Also, if you plan to start soldering more regularly, you might want to get some desoldering wick and a desoldering pump, check some tutorials, and practice on some scrap parts first.
I’m no sponsor or shill for these items, just a casual stroll through the bay for suggestions…
https://www.ebay.com/itm/322171797486
Mechanical keyboard don’t have super thick heavy duty power traces, so basically any cheap $25 dollar 30 watt iron from Lowe’s or other hardware store should do the trick for your needs.
When looking for solder, look for flux core or rosin core solder, practically all electronics grade solder is hollow and has flux/rosin already inside the solder.
For larger projects where you’re dealing with large power traces and/or large wires, you might want to invest in a more professional temperature adjustable soldering station, and additional flux.
What old flux I’ve been using (I admit I haven’t done all that much soldering in years after I quit that job, chemicals aren’t exactly healthy yo)…
NC-559-ASM-TPF(UV)
But hey, if you want some cheap flux, just go cut some bark off of a pine tree and let the sap run for a day or two. The original soldering flux was pine sap.
Good luck fully cleaning that shit off though, pine sap is super sticky…
Use flux, pre-tin your soldering tip and the stuff you’re planning to solder before you actually solder things together, rubbing alcohol and Q-Tips to clean residual flux off afterwards.
Yes that’s an extremely simplified explanation, but for real, cleanliness is of utmost importance. When solder is clean and has flux, it flows almost like mercury when hot.
Also, you don’t want the iron too cold or too hot. I’ve found temperature ranges between 370⁰C to 420⁰C typically best, lower temperature for thin data line traces, higher temps for large ground plane or power traces.
If I had to spot a guess, he was taking advantage of his savings account building interest, he had me and at least 2 other employees doing this. Walmart would charge $6 for the check processing fees, so…
(1500 - 6) * 3 employees = $4482, every week.
I think he was taking advantage of the delay in Walmart’s check verification and racking up his interest buildup on his savings, then turning around and paying back the original amount prior to interest accumulation.
Something like that anyways, that’s the loose understanding I came away with.
Edit: Damn good question though, if someone has a better explanation, by all means please share and educate us…
A former computer repair employer of mine apparently had us running what they call a ‘check racing scam’ back around 2014. I didn’t fully understand the nature of the scam back then, but I knew it seemed really fishy.
He’d write on the memo line ‘loan to shareholder’, though he wasn’t on the stock market and we most definitely weren’t shareholders.
When 2015 came, I was expecting my tax documents so I could file and get my tax returns in a timely manner, which should be given to employees in January and are due with the IRS by April 15th, at least here in the USA.
But no, even by April 15th, we still didn’t have our tax documents. It was on that very day I quit, and I reported everything to his banker, his tax people, and Walmart, where he had us cashing those checks.
Needless to say, those organizations were not happy with my former employer. That’s also how I learned what they call that sort of scam, a check racing scam.
He’d print out and have us cash checks in the amount of $1500 at Walmart, then have us bring the cash back to him and he’d go to his bank and deposit the money into his own account. Apparently Walmart doesn’t bother verifying the checks for another 2 days or so if the amount doesn’t exceed $1500.
As I reported his fraud to the different companies involved, I made it clear with them that any check in the amount of $1500 was part of his scam, but the lesser checks around ~$400 to $550 or so were my legit paychecks.
His tax people told me that what I reported answered a lot of questions they had. His banker said he didn’t have the privilege to share the employer’s banking data with me, to which I responded that I wasn’t asking any questions, I was only there to report (with evidence in hand).
I forget what Walmart told me, but their money center apparently passed the info up the chain of command. And then I just walked, and took my own personal toolkit with me.
I was one of the best employees he ever had, nobody else was worth a shit at soldering or had the knowledge and ability to get rid of rootkit infections.
He had 5 shops open when I quit. Within 2 years, they shut all of them down. Last I heard through the grapevine was that he was planning on opening a restaurant somewhere.
Lesson: If you’re running a tech shop, don’t fuck with the hardware and data recovery specialist, we do keep backups.
As a final note, once I got my ‘tax papers’, it was in October, and it was just a fucking PostIt note with how much I earned the previous year.
Edit: Yes, I’d still do that again to this day, if I had to. I despise scammers, and I especially despise scamming employers that make their employees part of the scam as part of their terms of employment.
Hey, there actually are NTFS drivers out there for MS-DOS/Win3.11, I’ve used that for data recovery when neither Windows NT nor Linux could access the partition.
Very little surprises me anymore, and I have no idea what all tricks FreeDOS and ReactOS have up their sleeves.
Gotcha, no worries 👍
Future goal, emulate Linux (any version that might work) under KolibriOS.
I think that’s actually doable, to some extent… 🤷♂️
I’m not even sure if this is satire or not, but is that even doable? I mean I’ve tested both FreeDOS and ReactOS before, but do they play well together somehow?
