Month: October 2013

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Extracting wisdom

Wisdom teeth that is.

Had a good thorough cleaning done, a filling replaced, and next week it’s back to the dentist to have my wisdom teeth removed.

Three of them are fine and aren’t causing too much trouble. The fourth one decided long ago not to come out properly and is embedded in the back of my jaw on its side. That one does cause occasional problems, especially with trapping food. That one definitely needs to come out, and the dentist says that while I’m under, the other three might as well come out too instead of having to come back another time.

Hopefully the extraction and recovery are uneventful. I wonder if I should ask to keep my teeth…

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Radio Shack deals for builders/makers

If you happen to be near your neighbourhood Radio Shack, stop in and you might find some good clearance deals. Look for the items with blue or tan on the price tags.

I stopped in today to look for an audio transformer to build a sound card interface for the radio, and ended up coming out with a couple pieces of 4.5×6″ perfboard, a resistor component pack, and a capacitor component pack that were on clearance. The perfboard was less than $1.50 each, and the resistor and capacitor component packs were $7 and $6 respectively. The component packs are normally in the $25 range I think. Although I’ve already got plenty of resistors and capacitors, it was really the boxes that I wanted. I think of it as a two good component boxes that come with free resistors/capacitors.

My store also had a few Arduino shields that were clearance marked as well.

Might have to pay a visit to some of the other Radio Shacks in the area.

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Charleston Eats: Little Star of the Caribbean Food Truck

Got to sample a beef empanada from Little Star of the Caribbean when they made a stop at MUSC today. Pretty tasty little snack.

LittleStarCaribbeanEmpanada.jpg

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Planet of the Apes

I was watching Planet of the Apes last night on Netflix and despite having seen it countless times before, I only just noticed this during the tribunal scene.

PlanetApes.jpg

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More workbench gear and parts

Thanks to Jason/NT7S for enabling my growing homebrew electronics ambitions. I now have a bunch of stuff to add to the workbench.

There’s this big bag-o-parts to augment the parts bin. It’s filled with resitsors, capacitors, diodes, transistors, inductors, ICs and crystals.

A bag of capacitors, resistors, diodes, transistors, inductors, crystals, and integrated circuits

He also sent along a first version of his HF return-loss bridge kit and an M3 frequency counter/power meter for the workbench. With the return-loss bridge, frequency counter/power meter, a signal generator and oscilloscope, Jason tells me I’ll be able to make all kinds of measurements for testing and characterizing circuits. I guess I’ll need to spend some more time with the Heathkit signal generator to see how operational it is. I’ll also need to pick up some BNC connectors and jumper cables.

Jason also recently acquired a couple of TI Tiva Launchpad boards, so I got his surplus TI Stellaris LM4F120 and MSP430 boards to play with. Not quite sure what I’ll do with them yet, but maybe they’ll push me to brush the cobwebs off the C I’ve learned.

I also received most of the components I’ll need to build some version of a sound card interface that I can use to connect to the radio for using digital radio modes. I think I’m going to have fun working on that project.