nik282000

My FPV goggles have no internal battery, they need to be run off a 2s-8s LiPo or 5v from a USB port. This lets me use a reasonably safe power supply instead of strapping a raw lipo to my body.

I bought a Cetus X kit last October and an Air65 shortly after, since then I have flow about 1K packs and loved every one. Learning to fly smoothly and calmly was a huge challenge in the beginning so I am pretty satisfied with 45m/week of progress. This is the Air65 in my favorite park, though the Cetus X is a pretty good fit there as well.

Photo taken at 6:32UTC from Burlington Ontario with a 4" f/9.8 refractor.

I got my hands on some really weird EL panels and did a little dive into how they work. I still have no idea where to get more but I think they may be DIY-able.

I was given an Ender 3 Pro last week and after a few bumps managed to successfully CAD, slice and print a booster seat for my phone. The caddy as it was would grab the volume down button on my phone, this little wedge solves the issue!

I learned this week that many high speed CD-ROM drives used balancing balls on the spindle to stop discs from vibrating at 10Krpm.

Between the platter that supports the CD and the motor there is a puck with a toroidal void containing a few ball bearings. When an out of balance CD is spun up the spindle and disc together rotate around their common center of mass, some point between the spindle and the edge of the disk. This means that the void containing the balls no longer rotates around it's center, it spins like a hula-hoop around the spindle/DC center of mass. With the "lighter" side of the system being farther from the center of rotation the balls roll 'down hill' towards the side of the void that is experiencing more centrifugal force. Eventually enough balls will collect on the light side to perfectly cancel out the heavy side. If there are too many balls they will distribute themselves inside the void until they cancel out each other's weight!

The link leads to a scaled up demo of this using an empty water bottle and steel BBs.

I found a box of CD-Roms and floppy disks in my mum's basement and damnit, I want to play them! I could use emulators, DosBox or VMs but it's never quite the same as having the real thing, so between an eBay mobo and a box of old parts I managed to build my new gaming rig to cover 1990-2005.

Its running a P3 at 1GHz, 512MB of ram, and an ATI Xpert98 with 8MB of memory. As I didn't want to run an old IDE drive with a million hours on it, I tried an SATA-IDE adapter, it caused some issues during the install but that just felt like the standard Windows experience.

Though unpopular, I went with ME for 2 reasons, the first was Dos support, the second is that I went from W95 to ME as a kid, 98 wouldn't have felt the same. The install bricked twice with video drivers but I finally got it up and running with the default drivers and an 18" Samsung flat CRT (runs up to 1600x1200 at a nauseating 60hz).

So what were your favorite games from the 90's and early 2000s?

Repaired some broken solder joints, sanded out the biggest scuffs and polished most of the scratches out of the screen. Oh yeah, and the paint job.

The two hemispheres are electrically connected to each other and to an AC power supply, the ring is connected to the same AC supply but 180 degrees out of phase. Particles are charged and then injected into the trap, they are then alternately attracted to the ring and hemispheres causing them to oscillate and become trapped! As the voltage is increased lighter particles pick up more speed until they are finally thrown free from the trap. In ideal conditions ions are all charged the same amount allowing the trap to sort the ions from lightest to heaviest, allowing you to determine the atoms that make up a particular substance.

In this model I can not control the charge on the particles but it is possible to roughly sort them from smallest to largest.

Notes: This trap is scaled WAY up, the ring had a diameter of about 24mm. I'm trapping non-dairy creamer not individual ions. The frequency this trap runs at is WAY lower frequency than that of a real ion trap. This trap runs at a much higher voltage than a real trap. Otherwise them mechanism of operation is identical to the real thing.

Forbidden Fibers

In the ten years since I took this photo the trail has been abandoned and the tree has rotted away.