Planning to succeed

I was sitting here in my lab this morning and reflecting on all the things I want to do in it. The thing about getting things done is they don’t get done unless you actually take the time to do them. A book will happily sit unopened on your bookshelf for your entire life if you don’t take the time at some point to pick it up and read it.

In this light I thought perhaps I might stand more of a chance of actually completing some of my projects if I put some structure around getting them done. To that end I have one specific activity to do for each day of the week:

  • circuit day (make a Maxitronix circuit or similar)
  • programming day (write some code, pick a project, there are lots)
  • old book day (review and document an old book)
  • Xbox day (recap an Xbox, or work on an otherwise broken one)
  • writing day (write something, e.g. work on my book, a long form blog post, etc)
  • new book day (read and document a new book)
  • holiday! (watch a movie! play a game!)

On circuit day and Xbox day I will make a video of the activity and publish on In The Lab With Jay Jay. The outputs from the other activities are not video but a lot of that will end up on the web somewhere too.

The sub-pattern is:

  • Video
  • Writing
  • Reading

I repeat that twice in one week and then give myself a day off.

Traditionally I’m very bad when it comes to having structure in my life, so I can only hope that this attempt to introduce some structure actually works out… wish me luck!

Op amp tester

I was watching How To TEST OP AMPS Using A Multimeter vs Op-Amp Tester Project Single Dual and I learned about this Operational Amplifier OP AMP Tester For Single Dual OPAMP TL071 TL072 TL081 TL082 Single/Dual Op Amp Test Board.

I have to cool it on the spending for a little while, but I’ve made a note of this on my shopping list.

Studio upgrade

The computer I’m using to do the recording for In The Lab With Jay Jay is called ‘wonder‘ and it only has six USB ports. I currently have ten USB cameras, and I’m getting more, so I don’t have as many USB ports as I can use. Also ‘wonder’ only has 2TB capacity (non-RAID) for storing the videos I record, which will probably get used up fairly quickly.

So I have been planning an upgrade for ‘wonder’ known as ‘victory‘. My new studio workstation ‘victory’ will have 52TB of RAID storage for video data, 2TB of SSD RAID storage for video recording, 12x USB ports on the back panel, and 4x USB ports on the front panel.

Along with this new studio workstation I intend to get a new camera, a Canon Rebel SL3.

Now all I need to do is save up a cool eight grand!

Etudes for Programmers

From time to time I swing by norvig.com looking for signs of life from Peter Norvig, but it hasn’t been updated in years. However today I pushed on the internet a bit harder and I found signs of life over at github.com/norvig. Norvig continues to hack on his pytudes project, which is cool. I was reading its documentation today and I learned about the book Etudes for Programmers. If I had more money I would definitely buy myself a copy of that book, but at the moment AUD$355 is just a tad out of my league.

CRC

I watched Ben Eater’s videos How do CRCs work? and Checksums and Hamming distance (the full course is Learn about error detection) then found the Wikipedia page: Cyclic redundancy check.

Also of interest: