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What are your special interests?

Aspeth

I really love learning about other peoples hyperfixations/special interests and - although I struggle to show it - get so happy and excited when someone shares theirs with me. It's probably one of the only things I like more than my own special interest tbh... I love it even more when someone feels comfortable enough to not only tell me what theirs is, but also tell me every detail about it. Even if I have no idea what any of it means, I still love listening.

I'm rambling so I'll just get to the point; I'm curious about everyone here. I had a *** night and this is the first thing that came to mind to make me feel better so I'd love it if someone would be willing to indulge...

Parents

  • I don't know if others like old technology, but I've been given an old homemade frequency counter (from Radcom March 1976) and quite like the look of the nixie tubes - I just need to confirm that the different buttons are wired to the original design and get it working properly and then add a multiway switch and some labels that should have been included when it was originally made.

    Here is a photo of it powered up showing the nice orange glow from the nixie tubes:

  • in reply to Trev

    I've decided once I've modified it to work as per the original design I'll add the functionality so I can use it as a clock and then leave it switched on and running as a clock.

    I think I'll leave it exposed, but with the mains input and the 350V DC that the nixie tubes run on insulated so if someone touches something on it that they shouldn't have they  won't get electrocuted.

  • in reply to Trev

    It'll use quite a bit of electricity I expect.

Reply Children
  • in reply to Trev

    My last brain cell died reading that 

  • in reply to Stuart333

    Probably not a huge amount, but any that it does use will mostly be converted to heat which will reduce my gas bill by a small amount.

    My computer uses far more especially when I'm running anything processor intensive - although the processor in my computer can run 128 threads at the same time I hadn't realized that if I'm running programs from an xterminal (in  Linux) I can only run 63 xterminals at a time - I had wanted to run 120 versions of a program that takes about a day to run (each checking 4 thousand million possibilities), but I'll now do it over 3 days, 50 versions a day - I can't run them in the background as I'm printing the decrypted text to the terminal, so I wouldn't be able to see it.  The encryption I'm looking at currently is probably something simpler anyway, but I can run the xterminals minimized and do other things with the computer whilst it is running so I might as well run through all possibilities.