Month: January 2018

Winning

Remember that multimeter I was so excited about a few months ago? It’s the one that uses your smartphone as the display. Well, I used its best two features within a week. First, my car was having trouble starting. We had a cold snap, so it was a good bet the battery had died. However, no one wanted to come into the garage with me to crank the engine while I watched the battery voltage on the multimeter. You know, something about it being below zero and not wanting to put boots on.

Well that’s NO PROBLEM because I hooked up the meter to the battery and watched my smart phone as I got in the car myself and cranked the engine. Or didn’t, because the battery voltage dropped to 7V as soon as I opened the door. When the headlights are on “auto” and you open the door, the computer checks to see how dark it is and then turns them on if needed. That was enough to show the battery was dead.

But wait, there’s more! I later needed to see if using batteries to power a desktop gadget I was building was viable. I thought the batteries would be dead in about a day and a half. So I slipped an SD card into the meter and had it log the current through the device as I went to bed. The meter has no problem itself with batteries. It’ll sit there logging for months on 2 AA’s. The gadget design will have to wait for another post.

Someone Is Wrong on The Internet

I know, I know, there are plenty of people on the internet who are wrong about a good number of things, but good gravy this irks me. Check out what I found on a do-it-yourself reference site.
Did you catch it? Okay, maybe you didn’t, and that’s okay, but by the end of this post you might be as annoyed as I am because that is not a f#$%ing Phillips head driver. That is a Pozidriv driver. They’re different. Now I know that when it comes to putting art into an article, it’s often left to editors and not the writers. It’s not always the case that the editor has mastered the content that the writer has. That doesn’t seem to be what happened here, though. Check out the text.
There it is: the error extends to the text. The writer claims a Phillips head “does not taper.” The drive in the image doesn’t taper, but the drive in the image is not a Phillips. In fact it is the taper or lack thereof that differentiates the Phillips and Pozidriv. Here is a comparison of a Phillips next to a #2 Pozidriv, courtesy of my toolbox.
As you can see, the blades on the Phillips (top) are tapered, while the blades on the Pozidriv are not. Plus, there are those extra splines between the blades of the Pozidriv that are a dead giveaway that it’s different. If you’ve ever had to lean on a Phillips to get it to stop popping out of a tight screw, then you have experienced the difference. The Phillips drive is designed “cam out” of the recess when the screw is too tight. This is to avoid applying too much force to the screw and twisting the head off of it. Pozidriv screws are designed to withstand more torque, and so they have a driver capable of delivering more torque without popping out of the screw head.

So how did the author get it so wrong? Given that that the article reads like a freshman essay that’s been padded out for length, I’d say this article exists just to produce ad revenue. I imagine the work put into it was 99% search engine optimization and 1% content generation, with no time to check Wikipedia.