The Nameless Day

Julie let me borrow The Crucible Series by Sara Douglass. I read the first book The Nameless Day. I liked the book and I'm enjoying the story. But at this point there's a lot that still isn't clear so I'm going to hold off on writing more till I finish the series (I think it would be like talking about The Fellowship of the Ring before reading the other two, except in this case it is not even clear that Frodo should destroy the ring). I will say she does a good job of putting you in the world (Europe in the 1300s), and does a good job with the main character's transition. And unlike some authors who write long books with lots of characters (Neal I'm looking at you) she's nice enough to sometimes remind you who they are and what happened that you should remember.

Project #2 Part 3

I've been very slowly building a boost converter as part of the grand plan for the iphone charger. A boost converter takes power from one source and then outputs power. What makes it special is the voltage it provides is higher than the input voltage. It does this by storing energy from the source in an inductor and then disconnects the inductor from the source and dumps the power onto a capacitor. The output draws power from the capacitor.

While 4 batteries in series works as a perfectly good charger for the iphone (I actually used it on the lost coast trip). It doesn't fit into the desired case, is hard to charge from USB and can be higher than 5V, which is fine for the iphone but technically above specifications.

The Maxim MAX1703 does the whole job of boost converting with just a few external components. And should be able to handle more current than needed.

I spent some time thinking about how to position the big components which I'm kind of happy with. However, when I went to actually connect things I just started putting things in one by one without a grand plan (obviously I had a schematic of what connections to make, just not where to physically put the wires). I think the technical term for the soldering style I ended up using is: crap. I was going to say rat's nest, but that actually is a technical term. Thanks in part to the poor style at first I had missed a couple connections when I hooked up the battery and the chip got very hot. Not sure if I did damage or not. Once I got that corrected the output was 4.6 V (within spec of 4.5 to 5.5). But when I connected a 10 ohm resistor the voltage dropped to 3.8 V (so it was only able to source 380 mA instead of 500 mA).

When I connected my ipod mini it charged for a moment than stopped. The ipod mini only requires 200 mA. So this is really a story of failure :(. I have more of all the components so I may try the same thing again and see if better wiring and not cooking the chip will work better.

I also learned the limits of 90 second epoxy. Its strong, but some inadvertent lever action can overcome it. Also, when the two sides mix it gets a little hot - not a big deal unless you don't know that and get some on your fingers and wonder what on Earth is happening to you.

I'm also going back and forth on if this is really the right approach or if it makes more sense to just find a nice case for the 4 series battery option.

One of the Series of Pipes is for Jose Cuervo

Used the series of pipes and tubes to do a cross country video chat shot with Laura and Jeremy. I know the technology has been around for a while, but was still a first for me.

I'm really looking forward to seeing Mike and Laura when they come out to the Bay Area in July! And it is great that they found such cheap flights. Coming out for the weekend is definitely worth the cost of those tickets.

I realized that I only posted about Dollhouse once, early on in the season. Before every episode I declared that this would be the one where it gets awesome so I was very disappointed when we got to episode 5 and it was still just ok. But then episode 6 happened and awesomeness occurred and continued through episode 12 (10's main story has a cool concept, but isn't as awesome, but the side story totally makes up for it). If you're dedicated I'd say watch the whole way through (don't be scared off by episode 3). If you're willing to watch a few episodes I'd say watch episode 1 to get introduced to the characters and idea then start at 6 and go up from there till you're hooked. If you're a Firefly/Buffy/Angel/BSG/Matrix fan you should be able to identify 5 actors by the end of the season. And you'll want to be caught up with season 1 so you're ready for when River shows up in season 2.

Weekend

Julie and Saeed fed me dinner Friday night - thank you! Also got in some good castle crushers and bomber man time.

Saturday afternoon I headed to a party with Jeremy and Emaily. I only knew a few people, but it was a fun crowd. After hanging out there for a few hours Julie and Saeed picked me up (thanks again) and drove me to Dublin where we had dinner with Ben who was in town and Adam (from aepi) and his wife who apparently live about 10 miles from me. It was great to see all of them. Then headed back to the party for a bit before heading home.

Sunday I killed a lot of the day watching TV, but eventually got off my butt and headed to Planet Granite to go climbing with Jeremy and Nina. I passed my belay test so I won't have to deal with that next time I go. I had a few moments where I thought I had suddenly gotten a lot better and a few other moments where I failed on stuff I expected to be able to do.

Overall great weekend.

Maker Faire

On Sunday I headed to the Maker Faire with Saeed. Thanks to Andy for the free tickets!

Probably the coolest thing there for anyone who played Mouse Trap as a kid was the life size, fully functional version (unfortunately these are iphone pictures so they don't do a good job capturing everything):







Also very cool was seeing the mentos and diet coke guys do their 100 bottle show which was fairly similar to the YouTube video (I know it's so 2002, but how often do you get to see it in person?):



What I think makes this giant hydraulic arm super cool is that someone puts their hand in a glove like thing and the big hand mimics what their hand is doing:



There was some more serious and focused stuff like people who will turn a Prius into a plug in hybrid. And there were some people selling tools and services to DIY types. And some smaller projects, many of which had a bit more focus. And then of course there's stuff like a spinning ball of fire:



And this thing (extra creepy if you saw Terminator the day before), can't see it in the picture, but the video is the people looking at it and is all ascii characters:



And of course some people doing their Steampunk thing.

Overall very cool. I'll definitely try to go again in the future.