Seismatters

SMSim3 is now ready.
It is easy to use, quite configurable and can produce ‘report grade’ graphics.

It handles a variety of file formats:

• SEGD Versions 2 and 3
• SEGY IBM and IEEE floating point
• Sercel Ground Force files
• Verif-i VFI files from their Sandwich box tester *(Limited- see manual)

You can produce the usual sim displays, plus a lot more –

• Comparison displays
• Mass-BP plot
• Tapers and envelopes
• Distortion analysis

There is a camera function to select and display only the traces you want

A unique feature for added QC is Stored Pilots.
You can even convert Custom sweeps from Sercel format to VibPro format and vice versa

Details Here:
https://seismatters.com/SMSim3.html

On a recent job, I noticed traces going dead during the day for no apparent reason.
Although it is not uncommon to see the occasional intermittent trace, this was occurring too often for my liking.

Luckily, SMRefract includes a database facility that can provide a history of bad stations.
What I saw was traces that were repeatedly intermittent.
A bit of investigation in the field revealed that FDU pins were breaking off inside the molding. It usually wasn’t obvious until the pin was actually wiggled, although in some cases the pin would pull
out when the geophone string was disconnected.
Even more entertaining was that some of the troubleshooters were well aware of the problem and instead of changing the link, would insert a piece of wire or solder into the female pin of the geophone string to ‘fix’ the station.

Quite a creative idea, but it just meant that bad equipment rolled to the front, requiring it to be fixed again in the future. It also meant that geophone strings with a blocked female pin would (attempt to) be connected to good FDUs, likely damaging them too.

I found that using SMRefract to detect these stations was practical, but a bit tedious, so have made some major changes in the Database dialog. There is now an ‘Output List’ where you can add traces you want to look at, and you can output Garmin or KML files that can be directly uploaded to a GPS if you want to go look at them.

Another new feature added is that FDUs that fail for the same fault at different locations can now be listed.
This enhances the ability to detect the FDUs with broken pins, and it will also allow you to detect FDUs that repeatedly fail tilt/leakage/resistance inexplicably and FDUs that perhaps show up as noisy more often than they should. Furthermore it allows you to see if bad equipment has in fact been removed from the line.

Here we see an FDU that had been checked and found to be bad (by me) and the recorder notified

And here the same FDU failing for the same fault a few weeks later at the front, meaning it was not changed when I asked.

Details of changes will in the manual in a few days.

With the end of support for Windows 7, I reluctantly decided to try out Windows 10.
The ‘upgrade’ went very well, although it took several hours.
The problem then was to make it usable.
Perhaps the underlying code-base of W10 is more stable and secure (maybe). To be honest I don’t care – Windows 7 proved
itself to be more than capable in both regards. I just want a system that is usable.
Sadly, it is quite obvious that Microsoft let the 5 year olds loose with the visual aspect of Windows 10.

The first thing to do of course was to turn off Cortana, the Aero crap and Microsoft telemetry.
Then try to adjust the visual appearance.
Windows 10 pretends to allow for customisation, but you cannot turn off themes. Themes are probably the single worst feature that Microsoft has ever come up with.
It appeals to managers, accountants and 15 year old school girls, but is a major source of frustration to anyone who actually needs to use a Windows computer for work.
You cannot individually set colours for the various parts of a dialog (title bar etc) or for the desktop, without affecting other parts – it is called the ‘Accent Color’ for some unknowable reason.
To make it even worse, the dialog windows now do not have any visible edge and the Title bar has been made far too large.

There is some good news though, there are 3rd party tools that can improve the visual aspects of Windows 10 but they do not entirely cure it. The user interface is simply terrible, to the point of being barely usable.
It is no real surprise that many people are now seriously considering a move to Linux.

Something that came as a further unpleasant surprise to me was that some of my QC software would not work under Windows 10.
Most of this was my fault – I even had comments in the code along the lines of “maybe a problem here, should check return value”
Once I fixed these oversights, things worked.
And it motivated me to add some features and fix a few niggling issues, more in another post in a few days.
So SMRefract, VAPSDB3, PN2 and SMSim3 now all work well under Windows 7 and 10.

For anyone considering a downgrade to Windows 10, you need:

http://www.classicshell.net/
to give you a usable start menu – the W10 one is unusable

https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
to disable a bunch of Microsoft spying and useless shit

https://msfn.org/board/topic/170375-oldnewexplorer-119/
This removes the ribbon bar crap from file explorer and makes it work better

Then you can spend a few hours trying to get a colour scheme that is barely usable, because that is the best that is possible.
Until you install this one:

https://winaero.com/comment.php?comment.news.1836

And enable the ‘Aero Light’ Theme, which is apparently deliberately hidden to prevent users from having a usable machine.
With it, you can get a just acceptable visual interface.
Sadly, we don’t have much choice anymore, Windows 10 is here to stay, or until Microsoft decide to screw us over again.

If only ReactOS had the support it needs to be completed:
https://reactos.org/