Johann Hari

Johann Hari is definitely a crank. I like him already! He wrote a book about drugs and addiction called Chasing the Scream, and there was a famous TED talk he did about that. I haven’t read Chasing the Scream, but this evening I am going to read Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again.

Note: the links to Amazon above are affiliate links. I recently signed up for an affiliate account with Amazon. Is that cool? Is that not cool at all? What sort of disclosures are appropriate when you use affiliate links? I have never used them before and am not expecting to make any significant amount of money with them, so maybe I should just not use affiliate links at all? I dunno. Would be happy to hear from you if you have an opinion.

Early Content #11: Demo of the ALKOY Capacitor Discharge Pen | In The Lab With Jay Jay

This post is part of my video blog and you can find more information about this video on this show’s homepage which is here.

You can support this channel on Patreon: patreon.com/JohnElliotV

In this video I demo my new ALKOY Capacitor Discharge Pen.

The bench multimeter I use in this video is my OWON XDM1041 and the bench power supply is my RIDEN RD6006.

The demo circuit used a 1KΩ 1/4W resistor, a 25V 330μF electrolytic capacitor, and an 18V supply.

Thanks very much for watching! And please remember to hit like and subscribe!


Following is a product I use picked at random from my collection which may appear in my videos. Clicking through on this to find and click on the green affiliate links before purchasing from eBay or AliExpress is a great way to support the channel at no cost to you. Thanks!

Yum Cha Heat Shrink Wire ConnectorsThis is an image of the product.

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Adrian Black goes PRO

In my feed today a note from Adrian Black from Adrian’s Digital Basement that he was retiring from his infosec job and going full-time content creator for his YouTube channels. His announcement is here. It’s fun because I managed to be the first person to wish him luck and my name was in the credits because I now support him on Patreon! You can see the proof in the screenshot below! :)

Data formats including YAML

I finally got around to reading about YAML at Wikipedia. Worth doing if you use YAML anywhere and haven’t read the YAML page yet.

The Wikipedia article links to the official website: yaml.org, which is good fun. It’s written in YAML! :D

If you’re interested in data formats and markup languages here’s some other reading on the subject:

Network outage

I’m in the process of moving some of my web systems to new servers. The blog.jj5.net has been completed, svn.jj5.net is a working progress, and some of www.jj5.net is broken until I can get around to fixing that too. This outage will manifest as some images which won’t load in blog posts. I’m sleepy now, so I’ll try and fix this tomorrow when I wake up.