Blind Side

Expensive Equipment

Insulation between the RF electrode and the mass screen.

Material: Macor.

Cost: about 1000 Euro (plus machining).

DIY Nokia USB charger cable

My recently bought N800 cannot charge over its USB port (what an utterly stupid design decision!), but the Nokia charger delivers 5V. Since this is the supply voltage of USB, I thought I would buy an adapter. So yesterday I walked into the cell-phone shop and asked. They had one. It cost 79 CHF. (about 50 Euros).

I am afraid I laughed into the face of the poor salesman. He got indignant and told me that he wasn't the one setting the prices. True enough I guess, but I was too busy laughing to reassure him.

Anyway, I decided to build my own USB charger cable. In the photo below you can see the ingredients: (clockwise) A soldering station, callipers, an old Nokia 3.5mm to 2mm converter, shrink-tube and an USB cable in the middle.

I cut of the 2 mm Nokia connector and the male USB connector, and removed the isolation from the cables. Thankfully they are colour-coded: Black for ground and red for 5V. The white and green USB data cables are not needed and get cut off.

Btw, it is important to put on the shrink-tube before soldering anything...

2 minute later: Connections soldered and covered in shrink-tube. I debated whether I should put in a diode, but then couldn't be bothered, and it shouldn't be necessary anyway.

....aaand here we are: Not pretty, but it basically cost nothing, and it does the job.

Erfurtian Adventures

The first part of Erfurtian Adnventures: The Journey





Uff, I finally scraped all my remaining courage together, got off my lazy ass and wrote this post about last weekends trip.

I arrived in Heidelberg pretty late, and met three very old & ugly friends there. Starting with the guy on the left at the back, clockwise: Peter, Sexmachine (Yes, that's his name.) and Chruss.

They are all holding a Faxe, a beer mostly noted by its congenial-sized container, viz. one litre.











After feting our reunion, we packed our laptop screen, which seemed to get heavier by the minute, and boarded the train to Erfurt.











The other passengers didn't seem to appreciate our efforts to relieve their boredom. Suggestions that this could have something to do with the hour (a quarter to midnight here) were quickly discounted, because honestly, what are you going to do on a train in the middle of the night? Everything to chase away the ennui, right?

Feeling unappreciated, we retired to the restaurant, only to be chased away by the train personal with the excuse that they close at one o' clock. Outraged, we went back to entertain the rest of the passengers in our car, until sleep overwhelmed us despite our best efforts.

Really, it is only because of Sexmachines inhuman stamina that I am not typing this in Kaliningrad, because he was the only one who managed to awake in time for our stop, at 0530h.







Leaving the train station in Erfurt, we first suspected having fallen victims to aliens, holes in the space-time continuum or (shudder) government agents, since we saw the Erster Wiener Feinbäcker, or the first Viennese bakery - which for some reason seems to be situated in Erfurt.






Second part: Erfurtian Adventures coming tomorrow, or whenever I get around to it.

moblog

am v. pleased w/ usability of nukie. am blogging on my way to erfurt, east germany. v. pleased w/ availability of unsecured free hotspots.
see photo of gare de lausanne taken w/ crappy cam. will maybe blog more at intermediate stop: heidelberg.

First post with Nukie

keeping text short - no keyboard. Instead scary picture taken with Nukies internal camera.

Dang-nabbit!
Noticed self has no hair. Curses, indescrete, soulless machine! Will punish n800 (has forsaken nice & cute nickname) by ripping out lavish 2GB memory and inserting 128 MB. Ha!

Also have noticed that blogger capable of understanding Her Majesties English, if prodded sufficiently. Can now type 'colour' without having to strangle next American. Will do wonders for court record.

Now off to buy new memory-card for Nukie. Toodles!

New Toy

I have got a new toy. To celebrate my birthday, I gave myself a Nokia n800 Internet Tablet, because the true joy is in giving.

Also, I wanted something like this since trying desperately to read novels on my old Handspring Visor, which had a 160x160 4bit monochrome display. That actually worked, but it is not the joy that makes life worth living.

Contrast that to Nukie (so I have a pet name for my toy, want to make something of it?), who sports a crisp 800x480 pixel display, with about a gazillion colours. Also, Wlan, which means I can finally read porn internet sites in my bed without raising the temperature of my belly by about 10 degrees .

Also, camera. And an FM radio, which is pretty cool - I have always wondered why laptops and the like don't have integrated radios - Philips makes a chip that is only 70 square millimeters big!

The only drawback is this seriously creepy experience I had when I got it:

Fresh out of the box, I enter the details of the EPFLs Wlan. Nukie asks me for authorisation, and I begin to type in my username, which is my family name. l - e - g... and suddenly the text-predictor thing suggests: legradic. Why does Nukie know my name? How does Nukie know my name? What else does she know about me?

I put on my aluminium beanie to screen out it's brain-reading waves, just to be on the safe side...

Circuit model

Right. Here you can see the fruit of my labours in February. I was trying to measure the Impedance of my reactor, to better modify my new automatic matchbox which refused to work as it was.

