dsavitsk

While we are complaining about vendors, a small warning about OSH Park: For those who don't know, OSH park is a PCB manufacturer, er, aggregator/middle man. You upload PCB files to them and they send you 3 of your design in a few weeks. They have replaced BatchPCB basically. For the most part, they have a lot going for them. The boards are reasonably high quality, the turn around time is not awful, and they are a neat purple color. And you can upload Eagle files directly without having to muck around with Gerbers. The downsides are that the turn around time is not really great, the purple is kind of ugly, and most importantly they are a little on the expensive side. For very small boards, it is a good deal, but once you hit 10 square inches or so, there are better deals out there. If that were all of it, OSH would be a great resource for DIYers needing one off utility PCBs. And in most cases, it is. Here's the rub -- there is no way to contact them. If something goes wrong, you are out of luck. Case in point, 4 orders from them were supposed to be delivered to me last week. According to the post office, they were, but in reality, they weren't. I have talked to the post office which said there is nothing they can do. There was a temporary mail delivery person working that day. I tracked him down to ask if he'd help find the packages (he was still working yesterday) and he said no. Our regular mail delivery person was back today and said he'd help, but seemed doubtful of finding them. It is only $70, so not the end of the world. The bigger issue is the time which is frustrating. Back to OSH, the issue is that I have tried to contact them to see if they can/will help, and there is no way to do it. I went to their support site and filed a question. They say they'll reply in 24 hours, but no such luck. I tried to escalate the issue, and it generated a new support ticket, referencing the original, which they have also not responded to. I sent an email to the only email address they publish, and this resulted in the automatic generation of yet another support ticket, which has also gone unanswered. So I assume I just suck it up. You get what you pay for, and sometimes not even that.

Ask 5 transformer winders and you'll get 10 answers. Short answer is nickel (which is the same as mu-metal) will saturate quickly with DC requiring a larger core. The increased core undoes nearly all, or possibly more than all, of the benefit. Some people still like it, but you'll get less bass and less power for the same size. And it costs a fortune. There are likely better ways to spend your money. But if you really want to spend it on big cores, check out Lundahl. For push pull it can work better. And push pull sounds better anyway. Slagle has experimented with adding a winding for filaments that is in the opposite direction as the main winding allowing currents to cancel. No idea how successful he's been. For small signal stuff with no DC, nickel or amorphous or whatever is better that steel hands down. Where the dividing line is between small signal and large is the question. Interesting. Less than an hour from me. Might be worth a trip down one of these days.

This may be too old fashioned, but I still us Pythonwin for Python on Windows. Have since 1.5.2.

Interesting option for quick and dirty wood cases: https://www.inventables.com/technologies/ply90-corner-brackets

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I am looking for a small, relatively inexpensive, VPN router box for a small office. Does anyone have a suggestion of where to look? Budget is a few hundred dollars -- more than a cheapo consumer model, less than an enterprise level box. Ability to be configured by an idiot who doesn't know much about this stuff (i.e. me) would be most helpful. Sonicwall is the name that keeps popping up, but I am not sure if that is the right solution or not. I would use pfSense, but so far as I can tell, there are no Windows VPN clients that work with it that allow one to connect at login (instead requiring one to log in and then connect to the VPN). As stupid of a requirement as that is, it is a real one.

I was college buddies with the guy who started Secretly Canadian. There are good stories that involve him, a 1lb bag of powdered sugar donuts from the Big Foot gas station, being the King of Bloomington, and his MBA roommate who looked like Sam the eagle.

Dill, smoked paprika, cumin, cayenne, onions, carrots, and garbanzo beans over rice is excellent. Put some yogurt and mint on it, too. Also, zucchini slices, cream cheese, and dill on pumpernickel is pretty good.

Will it work off of a phone?

260mm x 36mm x 11mm with 2mm wide and 2mm deep rabbets cut in them.

Just shy. I had a piece of almost the same size I tried to will into a pair of sides with no luck.

http://www.head-fi.org/t/661233/ecp-audio-dsha-1-l-2-black-diamond/150#post_10581448

A couple of initial pics ...

First orders should ship on Tuesday. Some pics from the production process ... Wood sides curing on the shop floor. Some front panels just out of the laser engraver (and not yet cleaned) A batch of populated boards just out of the solder oven. A fully populated board undergoing its first tests.

Ha! I don't imagine Justin is concerned.

Happy Birthday!

It would be possible. For it to be thin enough to not have a lip, it would not have enough strength, so it would have a small lip. And it probably still wouldn't be strong enough.

R.I.P. H.R. Giger

Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday!

I like the RCAs. I do wish they would buy some sand paper to take out the tool marks. Most importantly, a design like this would be pretty easy to replicate by anyone with access to a maker space with a small CNC, and an open source headphone design would be a fun DIY project. Probably why they are not talking about what driver they are using.

Have you ever been there when the guy parks his ice cream truck next to the line, and plays the ice cream truck music non stop? Makes the mere long line seem like bliss. What's amazing to me is that with the thousands of hot dog places in Chicago, so few competitors to Hot Doug's have emerged.

Happy Birthday!