studionebula.com

I’ve been avoiding using SMT parts with really small pins. I haven’t had any trouble soldering packages with pins on 0.05-inch centers, but I was leery of trying anything smaller. However, more and more chips are available only in TSSOP (and smaller) packages, so I figured I might as well give it a try. I’m happy to say that it’s entirely feasible, and not even difficult. Here’s a photo of a chip with pins on 0.65mm centers which I hand-soldered:

(The penny is there to give you a sense of scale. Also, the holes at the far right are spaced 0.1 inches apart, for a standard ribbon-cable header.) I did use a 5x illuminated magnifier while working but aside from that I used the usual stuff: standard soldering iron, flux pen, and very fine solder.

I’ve got another PC board in the works that has some packages with pins on 0.5mm centers. The pins look like thick hairs. It’ll be interesting to see how it goes with those. I’m assuming it will be more or less the same as soldering the chip shown above.

There are a few photos from our Christmas on my flickr site here.

May you have a very happy holiday of your particular inclination. We’re celebrating Christmas (hence the timing of this post, I suppose). The cats are amused by having a tree erected in the living room, and even more amused by the wrapping paper and other stuff that gets strewn around today. Our tree is sporting LEDs this year. I finally gave up on the incandescent variety last year because our strings burned bulbs out faster than I could replace them. It’ll be interesting to see how long they last, since it seems that, unlike the now-old-fashioned variety, you can’t replace individual lights on the strings.

In any case, happy holidays and best wishes for a healthy and prosperous new year! Thanks for reading my blog.

There’s a good op-ed in the NY Times here. The early bit about the shock of coming back to the U.S. after visiting an Asian country rang particularly true for me, but the whole piece is good.

It seems like I spent much of the past weekend fixing things and breaking things. As previously mentioned the kitchen sink needed to be fixed. With new parts from Moen in hand I became far more intimately acquainted with our faucet than I had ever expected to do. After nearly completely disassembling and reassembling it, I can say two things for Moen faucets: 1) they’re really well-built, 2) they’re complicated. I was very glad to have the step-by-step disassembly instructions that the Moen service rep emailed to me. After a few hours, though, I had everything put back together, the leak was fixed, and the faucet works as good as new (perhaps better).

However, some time later I discovered that the screen on my PDA was cracked. I usually carry it around in a cargo pocket on my pants; I probably crushed it against something while squirming around underneath the sink. The thing is less than six months old, so I’m somewhat vexed that I have to replace it. I’m trying to overlook the fact that it probably would have cost less to pay a plumber to service the faucet than it will cost to buy a new PDA.

My new Samsung netbook survived its freeze/thaw cycle unscathed. I’m quite happy with it. It seems just as good as the glowing reviews led me to believe, although I’d be happier if the button for the trackpad were elevated slightly rather than flush with the case. As it is, you can’t press it easily with the side of your thumb (unless you have really skinny thumbs, I suppose). Obviously it’s a machine built for portability rather than comfort, which is fine.

I’ve been curious about Linux for awhile and thought it might be fun to try running the machine with Linux rather than Windows XP. I have nothing against XP, but it crossed my mind that most of the software I expect to run on the netbook is cross-platform freeware anyway, i.e. Firefox and Thunderbird. To make a long story short, after a number of hours of downloading ISOs, making bootable USB flash drives from ISOs (since the netbook has no optical drive), installing and uninstalling various versions of Fedora and Ubuntu, and playing with stuff, I arrived at the conclusion that I have things I’d rather do with my time than play with Linux. Yes, it’s a nice-enoug OS and it’s a bargain at the price, but I’m afraid my eyes glazed over as I was reading the 1.5 pages describing the files I’d have to edit and the patches I’d have to install just to make the trackpad and Fn keys on the netbook work right. I gave up at that point and decided to use the OS that Samsung had included with the machine, along with the numerous little helper apps that make it do nice things like let me toggle the wi-fi interface on and off with a function key.

I fixed the kitchen sink Saturday morning. Sunday morning I was working on an ambient piece that I’ve been working on recently, which threatens to be the first piece of music I’ll actually finish in several years. Tracie discovered a small amount of water dripping from the ceiling of the laundry room, which happens to be directly below the kitchen. Imagine my delight.

It turned out that the source of the errant water was the hot-water shutoff valve beneath the sink. That valve has been a little fussy in the past and apparently my manipulations of the previous day were enough to cause it to drip slowly. I figured I’d have to head out to that orange-laden store, buy a new valve, and again spend some amount of the day wriggling around in awkward positions under the sink. The only hitch was that I wasn’t sure how to deal with shutting off the hot water altogether since there seemed to be a fair amount of pressure in the line even with the inlet to the water heater turned off. Fortunately my father is extraordinarily good at fixing things that go wrong in houses (and electron microscopy labs), so I phoned him. He told me to try tightening the stem nut on the valve which would compress the packing and hence possibly stop the leak. This indeed worked, so I was saved from the trip to the hardware store and further under-sink wriggling.

Back to the netbook. During my thrashing around I somehow managed to damage the partitioning in a manner that left me without the hidden “rescue” partition that Samsung pre-installs on the hard drive. (Yes, I probably could have gotten it back if I’d been more patient and/or observant. But I wasn’t.) This meant that reinstalling XP was something of a challenge since I don’t have an external USB drive on hand. (Firewire, yes; USB, no. The Samsung has USB but not FireWire. Let’s take a moment to cheer the fact that Apple is putting the nails in FireWire’s coffin.)