First week: Measure the Impedance with the Vector Impedance Meter. Try to come up with a model that fits the data. The model stubbornly refuses to yield anything but 100% reflected power.

Second week: Notice that I have spent part of last week proving that 1=1. Happy with my result, which nonetheless leaves a strange, empty feeling. Produce howls of despair. Notice that the settings on the 'scope used to read out the vector impedance meter were wrong and might have made the signal unnecessarily noisy. Repeat measurements and make a new model. Try to get down to 1% of reflected power - in vain.

Third week: A guy from electronics rocks up and tells me that the vector impedance meter was broken. Startled by my reaction, he kindly asks if I was measuring something important, or if gnawing on table-legs is normal behaviour on a Monday morning. Later: Break out in hysterical giggling while measuring the stupid reactor, again. Notice that it is no wonder the matchbox didn't work, since it is meant match an inductive load, and my reactor is capacitive. Sob quietly for a while, before hatching an insane plan to use inductive gerbils in series with PADEX. YES!

Yes, matching is a recurring problem. Also see here, and here. And here. Argh!

Driving Licence

After one year in Switzerland you have to get a swiss driving license, which I managed to do to day after a few false starts:

Attempt 1) "I am sorry Monsieur, but you need to get an eye exam to exchange your valid Austrian driving license for a Swiss one."

Attempt 2) "I am sorry Monsieur, but you need to get a proof of residence. Pardon me? Why yes, we do have your current address in our computer. That does, however, not change the fact that you need to go to the Controle des habitants and get the aforementioned proof. Have a nice day!"

Attempt 3) "I am sorry Mon... ackk! argll! Stop strangling... It was a joke! Here is your license! Honestly, no need to be rude."

Effect of coffee

The effect of coffee on me in the morning.


Inspired by my fangirlish comic-tribute I have started drawing doodling for fun. Prepare to be subjected to examples of my lack of progress from time to time.

Tribute to XKCD

XKCD is the nerdcomic. There is none other. I mean, the guy who writes and draws it wanted to build a couch, and ended up with a ball-pen, for Christ's sake! I am in awe.

Anyway, a recurring theme in XKCD is 'raptors. And Cory Doctorov, but that's another story. Raptors are awesome, and they will kill us all, eventually. But you can hold out (for a bit), if you raptor-proof your house.

But is that enough? I think not, and I drew the following comic to illustrate why (click to enlarge):



Lessons learnt while drawing this comic:

• My drawing skills are... limited
• Yes, that extends to stick-figures
• Cleaning up even a stick-figure drawing in Gimp takes time.
• It is not so easy to draw a stick-figure that suddenly turns around when it has no face.
  

Lessons I did not learn while drawing this comic:

• TEM, because I was drawing instead of listening to the lecture.

Oh, and the stupid spellcheck of blogger does not know "learnt" - let's all point at it and laugh!

Journal Reading

can occasionally be really funny - who would expect to find the following gem in the venerable Physical Review E?

Vulnerability of a killer whale social network to disease outbreaks - art. no. 042901 Authors: Guimaraes, PR; de Menezes, MA; Baird, RW; Lusseau, D; Guimaraes, P; dos Reis, SF Source: PHYSICAL REVIEW E, 76 (4): 2901-2901, Part 1; OCT 2007

When I find an article like that, I immediately stop reading and try to imagine what it could be about - especially simple here, because you can easily imagine a killer whale social get-together:

"Well, I heard she got it from Gustav - he always was one for the ladies, you know."
"No really? Gustav? But how could she do that to Jason? He was always faithful."
"Ha, thats what you think. He might never have waved a fin at you, but it was just last year that he made bubble-hearts for a girl, and I can assure you that it wasn't her!"
"Why you..."

Killer-whale cat fight follows...

How not to store fibre-optics

To continue my "look-how-stupid-I-am" series (see first installment here), I will show you how not to store a fibre-optics cable. See evidence on the right.

Thing is, the fibre in "fibre-optics cable" is made out of glass, and while very thin glass does bend a bit, it will not be happy if you bend it too much. So while the method to the right saves much precious storage-space, it does not save precious fibres, alas.

On the other hand, I can now order my own nifty fibres!

Idiot me

See also here.


A tragedy in one act.

A secret laboratory in the deepest dungeon-level of the EPFL. Mysterious laboratory equipment blinks and hums in the background. Boris (in a white lab coat, bien sûr) and Christian (in a blue mechanics overall) are standing before a small vacuum chamber. Boris is waving his hands in the search for words (although the conversation is in French it is reproduced here in English) while Christian is looking at him in dawning comprehension.

Boris: "You see, I is having new match-box and electrodes. New. Need cooling. With water."

Christian: "Ahh, I see. And would you like me to put them on the general cooling circuit, or on the deionised water?"

Boris: Yes! Cooling!

Christian: No, I mean... The circuit you use for your generator here. You know, the one where you have to switch on the pump.

Boris: Pump?

Christian: Yes, the pump behind the lab.

Boris: I have to switch on pump? Oh. Maybe that why generator always overheats, yes?

Christian: "..."

***

Photo: Lac Leman, Pully.