Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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decay & ruin
Biosphere II
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

fun social media stuff


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Like my brownhouse:
   might as well be 1982
Sunday, February 27 2011
Yesterday Gretchen and Ray had carpooled down to the city to participate in rallies supporting Planned Parenthood against the forces that would do their best to make the onset of parenthood as unpredictable as earthquakes. On their drive back home, the car (our Honda Civic) had suddenly started making that loud noise it makes when its exhaust system fails. This has happened to me many times with different cars and it's no big deal, but they'd kind of freaked out and had given me a call from the road. Since nothing had been dragging, I'd told them it would be fine to just drive the car home.
Today I decided to get some supplies to fix the car. I didn't actually bother to look at it; to do so would have required sticking the side of my face against a pile of filthy snow. But I figured that one of the flanges had rotted off one of the pipes and I would have to replace them with the functional equivalent. On the Subaru, I successfully did this with L-brackets and a pipe clamp. So they were on my shopping list, as were various grocery staples (particularly vegan cold cuts and veggies). I also wanted to buy a brand new operational amplifier (op-amp) integrated circuit. (Oddly, there were none to salvage from among my many scrap circuit boards, some of which date to the early 1970s.) The internet has completely revolutionized my retail habits, but when I want an op-amp immediately, it might as well be 1982. So I also ducked into the Uptown Radio Shack. Actually, back in 1982 I could buy all sorts of integrated circuits, including four bit counters and sound synthesizers. These days op-amps and 555 timers are pretty much the only integrated circuits that Radio Shack stocks.

Once I'd finished my shopping and was back at the house, I tried to get this new op-amp working, but it seemed that the solderless breadboard I was using was cursed. Not only did none of the online examples I tried work, but wires kept popping out of the damn thing. [Later I would discover that many of the metal clips inside the breadboard had all worked their way out its backside, something I hadn't been able to see because of the odd way I had it cantilevered out over open air.]


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?110227

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