With the correct tools and materials soldering can be very easy or with the wrong tools very difficult!
There are probably some great videos on soldering on YouTube, luckily it's a mature field so not much has changed!
Some random tips...
Lead solder is easier to work with, but with lead free make sure you are using the right flux and temperature.
It helps to preheat things as much as you can. You want to have a hot pad and hot lead, then add solder to that. As opposed to putting a blob of solder on the iron and trying to apply it like glue.
Too much heat can damage the board or part of course.
Use the right tips. Fatter tips can help more evenly apply heat.
If there is a lot of copper like a ground plane, it can take longer to heat.
Watch for cold joints!
Just overall think about getting the parts you want solder on hot, touch solder to it, remove heat.
The important thing with lead free is you're not looking for the color or texture when inspecting, you're looking for the shape, and absence of any tiny seam or cracks.
It's probably not gonna be 100% shiny, that's fine, it just has to wet effectively instead of just kind of hovering in a blob.
Lead free is the only thing I use unless I'm repairing some old pre rohs era thing I guess, but I generally don't encounter many of those.
Patrick McKenzie (patio11 fame) had a great blog post in credit card rewards
There is a lot that goes into it, and it is interesting how customers like me who literally never have carried interest and have to made thousands of $ in rewards over the years still make the banks money....
It's a mess, much like tip culture[1], because it just real equalized like this:
1. Merchant sells for price X
2. Credit card is invented
3. Merchant has to sell for price > X (say, 1.02 X) to cover some buyers using CC
4. Credit card offers 2-3% rewards on some goods
5. Merchant has to sell for prices even > X (say 1.04 X) to cover nearly all customers using cards. Customers who do not use the cards pay 1.04X and do not get rewards to compensate.
6. Merchant loses because they're beholden to processors, Customers lose because they're getting 2-3% of semi-currency for the cost of ~4% cash currency.
7. Processors get their profit
[1] - Employees deserve good wages for good work, tipping is just a bad algorithm to accomplish that
Credit card points/miles are an interesting topic, and I have found them to be kind of useful cyclically myself over last 20 years.
They are a way for airlines to create value out of thin air with their own fiat currency. For the average consumer the miles create less of a pure economic efficient benefit and more of a psychic benefit - funny money bucket that accumulates to defray some trip expenses. Economically they'd be best off with an outright 2% back card.
For the minority of customers who are flexible on dates/locations and willing to plan in advance - most airline/hotel programs have sweet spots at the more premium level.
I use them to fly overseas business class refundable fares at discount. It's not free, but the taxes paid + foregone $ I could have gotten with a cash-back card ends up being 2-3x economy non-refundable fare instead of the 5-7x listed cash price if I bought the business class ticket outright.
It's generally a time-vs-money thing though in that to maximize airline/hotel programs you need to pay attention to various limited time offers for signup bonuses, spending bonuses, conversion bonuses, redemption bonuses, etc. Without those it's a very uphill battle.
> It's generally a time-vs-money thing though in that to maximize airline/hotel programs
Credit card hotel booking portals are often much worse than what's available too.
For example, you might end up paying 30-100% more for a hotel booked through Chase Travel. At the very least you'll have way less selection. Even if price matching exists, you could still end up paying more.
I am traveling to Mexico next month and I do have a Chase Sapphire Preferred card (the one with the $95 annual fee). You get $100 in hotel credits per year if you book through Chase Travel.
In one of the spots I'll be at, there was (1) selection. It was $92 for 2 nights in a pretty low populated town that I'll be passing through. That hotel was rated 3.2 stars on Google.
If I use Google search or any hotel aggregator site, there were over 10 hotels available for half the price with much better ratings.
In this case it cost me about $50 extra to use the card's benefits.
Many people don't understand how rewards work when it's marketed towards your annual fee. The $100 credit doesn't offset the $95 annual fee. You pay $95 out of pocket for the fee. As soon as you book that hotel for $100 you've now paid $195 total out of pocket of which $100 gets credited back, so you're still out $95. If you instead didn't have the card and got the hotel at the cheaper rate, you'd only be out $45 or whatever you paid.
I mainly got the card because it had a really good sign up bonus, 0% international exchange fees and reasonable rental car coverage. Other cards can cover these benefits without an annual fee.
