Tonight I finally decided to stop receiving papermail stuff from Maxim. They already make their material (design guides, and the “Engineering Journal”) available online in PDF, but they haven’t added (yet) an RSS feed to know when they are updated. They have an e-mail option, but I’d rather avoid using that as it’s tremendously boring, for me, to receive more stuff in m mailbox.
Now that I’m using specto (I should add it to Portage by the way), I can just monitor the pages for changes and download the new PDFs as they are released. So I disabled the postal mail option. This also saves me from having to find space for the new releases. Unfortunately I’m not yet sure what to do with all these printed copies, as I don’t need them anymore (I rarely used them anyway, even though they came handy more than a couple of times). I tried asking a friend of mine, but he has less space than I do for them. I’ll probably trash them out to be recycled.
This is of course the step forward. The problem comes with the step backward.
As I said before I bought a PlayStation 3. One nice thing is that it comes with a preset Folding@Home client. I tried that to make sure that the place where I put the PS3 wasn’t going to make it overheat too much. Then I started to wonder. The research that Folding@Home is supposed to help is probably the kind of research that might just as well help me and my health problems. I use the PS3 during the late evening/early night, and I turn it down during the night, but since I wake up till I go to play some game, it would stay there sleeping. Why shouldn’t I run Folding@Home?
The reason why I shouldn’t is that it uses a lot of power to do that, about 280W, which a) is a cost b) is environmentally unfriendly. Now I’m debating with myself if it’s worth it. And if it’s worth to run Folding@Home on my workstation too. It’s not wasted power, as it’s employed for a worthy cause, but is it worthy enough not to consider this a step backward?
I’ll have to sleep quite a bit on this.
I decided to “resurrect” my electronics skills, after two years that I ended high school. The reason it’s simple: I got an interesting possible job proposal, but I never worked with firmwares, so I wanted to start playing a bit with at least basics of them for practising while I still have some free time before the start of the next job.
So thanks to Mike Doty (KingTaco) I started looking at 8052.com and try to understand a bit more what I only had some partial knowledge of. I also started looking up the datasheets for the chips I do have here, and going to print the main ones (I like having hardcopy of what I need to work on).
I also started looking on how to build PCBs, thing that I never did before (my high school was of computer science, although I had a class of electronics for the basic knowledge, and although we never did PCB work there, I knew a few things, like the usage of Ferric Chloride. Unfortunately, I’m afraid I won’t be able to create PCBs at all, the main problem being that I don’t have a “safe” way to use the UV lamps that seems to be needed for applying the copper-protectors before incision.