Maybe the first time I learned about getting draft beer to go was at Jeb’s birthday party last year when Nicole brought her dad a beer growler from a store in Athens that fills up jugs of beer to take with you. Later on at a brew pub in Wilmington, NC. A person brought in a jug to be filled from the tap. They had some kind of special bottle washing machine that looked pretty neat. They had a really cute bartender in shorts and a tank top who seemed to have a tattoo that started on her shoulder and went down to her thigh . . . well, I digress. They had a few different beers on tap that they made themselves. I wound up with a Belgian Tripel, which I picked because I like Belgian wheat beers. All the beers came in glasses specifically meant for that particular beer, but what I didn’t realize is the Tripel is a very potent beer (9.3% alcohol instead of the usual 5.5%) and they serve it in a tiny little glass. It was good though. My friends got manlier glasses of beer after getting their wives to let them come to the brewery with me instead of shopping.
WordPress HTML Is Case Sensitive
Yesterday I posted a blog entry of a flashlight review I wrote at BudgetLightForum. BLF has an editing tool that is like a little word processor with toolbar buttons, but you can also view the HTML it is creating and edit that if you really need to. It uses some unnecessarily complicated HTML tags (SPAN tags, particularly), so when I bring everything over, I edit the HTML by doing a bunch of find and replace commands to get rid of the funky tags. When I am done, the HTML is pretty clean and then I can cut and paste the HTML into WordPress using its HTML editing instead of its Visual editing mode.
One thing I really don’t like about that whole WordPress Visual/HTML editing thing is if you have certain tags that you put into a blog entry, they will be eliminated if you go to Visual mode. Because WordPress remembers the last editing mode you were in, sometimes if you go to edit an entry, it will default to Visual mode and the tags will disappear.
Tank007 E09 Review
Reviewer’s Overall Rating: 5 out of 5
Summary:
| Battery: | AAA or 10440 |
| Switch: | Twisty |
| Modes: | H-M-L |
| LED Type: | Cree XP-E |
| Lens: | Glass |
| Tailstands: | Yes |
| Price Paid: | $11.69 |
| From: | DinoDirect |
| Date Ordered: | 10 Mar 2012 |
Pros:
- Very nice build quality
- Bright!
- 3 modes
- Better throw than iTP A3
- Has memory (sort of)
Cons:
- Short runtime on High
- PWM
- Mode order is H-M-L
- Takes 2-3 seconds for memory to set
- No clip
Temperature Probe
I have a “hobby charger” to charge my lithium-ion batteries for flashlights. Hobby chargers are meant for people who use remote control airplanes and things like that to charge the battery packs. They run off of 12 volts DC, like a car battery so you can take them in the field and charge up. They don’t come with a battery holder, just clips that you might attach to a battery pack which has a number of different cells in it. The charger can charge packs like that and can be configured for as many cells and whatever current you want. My lithium-ion batteries are all single cell, but the hobby charger follows the best charging routine for lithium ion batteries: it applies a constant current that you specify until the pack reaches its maximum voltage (usually 4.2 volts for a single cell), then holds that constant voltage and lets the current taper off until the battery is full. This is called CC/CV.
Anyway, one of the features of this hobby charger is that it can monitor the temperature of the battery. Some battery packs can get very hot while charging so, in addition to monitoring the voltage, current, time, and polarity, the charger can also make sure the temperature doesn’t get too high. Normally this isn’t a problem because I’m not charging at real high currents, but I thought it might be good to get a temperature probe anyway since the charger didn’t come with one. So I look it up where to get one and, because these are hobby people, they say build your own. All you need is an LM35, some wire and futaba plug that goes into the charger.
I looked up LM35 and it is a 3-prong electronic component like a capacitor or resistor. You apply 4-30 volts of power and the LM35 will output a voltage that tells you the temperature in degrees Celsius. A voltage of 0.300V is 30 degrees Celsius. It’s that simple. The range is -55 to 150 degrees, so it will even give you a negative output if the temperature is below freezing. What a neat thing. I found a place on eBay selling them for 99 cents with free shipping, so I had to order one. It is coming from Thailand, so it will be a while before I get it.
Then I went looking for a futaba plug and it wasn’t quite as simple, but I did find that you can actually just buy a pre-made temperature probe for $2.60, but it is currently out of stock, so I will get one later.
Archeology Dig
Today I got to go visit an archeology dig that is going on at a project I used to manage. The new road is going to go through an area where artifacts were thought to be located. It was interesting, but they aren’t finding as much stuff as they thought they would. Some archeologists find some really neat stuff, but this type of stuff is more about pottery shards and arrowheads, if they are lucky. In this case, they found the stem of an arrowhead. It is this tiny little piece of slate, but it seems intentionally shaped.
