Sunday procrastination, it sounds wrong doesn’t it? But I still had a case of it, resulting in this new design for my blaog.

Its basically photoshop on a 960 grid, mostly for the sake of it since I wanted to test the neat package from 960.gs, it really speeded up my productivity, everything from idea, design to implementation took less then 5 hours!

I have a really nice course in Electronics at the moment and we are doing all sorts of things, but since it’s just an introduction to some physicists and not electrical engineering as such it runs a bit fast and jumps a lot of places, well enough about that So we have finally arrived at Digital circuits after two weeks of analog stuff. All the analog stuff is nice naturally but apart from sound it’s not really something you find in your everyday anymore (at last not if your everyday looks like mine, nerdish that is anyway my teacher proposed that if we liked we could continue our lessons at home (building a simple 3-bit decoder) it would be easy since a standard USB connection features a 5V DC supply which is exactly what is used in all digital connections (figures why it is used in USB devices so we could just use our computers as source! now this might sound trivial but it got me started on the idea of a simple home electronics setup, and I found that I wasn’t the first at that…

So first of all I build a simple little box for power:


Very simple design, some terminals, a switch and a junk plastic box I would guess
the total price to be around $4 It a very simple idea so you don’t really need a diagram
right? but I did the drawing anyway:


And Woila! a neat little supply for your digital dreams
Anyway you should remember that there is a max current at 500mA on a SUB port so don’t
use it for heavy equipment…

Well so far so good… but what else do you have in the electronics lab? well two
other devices that we frequently have used is the Oscilloscope and Function generator,
but essential in analog design and they might come in handy here as well… so I thought,
well I’m out of luck the Picoscopes we use at Uni is around $300 each and I would
guess the same for our function generators… then I thought about it… what device
in a computer is used for both?… the sound card! now the naysayers will point out
that it only works in the audible spectrum and true it might be so for older cards,
but since high-freq formats is popular at the moment audible or not I found that my
sound cards ADC is rated at kHz divide that by two and we have a spectrum up to kHz
it’s not microwaves… but hey it for free! the real problem is with DC and low frequencies
that is below 20Hz… Anyway I searched for an application that would fit my need
and it seems that this company has specialized in this! they have some further guidelines
on there website.

And for the function generator? well every synth will do, but if you want it simple
and powerful the same company delivers one as well (and a spectrum analyzer for that
matter) so for around $10 (+ $50 for the program) your a fitted with some simple but
very powerful tools just right out of the little box under your table

Just wanted to present some of my old stuff:

Techno:

The Future is now very trancy, and with vocals
by me
The Quiet Ending no, it’s not my vocals

Silent stuff

bv (still haven’t figured out what to call this one)
Improvitus tatix (I know it’s not mozart,
but it is a nice way to relax, just playing some random stuff)
Blue mountains again some randomness
played on a very niced Roland I borrowed from a good friend of mine some years back

I should at the moment be preparing for me reexam in Waves and Optics (the first try
didn’t go very well, head full of girlfriend, stress and stuff) But it’s hard to get
going after the summer, so I write a little here, just to get my mind in the mood.

 This
guy here, means a lot to me, a lot of people around the world seems to relate
to him of dubious reasons, and if all the organizations where right it seemed that
he was both, dyslectic, had attention disorder and a lot of other shortcomings, that
made him seem very human. I really don’t care, we are humans, and none are perfect,
but it is a great error to point toward a persons failures as a being and relate there
success to that. If you are a brilliant physicist and have a lot of ideas, but don’t
really understand why you should follow the normal route to acceptance, then you are
properly more like him then if you have problems concentrating. I’m not bashing people
who need a hero or a leader (well I am, a bit, am I not?) but what Einstein
could, was think out of the box, rules are not absolute but guiding lines for our
actions and reactions. So light was affecting atoms in odd ways, that seemed to disobey
Maxwills wave padigram? well it fit’s the particle padigram just well, Einstein was
brave enough to realize this, and publish it, and by that led physicist on the track
of quantized light called photons which again started the quantum mechanical revolution,
leading to our modern information society.

Dare to think, fantasize and dream. Nothing is too far out…