Until recently, I used plumbing solder and flux for electronics. They work fairly well, but the RepRap motor controllers refused to go together without more coaxing. There were a few bad solder joints on one driver that killed it.

My dad found me some solder in the basement, but I was reticent to use it without testing. I made an adapter that connects a computer to a stereo to test the solder (and to use).

From previous scrapping, I had all the parts needed: two female RCA connectors, and a 3.5mm male audio jack. I'd planned to make a 6" extention cable, but changed my mind and just assembled them deadbug style.

I only had white (left) and yellow (video) RCA's, so the gizmo uses a yellow plug for right. Sue me.

The adaptor went together easily. I bent the pins a bit, and just soldered them together. Electronics solder is much easier to use than bulky plumbing solder.

That's it for this experiment, and the new adaptor is playing music in the background.

I installed a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) module for Drupal recently. The module adds a formatting bar to edit fields, and displays what a post will look like after HTML is applied. It's called WYSIWYG (creative!), and I'm using it with a pretty little editor called CKEditor.

CKEditor contains a symbol select, which is incredibly useful for inserting characters like α and © into posts. Unfortunately, the default symbols selector was full of garbage (it contained mostly keyboard letters, without any greek. I write about coding and ECE, so symbols like Ω and µ will see a lot of use. 

Fortunately, there's an incredibly simple override. The Drupal module overrides the editors own settings, but overriding the WYSIWYG module it trivial. 

Views does almost what it should. There doesn't seem to be support for nesting lists, which I was looking for. It refuses to create a nested list (below). JQuery and AJAX could've done a great job of theming that into an accordian menu.

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As a summer project, I'm trying to learn more about woodworking. I like making things, and woodwoorking is one more method of creating.

My mom asked me to make her a yarn swift, which is a sort of lazy susan for a skein of yarn. Often, yarn comes in skeins (loops) that become hopelessly bunched as they unwind. A ball of yarn is easier to knit with, and she has a small machine that'll wind yarn into a ball. The swift holds the yarn as it unwinds, preventing tangles. 

After looking at some designs, we decided on a horizontal design, centered around two wooden X's. The lower cross would act as feet, and the upper one would hold upright dowels, which would hold the yarn. The longer arms would be 30" each (large skeins are usually smaller than two yards, and 30" arms could accomodate those.)

We decided to use a few pieces of 2x2 oak that were lying around. I started by cutting each board to the rough dimensions. The larger piece of oak split into a 30" piece and a ~15" piece; the shorter end was used for feet. I cut each board in half to make two 30x¾" boards and two 15x¾ pieces.

Half laps in each board improved the appearance and usability of the swift. I set the tablesaw blade to 3/8", and cut a 3/8x1½" slot out of the center of each piece.

We decided to use both fixed pegs (seated in holes) and mobile pegs (seated in channels) to hold the skein of yarn. The holes were incredibly easy: I drilled a 5/8" hole to a depth of 3/8" near the end of each arm. I swapped to a ¼" drillbit and drilled the rest of the way through.