Saturday, 16 May 2015

By on May 16th, 2015 in prepping, science kits

08:16 – We’re building subassemblies for science kits today, along with laundry and all the other usual Saturday tasks. It’s only a couple of months until the flood of orders starts, and we need to have lots of finished kits ready to ship. I also need to get purchase orders issued for stuff with long lead times.


11:16 – Back from a Sam’s Club run. We didn’t get much, but I did pick up a can of Lipton’s iced tea powder. I also grabbed a #10 can of White House Apple Sauce, just to try. We eat a fair amount of applesauce, and we’ve been buying Mott’s in 64-oz. PET plastic jars at Costco. I decided to give this stuff a try. It’s a bit less expensive per ounce in the #10 cans, but the real issue is that I much prefer #10 metal cans to PET jars for storage. If we like it, I’ll add a few cases to our pantry, but not until we’ve moved. At this point, I’m in replacement-only mode because I don’t want to have any more to move than necessary.

16 Comments and discussion on "Saturday, 16 May 2015"

  1. Miles_Teg says:

    “We’re building subassemblies for science kits today, along with laundry and all the other usual Saturday tasks”

    Hint: don’t leave your cell phone in your jeans pocket when you do the washing… 🙂

    (Yes, I just had to get a new one today.)

  2. OFD says:

    Can’t wet cell phones be rehabilitated in a bowl of dry rice or sumthin?

    Overcast and breezy here, with temps in the low 60s; gotta mow the yard and get ready for cousin’s Army commissioning ceremony later.

  3. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    Well, I’ve been putting keyboards though the dishwasher for 30 years now with never a problem. I’m not sure what would hurt the cellphone going through the wash unless the battery shorted and damaged something.

  4. dkreck says:

    Twice I managed to get a cell phone wet. With the old Motorola Star-tac I removed the battery and placed the phone in the sun for a coulple of hours. When I put the battery back it came back to life and worked fine. The next was a Moto Razr and tried the same trick. It never came back.
    Also had the wife dump water down the vents of a tv while watering a hanging plant. TV was on and I think we lucked out that the crt didn’t crack. TV crackeled and went dark. I took the back off and ran a hair dryer around. Came back just fine and lasted many more years. A early 80s Zenith 19″ that cost $500 back then, TVs are truley cheap today.

  5. OFD says:

    Several years ago we found an old rose bush dead and buried in a pot that had been in a snowbank all winter, withered and dried out and gone. Just for laughs, we repotted it, watered it and bingo! Came right back.

    I’ve done the keyboard through the dishwasher caper several times with the usual good results. I’d try a cell phone if I took the battery out first. Or the rice trick.

  6. Miles_Teg says:

    The display was a bit mangled. The sim card works just fine in the new phone. When the guy in the shop took it out he noticed that the battery was a bit wet. I didn’t like the old phone anyway – never liked clams, so I didn’t much care.

    Yes, I remember reading about the keyboard-in-the-dishwasher trick in PCHaiN. I didn’t believe it at first but then decided it must be true because O’Reily wouldn’t let anything in the book that might get them sued.

  7. SVJeff says:

    I ran 3 keyboards thru the dishwasher last week and was thinking yesterday that I should post that here for a bit of a blast-from-the-past. I got sidetracked and then saw this today…

  8. Jack Smith says:

    Printed circuit boards, after assembly, are often cleaned by washing in de-ionized water and then dried.

    However…once assembled in an enclosure you have to be concerned with connector mating surfaces and the like. Also, some equipment has a memory retention battery (not as common now since we have flash memory) so electrolysis can occur with wet boards that have been dunked in partially conductive water even if you have taken the main battery out.

  9. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    I always did a final rinse with DI water, although our municipal water has so few dissolved solids that it would probably not have been a problem.

  10. SteveF says:

    Printed circuit boards, after assembly, are often cleaned by washing in de-ionized water and then dried.

    It has to be de-ionized water because unionized water doesn’t do anything.

  11. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    Unionized is one of those words that scientists pronounce differently.

  12. SteveF says:

    Of course. I was under no illusion that I had invented that pun. Still, it was about the first chance I’ve ever had to use it.

  13. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    No criticism, just an observation.

    I’ve always found the differing pronunciations of iodine interesting. Many in my grandmothers’ generation, born in the 19th century, pronounced it eye-oh-dinn, but that’s almost never used now. Most people nowadays pronounce it eye-oh-dyne, with the long I in the final syllable. Many chemists and a few others pronounce it eye-oh-deen by analogy with fluorine, chlorine, bromine, and astatine. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone pronounce any of those with a long I.

    But, for real pedants, all of those pronunciations are incorrect. There is a fourth pronunciation that I’ve never heard anyone use in real life, and it’s the correct one. Even knowing better, I use the “deen” pronunciation because if I used the correct one, people would (a) think I’m very strange, and (b) have no clue what I was talking about.

  14. SteveF says:

    There is a fourth pronunciation

    ee-oh-something, I imagine, or perhaps yo-something. I’m not sure what the most correct pronunciation of the last syllable is.

    which I eventually intend to do anyway, but just not right now.

    Why not? You have so much idle time with nothing else to fill it, don’t you?

  15. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    Yes, it’s yah-deen. The Greek io is pronounced y+short O, as in iota = yotta. Or, more particularly, the original name was ιώδες (iodes, purple) for the color of the vapor.

    As I said, if anyone ever pronounced it that way, they’d get very strange looks.

  16. nick says:

    Huh, always thought that was eye oh tah.

    In fact, I know I’ve heard people say it emphatically, ‘not one eye oh tah more.’

    I guess it wouldn’t be the first time common usage was at odds with “correct” usage.

    The things you learn when you weren’t expecting it 🙂

    nick

Comments are closed.