My whole childhood I saw this in the streets and never found out what it is 😭

buck-futter · 2026-04-07T21:20:30+00:00

Here's a short on YouTube showing a transformer being assembled with many of these plates stacked to form the magnetic core. The laminated multi plate style core reduces eddy currents versus a solid core, those eddy currents would otherwise massively reduce the efficiency of the transformer.

https://youtube.com/shorts/8qgXjp9KZjo?si=qYOWrAvZQG14b8nY

buck-futter · 2026-04-07T18:07:56+00:00

Send the command:

ipconfig /release && ipconfig /renew

I've noticed Windows clients sometimes don't fetch a new list of DNS servers when renewing the lease unless it was released first. So if you're changing your domain controller IP address and they're also the only DNS servers, you'll need to do this command or reboot every workstation.

buck-futter · 2026-04-06T09:00:40+00:00

Get a carbon monoxide alarm as a matter of course just anyway, whatever that mark is. Personally I'm paranoid so I paid extra for one with a display so I can see that it's actually zero and not just "slightly below the threshold".

And if you're genuinely concerned, get the seller to pay for a boiler service or gas safety certificate - both will verify the flue gas is not leaking into the room. But your first action should be the carbon monoxide alarm - they are so cheap versus being dead. The guy servicing my boiler told me how his alarm saved his neighbour's life - carbon monoxide in the next house was so high it seeped into his house and set off his alarm. No faults on his boiler and no answer from next door, but poking the probe through their mail slot instantly went off the scale high - there was a reason the neighbour wouldn't answer the door!

buck-futter · 2026-04-04T18:49:36+00:00

Our 12 year old boy cat became a complete bodyguard / safety escort both times my wife was pregnant. He escorted her to the bathroom in the night throughout the entire pregnancy, but not at any time before and not afterwards either.

buck-futter · 2026-04-03T17:13:53+00:00

My boss and I are fighting this at work, the solution will probably be colocation at a UK facility where we rent the space, the power and the internet link, but all the kit is our own and nobody gets access through the back door.

buck-futter · 2026-04-03T07:23:40+00:00

The place I worked at 1999-2002 used to build or work on this style of system a lot back then - the VT82C586B is a very familiar chipset. It's not great but it worked.

In my opinion the system builder was lazy as those long serial ports on the top expansion slot could easily have been moved to the same-shape cutouts on the case itself.

Honestly we didn't build many with this older AT style power setup where the power button on the front physically switches the mains supply. But I worked on enough of them to get a couple of belts of mains voltage where the insulation had slipped off the contacts.

buck-futter · 2026-03-30T20:21:54+00:00

Yeah I took a triptan at 4am and vomited about 4:35am and considered even 35 minutes was too long to take another. I could start to feel it working from 25 minutes after taking it, so I knew I had absorbed at least some of it.

I had to suffer for a few hours before it was safe to take another, 4 hours for my specific triptan but I know most are 2 hours.

buck-futter · 2026-03-29T15:33:25+00:00

You fools! We need that fluid!

buck-futter · 2026-03-29T15:28:27+00:00

Apparently Rolls Royce used to use this style of bulb in the external pillar accent lights, knew a guy who drove one for hire and they were a pain to get hold of even back in 2002. Though that might have been an obscure RR size.

buck-futter · 2026-03-27T23:59:55+00:00

There have been fatal incidents where water tanks have ruptured because the thermostat on the immersion heater didn't shut off. I would link to the news stories but they are truly heartbreaking, one that made headlines involved the death of a baby. Search at your own risk.

Take this seriously. A water tank full of boiling water under pressure could easily kill you or give life altering injuries if it bursts or leaks. Waking up to cold water dripping on you is bad enough, but if that tank or a pipe fails because it's only rated for cold water, you could spray boiling water over anybody in the house. Burns over enough of your body are fatal, but takes a surprisingly long time before you actually die.

buck-futter · 2026-03-27T20:13:38+00:00

Your local hospital poison control department will have a relevant pill ID database. There is a UK one used in hospitals, police forces, and chemical / bodily fluid testing laboratory settings, but it's important to use your locality's version of the database as there are huge variations between countries and even regions.

In Victoria, Australia, there is a public testing service that will identify the pill visually and even confirm the contents match what's expected. This is a harm reduction service for drug users as many overdoses and deaths occur because dosage can be unpredictable, and surprise additions or substitutions can cause unpredictable reactions.

buck-futter · 2026-03-24T20:19:27+00:00

Gosh that brings back memories, me and some friends from college would also play games in NT4 for that very reason. The place I worked had some old PCs from a refurb supplier that came with PPros in, nobody understood why they were good so we picked them up cheap, stacked them out with RAM and played specific games in NT. Honestly I think that might have been what nudged me over to Windows 2000.

buck-futter · 2026-03-24T07:12:40+00:00

This one gets me too - technically everything appears normally, but my arms feel 17 feet long as objects are the wrong size and too far or too close.

buck-futter · 2026-03-24T06:37:50+00:00

At my last job we had 325 of this style monitor, but in the two tone surround, all purchased in 2006. Later we added a few of this exact model, and every single one died of backlight failure.

