Magic... You just need to keep a Windows XP box on life support to run the damn software.
this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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And don't you dare look at the proprietary-to-serial connector cable that was last made in Czechoslovakia!
Don't let the magic smoke escape!
Beige: the most expensive of equipment colors
This boy only costs a cheap 50k.
And this one over there we got for only 250k
Labs I’ve been in also have at least one inexplicable and kinda scary metal and asbestos monster from the 60s. Like this spinny boi:
Ahh centrifuges, the second most terrifying piece of lab equipment after the intern.
https://web.mit.edu/charliew/www/centrifuge.html they sometimes do this.
Interesting story and useful safety message, but awful web page design. Who puts white text on a nearly-white speckled background?
Edit: Turns out this isn't the fault of the webpage, other than the choice of background. Text is perfectly readable in Light Mode on Firefox Desktop and Mobile.
That's the early internet for ya 😎. I agree it's bad by today's standards, but these kind of pages have such a strong nostalgic quality for me. I just wish modern pages loaded in a femtosecond like this one did.
It did load very quickly, and is a very clean page. Just text, pictures, and links.
No banner taking up the top third of the screen, no autoplaying videos, no popup to receive notifications, no cookie warning...
Fun link: https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/
Who puts white text on a nearly-white speckled background?
Huh? Your browser may be in dark mode or something. Text color is explicitly set to black in the markup.
For the uninitiated, this was pretty typical personal web design from 1997-1999 or so. But the background doesn't tessellate, and makes the text hard to read in any color, which makes it pretty poor example.
Your browser may be in dark mode or something.
Yup, that was it. Thanks!
Made in West Germany and sounds like someone's pouring salt into a hair drier, but still more reliable than the Beckman centrifuge bought in 2010.
There's 3 rooms filled with delicate instruments worth 8 figures total, but the toilets are equipped with the roughest single ply paper your butthole ever will see.
That's because the instruments don't need to wipe
I'm going to start saying "and this is where the magic happens" in reference to everything in my house when showing new people around
points to toilet and this is where the magic happens.
Nasty ass blumkin boy
gestures toward the water closet
"And this is where..."
Yes, we all have a closet filled with Waters brand chromatographs
And the magic is a hot plate and a spectroscope. The top two beige boxes do the exact same thing qpcr.
Look at this IT nerd. I bet you help a bunch of people out huh. Everyone point and laugh
I'm a biochemist
Box get hot, box get cold, box get hot, box get cold
Sometimes the box (where the magic happens) is grey or even white :o
If you're really fancy it's both :)
Our gel electrophoresis machine was black, and many weeks of work lived or died by that magic box.
I used to have to fix a lot of those magic boxes. They are often extremely simple and built with 30 year old technology.
Somehow, I'm not surprised. Old tech is trusty, reliable, simple. I'm pretty sure banks often run on old tech for the same reasons. It drives me nuts seeing computers in place of simple controls.
For instance, as an appliance tech I've been getting familiar with the latest common GE dishwasher design the past couple years and discovered the computer boards are a common failure point. There's actually 2 of em--one main computer board doing most of the "heavy lifting", and a separate computer board for the user interface that wires up to the main cpu. That board for the user interface is a very common failure point (though the other one likes to go bad sometimes too). They're not even that expensive to buy, but they're endlessly more complicated than a standard control panel with mechanical buttons, lights/LEDs and a small screen displaying the time, or something even simpler like a mechanical timer that you simply advance to the cycle you want to run.
The technology has existed for longer than many of us have even been alive--nobody's building them anymore though...
It's always interesting to find a control system that's actually Windows 98 or 2000 running on it.
All I ever wanted was the machine that goes PING!
I don't have to click this link to both know what it is, and to hear it, and for that, I'm grateful.
So THAT'S why magic fails to happen in my apartment: none of my stuff is beige!
Lab rats will look at and tinker with these all day and night long, be exhausted, happy, angry, satisfied, and sometimes be awed by them in the most incredibly nuanced ways.
I'm jealous is what I'm saying.
When I started the gc was a magic machine filled with elves that made it work.
A few years later the gc fed the ms which is where the elves relocated after I'd figured out their housing situation.
Now they're living within the triple quadrupole, which I'm quite certain I will never fully understand the mechanics of.
It was fun hearing my explanations evolve as I became more experienced, introducing the interns to my toys every year, the ones that stuck around would overhear my explanations and question why I didn't tell them the same thing, "I didn't know how it worked when you got the tour!" Life long learning!
Why don't labs sponsor the PC modding community to make their shit work better? I mean, they already know how to work with liquid nitrogen..
The first one's Nintendo; I don't think I recognise the rest.
Is how Costa are kept high.
Come up to the lab and see what's on the slab!
Guy in beige wrappings in a glass box where the magic happens!
