A Few Updates

Febuary, March, April, May, June, July... oh shit it's already July!? Where did summer go? ...and this post sat around for another two months before I got around to finishing it, so it's now September.

Oops.

Anyway, in those intervening months I have done a number of things that relate to the blog, so here they are.

1] I made an attempt to reflow the wifi chip on the Sony Xperia Z3C.
2] I now have many spare parts for the Sony Xperia Z3C, if anyone is interested.

When I was reflowing it, I put it on top of a bunch of aluminum foil, took off the EMI shielding (and there was quite a lot of it), and pointed a 1500 watt heat gun at it. I didn't have a laser thermometer on hand to check temps, and I got a little carried away. There was a sharp *pop* and when I plugged the phone into an outlet, it didn't boot. From what I understand, I nuked the phone's built in memory. Oh well, next time I'll get a thermometer.

In other news, I have improved the performance of the Mac Pro by removing bits!

A bit of explanation: I've made the somewhat slow desktop framerates increase by a significant amount by removing the GeForce 7300 video card that I had in there as a fallback/boot menu card. I haven't got the slightest clue as to why that helped, but the idea came to me in the middle of the night and when I tried it, it worked. I've updated the Mac Pro Upgrade 2] Hardware post to reflect this discovery.

I have acquired new hardware! And lost temporary access to most of what I had since I've moved off to college.

New:
1. 17" Macbook Pro 2010. 2.66 GHz Intel i7, 8 GB RAM, 500GB HDD
2. Moto G4 Play, Amazon software variant (it's got ads)
3. Motorola Droid 3 (upcoming series)

Lost access to:
Literally everythign else on the "My Gear" page except for the TI 84 Plus CE, which I've brought with me. Unfortunately this means that any problems people may have regarding some of my projects won't be able to be resolved with anything other than my memory and some google wizardry. 

I also did very, very little work on the Macintosh Classic mod, but I have nothing to show for it as I didn't take pictures.

In a slight departure from the more "computerey" stuff that I normally toss up here, I've rebuilt a go-kart. Contrary to the Mac Classic, I took loads of pictures and will probably be posting them in a more "photo album with comments" way here in the near future. I'm also looking to do more car and engine stuff in general, because that's quite fascinating and lots of that sort of content is relegated to YouTube videos and forum posts as opposed to written instructions.

That's a short list of what to expect in the coming months, and I'll probably hopefully get around to making another post before December.