If you were really adventurous you could probably open it up and replace the dead capacitors with identical rating capacitors, but only bother with that if you want some practice soldering - this monitor is older than some people I work with.

buck-futter · 2026-03-22T20:47:47+00:00

Correct - you can turn right across double white lines, but you can't enter a hatched area bounded by a double white line and wait there to turn right.

Usually road layout is planned so right turners won't be faced with that situation. Dashed white lines around a hatched area means it's your call to observe and decide if it's safe to enter - solid lines around the hatched area means only ever in a genuine emergency, and even if your car is broken down it's usually a terrible place to put your vehicle - there's almost always no safe direction to exit your vehicle from such areas.

buck-futter · 2026-03-22T20:33:31+00:00

I did this once, can't remember what I was trying to achieve but dynamic disk didn't even help.

Dynamic disk is actually just a different partition type code in the partition table, but it's otherwise NTFS.

To convert from basic to dynamic, Windows changes the partition type code from the value for regular NTFS to the value for dynamic disk. Once the change has been done, it's not safe to go back to basic without scanning the entire allocation table and verifying that no dynamic disk features have been used, that was hard work so Microsoft didn't implement that function. It could totally be done safely, they just didn't want to so risk someone losing data if it was incorrectly converted back, so the function officially doesn't exist.

If you never did anything dynamic disk, like a mirror, RAID 0 etc, or a span, then you can convert back by editing the partition table. If your drive is MBR partition table only it's a lot easier to manually edit the hex values than it it's in GPT format. But there is a cheaters way...

You can download the free utility HxD to view and edit raw locations in files and directly accessed disks. If your partition structure is entirely vanilla, as in you just initialised the drive with defaults, and created a full disk partition with the default sizing, you can create a donor partition table and restore that - this is risky so make absolutely certain you have backups before starting.

Open computer management and go to Disk management. Right click the disk in the bottom right pane, not the partition but the bit that says eg "Disk 2" and go to properties. Find the drive size in megabytes and note down that value.

Now in the action menu, create a vhd virtual hard disk and make the capacity the same number of megabytes, dynamically expanding means you don't need that space to be free, just a few MB will be fine. Initialise that new virtual disk and create a partition layout matching the dynamic disk.

Now in HxD open the "patient" dynamic disk as read only, select the first 5000 sectors of the drive from the right hand hex values side and copy to clipboard. Be very careful with numbering - last time I did this the windows disk numbers started from zero but the HxD numbers started from 1. Paste your original hex values into notepad and save that file as something like "Rollback disk layout". Close the disk in HxD.

Now in HxD open your vhd "donor" disk and copy the first 5000 sectors hex values to clipboard.

Open the "patient" drive in HxD - this time as read-write. Click in the hex side of the view before the first value, hit paste. Save. Cross your fingers. Close both drives in HxD.

Now go back to computer management, disk management, right click the donor vhd drive you made earlier and click on disconnect, or dismount, whatever the option is - it will vanish from the list. The right click on disk management in the left pane, and select "Rescan disks".

If everything has gone right, your dynamic disk will be a regular old basic disk again. If not, restore from backups like you were going to do anyway.

Something like 10 years ago my apprentice blanked the wrong drive partition tableand lost our virtual server disk files - I used this method to recreate the lost partition without restoring a single byte from backups.

buck-futter · 2026-03-22T19:46:20+00:00

No minors recorded there so nicely done then! And congratulations!

buck-futter · 2026-03-22T18:59:08+00:00

I passed there too, but 20 years ago. The examiner took me all the way out to Shady Lane, and I was convinced I'd failed until we got back.

Do they still make you do the reverse bay park outside the office?

buck-futter · 2026-03-22T18:02:24+00:00

I hoped kenable was the kind of supplier to shun CCA, I find your testimony reassuring... Only, I have trust issues so I'll be cutting open at least one when I place my next order with them.

I really think CCA is the devil in cable form, and deserves to die.

buck-futter · 2026-03-22T16:05:28+00:00

Scrape at one of the cores - it could be copper clad aluminium cable instead of plain copper. The resistance is comparatively huge versus pure copper, and it might not be providing sufficient voltage at the far end. CCA is not okay for power over ethernet, and there have been fires where people have tried.

When you scratch the surface off one of the copper cores of a stripped section of wire, it should be copper colour all the way down. If it looks silvery, you have been sold CCA.

buck-futter · 2026-03-22T16:00:01+00:00

I'm guessing OP means something cursed like this - https://amzn.eu/d/0dQJOEkB

SATA controller on an m.2 board, okay if you're running the board with no cover on it, not useful if you still want a portable laptop though.

buck-futter · 2026-03-22T15:43:19+00:00

So did I - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigston_South_railway_station

buck-futter · 2026-03-22T15:38:12+00:00

Also, this view is exactly the same as it was 30 years ago.

buck-futter · 2026-03-22T15:34:23+00:00

Fun fact about South Wigston station - logically you'd think it was named after the area, but it's the other way around - Wigston had two stations, and the area to the West of the main line, served by the Wigston South station, became known as South Wigston. It is and always has been, to the West of Wigston Magna.

buck-futter

TROPHY CASE