December 30, and about 25 hours before a new year. I should change all my smoke alarm batteries. I was watching This Old House recently and the electrician installed new outlets in a very old house that had a gas chandelier that had been converted to electric lights. He showed how the new work had
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I got some 1 watt LEDs from Goldmine Electronics for 5 for $10 (They were on sale when I bought them). These are LEDs that do not have a mounting bracket, but were made for surface mounting. I’m not sure if the case itself is supposed to be held to the PC board only by
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My ‘old’ TV was a Samsung 40 inch I got 1 year ago. I should have remembered how many problems I had last year when I set it up. This new Samsung 46 inch is just as bad, if not worse. I do not want to setup the TV by having it search for all
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After my first feeble attempts to find a source of radioactivity to test my Geiger Counter, I took one of Paul’s ideas and tested several old 35mm camera lenses. I tried a very old Asahi SLR (before Pentax) but I got no radiation. Then I tested 2 Canon EOS cheap lightweight plastic lenses, still nothing.
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I have been working on my own “Power Bank” for recharging my cell phone. I went to the NOCCC Computer Club meeting last Sunday and to the Mobile Computing meeting. Ben, who started this meeting, decided that he wanted to buy some ‘power bank’ USB chargers for himself, family and friends. He could’ve got then
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I bought some cat# TOR-74 from All Electronics for 4 for $1.00. They say these toroid cores are Magnetics ZF410057C, but Google didn’t turn up any data on them. They are coated Grey, and are 9.5mm O.D., 4.5mm I.D., and 5.0mm high, or .375 inch O.D., .178 inch I.D., and .197 inch high. This is
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Along with the Sonalerts, I bought an assembled kit for a Geiger counter from Goldmine for $70.00. I didn’t know that it was a kit, but I would’ve bought it even if I did know. It comes ready to connect to a 9 volt battery, which I did as soon as I read the directions.
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I culled through a bunch of AA and AAA cells to find any that were dying or nearly dead. If I found any that were below 1.2 volts they were considered dying, and below 1 volt, they were considered dead. I then put some of the dead ones into Joule Thiefs to suck out the
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I’ve been using these DC-DC converters for charging cell phones in my car and in the house (more in this blog) and they work fine. But when I plug my phone in, my FM radio station gets a lot of RF interference. I admit that the station, KSBR, which is low power and far away,
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I haven’t opened it yet. It’s a Dell XPS tower with 16G RAM, 1T HDD, Core i7, 4G Nvidia video card. It was on sale through Costco online only. I forgot to order a monitor, but instead I’m going to get a 32″ TV with HDMI inputs. I ordered some longer HDMI cables from Monoprice.com.
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