It was hot and I felt like staying inside all day. Turns out I’m not that bad at it. I spent some time checking new software suggested by Agent M, shown here adapting a camera housing to hold a solar panel in place. He works for a church group that keeps him current on what’s new out there. The applications that passed the test today are SketchUp and Dropbox, which you can find on your own. I don’t like linking to pages that represent a moving target.
SketchUp (a Google tool) models 3D shapes, just remember if you are not already an artist, the learning curve is barely worth the effort. But try the 3D lettering, that definitely has potential. Dropbox is an elaborate way to share folders or transfer files without having to use portable media. I’m no expert at it yet. You can store files on their web site. We are establishing this connection for the club.Add a few more hours configuring the new computer. It still exhibits glitches but is as fast as anything I’ve connected to it. These are not intense hours, I take it easy, a cup of tea, a snack, some reading. If the world is out there, I didn’t pay attention today. See, it is easy to tell when I’m getting along financially. When the pressure is off, I’ll take random days off. I flipped through Imgur. I watched Riverdance on youTube. Kind of a stop and smell the roses day.
I was hoping to find some tutorials on integrated circuits, but all I found was advertising and data on how they are made. One day, somebody will invent a search engine that blocks sites that advertise when they know quite well you are not looking to buy anything. Remember when the Internet was supposed to make everything cheaper because the sellers didn’t have to pay for a brick and mortar store front?
I like history and watched many older newsreels. Somebody should tell certain dumbfecks out there that a series of stills with blaring background music is not a video and doesn’t belong on a site for real videos. Then again, I ran my name through Google, Altavista, and Yahoo. There are ten people in the USA with the same name, they live from Pasadena to Boston, and I can get their life histories for 95 cents each. The profile that most closely matches me says I am 37, live in Doral, Florida, and am married to a 41 year old lady named Veronica. Ah, close enough.
But most fun of all was the research, it is plain something I like to do in my spare time. And I have the ex-girlfriends to prove it. These days, I have a lot of spare time. Electronics is not to be confused with electric circuits. The difference is that in electronics, you have electricity controlling electricity rather than control by a host of mechanical devices. I’m still learning both and I’ve not been pleased with the help I’ve been getting on-line. For example, the lack of documentation on how components are connected once you’ve soldered them to a board. It was not obvious, at least not to me, until I saw the mess other people were making of it.
Then, you stub your toe on something interesting. Have you ever heard of Manhattan style construction for prototyping? Me neither, and like most electronic “terms”, if you don’t already know it, you can hardly go looking for it. This technique involves glue and little copper pads you punch out of thin metal or nibble from old copper boards. They are glued, not soldered, onto the surface a grounding plate and from there the soldering is incredibly easy compared to continually flipping the board over. The style “Manhattan” arrives from the different architecture of mounting the components. When viewed from the side, one evaluator thought it resembled a city skyline.
I will be giving this a try. With my rudimentary skills, I will likely build a circuit with needlessly wide-spaced components, lots of mistaken paths that will be expensive to fix later, and leave scraps all over the place. Therefore, would I be correct in naming this style “Hialeah”?
