Liquid metal

2009-08-20 10:44 by Ian

Picked up about 11.5kg of mercury yesterday and cleaned it up. This was my procedure and pictures of the results.

Cross-filed under photography because I took lots of photos of the mercury while I was cleaning it. The pictures can’t do it justice. The stuff is beautiful.

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Why I Have Two Names

2009-08-11 22:11 by Ian

I am often asked this these days.

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More silly doodles

2009-07-05 21:58 by Ian

Stuff I drew. All idle doodles.

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Hand Replacement of large non-BGA surface-mount IC's

2009-07-05 12:12 by Ian

This is another procedure I wrote while doing camera repair. Occasionally, there was an identifiable chip that would go bad, but which replacement was considered impossible at our small shop. The alternative was replacing the entire PCB that it was mounted on, which would be an order of magnitude more expensive.

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Testing PHP_PDF.DLL on IIS6 and Win2K3

2009-07-02 08:40 by Ian

This is a component that I tested for installation on CrystalTech’s PHP4 servers (yes, we still offer PHP4). Each time a customer requests a component, we have to test it to ensure that it won’t kill the resources on the server. This is the report that I gave to the other server admins…

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My first fractal poster

2009-06-25 22:10 by Ian

Made in one sitting using Photoshop and UltraFractal. Full-size version is 5 feet wide.

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The coolant chiller

2009-06-25 19:52 by Ian

For doing distillations and extractions using solvents with low boiling points (such as diethyl ether or chloroform), the coolant in the condenser must be below the temperature of tap water.

This is my solution to the problem of reliable sub-zero cooling.

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Couldn't bring myself to work indoors today

2009-06-24 00:26 by Ian

I couldn’t bring myself to work indoors today. I setup my gear outside to determine the alcohol concentration in a co-worker’fs home made cider.

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Dice on Microfiber

2009-06-15 02:56 by Ian

This was some photography I did for my website. It was in use for more than a year. But I still like the photos. So here they are.

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Introduction to Soxhlet extractor

2009-06-13 20:49 by Ian

My extractor was delivered today, and I chose to test it by extracting essence of eucalyptus using methanol as a solvent.

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