I Can Has Surface Mount Electronics?

(It's goin' here 'cos it is state-of-the art. If I come up with vintage-type packaging, the finished item will be featured at Retrotechnologist).

At the Dayton Hamvention, I picked up a little kit, a "digital dial" frequency display for receivers, transcievers or transmitters. It was tiny, not terribly expensive and looked like fun.

Took a closer look at it when I got home and -- oh, horrors! -- it was mostly teeny-tiny surface-mount parts.

But why not try? Sunday afternoon, I took a deep breath, got out my second-smallest soldering iron* and the good solder, and set to. I ended up using a mechanical pencil to hold the parts in place, which makes it a three-handed operation. Next time, I'll try eutectic solder (63/37, it melts superfast), as even the small-gauge silver-bearing stuff tends to be overly gummy, and wanted to carry parts away on the soldering iron tip:
Front

The working side.
Scale? The holes in the corners are about 1/8" diameter. The leads on the ICs are on 0.05" centers. On my monitor, the full-size image is about twice life-size.

The solder is kind of globby, I need to deflux it and some of the parts are a bit askew -- but it works!
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* I own (but cannot find) a miniature Wahl/Iso-Tip, one of the best, tiniest controlled-temperature soldering irons ever made. Unlike all other Iso-Tips, it's not cordless. They're not made any more; I don't think even Wahl remembers them.

Hoosier Hashcat?

Natural prey of the over-20 tomcat: Roast Beef Hash. I had not fully realized this until breakfast today.

Memorial Day

...Local Paper leads, of course, with auto race results; the TV network on my alarm clock was interviewing surviving WW II WASPs, a group that kinda got shoved under the carpet after the war (to the extent that you can do that to Jackie Cochran, anyway, which turned out to be rather a lot when a majority of the women fliers were after the "Mrs." rating).

Not a whole lot about the fallen. It's become trite to refer to all the lost warriors of all our wars as "heros." Some even meet the cinematic criteria; most of 'em would have told you they were just doing their job, attention on the task at hand, "heroism" the farthest thing from their thoughts. They were there to do what needed to be done and fell in the doing -- and, movies and novels aside, that's heroism.

You and me, we're not a network or a newspaper; we can take a little while to stop and remember; we can pause to acknowledge their effort and sacrifice.

If you do nothing else this Decoration Day, at least stop, step back from the grill and ponder the meaning of this day.

Update: stopped by my father's gravesite this afternoon. He was a Naval Reservist. Three years and I still feel a pang. I still miss him. Should have brought a flag.

Scoot Over, Flatt & Scruggs

Yeah, it doesn't look like a banjo but don't be fooled:

I'd pay money to hear her sit in on Foggy Mountain Breakdown.
But you've got to admit, you didn't expect this:

The banjo/lute thing is called a pipa. It's kewl.

I Work On A Starship: New Content!

Back to the main narrative at last, with a revised and expanded Chapter 1. We join our intrepid young heroine as she departs Lupine for the rugged pioneer city of Aberstwyth Port, on the former Far Edge planet, Frothup:

...[A]s soon as the squirt-booster is clear of the ship and the 'Drive field, it drops just like a rock, heat-shield end first. The feeling is precisely one of being in a vehicle that is pushed off a cliff, which is pretty much what just happened.

Continued on the far side of the linked text!

What Price To Hold The Puppy-Wuppy?

If the Royal Family are the nation-state equivalent of a purse dog -- ornamental creatures of no practical use, doted on by the owners who support them -- then Fergie's terrible indiscretion is to have sold off chances to hold a pampered Pomeranian (or some other dust-moppy doggie). Who cares?

My Clothes Know The Way Home

Does your skirt (or even utilikilt) know where Santa lives? It would if it was the NorthSkirt!

Wearable tech-art usually turns out to be a watch with buttons too small to press or a too-Mod light-emitting-diode-covered minidress that weighs 30 pounds with sharp connections in places you'd as soon not get zinged. Not so this time! Soft circuits and good material choices...well, go see!

I like.

I Work Onna...

...Planet With Too Many Telephones. Yesterday was my birthday (I was twelve again. And why not?). Family and friends all called to wish me a happy, which was sweet of them.

My employer had, in their own sweet way, decided to give me the gift of overtime: three days in a row of early-early, 0430 to 1300 shifts. Started yesterday.

So anyone who found me spacey or curt on the phone, sorry! I was later than you thought. ;)

Web Wander

Start at Bletchley Park; turn on Y-Stations at the interchange and head straight on to Beeson Bump, where the way forks; one side to the mysterious Bathicnus paramoudrae, which we know only from the trace fossils left by its burrow: Pot Stones. The other fork, of course, leads to Dew Ponds and hence to Air Wells, an erroneous conclusion made working reality by modern plastic.

It's simple, really; and it would only confuse you to learn I actually began it at The Chap. Their prime avatar looks a bit like Bob Dobbs's long-lost English cousin, no?

...Now, as long as there's no Bathicnus in the tub, I'm off to ablute and then for afters, honest striving.

(Thanks to Jenny)

Big Wheel Keeps On Turnin'

The wonderfully-named and faded nearly to nothing then reconstituted by great effort League of American Wheelmen (LAW), the nation's very first bike gang (in the XIXth Cent., pedalling high-wheeled "pennyfarthing" ordinaries) became, some sixteen years ago, the prosaically practical League of American Bicyclists.

H'mm, tenor of the times an' all that; what's one more advocacy group? (All the other kids do it, after all). Still, I'd be sad if that were the end of it.

Luckily for me, it's not: ladies and gentlemen, I give you: The Wheelmen!

They're my heros. I'll be watching this bunch closely; they look to be a prime source of material for Retrotechnologist.

(Staghounds, you know this is all your fault, sending me that antique bicycle book...!)

Dentistry!

Here's a secret: I've been short-tempered the last four days. I'm walking around with a broken tooth. #10 (Ms. Left Maxillary Lateral Incisor t'lesser folk than you, my readers) kind of fell apart during flossing. The damage is all on the side that faces my tongue. It's all sharp edges and it hasn't been nice.

I'm off to the dentist's this morning to have that looked at, treated and possibly even fixed. What fun!

Oh, well, he's competent, personable and handsome. The chairs are comfy, too. If I could figure out how to read while they have three hands, a drill and some freaky-lookin' Implement of Torture The Healing Arts in my mouth, it would be mostly win -- though no cake.

Aw, Jeepers--

That rascally Galileo; see, he should'a never worn so short a skirt if he wasn't lookin' for, you know, action.

Elsewhere, my assertion that the Roman Catholic Church "punished him for bein' right" was supposedly refuted. Among the arguments? Why, that insiders -- Church officials -- warned him not to publish, or at least to soft-pedal what he wrote, lest the public be inflamed. And he foooooolishly plowed right ahead.... Askin' fer it!

Here in the modern world, that trick is known as Prior Restraint. It's generally held to be indicative of an unfree press, of a regime in which the free exchange of ideas is banned or restricted. (Someone will claim this only counts if it's the government going it. Guess what entity was the government in that place at the time?) It's a bad thing.

Galileo was indeed a tactless fellow, consistently so; anyone who knew him, knew that. This is not just cause for house arrest -- all the more so at a time when telephones and to-your-door pizza (let alone mouse-click shopping and Amazon.com) weren't even on the horizon.

I predicted this line of argument; it comes up every time. I take no pleasure in having done so.

What people love, they will justify. It's no real favor to call 'em on it; they're only gonna be offended. Little Junior may be a monster some of the time but Mom and Dad love the wretch all the time.