I hope you’ve been having fun too. For introverts who aren’t working much, like me, this time is awesome. I know, some things are crappy out there, and the economy will take a long time to get better, but in the meantime I’m not worrying about that.
I always have a few hobbies going at any given time – the things I’m doing when not gaming or hanging out with Jill & Alice. Here’s some things I worked on just today!
Indoor Archery
This poor box has been turned over a few times, but it’s the third target this year I’ve shot so many arrows into that it breaks in pieces. Fortunately our local dump is full of boxes and old carpet and stuff, so it’s cheap to make more targets.
This week I’ve been researching nocks for greater speed. Regular nocks are my current limiting factor (I think). I also ordered a new bow, a 40 pound horsebow. Can’t wait!
I also repaired a lot of arrows this week. I taped up the fletchings where they take the most abuse, and installed some pin nock adapters (I break nocks almost every day speed shooting).
This is a really fun hobby because I just keep my bow strung up and shoot whenever I’m walking around the room, like five minutes at a time.
Electronics
This past month I’ve been working on (and repairing) a bunch of lights for the kitchen. They are controlled by a motion sensor and go off automatically when no one is nearby for five minutes. I did all the wiring and cabinet hole drilling, and built the circuit in a little box above the sink. It worked great but I had a couple loose solder joints lately. Fixed the last one today, I hope.
Here’s how it looks installed again. Each set of wires goes to a different LED strip underneath a cabinet. It’s a bit messy but we don’t use that cabinet much. This week, with the help of my friend Torsten (a real electrical engineer) I wired up the power supply to AC. I was careful, but scared, since this was my first foray into anything AC related (normally I work with only DC).
Altogether the circuit draws about 8A, which is why I used two power Mosfets in parallel with heat sinks! Here’s how it looks working – no more dim kitchen! The black wire on the left is all you can see of the circuit.
On the left in the back is the new wine we bottled yesterday! And the cocktail in the wine glass is actually ant poison made of sugar and Borax. No idea why Jill used that glass 🙂
Greek
Just for fun, today I learned some Greek. I know, a little Greek can be dangerous 🙂 But lately I’ve found myself looking up verses with Strong’s a lot, and got curious about the alphabet and decided to learn a bit. I don’t think I’ll be a very good scholar, but I had fun making my own chart with actual pen and paper.
Yep, AC can kill you. It’s rare for someone to actually die, but you can get very hurt easily by just touching the wrong thing or being careless.
A nock is the thing on the arrow that attaches to the bowstring.
That is really neat about the lights, Ben: it looks so much brighter under there! I don’t know what a nock is, so I wasn’t able to understand the bow and arrow references. What scares you about AC? The amount of power going through it?