Author: Joe

London, Day 1

Normally I’d just put up some of what few pictures I took and call it a post, but we traded pictures after we got back. That means that alongside my 138 pictures I have 1300 pictures taken by my sister and 612 taken by my dad. For comparison, Allison took nearly as many pictures in the British Museum alone as I took the entire trip.

We arrived in London in the morning, met Dad at the airport, then made our way to the bed and breakfast we were staying at to dump our luggage. After that it was a reasonably short walk to Buckingham Palace, where many pictures were taken.
Buckingham Palace
Note that it was actually sunny, I hear that’s rare.

After we’d had enough standing around watching people wave selfie-sticks about taking pictures of themselves we wandered through Green Park.
Green Park Gates
We didn’t go through those gates, they’re apparently special and were locked, but there was a path around them to get into the park.

At the top of the hill we found a bus stop for a hop on-hop off line of tour buses and paid a lot of money for tickets to be able to ride the buses and their river boats for two days. Then we got on the bus for a lightning tour of London:

Trafalgar Rooster
Trafalgar Square has four plinths but only three are occupied by permanent statues. The fourth apparently didn’t get a statue built due to lack of funds, so every so often they install something new there (wiki article).

St Pauls Cathedral
St Paul’s Cathedral

Westminster Palace
Westminster Palace (parliment)

Tower Bridge
Tower Bridge from up the river

Tower of London
Tower of London (side opposite the river)

Post Gap

It’s been a while since I last posted, but I’m finally sorting through my pictures from the UK. Until I get that finished, here are a couple pictures of my cats.
Dash Outside

Warm Cats

Breaking the Rules

Radioshack failed me this evening: they don’t sell micro usb jacks, and when it came down to it they sell the plugs but not the jacks for the smaller variants of barrel power connectors. They do sell 1/8″ mono headphone jacks and plugs, and as far as I could find that was the smallest plug/jack combination I could get (prioritizing small for the jack).

For context: a while back I got some of this stuff with the intent of making heated gloves or at least hand/wrist warmers. It was cold enough this week to make me think about that project again, but I need a power source.

Micro usb seemed like a great idea: if I’m at a computer I can plug it in there (probably for low current, but it shouldn’t be all that cold if I’m sitting at a computer), or I could use my car phone charger (don’t know the current, but it would be better than nothing), and for a portable solution I could cut the end off a usb cable and wire it to a battery (I certainly have enough usb cables…). I’m seriously considering ordering micro usb plugs from sparkfun, but I think I’ll need a more final solution including something to mount the plug to for it to last. In the meantime, headphone jacks will have to do.

Along with my headphone jacks I bought a sacrificial usb extension cord to modify (extension so I would have a usb female plug to make a usb battery pack out of if I ever feel the need). Here’s the completed modification:
Soldered together

And the successful results:
Success!

I’m fairly certain that it’s a bad idea to have power run to this type of plug (hence the post title) because:

  • it’s easy to short across two exposed and side-by-side contacts
  • what happens if you pump 5V DC into a headphone jack?

At any rate, this is intended to be a temporary solution while I’m prototyping this. Ideally I’ll find a better solution and order parts at some point.

I didn’t actually measure it, but my laptop put out enough current to very noticeably warm a 6-8 inch length of the heat tape. That means I’ve got all the pieces I need to make this work, next step is to figure out how to either 3d print or sew a glove to wire for heat.