Avian’s Blog

Last Thursday Andraž's laptop charger died - a LiteOn 19V 65W universal laptop power supply. He went and bought a new one the same day. And since I can't stand watching people throw away what could be perfectly good electronics I took it to have a closer look at it and maybe salvage any usable parts.

First there was a problem of how to get through the casing that is obviously designed to keep curious people out. Seriously, this thing is built like it is housing a nuclear reactor. It took quite a lot of sawing, heating and prying to get through an outer plastic and an inner aluminum shell.

After I got to the circuit the error was quite obvious. There was a bad contact on the board. Maybe it got loose because of a mechanical shock or maybe it was badly soldered in the first place. Anyway, before it finally blew itself off there was probably some arcing because tiny balls of solder were blown around the circuit and melted into the inner wall of the casing.

After properly soldering the blown connection and a bit of touching up some of the other suspicious points I connected it to the mains and it worked!

I did some more tests with the power supply under around 50% of it's maximum load and it held up perfectly (I didn't have a large enough resistor at hand to test it at full load). A quick calculation shows 160mΩ equivalent series resistance, which is quite nice. It will definitely come in handy in this or that electronics project.

So, thanks Andraž and I hope your new charger will serve you well.

Last year when I was in London I've seen people giving around cute little cards. After some questions I've learned about Moo, a web service that can be used to order a number of printed paper things, from those mini cards to stickers.

So a couple of weeks ago I gave it a try. I've also heard nice things about their web site and since I'm still a bit cautious about using all these new-style interactive web interfaces for anything serious I wanted to see how a good one looks and feels like.

Well, the final impression was really good. Everything looked and worked correctly in Debian's Iceweasel. I've uploaded some images and was able to crop and adjust them in browser. At first I had some problems because I had images that were already cropped and Moo kept putting the edge of the images off the card. However their FAQ quickly cleared things out and I got a JPEG template which I used to prepare the margins of my images correctly in GIMP. If I wouldn't want to mess around with that I would be finished with the order in a couple of minutes. Nice. No needless extra features, only what you really need.

This is also the first time I got the impression that I'm really using an international service. They have a flat rate for shipping anywhere in the world - something I haven't seen anywhere else before. Another nice thing is that they properly support international characters! They printed my name correctly, which can't be said for some companies in Slovenia where many still struggle with that on their web forms (I must remember to post once all the different ways I find my name wrongly printed in my (ordinary) mail).

Anyway, I also liked the way how they add an impression of a personal touch to the whole thing. You see comments like "Excited? We are." here and there. It's interesting how I never got the feeling that they're overdoing that and I usually have quite a negative reaction to companies trying to fake emotions that way.

They also say that they care about the environment and that they only use paper from sustainable forests and so on. Nice, although I find their choice of a plastic box for shipping my cards a bit conflicting with that mission. It's made out of recyclable polypropylene so I guess it's not that bad.

So, if I'll need a bunch of colorful cards, I'm definitely going back to Moo.

We saw these lenticular clouds over St. Margarethen in Austria last week. These circular things looked much better in real life than on this photo. Image a scene from Independance day.

Guess what's this going to be...

On Monday we had some discussion at Zemanta about naming strategies of popular internet services and startups. That got me thinking and I've hacked up a start-up name generator. I'm obviously not the first one with that idea.

Anyway, it's a simple Perl script using a probabilistic model of Web 2.0 namespace (which I made up on the spot). Given that it took me 15 minutes to write it it's surprisingly effective and produces approximately one useful name out of 140. Useful meaning that someone with a lot of imagination might use it to name something.

Even more surprising is that out of those more or less randomly generated names more than 30% are already registered as .com domains. So in a rough estimate if there are approximately 10¹⁰ alphabetic names with between 4 and 7 characters that means 3 billion registered domain names. Amazing.

If you're going to launch a web service, you better do it soon.

I just saw this old Sony microcassette (you know, magnetic media you used to store audio on). I was just amazed how fair advertised capacities used to be:

Today large type would probably say something like "180+ min^*", and somewhere at the bottom there would some legal text about how capacity depends on the quality of recording and equipment used.