BrokeBit :(

I can't get my fitbit to charge at all. Every once in a while I can fiddle with it and get it to light up. Seems like I've had it for four years now. It doesn't hold a charge as long but it worked until today. Nothing. So I took it apart.

See the black wire on the right? It looks like it used to connect to the little solder blob up to the left of the end of it. The black rectangle with the orange/yellow tape on the end is the battery. It's just floating around in the case not really stuck to anything but sort of restrained by the ribbon cable that goes around to the electronics on the other side of the fitbit.

I've never soldered anything this small... but I'll give it a try.


Update:

Success!!!

100 pF

I finally took a few hours and put together my JYE Tech Capacitance Meter Kit. It was a pretty simple build. Some folks on Amazon complained about the instructions but things seemed to go pretty straightforward for me.

 

It basically seems to be a version of this ELM-ChaN circuit. I tested it out on a few old capacitors I can still read the markings on and it seems to work just fine. Now I can check out some of those that I can't read :)

Next step: Mount it in a mint tin or some other small metal enclosure.

Find from Tiki Isle

Found this guy at Goodwill today. It's a candle holder with the remnants of a red-orange candle in the top. Pretty rough black paint (not a glaze) but seems to be in decent condition overall. 

I wasn't able to find a lot of information on Tiki Isle Enterprises in Longwood though I could find some filings from them in 1972. They made a few different candle holders and masks.

The sticker also uses the abbreviation "FLA." instead of "FL" but it also includes a zip code. Zip codes started being used in 1963 and at the same time the state abbreviations were standardized to two letters to make more room for the zip codes. I'm going to guess this one is from the early 1970's.

Modem? What's that?

Modems...

Before the internet was just nuts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayes_Microcomputer_Products

Mazda doesn't like umlauts.

Happy Halloween!

A Little Optimistic

I'm pretty impressed with the fuel economy of the Mazda3. The drive in to work today came in at almost 40 MPG (I lost a little in the parking deck.)

I'm sure the computer is a little on the optimistic side so I'll have to see how things do over a few tanks.  It's quite an improvement over the 10-year-old Mini though.

Update 2013-09-26:
Filled up last night and the average was 33 MPG overall for about 2 weeks. I'm not sure how accurate it is as I don't really know how "full" the tank was when I got it. It certainly couldn't be worse though.

Illogical

Tikidance

iStopMotion for the iPad is on sale for $0.99. I couldn't resist.

Appleton Neckbreaker

I finally managed to snag one of Tiki Farm's creations for Appleton Estates. There have been a few of these over the years and you'll occasionally see one on eBay. This particular design is by lowbrow artist Von Franco.

All 100 of these sold out in 6-7 minutes from what I could tell.  I got #20.

Hulala Time

I was looking for something new to play that wasn't electronic and didn't have a ton of knobs to mess with. I listen to exotica and Hawaiian music a good bit so why not a ukulele?

I've done some online research on and off for a while and finally narrowed things down to a concert size ukulele in the $100 range (Will I ever figure it out? Will I stick with it? I really don't want to spend more.). I did some poking around to find somewhere local to deal with as I didn't want to just order something mail order and get something that's out of whack, unplayable, and me too confused to understand that it was the problem instead of me. Lo and behold I discovered Mike at Uke Republic over in Austell and ended up with a Hulala Ocean Dance series concert ukulele.

It's got hula dancers on it. Could I ask for more? (Well actually a tiki would have been better and there are ones out there with tikis on them but they either didn't get very good reviews, were custom jobs, or simply out of my price range.

I also picked up a little clip-on chromatic tuner so I retune it every time the G string goes flat... which right now is about every time you aren't looking at it. Hoping that settles down a bit as the strings stretch out a bit.

I learned two chords tonight. C and F. I played some other ones but those didn't graduate to "learned" yet. This whole chord fingering thing is unnatural and weird. It's going to take some adjustment.