Have the same card solely for the rental car cover. And to be fair it works, had an issue and they refunded the full expense without too many hoops to jump through.
Supposedly the free Chase cards have comparable rental insurance. The main difference is Sapphire is always primary insurance, but Flex and Unlimited become primary when traveling internationally and if you happen to live in a place that requires no car in the US and you don't have insurance, it becomes primary in the US too.
Not sure what the differences are when filing claims though.
I will say this, it seems like more and more countries are starting to require Third-Party Liability (TPL) insurance and the Chase cards don't cover that so you still end up having to pay out of pocket for partial coverage (Chase for CDW, TPL from the rental agency). Some rental places don't make it easy to split these out.
> They are a way for airlines to create value out of thin air with their own fiat currency. For the average consumer the miles create less of a pure economic efficient benefit and more of a psychic benefit - funny money bucket that accumulates to defray some trip expenses. Economically they'd be best off with an outright 2% back card.
“Saving” airline miles is definitely suboptimal, like you said, getting 2% cash back and redeeming it immediately is the optimal strategy. Money is fungible and cash depreciates.
Plus, the “deals” you have access to with airline miles are not slanted in your favor.
At least cash has the option of earning interest in a bank account, or getting invested in other instruments.
Miles can always be devalued by the airline. Some airlines like Singapore, Qatar, and United, even practise stealth devaluation by controlling the number of cheap "saver" seats released.
> For the minority of customers who are flexible on dates/locations and willing to plan in advance - most airline/hotel programs have sweet spots at the more premium level.
What does this mean? I'm not clear what the sweet spot is - are you talking about buying points/miles/etc outright with cash rather than earning them as credit card rewards? Everything I've read is that these are almost always bad deals.
It means that the vast majority of redemptions are a bad deal, but every program has gaps in their earn/burn charts that lead to good values.
There is no one-size-fits-all answer.
If you do not have time to look into it, plan trips 6-12 months in advance, or have flexibility (will go anywhere thats a deal), then they aren't worth it.
I actually had a positive, although a bit weird, experience with Microsoft. First, I got a response 3 months after I applied to schedule an interview! I figured it was due to the holidays. After the interview the recruiter called me personally and gave me the bad news that I didn’t get the job, but actually gave me specific feedback on where I did well and poorly on the interview. I was shocked! I think it’s the only time I’ve ever received non generic feedback.
I’ve heard a lot of bad experiences too, so unfortunately I think I was an exception!
I had a project miniaturizing nasa tech for detecting hypoxia with o2 and CO2 sensors. It used a phosphorescent dye that changed a delay flash (ie you blinked a light, the dye would absorbed and blink back after a delay) based on temp and o2.
CO2 was measured with infrared but water also absorbed it, so you need to heat things up enough to not have water. It can be small, but not watch small.
> CO2 was measured with infrared but water also absorbed it, so you need to heat things up enough to not have water. It can be small, but not watch small.
Can't you just measure CO2 "naively"; but then also, separately, measure rH; and then use the rH value to grab a research-calibrated LUT to pass the raw CO2 value through?
(I presume this is why all the little standalone CO2-sensor boxes you can buy also have rH displays. They're measuring it anyway to normalize the CO2 value, so they may as well make it a feature and display it.)
Yes, I think in that way it is dumb. But in another way I think it could be justified as a way to try and blaze some new trails and see what's possible by having users not worry about cost in the beginning.
Sure most token burning ends up being a waste but some ideas pan out?
Not disagreeing but it's another way of looking at it IMO
Its interesting, I think people sometimes think there is some binary existence of furniture sometimes! What's nice about todays modern economy is that there is a whole spectrum of tables I can purchase.
I can get a ultra cheap mdf Walmart table, a slightly less cheap Ikea table, maybe a midrange crate and barrel table, or a very expensive hard wood table from the local furniture store. Here in the Midwest we even have hand made Amish furniture available. So buy what you want!
I've found llms themselves get way more long winded in their responses once context starts to fill up. Fortunately it's not impolite to tell Claude to be more concise!
Right now most of my day is spent thinking about what to build next. If ai is gone, a large chunk will go back to reading and writing code again!
So pretty much the same path but much slower