What did I just watch? Post odd video links here!

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Posted: Sun Mar 17, 2019 4:42 pm

I don't know where this goes. It doesn't seem to fit anywhere so I'm putting it here. Odd bewildering video that I think is supposed to be some type of artistic expression. But it reminds me so much of the loaves of bread and fish on the head that some used to get lads to do....

https://www.facebook.com/2262429073978023/posts/2382931125261150/

Posted: Sun Mar 17, 2019 9:05 pm

I always thought that the Kellog's Gay Pron commercials were a thing of legend!

This, however, concerns me much more:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeb5LdAyLC8

Posted: Thu Jul 04, 2019 2:36 pm

Thanks Bearkat. I was just going to start an interesting videos thread and found you'd beat me too it.

You've all heard of hand wringing. I encountered these in my former life as an engineer, when I worked for company that manufactured and serviced extremely accurate measuring and weighing machines. We also made various standard gauges for weight, length, flatness etc... These were by far the most fascinating. Called gauge blocks. (gage blocks in the Us)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lOOl3VxOtE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbsd2OpPOMw

Posted: Fri Jul 05, 2019 8:15 am

Those of us of a certain age will remember Cold War era news items of Western or Russian military types blinking at large digital displays on control panels, pondering whether or not to push the big red button that says, whatever you do don't ever push this big red button. The digital displays were tubes (not vacuum) called Nixie (Numerical Indicator Experimental) Tubes.

They were phased out in the west early/mid 70s after the invention of the LED and subsequent liquid crystal display. But in the Soviet Union they kept on producing Nixie tubes right up until the collapse of Communism in 1989.

What happened then was people realised how beautiful they looked compared to the rather bland modern alternatives and started making clock kits. When the supplies sitting in Russian warehouses run out, that's it. There will be no more. There are a couple of hobbyists making them but they are extremely expensive and will never be made in the numbers they once were. I have built two Nixie clocks of different designs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4-pgzyT0No
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0xamRXGe1E

Master Baiter Joined: 02 Feb 2019 Posts: 163

I actually have 6 of these tubes in my workshop. New Old Stock, German. I will probably never get around to building a clock from them..so they are up for grabs.

Posted: Fri Jul 05, 2019 10:02 am

What type are they? I'm on the lookout for some spare IN-18 tubes. One of the tubes on my clock is just starting to get cathode poisoning.

This isn't my clock but same type.

Posted: Fri Jul 05, 2019 1:52 pm

Those are beautiful.

Posted: Fri Jul 05, 2019 2:36 pm

I just looked up the price of the large IN-18 tubes used in one of my clocks that I made about ten years ago. They've gone up from $20.00ea to $60.00 in that time.

They don't really blow like vacuum tubes (they are filled with an inert gas) but the cathodes (the actual metal stamped in the shape of a digit) becomes poisoned over time so dark regions appear until they are more dark than light.

The military grade tubes are the best. They were also used as readouts on scientific instrumentists as well. I worked for a while helping develop (while I was apprenticing) the first commercially available electronic weighing machine in the UK back in the mid 70s that had a pretty row of nixies on each side. That's how I know about them.

<a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=avery+1750+scale&client=firefox-b-d&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjQiYmp-53jAhXnWxUIHYeuDoIQ_AUIESgC&biw=1536&bih=750#imgrc=OOKOnZdBJJ8EoM:">Linky</a>

The weighing machine cost almost as much as a car. The sales reps sold them on the principle the butcher or greengrocer would make their money back, because they were so sensitive they would be charging for the weight of the bag your carrots were in, or the paper your pork chop was wrapped in being charged for as well as the goods. They never miss a trick.

Master Baiter Joined: 02 Feb 2019 Posts: 163

I´ll take a look a little later this evening - mine may be the circular type, don´t remember.

Edit: Yes, they are NOS Siemens ZM1022. Let me know if you have use for them anyway.

Posted: Mon Jul 08, 2019 9:17 am

Not a type I need but worth putting up on an auction site if you have no use for them.

Posted: Mon Jul 08, 2019 9:46 am

Nixie tubes were not just pretty. A type of nixie tube called a dekatron (because its display was ten dots arranged in a circle on the top of the tube), was used to make a computer to help British nuclear scientists in the 50s do repetitive calculations in days or weeks that would have taken human computers months or years to calculate. A museum of computers got it working again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBP7AxXHxAA

Alan Turing, gets most of the credit for the Bletchley Park Code Breaking achievements. The real genius though, was a modest post office engineer called Tommy Flowers. He was able to design and construct an electronic computer that was able to take the mathematical problem (that Turing understood) and actually apply it to cracking German encrypted Enigma messages. Tommy has been reduced to a footnote in the code breaking story but it never would have had anything like the success it did without his Colossus computer.

Posted: Fri Aug 30, 2019 6:29 am

Make yourself a cup of tea, grab a digestive biscuit, put your feet up, and watch these. It's impossible to pick a favourite.

https://www.youtube.com/user/theDIYSRC

Posted: Sat Oct 26, 2019 4:19 pm

How Nixie Tubes are made. I never thought anyone would ever make any more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxL4ElboiuA

Posted: Tue Dec 10, 2019 4:40 pm

Here's a video by SciShow Psych about scams:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1ZFVeNAAeI

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