Side note, I’ve also tried KolibriOS before, amazing project for its tiny size, still have it on physical floppy disk right now even.
You’re right, we also need a CP/M terminal running on top of the Minix kernel…
We need a healthy mashup OS between TinyCore, KolibriOS, ReactOS, and TempleOS, then I’ll be happy.
Things were different back then. QBasic was free yo, I couldn’t afford $200 or whatever for paid development software. Besides, I was just starting to learn anyways.
Later on I did end up finding a pirated copy of the full QuickBasic 4.5 at least, which allowed more RAM usage for my programs.
Edit: In a parallel universe, if I could have afforded it, I might have otherwise started with Borland Delphi.
I started from the ground up in December 1998 with a bare wireframe engine, largely inspired from a demo wireframe engine from another developer. I was 17 years old then so it was basically my after school project, not a school assignment, but my teachers were impressed.
I didn’t quite just copy/paste his code though, I carefully read over his code and comments to the point that I understood how it all worked, and rewrote a much cleaner wireframe engine of my own that supported colored lines and even loading from files, which the original demo didn’t support.
Later on I came across another demo, from the same developer I think, that demonstrated rendering solid triangle shaded 3D models. Again, I read over everything and rewrote everything from the ground up, largely looking to optimize the rendering technique for the highest number of polygons per second, and of course to be able to load different models from file.
Then I just started having a bit of fun with the polygon rendering, starting with an optimized integer based greyscale gouraud shading algorithm, which ran way faster than any similar demos I could find at the time. Note that this was all CPU driven, no fancy GPU at the time, the 3Dfx Voodoo was still a pretty new thing I couldn’t afford…
Then I got the idea of trying to bring color to the project via error diffusion, since I was basically limited to 320x200x256 color display mode, unless I wanted to run a high end video mode at a snail’s pace LOL! Error diffusion is slow though, so how did I speed that up?
Well, I did away with the gouraud shading and went back to treating each polygon as a single solid RGB color, shaded using the Lambert’s Law technique. To speed up the error diffusion process, I’d only process 8 pixels into the diffusion algorithm, then as the polygon rendered, it would just pick randomly from that 8 pixel buffer.
Since I was programming in QuickBasic, arrays were limited to 64KB each, meaning that memory was very tight, and I actually had to allocate two arrays for the Z Buffer, one for the top half of the screen and another for the bottom half.
The inspiration for the camera tracking came from a rather unexpected source, a simple mouse string toy demo of all things LOL! I realized that if I used just one segment of that string algorithm, I could link the viewing angle to follow a point in the model, or with some creative adjustments, basically follow any arbitrary point.
I also made a side project crude CAD scripting thing of sorts, mainly meant to render a torus or sections of a torus with whatever dimensions I wanted. With the right inputs, that also allowed me to easily generate spheres, cylinders, cones and tubes.
I think I finished the original wireframe engine within just a couple or few days, but the other versions that had filled in polygons probably took me a week to start with, and the more advanced techniques probably took me around 2 months each, all in my spare time of course.
I didn’t really have any final product in mind, I was just experimenting and learning ya know. When 3D GPUs started becoming a big and common thing, I didn’t see much future for my little project, but I sure did learn a lot!
The best I’ve got is a brown dog. He’s not much bigger than a large cat though, does he count?
His name is Brownie…
Back in 2001, I wrote my own 3D graphics engine, down to the individual pixel rendering, shading, camera tracking, Z buffer, hell even error diffusion dithering for 256 color palettes.
And I still don’t know half the terms you just used.
I do know points, polygons, vectors, normals, roll, pitch, yaw, Lambert’s Law shading, error diffusion feedback…
And my Calculus 2 teacher admired my works and told me I had the understanding of a Calculus 4 student.
Did your keyboard have a stroke? Haha, I more or less get you though.
Tell them “I need this job because working 40 hours a week at the sperm bank is very exhausting”
You do have a point, but most phones have one edge that doesn’t have any buttons, and most people have their phone in a case, which assuming it’s a proper fitting case, usually cancels out that camera bump issue and makes it sit properly flat on a table.
Thank you for caring. If you need to or just feel it’s best, there are all sorts of safe live animal traps out there, if you need it or any more coons relocated…
That’s actually a pretty good question.
With no exact answer, I do think this will at least in part depend on relative comparison to how exactly level your floor/ceiling/counter/table or other frame of reference is, which itself might not be perfect.
Side note, basically every smart phone out there has orientation sensors, so it should be just as easy as downloading a Bubble Level app from the app store.
I just dug a bit deeper looking into it, apparently it falls under the category of fake check overpayment scam…
https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/how-spot-avoid-report-fake-check-scams
The boss was using checks from QuickBooks, but was not using their software. He had one of the employees make him a template spreadsheet to line up the fields on the check for his printer.
Whatever he was doing exactly I’m not 100% sure, but he was definitely cooking the books all the way around.