So then I spent some time learning about obscure things like BartPE and the Ultimate Boot CD and how these things can be used to do stuff on PCs that lack optical drives. Sadly, after downloading and constructing these things, neither of them worked particularly well, possibly because I was using an OEM XP CD. That’s when I hit upon the solution which I should have thought of in the first place: take one of the optical drives out of my PCs and use the interface from one of my external USB hard drives to connect the drive to the Samsung. That worked flawlessly, and I was able to install XP in the normal manner.

But hey, I could have had a worse weekend. I could have been in my friend Dan’s shoes. Dan and his wife were flying from California through DIA not long after that Continental flight went off the runway. Dan and his wife got to spend hours waiting around in California, then spend hours standing in line in DIA, then getting shuffled off to a hotel at about 10:45PM to catch their connecting flight the next day. I haven’t heard from Dan since we chatted by phone while he was standing in line, so I presume he’s managed to get to wherever they were headed.

My sister alerted me to the presence of a new online snow globe here.

Chris just alerted me to Garfield Minus Garfield, a site that posts Garfield strips with Garfield himself entirely removed. In the words of the site’s creator, it is “a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb.”

I think the results are generally better than the originals, frankly.

In a fit of gadget lust propped up by rationalization (”it’ll be great for travel!”, “I can use it to play with Linux!”, etc.) I ordered a Samsung NC10 netbook. The FedEx tracking info said that it arrived in the Denver station last night and it was delivered here this afternoon. This means that it traveled through near-zero temperatures yesterday, sat overnight in an unheated depot, and then rode around in an unheated delivery truck most of the day while the temperature stayed well below freezing.

This treatment in itself is unlikely to harm a computer, but it is prudent to let it come up to normal room temperature before turning it on. The battery is probably cold enough that it won’t produce any electricity to speak of and shouldn’t be charged. The LCD might not work right. The most significant potential problem, though, is that water might condense on the metal surfaces inside the case, even in Boulder’s relatively low humidity.

So, my new toy is sitting in its box, warming up gradually. Tomorrow morning I’ll take it out of the box and let it sit for a few more hours before turning it on. Yes, I do feel a bit like a kid waiting for Christmas morning.

It was -11F (yes, that’s eleven degrees below zero, Fahrenheit) when we got up around 7:30AM today. It snowed quite a bit Saturday night and Sunday morning, so it (finally) feels like winter around here. Most of the windows in the house iced up, even though they’re double-glazed. Here’s a photo of the front window:

It is such a joy to discover that there are still companies around who understand that supporting their products after the sale and treating their customers well are good things to do. I discovered today that Moen, makers of faucets and sinks and things, is one such company.

We have a Moen faucet in our kitchen sink. It was installed a little over six years ago, and has generally been an exemplary kitchen faucet. Recently, however, it started leaking a little bit at its base. Unfortunately I didn’t install it myself, nor did I retain the instructions after it was installed, so I didn’t really have any idea how to approach fixing it. (We paid someone else to install it because we had a bunch of upgrades done to the kitchen all at once, and as long as there was going to be someone here to deliver things we figured we might as well have them install them as well.)

So, I did what any sensible person does these days and looked for a Moen website. Lo and behold, their website is a stellar example. Within a fairly short period of time, I figured out exactly which model of faucet we have, located an FAQ that explained what might be wrong with the faucet, downloaded PDFs of both the installation instructions and an exploded diagram labeling all of the parts and providing their numbers, and found that I could order replacement parts directly. I also discovered that their faucets have a lifetime warranty against leaks and drips, and that they’d provide service parts for free if I could establish proof of original ownership. Being something of a packrat, I did indeed have the receipt for the faucet in a file cabinet.

I still wasn’t entirely sure what was the most likely explanation for the problem, so I found their 800 number and gave them a call. They have a nifty automated service that will take your name and number and call you back if their service reps are busy, which they were. I got a call back within the promised period of time from someone named Michael.

Michael was very polite, well-spoken, and really knew his faucets. This guy talked about my faucet as though he had designed it himself and had installed and serviced hundreds of them. I’m sure neither was actually true, but rarely have I spoken to a service rep who had such detailed knowledge of his company’s products. By the end of the six-minute conversation, Michael had verified that I’d identified the exact model of my faucet correctly by asking about one detail of its molding, diagnosed the two most likely causes of the leak, suggested a bit of routine maintenance that could help prevent another sort of leak, and arranged for delivery on Monday of two different sets of service parts (so that if one didn’t work the other would and hence I wouldn’t have to call them back) for the faucet for a shipping charge of $9. I could’ve had them sent for free if I was willing to wait until the 26th, but I’d like to fix this leak sooner than that. Michael also emailed me two documents with detailed assembly and service instructions, with color photos of the exact model of my faucet. That email arrived a few minutes after I hung up the phone.

I’m basically stunned. I’ve spent a lot more money than I did on the faucet for things for which the after-purchase support ranges from awful to non-existent. The next time I’m shopping for a faucet there is no question that I’ll buy a Moen.