Thursday, 21 November 2013

Soldering Iron Review

I recently bought a new 45 watt iron from Princess Auto. For those who have been inside a Princess Auto they know what kind of store it is. Mostly tools, some surplus and a lot of different things to spend money on. Now, this iron was reasonably priced, $9.99 and for that price, it works. It's a firecracker, it gets hot enough to solder just about any wire gauge you should expect to see. It won't do 2 gauge wire and 12 gauge might be a push, but 16+ is easily fair game. That virtue is also it's one drawback. It gets really hot. Too hot to solder circuit boards for an hour without some kind of throttle. I happen to have a kludged together heat control, but I won't be posting plans on it, because it involves playing with mains voltage. If you don't feel totally ready to take that risk, buy a commercially available adjustable iron. I owned one, an it worked very well until it died of old age.

Aside from the fact that it isn't great for extended use, and the fact that replacement tips are hard to find, I cannot find fault in this product. For someone needing a general use iron, I highly recommend it. For those who never work with more than a circuit board, it is too powerful, get a much cooler running iron.

Apple care

I own a MacBook, still within it's full warranty period. It started making abnormal noises in mid September, on rare occasion. It was a cause for concern but never enough for me to bring it in for repair. It continued to get more common and more persistent until this week, when I could no longer take it. I took it to our on campus bookstore here at UBCo. They could not diagnose the problem, and I was told to call apple care. As they diagnosed it, it is a hardware problem and I was referred to a reseller known as iWorld. As their tech had just quit, my computer and I will have to wait. Not easy to do when you have one computer and six classes calling on that resource. Now I have been told that there might be one more technician in amongst the city of Kelowna, and I can't wait to see if this is true.

Tuesday, 19 November 2013

Apple Maps in OSX Mavericks?

From the company that brought us iPhoto and the iMac comes a creation that has an entire group of haters all to itself. Apple maps. This app is the most useless thing to grace my phone for a long time. I use maps for transit, and Apple maps doesn't get transit. Now my MacBook has been Apple Maps'd. Thank you Apple. OSX is beutiful, Pages looks wonderful, and the rest of it just works. Why did you have to come along and put Apple Maps on it?

Monday, 18 November 2013

Choosing a Soldering Iron

For those who need a soldering iron, I would like to address one piece of advice that was written in many places on the web. I recently had to get a new iron when after many years of venerable service my 60w adjustable iron bit the dust. This iron was my first soldering iron, and like most people buy, it was what is known as a soldering pen. These devices often serve faithfully until mechanical failure, however, since that is wonderfully irrelevant, what it boils down to is this: there is absolutely no active temperature control for these irons. A 45 watt iron puts 45 watts into the tip until the thermal difference between the tip and the air causes 45 joules of energy to leave the tip per second. As would be expected, this pushes the temperature of the tip into the 700-850+ degree Fahrenheit range. I have a very technical term for how hot my new 45 watt iron gets. Freakin Hot. Hot enough that I unplug it after 5 minutes to try and tame the temp. That was one thing my old adjustable heat iron didn't suffer, because for different jobs, different wattages. Now for why I take issue with one of the most commonly spouted pieces of advice, which is to get a temperature controlled iron. These irons have many forms of controls, from thermocouples to special tips that become non magnetic at a certain temperature. When the temperature that the user desires is reached, the irons heater turns off and when they cool down it turns back on again. Like your home furnace. These devices represent the gold standard in hand held soldering tools, but I take issue with them. They sound so awesome, how could I? I would love to have one, but reputable brands usually charge upwards of $100 for one. My soldering pen cost a whopping $10. For many, the idea of a hundred dollar investment is hard to swallow for a tool that "just gets hot". These solder stations do more than that, but are they necessary? I would say no. It is perfectly possible to solder with a plug in soldering pen. There are some things to remember, for example it isn't good to leave it plugged in and untouched for even a minute once it gets hot if you're working with any iron over 30w. Higher wattage irons are great for soldering the occasional big wire, but they really work best when throttled. This is pretty simple to do, as all that's needed is a light dimmer. Some irons even come with simple dimmer circuits built in. My last iron did, and that will be the basis for temperature controlling my new iron. Of course, never use a dimmer that cannot handle your iron.

100 spams in a day!

Yay! It's only 11PM and this blog has had 100 hits today alone! [Edit, by 12:00 we had 300 hits] For a blog that's only something like 23 hours old, that is a heck of a lot of hits. Unfortunately, these words will mostly fall on deaf ears for now as those views have come from spambots. These highly effective lines of code search the internet for fresh meat, and attack new blogs. One you've got one, don't expect it to go away, but do ignore it. These spambots hit your blog up with a ton of views in hopes that you will click on their URLs in the pageview stats. They can then do much more interesting things with your actual computer once you're on their page. This is part of the reason that you need to leave URLs that seem suspicious alone. These include very suspicious names like Vampirestat.com but also some not so fishy sounding ones like Kallery.net. For any bloggers like me, these things muck up your ability to even figure out if you've got an audience. Thankfully these things haven't found my email. 100 emails a day would be a new level of swamped. Now to be fair, some of these hits are generated by Robynn and myself in the course of editing, but given the number of hits that are created by a Mac, I'd wager that my editing isn't a major contributor.

Don't Push The Button

This is a test

Technology and tools