I Should Be Ashamed Of My Laziness

But heck, life with two ~teenagers is apparently tiring and busy.
I’ll try to catch you up on some of the more interesting things.

Exciting things like how I organize my “wallwart” power bricks. You can’t just throw them in a box together because they twine together like a king rat.Divided roughly by voltage (but not AC/DC).

Individually bagged, mostly labelled. Ziplock type bags are cheap.

I built one of the incredibly XR2206 based cheap function generator kits available on Ebay from China. I think it was maybe $6 or $7. I’m too lazy to look it up.

I worked a little bit more on what I believe is a Quixotic attempt to fix the Alesis keyboard I bought at the beginning of last summer. I found that the previous repairperson/demon from hell had ruined one of the pads & vias for a capacitor (probably pulling it off mechanically rather than desoldering?) on the PCB and just glued the cap onto the board.

So I used a grommet to create a new pad and via and scraped back the solder mask to connect. I haven’t done that before. The synth is still dead but now the power section works.

I found even cheaper function generator kits on Ebay (it’s fun to search “DIY kit”) They were about $2.00 each. Why? Don’t ask.

In 2014 snow smushed down our grape arbors. I finally pulled them upright and pounded in some supporting t-posts. The grapes were happy.

Felice’s riding mower had a small problem with one of the spindle housings…

It took me hours to get it all apart…cheaters and extensions and swearing.

After I rebuilt the mower she took it out and got it stuck in one of the grape arbors.

That brings us up to the 4th of July.

Playing with a old webcam and adapting it to a microscope. It was unsatisfying.

I decided to build one of the cheap DSO Oscilloscope kitsSorting resistors with a breadboard and an Ebay component checker.

If you were living under a rock and hadn’t heard, we had a total eclipse in Oregon.
Felice and family enjoying the weirdness.

Playing with colanders.

They had several alerts.

Weird shadows. I didn’t have a good lens to take an actual eclipse picture, but there are plenty of good ones out there.
I will say that I was skeptical about how amazing a total eclipse would be. It was, in short, the most interesting, largest and amazing thing I have ever seen in my 50 years. Breathtaking does not do it justice. If you have a chance to see one, do it.

There was also a whole bunch of stuff I didn’t take pictures of this year. But I’ll try to do better.