Stream of consciousness

A couple weeks ago, I looked into Active Noise Canceling (ANC) technology. I already understood the concept (wave superposition of an inverted signal to yield a zero sum), but it was interesting to see that the ANC chips were essentially just opamps that relied on the user for gain values and audio filters. I don't have the same level of understanding of analog circuitry as I do digital, so I put off deciphering the filter elements and instead just bought a pair of ANC earbuds by Audio-Technica. They should arrive in time for the 2-week roadtrip starting this weekend. Maybe I'll get around to making my own sometime. discreet implementation, chips with digitally set gain, analog chip with real values for filters

I also bought two Kingston 64GB solid state hard drives. They were on sale. After flashing new firmware (they have bad firmware - which is why they were on sale), they will be added to a custom desktop in RAID 0 configuration. The desktop wasn't being used, so I am working on getting it to match and sync with my laptop. The RAID 0 should yield 128GB at about twice the speed of either the drives individually. Extrapolating from my laptop's performance with an Intel SSD, this is going to be amazing. 

I also bought a broken TI84+SE calculator. Goodness, I have been spending a lot of money recently. Hopefully I can get her working. If all goes well, I plan to backlight her and maybe even add solar power and rechargeable batteries. I have worked with Li+ batteries before, so this should be doable. {Yes, I use the female gender when referring to electronics (like people do with boats).} I had a strong urge right then to place a semicolon after that last bracket. 

Laptop Thermal Compound Replaced

Lauren, my primary laptop (HP tx2), had been overheating, burning my lap, and shutting down unexpectedly. Upon installing Speccy (same people as Ccleaner), I found out that she was running in the high 90 degrees Celsius. Considering that my AMD processor is rated for under the boiling point of water, I knew something needed to change. Task manager showed usual idling CPU usage, so I couldn't blame the heat on any one program. Lauren was just getting old and dusty. I also expected that she had poor quality thermal compound on her processor.

My best friend, neighbor, and fellow computer expert, Lukas, had a partly used tube of Arctic Silver 5 that he was willing to give me. Today, I took the time to disassemble Lauren, clean the heatsink, and replace the (dry and crappy) old thermal compound. After a scare with the screen's cable not being properly in, she is back up and running and COLD!!! Well, cold in comparison. (66*C with a few tabs open in Chrome)

For those of you wishing to do as I did, Arcticsilver.com has good instructions.

Welcome

Hello, World.
I am beginning this blog to share what I do. The name takes from my usual response when someone (usually a non-science person) asks me why or for what purpose I have done something scientifically beautiful when they cannot see the beauty and do not understand the underlying processes. To better explain this concept, I reference the great Randall Munroe: Beauty - XKCD

As to the URL by which my blog may be called by the vast mesh of domain name servers (of which, I prefer 8.8.8.8 Google, FTW), it is my first handle and, therefore, crappy enough that it wasn't already taken.

As to the topics of my posts, they will be anything from computer science to microelectronics to pyrotechnics among myriad other similar things that I spend my free time doing and my thinking time thinking.

Welcome to my blog. I hope to update at least weekly.