Recent submissions

Comment · 6 years ago
Yeah I bought a Magic Mouse 2 earlier this year and regretted it instantly. Apple need to stop thinking outside of the box when it comes to mice.

You’re right about the positioning as well. If you have a full size Apple keyboard the trackpad is too far away always. If you have the compact layout Apple keyboard it’s too much of a compromise with keys.

Best outcome for me was turfing the lot and the Mac and getting a Logitech mouse and a TKL layout cherry MX red based keyboard. So much better.

I’m sorry but the Apple input devices are inferior even to the lowest grade no brand stuff from Aliexpress at this point.

Comment · 6 years ago
Yes. Similar experiences. Basically the position I ended up in was mandatorily selling out to Oracle with no other choice on the table. The key purchasing decision was whether Sun or HP got to bugger us for hardware. This was loudly shouted out to drown out the “why do we need oracle” question. This took months of noise and pretendering (pretend tendering) and all sorts of meetings where no one knew anything about anything that was being required. But everyone was doing Six Sigma of course do the cargo culting was justified by process. Eventually HP was pulled out of the hat because someone saw a nice shiny sales brochure.

In the end, £1m down the shitter, 9 web pages written in JSP backed with a full 42U rack HP/UX crate running oracle was seen as a success. The whole platform was scrap in three years. each http request made cost £83 in the end ($100ish).

And that’s defence spending in a nutshell.

No one says a thing to stop this happening.

Comment · 6 years ago
This is the thinly veiled next round of Trump vs Bezos by the sounds.

Hint: There are no winners.

Comment · 6 years ago
That’s about it for commercial stuff. The trick is really managing it pre-compliance which amounts to renting a signal analyser / SA / measurement receiver and going at it with a near field probe to avoid having to pay for it more than once. Rigol do some adequate kit for less than your mugging from a leasing company now. As for the lab guys they don’t have a tight loop with the design engineers when you are going for compliance testing.

We used stuff in defence sector I can’t talk about even today past saying they have specially designed facilities that rival the commercial sector and fairly capable high end 3D field mapping equipment that cost more than my house did. It was based on commercial kit from Agilent with their own software and hardware.

As for antennas, they’re not really that voodoo. I’ve built quite a few even up to 2.4GHz. I played with 10GHz as well but not successfully yet. Same for radiation. PCB traces are antennas and transmission lines. Impedance control is fun IMHO.

There are design patterns and crib sheets at most large companies that avoid such pitfalls though. Spinning another board is expensive so avoiding this sort of stuff is where your design engineers should be leveraged. Some stuff is indeed tweaking but that’s getting less these days with some of the CAD software around. But it costs real money.

Comment · 6 years ago
I have, in defence sector.
Comment · 6 years ago
Correct. Although it’s possible on older handsets with 3.5 jack that the audio amplifier in the handset itself is possible to receive. I’m not sure about lightning.

But I very much doubt at the stated range. The EMC guys would be all over that.

Comment · 6 years ago
It’s physics. There is EMC testing done on these devices. There is little opinion involved in such matters.
Comment · 6 years ago
I doubt it. That probably wouldn’t pass the EMC testing. Exaggerating I suspect to back up the claim.

Really why is this a surprise when you can hear the phone blips and buzzes from the RF induced pickup on shitty hifi equipment.

Comment · 6 years ago
I am disregarding the whole thing. The author knows nothing of EMC. This is expected at close quarters.
Comment · 6 years ago
I suspect that’s unlikely from my own experiences on this stuff. Perhaps 20-40cm is more likely.
Comment · 6 years ago
This is not surprising. We’ve been using AM and FM radios to debug circuits for decades. They can pick up oscillations and instabilities.

But the range is centimetres at best. So much so the antenna gets used as a fairly directional probe.

Comment · 6 years ago
>10Gb - Stick it on a bitlocker encrypted USB stick and chuck it in the post. Next day download if you send it 1st class here.

<10Gb - chuck it on S3 and send a link to the other person.

Comment · 6 years ago
I just get poked on slack. Question answered. Life carries on.

The advantage there is I can choose when to respond which is never the case in shoulder tapping office environments and meeting schedule negotiations both of which are disruptive.

Email is even better than meetings and disruptions!

Comment · 6 years ago
Yeah which is why I do neither.
Comment · 6 years ago
Completely agree. Perhaps we should get on air and outnumber them :)

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