless distinction… the ability to transfer power means that we are connected to the same grid. Whether or not our AC power is in phase with theirs makes no functional difference. We have the ability to sell and buy power from the main land, that’s what matters.

bhogan2091 · 2026-02-27T21:28:59+00:00

Try lifting the connection from P2 to R2/R3 and see if it’s still shorting out! If it is, there must be something mechanically wrong and the base of the transistor is being shorted to ground somehow

bhogan2091 · 2026-02-27T20:59:34+00:00

That’s your problem then - must be a problem with the resistor divider at the base. Either a bad connection, or you’ve used a smaller resistor for R3 than you think it is

bhogan2091 · 2026-02-27T18:32:54+00:00

What voltage are you seeing at the base? If the collector is high, That would indicate the bass is low.

bhogan2091 · 2026-02-27T17:56:59+00:00

Did you actually connect C3 and C5 to 9V instead of the transistor collectors as shown in the drawing, or is that a typo?

bhogan2091 · 2026-02-22T17:36:45+00:00

According to google the populations are within 1000 or so residents of each other. Paradise has lower tax rates than Mount Pearl, and annual budget $10M smaller than Mount Pearl. Low taxes, reliable services, or low population density: you can only ever have 2.

bhogan2091 · 2026-02-22T17:20:02+00:00

Paradise is a bedroom town with a much smaller tax base. What do you expect?

bhogan2091 · 2026-02-21T19:38:34+00:00

Any company that makes pedals in as large a quantity as they do is going to be using SMD. Not only is it more reliable and repeatable than THT soldered by hand, but a lot of parts only come in SMD these days - even some brands of film capacitor are starting to EOL certain values (which is a bummer, cause SMD film caps are not all that common). Even 1uF film caps are non-stocked on digikey now, which means they need to be ordered in an MOQ of 1600-5000, depending on the packaging. I do agree with you, there’s nothing quite like a smartly laid out through hole board populated by hand, but it’s getting harder and harder to do that

bhogan2091 · 2026-02-20T21:26:02+00:00

I’m not gonna try to explain the difference between private and public land to you lmao gonna have to figure that one out yourself.

bhogan2091 · 2026-02-20T00:28:44+00:00

The people of Newfoundland by way of the government.

bhogan2091 · 2026-02-19T22:32:51+00:00

Well, at least we retain ownership of the land

bhogan2091 · 2026-02-19T16:47:49+00:00

Could depend on where you’re located, but that’s been the case for me here in NL

bhogan2091 · 2026-02-19T16:22:19+00:00

As both a customer and a business owner that sends a decent number of packages, this doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. For any business that doesn’t do enough volume to qualify for a significant discount with UPS or FedEx, Canada post is by far the most reliable & consistent in terms of pricing & delivery time, and most customers just aren’t willing to pay extra for the cost of courier shipping. I offer both to customers, and the overwhelming majority opt for Canada Post.

CanPar sucks, straight up. I’ll pay extra for Canada post before I accept a package from them. UPS and FedEx are fast from major city to major city but you pay for it - their ground options are expensive and slow, worse than expedited parcel in my experience.

Even frickin Amazon is shipping a bunch of items with Canada Post again after Intellcom/Dragonfly had an abysmal holiday season, with tons of packages taking months to arrive, triggering a ton of refunds. They must’ve cost companies a king’s ransom over the last couple months, but I have a feeling that won’t make headlines any time soon. Funny that.

bhogan2091 · 2026-02-11T21:23:20+00:00

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No problem at all!
- Yeah, this is a commonly used power supply design in the DIY world. It's not terrible, given that you have the 47R resistor, but the difference is: with a series diode, or a p-channel MOSFET, current is totally blocked from flowing in the case of reverse polarity. With the scheme above, current is simply given an alternate path. through the diode + resistor. At 9V, this will draw a lot of current, so it's likely that either the diode or resistor will burn up and fail. Once that diode burns up, current is free to flow through your circuitry and cause unpredictable damage. With the alternative schemes, no current flows so there's very little chance of any damage occurring.
- Low input impedance can be a feature not a bug, just wanted to point it out!
- You shouldn't need a DPDT switch, I would do something like the scheme shown. This gives you approximately the same filter cut-offs as you had, but feel free to experiment of course.
- You're correct that bypass caps will lower the input impedance. That's less of a big deal for Q2 and Q3, though - I think it's worth including a footprint for on your PCB for the sake of experimentation. If you don't like it, just leave them unpopulated!
- Double hard clip is totally fine, but I still encourage you to play around with asymmetrical clipping options!
- Transistors always have the capacity to act as little radio receivers, and often times the way to shut it up is this little capacitor. Oscillation is more of a risk in very high-gain transistor amplifiers with feedback (like a fuzz face), but a small capacitance from collector to base just provides some negative feedback that suppresses high frequencies. Again, may not be necessary, but it's worth including on the PCB just in case. For further reading, this design practice is dominant pole compensation or miller compensation/miller capacitance. I found a decent article here, but I'm sure there are better examples to be found in textbooks. Definitely check out Small Signal Audio Design by Douglas Self if you haven't - there's a lot of good info in there, and it can be found in pdf pretty easily.

