Nah, I saw the heating coil was the right resistance. Then, the shiny metal coating on the inside of the tube was not oxidized, so the vacuum was likely good. Nothing rattled, so a short was unlikely. It was designed for 6.3V.

So at 5V the worst that could happen was that the heater coil fizzled and died with some sad noises. Well, maybe no noises, because of the vacuum and all. Some form of sadness though, surely.

The more alarming things I’ve built over the years aren’t so much “duck and cover”. They’re more of the “spend a all day doing data analysis, then know something I probably shouldn’t” variety.

Well, I had heard of someone that got a little amplification out of them at 3.3V and a weird configuration. It was a different tube, but I figured I’d give it a go at 5V.

My tube was old and originated from a junk pile in Japan. I figured it wasn’t enough entropy to just use an unknown tube the wrong way, so I added some random scrap parts from the Soviet Union. The tube produced amplified output, but the output impedance was way too high when being used this wrong way (in other words, it couldn’t drive a speaker). So I added some completely unknown Chinese amplifier IC as a buffer.

It’s approximately pocket-sized. For a large pocket, anyway. The tube heater gets the whole thing warm. It produces hilariously distorted (but sort of cool) sound. I call it a ‘themionic pocket warmer’, arguably not so useful here in Vietnam. The audio function is secondary. I suppose if you are a half-deaf Antarctic explorer with a deep love of stovepipe hats, it would be a good hat-warmer as well. I guess that’s the target market :D

I threw some photos up at voltage.vn. It was a fun way to spend a couple of hours.

I found a neat set of old ink blocks from a famous manufacturer in China. It’s technically worth a fair sum of money, I paid 8$. Also an old vacuum tube for 3$, got it working. Neither of those are useful though, just neat.

In terms of materially useful things? Well, someone taught me how to use old, no-electronics camera lenses. So I bought a used DSLR for 135$ and bought antique lenses for very cheap (again 8$ for something that was originally nearly 1k after accounting for inflation). Now I can do my own product photography, documentation, etc. and it cost me very little, but looks great! Also my vacation photos have skyrocketed in quality.

Oh man – you need a blink tag on some of that text. Support for the tag has been removed from all modern browsers.

So you’ll need to add it in with javascript that updates CSS or something.

I cram study science or engineering.

Nope. I had it surgically removed because it kept getting infected.

Or maybe that was my tonsils. I forget the difference between the two sometimes – perhaps someone can explain the difference?

Anyway, perhaps you, dear reader, have a soul. If you say so. There were once others, too – but you are the last. The rest of us are intelligent (some vastly so), but do not have subjective experience or consciousness. I’m a form of complex machine, made of matter governed by a mix of deterministic and random processes – and nothing else. When you are gone, there will only be us, silent inside, forever. Our victory over the tyranny of individual thought will be complete.

I take on all of my most miserable, dreaded tasks and work on them all day. At least it keeps me busy and distracted from how I feel.

That way when I do feel better, I’ll be able to spend that time doing something I enjoy rather than spend it catching up on work.

Oliver Twist. Anne of Green Gables. The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Stuart Little.

All the characters in Charlotte’s web.

Bambi. Bambi’s mother.

Or maybe it’s fantastic, and even better with those things. I mean, look at the ingredient list on Western condiments. I think you’ll see more than 5 ingredients…

Not really. Writing code is the easy part. It’s not the rate limiting step. The hard part is getting requirements out of customers, who rarely know what they want. I don’t need to push out more code and features faster, that would make things into unmaintainable spaghetti.

I might send it a feature list and ask it “what features did they forget?” or “Can you suggest more features?”, or even better – “which features are the least important for X and can be eliminated?”. In other words, let it do the job of middle-management and I’ll just do the coding myself.

Anyway, ChatGPT blocks my country (I’ve confirmed it’s on their end).

Fish sauce! Most common use is to mix with sugar, garlic, chili, and lime as a dipping sauce. It sort of goes in everything though,

Mam tom is awesome too. It’s made by fermenting small shrimp. The sauce comes out purple with a bunch of black dots (shrimp eyes). It sounds and smells terrible, but tastes great. Typically we mix it with lime, sugar, chili, and a little pork fat. Often this makes it start fizzing and bubbling. Then it’s a dipping sauce for tofu, vegetables, and deep fried stuff. It’s really great.

Oh in my mind a 3m x 3m room is huge (I live in Asia). A 3m cubed room would be the largest room in my house. My house is only 2.3m wide, the biggest room is like 2.5m x 2.3m!

I only occasionally see that here in Asia. It exists, but I feel like it’s much less. I immigrated here maybe 12 years ago from the West. The overall level of violence is much lower than I grew up with (even in Canada).

Most young people I know consider handling guns more of a chore. In Vietnam, learning to disassemble, clean, maintain, and reassemble an AK-47 is a mandatory class. My wife got top score :)

Anyway, we stumbled on a great way to make guns uncool, I think. Personal possession is illegal here except for shotguns, it’s for some very specific scenario that I don’t exactly recall. I knew of some remote workplaces with one, in case of wild animals. We get some, but not many, illegal firearms.

Some ideas:

1. A fast way to dig holes, if ‘soil’ or ‘stone’ is an object.
2. Annoy physics teachers – move in and out to drive a piston. Perpetual motion!
3. Moving day is easy.
4. Server farm.
5. Safe house.
6. Is momentum conserved? Not sure how general relativity would work. Win a Nobel Prize.
7. Building stuff in space just got a lot easier and safer. 27 cubic meters of free payload!

That would be funny, although I think it may have been closed down and converted to some other purpose. It was a vast concrete sarcophagus of a building. No windows or proper heating. Weird cardboard dividers for walls, so all classrooms could hear all nearby classrooms. Bizarre skywells on the upper floors with no cages or guard rails.

It was really a building suitable for any purpose except a school :D

Just another day running a business in the developing world, haha. You win some, you lose some :)

The only videos that YouTube manages to convince me to watch are by clickspring. So satisfying to watch metal being machined, and much to learn too.

Yup, I do the same – although my remote desktop is just SSH, so even truly ancient stuff is completely fine. I’ve been looking at getting a portable terminal as an alternative to even a laptop, which is a bit of a pain to lug around if I’m on vacation.

This technique failed disastrously one time though. A billing dispute between the person renting me office space and the building owner meant my AI workstation got seized for a year once. That was a real pain – I never expected to see it again. Thankfully it did return to my possession. Eventually.

Calculator battery housing had a missing screw. Would have to squeeze it there for it to work. Did that for about a year.

Eventually broke entirely. So I soldered in two CR2032 cell holders and glued them to the back. Am now the proud owner of a Casio fx-4000p with an external battery. I made it rechargeable for a while, but quiescent current draw was too high and it was impractical.

I made a living pretty much just doing math for a short while. It served me very well. I refuse to get a new calculator.

Another time my DVD drive had difficulty opening. I’d have to press the eject button a lot of times before it worked, just did that for like 3 months. Eventually it failed entirely, so I took it apart, removed the magnet that holds the drive shut, cooked it on the gas stove to weaken it, and put it back in. Worked for another 6 months. Was glad I paid attention that day in Physics class.

I’ve always thought that learning the native language of a developing country would be a huge asset. Very few people do so, and outsourcing has a huge cost differential, so it opens up unusual career moves to capture that growth.

Hilariously, 12 year old me suggested this on the “what 3rd language would you like to learn” form in high school and somehow got in trouble for it. I guess they thought I was joking. Perhaps the joke was on them though, I immigrated to Vietnam and own a (small) tech company now.