UptownMaker

33:  Booklet printing I don't know why I didn't see this feature on printers earlier but I love that I can print out a document designed to be folded in half and stapled in the middle.

Side trip from my regular posts on organizing your work space and taking it with you:  tools that you didn't know you needed. Most of the tools in the toolkit are obvious- the soldering iron, the tweezers, the "helping hand", etc.  There are a few items that are in my toolbox (or are always close at hand) that I use constantly but somehow never make the lists I've seen for equipping a bench. 1. Cyanoacrylate adhesive- especially the brush-in-bottle "Krazy Glue" brand that I highlighted in my tool kit post.  Useful for "dead-bug" assembly, reattaching lifted pads, and temporarily holding things in place while you work on them (I know many CNC machinists who use CA to hold their workpieces down while they are in process. 2.  Hot glue gun- super useful for low-cost ruggedizing, strain relief, conformal coating and mounting PCBs.  Nothing fancy- a standard low-temperature hobby gun will work fine.  In fact, the high temp type take a little too lo...

I was down- hard- yesterday with a bad bout of food poisoning, which brings me to the 32nd item I love about living in the future: 32.  Symptoms of disease are easily available- Of course, this has it's downsides.  While the SYMPTOMS are often widely available, as are the prognoses, sensitivity and specificity are often ignored, as are any kind of information about likely age groups, races, gender types, risk-enhancing behavior, etc etc. In other words, it's better at ruling things OUT than ruling them IN- but it WAS comforting to know that the very serious food-borne illnesses generally don't have the symptoms I was suffering through.

I've been obsessing over how I can plan a trip to Maker Faire next year using the train...online travel reservations are pretty spectacular, since I can try different departure dates and travel permutations and find a cheap option.  I should write a Python script that spools out dates and returns prices...

Or at least, any PC.  I need to figure out how to do this from my phone...

In part 1, I covered my mobile electronics kit .  This time around, I'll look at my mobile electronics toolkit. While the mobile kit contains (almost) everything I need to do some breadboarding of circuits, more permanent hacks, installations, disassembly of finds and really fun stuff is all bound to require more advanced tooling than the cheesy $5 multimeter (that link shows it for $13, but it's available locally in the Twin Cities at AEI for less than $5, and with a bulk discount option)(yes, I have purchased multimeters in bulk) and adjustable wirestripper in the kit.  After a few scrambling debacles where I realized I didn't have what I needed to finish the job, I decided that I'd best come up with a toolkit that I could use at home and on the road. After some hemming and hawing at the local Home Depot, I bought a Stanley XL Tool Organizer , which is a nice fold-up unit- essentially, two of the more conventional see-through plastic lid boxes that fold up arou...

Of course, it kills my productivity, but it's pretty much what I've always dreamed of- someone says, "here, I think this might be interesting to you" and I have all the reading I can manage.