A Crummy Commercial

I have blogged on this idea before in passing but it's worth repeating: when building an electronic project be sure to use a Sharpie on either the inside of the case (or on the circuit board) to record the date. Then, enter that date and as many notes as you can think of about the project into a lab notebook ! If you are like me your memory was never that good, but even if you HAD a good memory, it will probably get worse as time goes by.  With the written date it will be easy to refresh your memory on the project.  And in that notebook, remember 5 Ws and an H: An excerpt from the Kipling poem: Keep Six Honest Serving Men I keep six honest serving-men    (They taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When     And How and Where and Who. source:  https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_serving.htm In other words, consider yourself a reporter trying to explain the project to someone who is unaware of this project (probably YOU in t...

I saw this notebook on sale at Target: source:  https://www.target.com/p/graph-ruled-solid-composition-notebook-black-unison/-/A-17079119#lnk=sametab 50 cent notebooks, it's only July 4th, not September - are kids going back to school already ?   I literally paid almost five times that price on Ebay for the same notebook (six for $14.45).  But it was purchased from a real person in Mississippi and did include shipping via USPS to the island - I never know which carrier Target will use to ship. The covers are flimsy compared to the Mead marble notebooks I had been using but the grid paper should be better for drawing schematics. Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm

For the first time in a long time (since September 2022) I decided to try pressure canning some dried garbanzo beans.   These round beauties have a nice flavor, very hearty.  Usually I pressure can 4 pints at a time.  I pre-soaked the garbanzos in salted water for 8 hours. But when I started putting the soaked garbanzos into the canning jars I realized that I only had enough for 2 pints - I had split the 1 pound bag in half using my kitchen scale but I should have used the whole bag ! In defense of my memory, in 2022 I was still working on a 20 pound bag of garbanzos so that must have messed up my calculations.  Anyway I canned just two of the pint jars for 12 minutes at 10 psi after adding 1/8 teaspoon of salt to each jar.  They are delicious. But it occurred to me that I should have a kitchen notebook similar to my lab notebooks !  Since shifting over to the graph paper style for the lab notebook I now have a stack of regular lined marble notebooks t...

Notebooks have been mentioned before: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2022/01/power-supplies.html https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2022/03/notebook-index-file.html But I thought that this video was really cool: source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLbvYv1WiZ0 It reminds me of two things:  the videos of catalogs on Youtube where they browse through page by page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k14oj-4mExY   And the Engineer's Notebooks from Radio Shack by Mims: https://archive.org/details/Forrest_Mims-Engineers_Mini-Notebook_-_Communications_Projects_Radio_Shack_Elec But the fun thing in the video is his inclusion of the shortwave soundtrack, brings me back to those old Hallicrafters S-120 days of my youth ! I've got to see if I can find graph paper type notebooks, I usually just use the lined composition marble notebooks but the cool kids all seem to use the graph paper style. Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm

 I updated noteindx.txt recently.  It's a chronological list of the page titles of my notebooks: The Sony 2010 is a shortwave receiver As shown, I use the find capability in Notepad to search for a key word.  It's not like using a true search engine but usually good enough to find the entry I want. As mentioned previously I try to write the date on any circuit and then have a corresponding entry in my notebook. date on the top of the K2 supply the dates just need to be close :) Although it's pleasant to leaf through a notebooks to look for stuff after more than one notebook it becomes kind of a chore: the over 20 lab notebooks on a shelf next to the bench so noteindx.txt became a necessity.  I write the time span of the notebook on the cover the cover of the first notebook with date range and also in noteindx.txt.  A more organized person would have color coding or numbering on the spine but this is good enough for me. an amplifier for the microphone output of ...