Random Thoughts

This is a little report on running the blender3d burster plugin in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 64-bit.  It runs, but has an annoying flickering problem.

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Sometimes technical, sometimes off-topic, but always a diary of what I’ve found interesting in my browsing.

At AAAWelder.com  you’ll learn how to build your own boat and hand crafted Oars, construct a 100 Amp “Buzz Box” Welder and learn how to weld with it, assemble a working A.C. Generator for portable electric power, read short adventure stories and much more…

I wanted to find out how to set up ground planes in Eagle PCB editor, and knew it shouldn’t be too hard to do.  Turns out it’s really easy, and below is a link to a simple tutorial on how to do it.  There are lots of reasons to use ground planes–RF and cross-talk shielding, saving your developing and etching solution,s to name a few.

http://www.muzique.com/schem/eagle.htm

Here’s a page I found when looking for the specific heat of water ice.
In the old days, they harvested ice off of lakes and used it for
refrigeration.  A gallon of water ice needs to release and absorb 351.8
watt-hours of heat energy in order to cross the freeze/thaw phase.
http://www.rwc.uc.edu/koehler/biophys/8c.html

I found a nice calculator for electrical calculations.  It does the
four quadrants of the electrical pie, calculations for power, voltage,
current, and ohms.  Very nice.  One day I needed to know the amperage
draw and power output of a piece of wire with 12 volts applied to it,
and I found this:
http://www.the12volt.com/ohm/page2.asp

Lately I’ve been interested in GPS navigation.   A friend and I have
been doing canoeing and hiking adventures, and I needed to convert
between, hmm, what was it now?  There are so many different coordinate
systems.  This one will convert between GPS coordinates with degrees
and seconds (even with a decimal in the seconds), decimal degrees, and
DMS (Degrees, minutes, and seconds) coordinates.
http://www.cosports.com/index.php/tool/tools/latlong

I do the recording at my church, and one thing we’re trying to figure
out is how to pipe our P.A. system into the phone line, so we can do
conference calls where people such as the elderly or otherwise house
bound, or remote members can call in and hear the service.  I found
this site to be inspiring in regards to adapting signals from audio to
telephone:
http://www.vtx.co.uk/remote/telephone_interfaces.htm

Got an old circuit board full of perfectly fine SMT devices, but you have no idea what they are or what they do?  You need data sheets.  Lots of them.  (more…)