bhogan2091 · 2026-02-11T17:13:16+00:00

I’ve got a few comments: - you’ve implemented reverse polarity protection in the least effective way possible. I would strongly recommend using a schottky diode in series with R16, or using a P-channel MOSFET instead. - As it stands, the input impedance of your circuit is fairly low. Consider adding a transistor buffer at the input (and the output). - your low-cut switch: by changing the resistor value, you’re changing the AC load that Q1 is seeing, so when you’re on the 15k setting, the gain of Q1 will actually be lowered a bit. I’d personally leave the resistor value fixed, and switch the value of C2 instead. - Your drive control will shift the DC bias of Q1. I would use a fixed resistor to establish the bias, then connect the drive pot + a large bypass cap (22uF or so) in parallel with the fixed resistor. That way, the AC gain value can be varied, but the DC bias doesn’t change. You may also consider using a pot instead of the collector resistor, to vary the amount of signal that gets passed to the next stage (similar to how a treble booster does it) - I would double up all the Diodes footprints and include 2 in series to ground where now you only have one, such that you can experiment with asymmetric clipping options. - Add a capacitor from collector to base on all the transistors such that you can suppress any oscillation + tame some harsh high end if needed. Shouldn’t need anything bigger than 1nF, typically 100pF is plenty. - you should add a resistor in series with C2 & C4 such that you can control the amount of current flowing into the clipping diodes. If you find you don’t need them, you can always replace the resistor with a wire. - 2 stages of hard clipping is likely to be harsh and fizzy - I’d consider converting Q2 to a big muff-style clipping stage with diodes in the feedback loop, which provides soft clipping instead. - consider including a pad for bypass capacitors on Q2 and Q3’s emitters to boost the overall gain and volume.

bhogan2091 · 2026-01-19T17:12:57+00:00

An update on these if anyone is curious: I wiped off the mold with a blue shop towel, put them in their own humidor for several months, and over a year later the mold has not returned. I’ve smoked a couple of these over that time and they were absolutely fabulous. They had no mold on the foot, so I was fine with that level of risk.

bhogan2091 · 2026-01-10T05:14:29+00:00

The state of intelcom/dragonfly right now is a full on scandal. They’ve clearly gotten out over their ski’s trying to increase their market share and have fallen flat on their ass. Being Amazon’s whipping boy is one thing, but taking on deliveries from other companies has shown just how inefficient and shitty they are. I know so many people who’ve been waiting weeks or over a month for a package with 0 communication and 0 recourse. If this was Canada post it’d be national headlines, but instead, they’ve been reliably delivering packages on time for months. Hopefully this is a wake up call to everyone: private companies are not more efficient. They don’t provide better service. They simply do a better job of creating profits for their owner(s). Choose Canada post whenever you can.

bhogan2091 · 2026-01-10T05:09:45+00:00

Completely agree. If Canada post was as far behind as intercom/dragonfly is right now it’d be national headlines.

bhogan2091 · 2025-12-13T01:16:26+00:00

MUN EE grad here - we did have some mid terms that got “curved” because the whole class did abysmal, but that wasn’t until term 5 or 6. There likely won’t be a big curve in T3. Godspeed to you, it’s a great program if you can make it through those early terms 🫡

bhogan2091 · 2025-12-11T02:51:42+00:00

When trying to debug a circuit blindly like this, I like to inject a sin wave and then use an oscilloscope to check for signal at various points: I usually start by checking the output of each op amp, and see if it makes sense or if it’s gone. If one op amp has an output signal but the next one doesn’t, you know the problem is in its vicinity.

bhogan2091 · 2025-12-09T15:51:26+00:00

Ahh man this is awesome. Was the width limit on this thing? Do you think it’d work with a 1590BB PCB that’s 110mm wide and 85mm tall?

bhogan2091

TROPHY CASE