Eggs

Preface: We’re not allowed to have heating elements in our room. Or microwaves. Or heat sources except hair dryers and irons of various sorts.

Oops: Roomie, who is fantabulous, has a tea boiler. I have a box of eggs.

Mad Science: Tea is basically hot water, right? Heat water, drop in egg, have hard boiled egg for [meal].

Ending well: Of course not. The tea boiler has no controls on it other than the plug. No timer, nor temperature.

Conclusion: It takes slightly longer than 10 minutes to achieve a hard boiled egg, dropping them in is a bad idea- one gets egg drop soup, not a hard boiled egg, and tongs are really useful.

I do not own tongs. Or a spoon- had to borrow Roomie’s, who, unlike me, is prepared to live in real life.

The tea boiler is kinda like a pitcher with a heating element. This is the first egg, surround by egg dropped soup.

The instructions said to let them cool in water. Doing so.

This is the first one again. It didn’t cook completely, but was firm enough to be considered done and it was delicious.

…yep

Boots

I got my combat boots a couple of years ago and have been wearing them all the time since. The heels have taken a bit of wear but they’re still in good condition. Now that I’m in college, my non-sequential classes are a minimum of 1/3 of a mile away… I’m walking about 2-3 miles in a day right now. I got a skateboard, so that’l reduce the wear, but it’ll still be a lot of steps.

Here’s them now, and at the end of this year, I will post another picture of them.

Skull Candy Headphones

I picked up a pair of nice-but-broken Skullcandy headphones from a friend. Symptoms- right side doesn’t work. Wiggling the cables doesn’t help.

Obvious solution: Take the lid off! And so I did. The wires tested continuous from the ring, through the speaker, and to the end of the cable from the shell. There was a resistance (of about 30 ohms? If I recall correctly.) across the speaker, indicating that it was still functional, not just passing current. I resoldered the wires to the pads because it looked like the original joints were all cold soldered, which makes for a poor connection.That did not fix the fault, instead isolating he faultto three feet of cable.

Wires always break at the connectors. That’s where they bend. The easiest connector to get to is by the plug. Taking the plug apart revealed nothing useful. More continuity testing revealed that the break was in the actual wire. Cut the wire back and inch, and it works. Reassemble everything in reverse order, with heat shrink tubing, and tada, working headphones.

All pictures are preoperation.

Here we’ve got the pads where the wires connect to the speakers. The blue wire has the best connection of the four because the other three are cold solder joints or have resin caked around where the wire exits the solder, another sign of a bad joint.

This is the inside of the plug. It looks like they filled it with hot melt glue and jammed the stress relief on over it. Crude, and not much better than what I did. I cut the glue off to get to the plug so I could resolder the wires to it.

The wires. The set on the right are all broken. If you look carefully, they are all missing wires from their left half- headphone cables are usually composed of multistrand wires with insulation that burns off when soldered. The left set is perfectly fine. Here, the yellow ones are from the shell/power, red is from the ring, and blue is from the tip of the plug.