Category: goatee-stroking musing, or something
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It’s Ill-Advised Facial Hair Month!
It begins with a shave …
Yes, I’ve signed up for Movember. Sponsor me, or I’ll grow a Holiday Neckbeard … -
No work of art …
but it is my first working lead-free, SMT soldered circuit. I have two SoftRock Ensemble RXTX radios to build, and I thought it would be better to melt a $10 trainer kit than a $100 radio. It works as expected, though I wouldn’t describe the red/green LED’s insane flickering to be “an attractive and functional SMD dual color LED flasherâ€.Flux is your friend here. I tried Chaney’s recommended method of supergluing components on the board, but that didn’t work. What ended up best was applying flux to all the pads, supplying the thinnest layer of solder possible, refluxing the pads, then flowing on the components. A steady hand, a magnifier, tiny (½mm) solder, good tweezers and a pointy soldering iron helps. Some kind of fume extraction is good, too, as Pb-free flux is a tad acrid.
I don’t miss eutectic leaded solder. Sure, it’s easy to use, and it’s got a kind of magical quality that it’s below the melting point of either lead or tin. But Sn-Ag solder is toxic enough, and I don’t need to dump more lead in the world.
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not your dad’s multimeter
I’d been surviving on a series of sub-$50 multimeters for years. They’d give an approximation of a reading,then fail miserably in a variety of stupid ways. The last one, a rip-off of an Extech, decided to show me how its wires were connected to the probes. “Barely” is a fair description.
So I thought I’d buy a decent meter. One that had heft and gravitas, like the Avo 8 that my dad used to bring home from work. The Avo — seemingly constructed from bakelite, glass and lead — didn’t just take readings, it told you The Truth on its mirrored scale.
So I bought an Agilent. Reliable company, all the right features, beeps politely only when required; a very, very sensible meter. Then I found these in the package:
Dude, what?! Skins on a meter? Meters aren’t toys. Meters are sensible things used by sensible people. We don’t want our work distracted by thoughts of Space!, America!, Sports!, or Some Kind of Bug Thing Eww Squish It Squish It! If you were able to get “skins” for the Avo 8, they would be about Wisden, sheds, and the TSR2.Despite the sticky nonsense, it’s a good meter. I also managed to catch a Handheld Digital Multimeter Cash Back Offer, so it’s cheaper than competing Flukes and Extechs.
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Futile Devices
I was struck last week by the realization that I hadn’t done long division in decades. When the Casio FX (can’t remember which; it was small and solar) hit my life, the need to do long division vanished. So it’s probably around 30 years since I last had to do it.
My first attempts to remember how were dismal. Then I remembered the whole bit about “bringing down the units”, and it all clicked. I made the following animation to show how I did it:
This might be a slightly odd way of doing it, but it’s the way we were taught. -
a shortt detour
MetaFilter‘s Ownâ„¢ TimTypeZed — aka Tim Shortt — is incredibly modest about his talents in person, but his artwork speaks for itself:
"Rob Ford – Lingerie Football", by Tim Shortt Tim’s my nearest neighbour on MetaFilter, and I’ve met him at a couple of meetups.
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I miss British advertising copy …
This charming bit of rubbish on a bottle of Innocent orange juice scored in Eyemouth:
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UncleWiki
For the last few weeks, I’ve been working on UncleWiki, a wiki about the Uncle books, by J. P. Martin. It’s a very rough framework right now, but I’m adding content as I go. Please join in!
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It was just in the freezer for a little while … honest
So I popped my Sigg bottle in the freezer to chill it before a bike ride … about two months ago. Guess I forgot about it. Oops. -
appropriate names for a kitten (male)
- Gremlin
- Spod
- Mephibosheth
- Stinky
- Boutros Boutros-Ghali (boubou for short)
- Grunt
- Peeble
- Numpty
- F’tang
- Sir Percival de Vere-ffoulkes Gerbil d’Eath
- Hok
- Globbit
- Allergen
- Dog
- Microlion
- Spoon Wrassler
- Jerzy
- Nuance
- Puck
- Eraser
- Floss
- Voon
- Kimchi
- 12AX7
- Hungry
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doubletree weather
Something’s very wrong with DoubleTree‘s weather widget for Chicago on this July 4th …
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(no subject required)
Initial concept: Jeff Norman.
Photo credit: “Marwell. Baby tapir. Taken by Sarah C, 13/09/2010.” from World Tapir Day’s Miscellaneous tapirs Facebook album. -
Open Season on Open Letters
Open Letter to People who write Open Letters
Stop it. No-one reads them, and it’s annoying.
Oh wait …
