Via the ever-handy Good Morning Silicon Valley comes Says-It’s Official Seal Generator.
Once I saw that the gallery of iconography included a raised fist, I was pretty much obligated to use it for a rendition of something Greg said several years ago.
Given enough time, I might actually find something useful to do with it.
Recent acquisition of a hot-air rework station, and attendant attempts at surface-mount soldering, have taught me that, to paraphrase Frank Herbert, “God made SMD rework to train the faithful. One cannot go against the will of God.”
In truth, it’s more than a little gratifying once you start to get the hang of it. Spark Fun‘s excellent tutorials help quite a bit. But there’s a point, somewhere around the fifth time you’ve blown a component the approximate size of a fingernail clipping clean off the board, where you start to wonder whether maybe you wouldn’t be more fulfilled collecting stamps or something.
Things (I think) I’ve learned so far:
The fact that you’re working on a very small part does not automatically imply that you should use the small nozzle. The small nozzle produces faster airflow, which increases your odds of accidentally blowing a small part about.
Don’t overdo it when you dome a pad in preparation for soldering down a component. Soldering through-hole parts using an iron accustoms you to using lots of solder as you build joints. SMD is all about very thin layers of solder pulling components into place via surface tension. Excessively generous domes just get squished by your component’s lands, sending solder to places where odds are you didn’t want it.
If I succeed in my current rework attempt, I might actually attempt to build something new next.
Is it really so much to ask that if you want to work in the tech industry, you should be able to perform basic triage of a problem, identify the relevant aspects of your configuration or methodology, and synthesize a succinct summary of the preceding items? Apparently, yes. Certainly it seems to much to assume that your cow-orkers will possess these skills.
All I know is that if I get too many more bug reports of the “Wah! It doesn’t work!” variety, with no establishing context and no further detail, I’m going to hoist the black flag and start inflicting paper cuts with printed pages from “How to Ask Questions The Smart Way“.
I Can Has Cheezburger? is kind of like Cute Overload, only with “im in ur base“-style captions.
In particular, it has given us the Walrus Bucket Saga, reproduced here, as they say, “for your convenience”.
Personal favorites: “Miss Mah Bucket“, “I R Not Squeezy Toy“, and “Mah Camouflage iz Workin“.
Late, of course. I swear I don’t know how regular bloggers manage to keep up the volume.
Anyway, the weekend was mostly a ball, modulo getting hammered by something that could be a bug, but is likely as not just a bad case of seasonal allergies.
On Saturday, I attended the Maker Faire, where a tremendous amount of cool stuff was on display. TechShop had almost an entire hall — one of the smaller ones, but still — to itself, with a bunch of machines in operation. The laser engravers were almost hypnotic to watch, as their flying heads burned crisp, variable-depth designs into sheets of wood band by precise band.
The plasma-arc cutter, meanwhile, bordered on intimidating: I watched it cut copies of TechShop’s gear-wheel logo out of eighth-inch steel as easily as an X-Acto knife slices dolls out of paper. When I remarked how fast it was, the woman exhibiting it informed me with just a trace of glee that its top speed was considerably higher still.
I strongly suspect that I’ll become a TechShop member in the not-too-distant future.
I’d been eyeing the Make Controller Kit with an even mix of curiosity and desire for a while, but deterred by the long backlog from actually taking the plunge and ordering one. However, the sight of several dozen, stacked in unassuming cardboard boxes at the Maker Store, just waiting to be purchased, proved to be more than a match for my limited reserves of self-restraint.
It should come in handy as I ramp up on mucking around with DIY sabersmithy — I have some ideas involving sensors and color-modulated RGB LEDs that won’t get very far at all without some kind of microcontroller to tie the pieces together.
I also picked up a copy of Make Volume 10, which lays out plans for a so-called “brain machine” — also known as a “Sound and Light Machine”, or SLM — based on Limor (“Lady Ada“) Fried’s MiniPOV v3 kit. I’ve always been intrigued by SLMs, but put off by the high price tag. For less than $20, it’s hard to see going wrong.
Unfortunately, by about mid-afternoon I was congested enough to have trouble hearing through my right ear. After a failed attempt to sign up for the afternoon Ybox workshop, which was totally overbooked, I called it a day and headed home. I had a great time, though, and definitely plan to be back next year.
I rounded out the day doing some work on the sabers, mainly on the Luxeon conversion of my Darth Maul, which will be documented in greater detail later.
Things after that are a bit of a blur. I slept poorly, tossing and turning with my thoughts arace, probably owing to the stimulant effect of the decongestants I took too close to bedtime, and consequently spent most of the morning feeling groggy before collapsing back into an afternoon-spanning nap.
Still, all and all, a pretty good weekend.
It started innocently enough.
I had just picked up Master Replicas’ newest lightsaber, Yoda’s personal model, and it put me in mind of the fact that I’d been meaning to take a closer look at the copper highlight kit for my Return of the Jedi Luke Skywalker model. But I’d lost the link, and so had to do some digging.
Eventually, I found what I was looking for.
In getting there, though, I blundered across a couple of sites that I hadn’t known about, and discovered that there’s an active community of do-it-yourself sabersmiths who aren’t waiting around like good little consumers to be delivered, over the counter, the next generation of technology.
They’re combining so-called power LEDs, like Philips’ Luxeon series, with ingenious optics to produce bright, luminous “blades” that are virtually impervious to impact damage.
They’re building systems of modular hilts to let you assemble your own personal model, and thinking up inventive ways to adorn them, including bargraph-based charge indicators.
Maybe most impressive of all, they’re building their own microcontroller-based sound and light modules, with capabilities that put the Master Replicas stuff to shame — blade flicker, solid-state motion-detection, high-resolution and -quality sounds, and even a certain degree of programmability and customizability.
Well. It seems I’ve found my expensive obsession for the summer.
Warren Ellis is always a hoot and a half, but Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. is an irrationally exuberant romp even by his high standards. It may, in point of fact, be some of the most fun you can have with pants on.
(Not that, strictly speaking, you need to be wearing pants to read. But ever since that incident at the public library a while back, I’ve tended to err on the side of caution.)
George “Slam Dunk” Tenet, on the tour circuit for his new book, is busy trying to sell a new dubious claim: that he was somehow the victim of circumstance, that all of the bad decisions about pre-war intelligence were made by somebody else.
Pause and admire that for a moment. The head of the CIA, the original black-bag outfit, a dupe, a pawn, a patsy. Savor it.
Various quarters, however, are noting that his protests and disavowals ring slightly hollow for as long as he keeps the Medal of Freedom George Bush hung around his neck, or profits — to the tune of $4 million — from the contract with his publisher.
Not to put to fine a point on it, a group of former CIA officials have penned an open letter basically pointing out that he’s full of shit.
For some reason it puts me in mind of a They Might Be Giants lyric: “Can’t shake the Devil’s hand and say you’re only kidding.”