Note Taking for Work Projects

I tend to struggle with bouncing from one extreme to the next with note taking. Either I go for the most organized, amazing, system that is really difficult to implement, or I go to the opposite extreme and take no notes. I also have a really bad memory, so I’ll often make a super-amazing note taking system and then just forget about it totally after a few months. So here is a good compromise that seems to work really well.

I have a “Projects” folder on my laptop, and inside I make a subfolder for each project.

Projects
`->2024_02_04_current_calibrator
`->2023_08_23_radio_tuner
`->2023_07_22_electronic_thing

All the files for a project go inside of these folders. And the date at the beginning is just the start date of the project, so I can easily sort by most recent projects.

Inside each project folder I put a simple LibreOffice word document. Then I just make entries in the word document with the date, and any notes I need to take. I settled on word documents because you can put text, images, and even hyperlinks to other documents in them.

This seems to work the best for me, and when someone says “Hey Hunter, can you tell me why you did this weird thing on this project from two years ago?” I can go to that project’s folder, and open up the word document and figure it out.

Things I’ve tried that I gave up on

  • TiddlyWiki (I unexpectedly lost my work a few times)
  • Org Mode on Emacs (Really hard to just copy paste images in)
  • Plain .txt files (No images)
  • Having a daily log, making a new word document for every day I work. Then using a script to search through them for any keywords (I could never remember which date I did a project on, and odtgrep() needs to have good keywords to work)
134 # search open document texts                                               
 135 function odtgrep(){                                                        
 136     term="$1"                                                              
 137     for file in $(find . -name '*.odt'); do                                
 138         unzip -p "$file" content.xml | tidy -q -xml 2> /dev/null | grep "$\
     term";                                                                     
 139         if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then                                              
 140             echo $file;                                                    
 141         fi;                                                                
 142     done                                                                   
 143 }   

Now the only thing I need to decide on is do I put the most recent entry of my notes at the bottom of the word document, or the top? I’m leaning toward putting it at the top like:

Project Notes
  March 12, 2024
    (Lots of notes)
  March 8, 2024
    (Lots more notes)

The Music of the Protons

Paul Horowitz performing the nuclear procession experiment.

I just stumbled across this gem of an old video from MIT. It was made between 1983 and 1984, and stars Sidney Coleman, Ed Purcell, Paul Horowitz, and Isaac Silvera.

I’m a huge fan of Paul Horowitz, his Art of Electronics books have taught me much of what I know about electrical engineering. There isn’t a lot of info about him online, he seems to mainly keep to himself despite being a celebrity among electronics nerds.

The experiment they are performing is described in more detail at the bottom of this page: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Nuclear/nmr.html

A large magnetic field is applied to a sample of hexane (a straight chain hydrocarbon with 6 carbon atoms and 14 hydrogen atoms) which causes 1 in $latex 10^{7}$ of the protons to align with this strong magnetic field. Once the field is turned off, the protons precess around the earth’s magnetic field. They do this at the Larmor frequency of approximately 2-3kHz (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_field_NMR).

Dusting off my Radio Telescope

Got out my little radio telescope that I built but never used.

I’m using a raspberry pi 4 now. For testing, using RealVNC is very nice. It let’s you view the desktop remotely. Eventually I’ll probably want automated collection/pointing/recording data for which a Python script would be best. But for now just logging in with RealVNC works well.

To install the rtl-sdr stuff, it is actually really easy. I started building from source, then realized you just need to do $ sudo apt-get install rtl-sdr

pi@raspberrypi-tx:~ $ rtl_test
Found 1 device(s):
Using device 0: Generic RTL2832U OEM
usb_open error -3
Please fix the device permissions, e.g. by installing the udev rules file rtl-sdr.rules
Failed to open rtlsdr device #0.

Likewise to install GQRX you can just just go to add/remove software and search for it.

You can search packages by name with

pi@raspberrypi-tx:~ $ apt-cache search gqrx
gqrx-sdr – Software defined radio receiver

The driver from Adafruit has changed for the accelerometer. I’m still using the old depreciated one.

I installed Cheese, then could hook up a USB webcam to verify the dish pointing.

Would be cool to allow other people access, need to figure out a safe way to do that. VPN?

Documentation for the Bridgeport Series 1 Bridgeport Tool Changer (BTC-1) Machining Center

I recently purchased a huge old cnc milling machine. It is from circa 1980, and the person I bought it from did a retrofit on it to use LinuxCNC. But finding any documentation about this mill has been almost impossible.

Here is an album with pictures of my BTC-1: https://photos.app.goo.gl/gXBEVYJNcvcbrvvM7

However, someone who has two of these machines was kind enough to send me images of some documentation. I’ve posted it below in case someone else has one of these machines.

Here is another set of documents.

Bauch & Lomb 7×35 Binocular Repair

Click on this image gallery to follow along with the exciting repair saga. I bought these old binoculars for $12 years ago. One of the eyepiece double lenses had become impossible to see through. It was held together with Canada Balsam that had yellowed, and I took it apart by placing it in boiling water for a few minutes then sliding the two pieces apart. I almost gave up and threw the binoculars away, but then on a whim I bought a bottle of Norland optical adhesive #63 from Edmund optics for like $35 to glue the two halves of the lens back together. With that much money invested, I now felt like I HAD to get these things working again. Everything went smoothly, except losing some of the tiny set screws, and forgetting which side of the lenses was front and back (found out yes this does matter). Put it back together and everything looked terrible, very distorted. Switched all the lenses front to back and reassembled and viola! Now the image looked good. Note to future self, keep track of lens orientation and don’t drop the little set screws!

The Effects of Nuclear War

http://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk3/1979/7906/7906.PDF

This study was made in 1979 in response to a request from the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. They wanted to understand what the effects of a nuclear war would be on the United States and the Soviet Union. What I found interesting is the Appendix C. It contains a fictional account written by Nan Randall of what would happen in Charlottesville, VA in the aftermath of all out nuclear war. Pretty crazy stuff. I can’t help but feel the outcome would be even more grim today, forty-one years after this was written, because of our increased reliance on technology.

New Phone!

I just got a new phone, the Nuu Mobile F4L. It checks several boxes of what I’ve been searching for in a phone.

  1. It is a dumb phone.
  2. It can do group messages! I’ve purchased several dumb phones in the past only to find that they don’t do group text messages. It’s a deal breaker to have to constantly text people back and say, “I can’t read what you just sent me”.
  3. It allows for pretty fast texting. Some dumb phones are really slow, they can’t even keep up with the speed normal people text at. Having a dumb phone already means you are texting slower, so having to wait on the phone to catch up is another deal breaker.

https://ting.com/shop/nuu-mobile-f4l_Black-new-lte_vz