JTode

Hey folks, I have a Mackie 802-VLZ4 mixer which does this narsty pop when you turn it on; I'm pretty sure it's what killed one of the woofers in my monitors. It has been put out of service and I will either harvest its many through-hole organs or else fix it.

I could not find a schematic, but I don't assume it can't be found, I just haven't yet. It's not a big board but it's all analog from what I can see.

There appears to be a separate power supply board which feeds

+15 AGND -15 GND +48

to the mixer, which is two boards connected by thick soldered wires.

I have looked with magnifiers on at all the caps, none appear to be leaky or swole, but I'm assuming this has something to do with the power supply putting out a spike at power on. The power board has a lot of really tiny caps, I still don't really understand power supplies that well. I need to do more studying of them I suppose, they're pretty central.

Edit: I have a little tiny oscilloscope that I bought years ago and haven't used yet, just figured the day would come. This is probably that day, to measure that spike from the power supply. From the looks of it I'm pretty sure that if I can just get better quality, non-spiking power to those connectors it should be fine.

Anyways this board would be very handy right this second if I felt like it was safe to let it touch my good kids, but at the moment it's the unfavored child who won't stop hitting the others. If anyone would like to see them I have/can take photos. The boards have codes on them, presumably codes that Mackie employees could use to dig up schematics, but will they? I suppose I'll try to find out today. It's past warranty of course.

Hey c/dogs, meet Bo (left, mine) and Marlo (right, his visiting cousin). They are hanging out by the poo, like they do.

[Edit 2: I think anyone commenting should identify how much they use Facebook in their comment lol]

On the list of people I describe in the subject, I place myself first. If you're here to defend yourself by showing me your receipts, congratulations, you win, I just saved us who knows how much time. I'm typing this out in an attempt to describe phenomena, not persuade you of anything in particular, other than, this is a thing I see happening a lot; too much would be my take.

I'm just gonna grab [a] most egregious example, but I would like to talk about this, not as a horrific fail, but as an exemplar; at the moment I believe that most people categorize it as the former.

[edit: there really is no "most" egregious example, and I just thought of a much worse one, and unlike Facebook I am fully guilty of this one: I own and drive a car, a lot, and boy am I ignoring some real world consequences there.]

That example being, Facebook Acted As The Main Propaganda Outlet For A Genocide Of The Rohingya In Myanmar, and therefore, Anyone Who Uses Facebook Is Using A Tool That Has Bloodstains On It And Are Somehow Not Horrified.

To more easily conceptualize this, it's much the same as me needing a shovel, and having a neighbour that I happen to know murdered someone with their shovel, but has not been arrested for it, and right when I need the shovel, they walk over with their bloodstained shovel and offer to let me use it for my non-murder task. And I just go "Wow how convenient that you happened to be here with that bright-red shovel just now, I think I'll use this one one of yours with the little spatters of brain on it, instead of walking over to my shed and getting my own shovel out!"

We are talking about murder here, Facebook was used to foment mass murder and in a world that made sense, Zuckerberg would be handed over to the ICC years ago, along with Henry Kissinger and a number of others who instead hang out at the Nobel Peace Prize club where Barack makes a mean Mai Tai.

The problems that people use Facebook to constructively solve is connections to family and close friends, event and interest group organizing, the marketplace, and for the avid user it constitutes a daily journal.

These problems could each be solved using something else that is also just as gratis. It might be a small amount of effort more, but then you maybe don't ever have to touch the remains of a human life that once existed and now does not, due to this particular device being used to end that life.

But it seems that it's more convenient, easy, zero effort, to simply ignore the gore.

That's what I see on the internet. I don't think anyone has ever accepted a bloodstained shovel and set to digging a ditch with it who didn't also feel that their life was next if they didn't, but as long as there's no visible bloodstains, as long as it's just a few articles and podcasts from known radical leftists, eh, look at little Jimmy's recital, isn't he cute?

He's been with us about two weeks now and still learning some of his manners. He's also a nut.

Says he gotta pitch. VC says go ahead.

"So we first, we take the money and we go to the least developed part of the world and we pay some people to kidnap some small children and force the inhabitants to sign over their land rights. Then we get some other people to write up some reports that say there's gold in the hills and we raise a bunch more money. "Then we just basically, we build an island where we hire loyal guards, I have a guy he says he can do an implant that'll make them loyal, we can use those villagers. And we just build a fort and we only let hot chicks and people with sweet jetskis come. "Anyways we stock up on guns and stuff and wait for it all to burn and then we rule the world, we do anything we want!"

VC says, "That's an incredibly immoral idea, we love it, in fact, we've already been working on this for some time. What do you call this start up anyways?"

"The Aristechrats"

I'm not the most on point as far as keeping up with the internet so possibly it is actually happening, but I have not yet identified a direct challenge to Facebook from the fediverse that has been settled on by those already here.

I was on Mastodon for a while but realized I hate Twitter-style interactions, as much as I enjoyed posting about all the stuff I'm into - as the Twitter people kept coming like waves of Saxons with funny hair on Britain's fair shore, I got into some supremely silly arguments and then got out. I didn't bother to wait for them to burn my village, they're welcome to it.

I'm now giving Lemmy a go, because as far as participation in platforms, I lasted longest at Reddit, though I was gone long before the recent exodus. Hopefully my dogs, cats, plants and microcontroller projects will get some love from The Internet's Good Strangers here.

But I was, in the early days, quite an avid FB user and considered it unleaveable until 2016, at which point I realized it was not just leavable but likely to get us all killed. I still have a (good parts of) Facebook-shaped hole in my online life, which is where all my real friends and relatives used to hang out for my daily perusal, and where I could send out my various snarks and know I was amusing at least one or two people who genuinely found my antics delightful. I'm not a troll but I'm definitely a Grouch, and even Oscar needed a hug every now and then.

So given that most of us are here because we recognized the cycle of enshittification at some point and decided to make a different choice, and given that we've so quickly embraced replacements for every other big silo, and given again that most of us were probably once on FB and used it to be connected to our real people... why have we collectively shied away from even offering a viable Facebook alternative?

Whenever I ask my more "woke" friends why they're still there, it nearly always seems to be that their old relatives are all there. I can see that that would be a great challenge, to move them off of that pablum-crack. Maybe the Secret Council Of Woke Fediverse Elders is using all these lesser platforms as gamergate-like test runs to iron out the kinks in federation. Perhaps even the seeming willingness of Mastodon admins to let Meta poke their tentacles in the door is entirely a feint - perhaps Mastodon was never intended to be kept in the first place, but rather, is just a honey pot to gather important battlefield notes for the coming attack!

maybe?