Preparation of bromoethane
2010-03-06 17:37 by Ian
This is an attempt to brominate a primary alcohol.
Comment [2]
Concentrating sulfuric acid (chiller test)
2010-03-06 14:34 by Ian
In my area, sulfuric acid can be purchased at automotive supply stores as battery electrolyte. This acid is useful as it stands, but higher concentrations are frequently required. This is the operation that was used to test the thermal load capacity of the coolant chiller.
Extraction of ibuprofen from Advil tablets
2010-02-02 03:02 by Ian
After cleaning out a medicine cabinet in my house, I found a bottle of Advil tablets that was expired in 2007. As long as I was going to discard them, I decided to satisfy a curiosity about how they were constructed. This is my first attempt at isolation of ibuprofen from Advil gel-tabs.
Take the Time
2010-01-08 19:21 by Ian
Lyrics to an amazing Dream Theater song.
An accessible introduction to PHP optimization
2009-09-07 22:09 by Ian
This was a ticket that I had from a customer who wanted us to increase the upper-limit on PHP script execution because his crappy script wouldn’t finish in time before our server-wide limit shut down his PHP process.
I’m posting it with the hope that it will be of help to someone new to PHP trying to write a cleaner script.
Mercury distillation
2009-08-26 20:30 by Ian
These are my lab notes and photos for the mercury distillation.
Comment [4]
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.
Comment [2]
Why I Have Two Names
2009-08-11 22:11 by Ian
I am often asked this these days.
More silly doodles
2009-07-05 21:58 by Ian
Stuff I drew. All idle doodles.
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.