Dear future-self: To teach my kids about hot air rising and cold air falling, I put together a simple demo to measure temperature at different heights up our living room wall. Measurements were taken using four cheap LED temperature gauges, mounted on a cardboard panel, and with the actual sensors mounted at ~0mm, ~800mm, ~1400mm […]
This post archives some minor in-house observations for my future-self’s enjoyment. My 2021 home file server contains six horizontal HDDs stacked vertically, with the case’s front panel air intake sitting at ground level. The front panel loves dust. Dust loves the front panel. Airflow does not love the dusty front panel. For many months now […]
Over a lifetime of salvaging electronic components, I’ve accumulated a goodly collection of misremembered or poorly marked resistors, capacitors, transistors and diodes. Can’t quite recall what they were for, won’t throw them out (“just in case“). Enter the “Geekcreit LCR-T4 12864“, a small device that can detect and characterise transistors, resistors, capacitors and diodes on […]
Here’s a short story, with a lesson obvious. Develop a shared interest in Minecraft with my kids During a 2020 Covid lockdown, look for ways to satisfy the Minecraft interest on an XBox One Stumble across cdkeys.com, a site for purchasing fully digital game keys Find “MINECRAFT EXPLORERS PACK – XBOX ONE” (full game) from […]
If you have Foxtel cable TV service in Australia, do not put up with the broken-as-delivered iQ3 box. Demand a “downgrade” to Foxtel’s very functional (and far more reliable) iQ2 box. We battled with an iQ3 for December 2016 and January 2017. Signed up to a special deal in November 2016 where the iQ3 was […]
While constructing content for a Plex Media Server (PMS) at home I’ve recently need to both split and merge .m4v files containing h264/aac encoded material. These are my notes to myself of what I did using ffmpeg after much googling. If you’re not me, hope these notes help you too 🙂 Splitting an m4v file Hypothetically, I’ve ended […]
Back on April 19th 2015 I ordered a Optical Digital Coaxial Toslink Signal To Analog Audio Converter Adapter from Banggood.com. It arrived April 30th 2015. For my own records — it works! Very simple use-case: The TV in our front lounge had a Toslink optical audio port, but no headphone jack. How to use headphones? An adapter, […]
I purchased a cheap clone of the Saleae Logic 8 port logic analyser (LA) from Banggood.com on Dec 16th 2014. This page reflects my initial experiments with using the device under Windows 7 and FreeBSD 9.1. The clone does 8 channels of digital capture (no analog capture) and peaks at only 24MHz sample rate, but […]
I am. Because. 