Month: January 2022

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Internet Radio

A while ago my wife surprised me with an old fashioned radio. It’s an Emerson 805 Series B model which was available in the 1950s. The radio does not work anymore, although all its guts were still intact, tubes and all. I decided to turn the radio into a working internet radio, and hoping to keep functionality of the tuning dial and power switch. 

So far, all I’ve managed to do is take the radio apart. A lot of interesting components inside, but for my purposes I will only keep the plastic enclosure and tuning and power knobs. The back needs to be recreated, which I will do with the laser cutter, as well as inner speaker lining. Not sure what I will use for that, but it can be attached to a lasercut support structure. 

For the electronics, I will initially be following a guide from Instructables – this one I found from _Marcel_ which looks very close to what I’d like to accomplish. In addition to new electronics, I’m also going to clean and repaint the enclosure and knobs, unsure of the color scheme right now, but I will want to keep a retro look to the radio. All for now, a few photos of the radio below.

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COVID Testing

A new addition to this school year has been the weekly COVID testing. The school has tried to break up testing into groups for each period of the day to minimize wasted class time, however, teachers often fail to adhere to their specified time, and when this happens it causes a backup in the line, which leads to long waits for students and faculty to get their testing done.

Especially during this time of year, where COVID cases are on the rise post holidays and with the Omicron variant, the school has opted for individual testing instead of their normal pooled testing. I understand the decision, it’s a quicker way to find out who has tested positive and to keep those people out of the building. On the other hand, it can take a lot of time away from students during the school day. Luckily for my group of students today, the three time slots we had schedule to do testing worked out perfectly, zero waiting in lines, and we were back in the classroom working after only a few minutes.

I don’t see an end to COVID testing this school year, and have a feeling it will remain in place in some form at the beginning of the 22-23 school year as well.

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Sunday Cleaning

With the Premier League being on a hiatus due to the FA Cup this weekend, I took the time normally spent watching soccer to clean up my office. I worked out in the morning and then got to work organizing and cleaning. It’s been a while since I last cleaned the office, so there were a lot of things that needed to get done. Mainly a lot of airplane study material that I no longer needed could be trashed. Additionally, I realized there is the need to get some organizational storage strategies for all the different types of items I’ve accrued, hardware for electrical, screws, nuts, bolts, wire, velcro, tools, etc.

Spent several hours in my room downstairs, and the mini split unit did a good job of keeping the room cozy, since it isn’t attached to our baseboard heating system. Did not finish my cleaning, but it was a good start. Will continue next weekend as well. Ordered dinner from Istanbul Diner Cafe and was in bed reading by 9pm.

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Toothbrush Update

A few days ago I wrote about how my wife’s Philips Sonicare electric toothbrush failed. The brush still turned on, so the battery was not an issue. After taking it apart I was able to discover it was a mechanical fault, a metal piece had sheared off making it so the head would no longer vibrate. 

I was able to locate a new piece on Ebay to replace the broken hardware and it was an easy install to replace the part. The toothbrush is now functioning properly again, and a $10 part has saved us $100+ dollars on replacing the electric toothbrush. 

A few pics of the replacement part and the broken part below. In the first picture on the right you can see the old part with the sheared off piece. The middle image shows the sheared off part with a metal attachment. A screw (not shown) goes through the attachment piece and through a part connected to the brush mechanism, and then screws into the captive nut on the sheared off part (you can see the bottom of the captive nut sticking out of this piece. The photo on the left shows the not tip assembly purchased from Ebay. You simply need to unscrew and then attach to the vibrating mechanism on the toothbrush. 

We may not be able to fix everything, but we should endeavor to fix what we can rather than throwing something away.

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Snow Day

We learned towards the end of the school day on Thursday that school on Friday would be cancelled due to inclement weather. It’s a funny thing, most teachers I know despise snow days, for they see it as taking away from their summer vacation (snow days are added on at the end of the year as meaningless half days of school). Students, on the other hand, rejoiced as they heard the news.

I spent the early part of the snow day shoveling out my car and our front yard. The snow was light and fluffy, and fairly easy to move around. We are fortunate to have a small garden area in the front of our house which serves as a place to dump snow from the sidewalk and our cars – not all houses on our street have such a high end luxury, and end up stacking snow between cars on the street. After about 45 minutes of shoveling, we had cleared everything pretty well, and the snow that fell after was not very substantial.

The rest of the day was spent working in my office and then some couch time with the chihuahuas. An early start to the weekend.