Three Wise Men

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A while ago I decided that as a geek I need to equip myself with binary clock or a digital clock made with Nixie tubes. Until now the idea was brewing. It was almost 15 years since I designed a circuit board by myself and it was a little less time ago when I was soldering something. I had to find an already made kit that didn’t require designing the circuitry from scratch. Pretty soon I ruled out the binary clock since they can be easily obtained in any geek store. Nixie tube clock is a completely different story altogether. Tubes are nowadays relatively rare and much harder to get. After some digging and my distrust to purchase a bunch of easily shattering glass tubes on e-bay, I found tubehobby.com which offered various nixies and complete clock kits. For a relatively low price of $99 I ordered complete nixie clock kit. Kit included all the electronic parts and the Nixie tubes. There was no power supply and casing. Power supplies are easy to get and you’ll be able to find one in your local radioshack store.

Kit from tubehobby.com had basic online instructions on how to assemble it, what kind of power source is required to drive the clock and few tips about setting up everything.

Assembly was fun and memory reviving experience. I do recommend that you use sockets for integrated circuits since they are more delicate and harder to replace if you damage them with too much heat at soldering. When you buy chip sockets make sure you double check what you’re buying or you’ll end up like me. With one wrong socket and a decision about waiting one more day with the assembly. Instructions were clear and easily understandable, but you’ll need a background in electronics and circuit design if you want to make this to work. If you never held a soldering iron in your hands I recommend that you get someone to help you.

Two things that gave me a little headache during the assembly. Setting the firing voltage for tubes – there is a small potentiometer on the board and a capacitor where you need to measure the output voltage of the driver. A slight, tiny move of the potentiometer changed the value by 10V or even more, so finding that 160V was quite a task. Second problem was more of a dexterity issue. See, the tubes have 13 long and bendable pins that need to go through 13 tiny holes that are very close together. It took me about 5 minutes to insert each tube. :)

Apart from one broken separator bulb, kit from tubehobby.com was perfect. I am not sure if separator bulb was broken during transport or if I fried it when I connected the clock for the first time. Separator bulbs can be set in three different modes. They can blink once per second, then can be used as an AM/PM indicator if you use 12h clock format, they can be constantly lit or you can switch them off. Only one bulb was working for me and I found the blinking highly annoying. I turned it off and I’ll probably remove both bulbs from the circuit board sometime in the future.

Of course, you need to see the video of nixie clock in action.

As expected with every major update the stability of an operating system can become quite an issue. Sony‘s 3.00 firmware update about which you were informed previously is not an exception. Many issues plague this newly released monstrosity.

Among them some crashes of the best PS3 game called Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. There are also reports of bugs in friend list, dual shock 3 controllers losing signal, louder fans, poor wi-fi signal.

Since I am a PS3 user I can understand the rage of the other like me who updated to firmware to 3.00. Specially with the hardware quirks that presented themselves with the update. But for Sony the real problem is money. Games not running or crashing means loss of profit and bad publicity. Therefore Sony stepped up and announced a minor update called 3.01 which is available from the September, 14th via System update.

3.01 fixes some of the more pressing issues. Games will continue to run. So Sony says.

Recently BigWhale reported that PS3 prices will plunger. Subsequently old PS3 versions will lose its value due to the new, slimmed down PS3 version. Now there is some hope even for us mere mortals who own the original version of PS3.

On September, 1st you might have been surprised to find out that Sony launched its 3.00 version of PS3 firmware. Let’s look what goodies they prepared for us.

Every now and then you are able to read about new kind of batteries with higher capacity, faster recharge, new technologies, new materials used, cheaper production, and so on, and so on. However this first half of the year was really charged up with battery news.

We’ve been reading about new batteries on a monthly basis and if all those predictions come true and all those announcements turn into workable products then in the next five years our notebooks will need to recharge once a week and we’ll never have to worry about power management again.

A quick recap of some battery news so far.

Due to slow booting times users tend to keep their computers plugged in and powered up  24/7. This increases their total power usage. So, how can we help prevent higher power usage of PC‘s?

We all agree that consumers of power in computer system are components that are attached to the computers main power supply. Main power supply supplies power from the power grid. Additional devices with independent power supplies can be included with computer. I am thinking of monitor, speakers, printer and cable modem. With one word we will call all this devices “a system”. To calculate an average power usage of the system we will check an average computer system and try to calculate how much power does it use while working, while idle and while in suspended mode. Now if we could only get the characteristics data for our power supply.