Soldering with a flux pen

I have to confess, I'm a lousy solderer, my hands tremble, and I'm often too anxious to get the job done and leave bad joints. To make the job easier, I used on my latest project some external flux (sigh... I know, should have used it always).

A 1 to 4 MIDI splitter. Soldering pen on the left

I decided to try out a flux pen. It seemed to be less messy than rosin. I was unsure would it be as effective, though.

Well, it was pretty good. It is easy to apply, and I could smear it on the PCB rather accurately. After administering the stuff, I learned that one must be relatively quick to do the actual soldering; it seems to vaporize quickly and lose some effectiveness.

Comments

Bird is causing high CPU on my macOS

There is no lack of people complaining about MacOS Tahoe, mostly about rounded corners and inconsistent design decisions. I have not paid that much attentention to that, but there is one mac bug i have paid attention to. It hasn't been a visual or ux but rather few system processes pegging the CPU. trustd , alongside with ecosystemd and ecosystemanalyticsd all reported high CPU usage. I can't exactly recall when this started, it might have predated my Tahoe upgrade but anyway, the trio of processes all had high CPU usage. Sure, it may have been the virtual efficiency cores and whether it affeced battery life or slowed down other processes i don't know to be hon...

I'm not a passionate developer

A family friend of mine is an airlane pilot. A dream job for most, right? As a child, I certainly thought so. Now that I can have grown-up talks with him, I have discovered a more accurate description of his profession. He says that the truth about the job is that it is boring. To me, that is not that surprising. Airplanes are cool and all, but when you are in the middle of the Atlantic sitting next to the colleague you have been talking to past five years, how stimulating can that be? When he says the job is boring, it is not a bad kind of boring. It is a very specific boring. The "boring" you would want as a passenger. Uneventful. Yet, he loves his job. According to him, an experienced pilot is most pleased when each and every tiny thing in the flight plan - goes according to plan. Passengers in the cabin of an expert pilot sit in the comfort of not even noticing who is flying. As someone employed in a field where being boring is not exactly in high demand, this sounds pro...

Building a OTel sink that follows GenAI semantic conventions

I've been working on an OTel sink recently. To be more specific, it concerns receiving telemetry data from LLM interactions. Fortunately, there is a spec for all of this called GenAI Semantic Conventions . That is what I based my work on, so I can make assumptions about key attributes to highlight in the sink's UI, which is actually a CLI in my case. I dogfooded my handrolled sink using Pydantic AI (my favorite LLM framework), and all good, it follows the spec well. Key attributes flow in as specified. Pydantic AI also includes some of its own attributes, but that is expected. However, pick something like Claude Code, (via anthropic agent sdk), the reality is a bit different. It does not follow the spec at all. It has its own custom attribute layout . Same direction, different flavor with LangChain. The Python source has zero opentelemetry imports anywhere. None. The ls_* namespace ( ls_provider , ls_model_name , ls_temperature ) is its own thing, with LangSmith as the on...

Koodihommia

Search This Blog