test please delete

[norrahe]

Lunch time.

Chicken pot pie from eat.

I used to like that one, especially the big pastry bit they put on top

[zeitghost]

Well it made me larfl

Are tantalum capacitors safe for use in new designs? - Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange

This is the bit I liked the most:

Unlike Al wet electrolytic caps which tend to self heal when the oxide layer is punctured, tantalum tends not to heal.

Small amounts of energy may lead to localised damage and removal of the conduction path.

Where the circuit providing energy to the cap is able to provide substantial energy the cap is able to offer a correspondingly resistant low resistance short and a battle begins.

This can lead to smell, smoke, flame, noise and explosion.

I've seen all these happen sequentially in a single failure.

First there was a puzzling bad smell for perhaps 30 seconds.

Then a loud shrieking noise, then a jet of flame for perhaps 5 seconds with gratifying wooshing sound and then an impressive explosion.

Not all failures are so sensorily satisfying.

I've seen that with a 286 motherboard some 20 or so years ago.

The stench was appalling.

[zeitghost]

It's The Return Of The Phantom Driller!

[NickFitz]

Sausage butty for lunch. M&S Lincolnshires. Fresh sesame seed bloomer. Lush

[FiveTimes]

Sausage butty for lunch. M&S Lincolnshires. Fresh sesame seed bloomer. Lush

I also had sausage cob for lunch with some pringles and a piece of shortbread.

[zeitghost]

Gosh.

Looking at some PIC code in C from about 18 months ago.

Took a quarter of an hour to figure out WTF it was doing.

It's a 15 line program.

It's a bit more commented now.

[NickFitz]

Teapot activated

I'm working through a book about the up-to-date approach to iOS programming, as I'm several years behind in that stuff. In particular, I've never done any work in Swift. TBH, I really liked Objective-C, but I believe Swift is what all the cool new stuff will be written in, so I suppose I ought to learn it

[zeitghost]

The problem with my 15 line PIC C prog is the amount of hardware manipulation involved.

It does interrupt stuff and I/O stuff and timer calculation stuff, all in magick numbers.

I must have been on a roll (probly ham & pickle) when I wrote that.

And you can't do anything with a PIC without consulting the datasheet.

[zeitghost]

Byeeeee

[NickFitz]

The problem with my 15 line PIC C prog is the amount of hardware manipulation involved.

It does interrupt stuff and I/O stuff and timer calculation stuff, all in magick numbers.

I must have been on a roll (probly ham & pickle) when I wrote that.

And you can't do anything with a PIC without consulting the datasheet.

Aren't you supposed to define constants to represent the magick numbers with something meaningful, like THING_BOGGLE_REGISTER = 1 << 7 and so on?