Brian sent me this link the other day, and it just made me giggle, repeatedly. Brian also firmly believes that audiophiles are to music what pedophiles are to children, but hey…
Seriously, do any of these items listed make anyone go, “Hey, there is a nugget of truth there, I bet it would work!”?
Just nuts.
So, things seem to be warming up out here, maybe a little. With luck I’ll be on the bike more soon, hopefully with a drastic decrease in my gas bills. The difference between 20MPG and 50MPG is boggling when you drive almost 500 miles a week. I have been riding a bit, and even doing about 80-85 on the interstate, the bike has been clicking off 46-48 MPG. I’ve been debating putting this to work for me once it warms up a bit, maybe delivering pizzas via the bike evenings and weekends, but I worry showing up to a door clad in black with a helmet on might not get me many tips, haha.
I’ve spent the last couple of months knee-deep in electronics, which has been good for me. My lab is a disaster area, seeing as I have been trying to juggle too many projects at once. I’ve been working on this cute little board that can switch 3.2kV into a 6pF capacitive load in under 500 nanoseconds. I tested a prototype yesterday, and it failed miserably, taking almost 20 milliseconds to get charged. I did discover I had a resistor wired up wrong, so maybe there is hope yet. We had a laser come in last week that wouldn’t fire, and it was handed off to me to resolve. It was a model we barely ever see, and I had to spend a whole day trying to find manuals and schematics. I soon discovered what was wrong, but not what was causing it, as it were. A lot of probing and a couple of component replacements later, I found out that a 1uF surface mount capacitor was ‘flapping’, that is, sometimes it would charge, but most times it would get to 5 volts and short out instead of going to 12 volts.
In the middle of this, Brian had a most interesting problem that I ended up getting sucked into. As it is well known to anyone that knows me, and as Brian was most anxious to point out later, I just cannot let go of a technical problem once I think I can fix it. In this case, it was the color copier. One of the imaging units had failed, and Brian ordered a cheap replacement. The replacement was branded the same as the guts of the copier, but not the same as the sticker it was sold under. The imaging unit was -exactly- the same, but, the copier detected it was not the more expensive unit and thus, told us to replace it with the proper unit. We quickly found the EEPROM in the end of the unit that told it this information, and a couple of trips to the EEPROM reader/burner and a little hacking, I had it convinced that not only was it the old imager, but it was of the right model and it was -brand new-. This may eventually become a product, judging by our success, hah. Geeking it up.
Amanda has a ‘new’ car now, a ’95 Subaru Impreza wagon that needs some love. I should hopefully have fixed a couple of small items within the week so she can register it and we can drive it, hopefully resulting in an upgrade of fuel economy. We shall see. It is 4wd and a 5 speed, and I’m hoping to use it to autocross in once she is able to get a new one. We’ll see.
Still a bit stir crazy here. Amanda works weekends, so we never have full days off to do things. I discovered a local caving grotto, and I hope to get a chance to go caving with them at some point soon and get out of the house. I’m hoping to come visit NM again soonish to take care of a few loose ends, but we will see.
Maybe there will be more updates in the near future. I’ve been somewhat avoiding updating as nothing much except just dull geekery is happening, although I have been having fun for the most part.
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