This week I became interested with sodium and it’s inherent instability. It’s readily available in many compounds such as NaCl (table salt). Really, all you have to do to separate the Na from the Cl is melt the crystals and subject the liquid to electrolysis. Here’s my procedure:

DISCLAIMER: This procedure is just a brainstorm, I haven’t carried it out and I don’t know that I ever will. I’d be interested in your input, but unless you know what you’re doing, don’t do anything like this.

Equipment & Reagents

• Time & patience
• As much NaCl as you feel you need. You can calculate the yield by looking up the atomic weights for Na and Cl – if you’re having trouble doing that you shouldn’t do this procedure… just buy the Na.
• Carbon electrodes and several car batteries wired in series.
• A large glove box (preferably one you can modify and that can withstand a mild explosion)
• Powerful air conditioner.
• Kerosene
• Wire
• An electrically nonconductive container capable of withstanding thousands of degrees Celsius of heat
• A noble gas… helium will work and is readily available
• Heater hose (probably)
• Any other stuff I forgot to mention, like tools for modifying the glove box.
• Oh yeah, oxy-acetylene or oxy-mapp and torch kit.

The major concerns in this procedure are: A) Sodium is highly explosive, especially in its powdered form which is what you’ll be dealing with.  B) You’re going to be using an extreme amount of heat right next to an alkane (kerosene) which is pretty flammable. C) The electrolysis of liquid NaCl gives off Chlorine gas which will kill you if you inhale it and D) The amount of electricity gets extremely dangerous when you start connecting batteries together in series.

So, you’d modify the glove box to have a permanent ceramic dish with the NaCl in it, then have a MAPP or Oxy-Acetylene burner positioned strategically underneath it so as to have it at the right temp, but not too high. Modify the air conditioner so that you have hot helium coming out and cool helium going in. Everything is perfectly sealed. Separate from that is the helium input; it must first flood the box, then step it down and just have some positive pressure. Another hose should vent out to the roof or somewhere where nobody is present, and there should be a fan blowing on the end of it so the Chlorine gas doesn’t get too potent. Do it on a windy day I guess!

I know I’m going to forget something, but let’s move on to the next part. Take the batteries and wire them in series into the box connected to graphite rods. The graphite rods should resist corrosion and be able to withstand heat well… You’ll have a vat of kerosene (preferably actively cooled somehow) inside the helium-flooded box, but not too close to the flame. The kerosene won’t ignite without oxygen, but it could get a little to hot for comfort and start to dry off or even boil. When the Sodium particles start to form on the anode you’ll have to take it out, let it cool for a second, then brush it off in the kerosene. Rinse and repeat. Once you’re done, leave the cooling mechanisms on as well as the helium flow and the ventilation. Let this whole set up cool down to room temperature then disassemble everything. You will have pure sodium in a powdered form as a sediment at the bottom of the kerosene vat. Take note that powdered sodium is very dangerous just due to it’s huge surface area – it’s subject to explosion at any time. You may wish to develop a procedure to melt it and then mold it into a bar, but you may be able to do this in the kerosene with simple pressure… I know it’s very malleable at room temperature, but I’m not sure if you can get the particles to smash together or not, you may need heat.

Don’t ever try this, and don’t assume it’s correct because I haven’t tried it. I just thought it up. Maybe an electronics engineer could help you robotize this whole thing with the use of a camera so you don’t have to be anywhere near it and you can do it on a grander scale. Just a thought.

-Dan

Remember this page? It brings back so many memories.

I had a lot of fun writing up articles, tweaking the indecipherable php and shooting videos with my brother. I’m still looking around for the energy drink video which is definitely on one of my hard drives. It wasn’t a very good video, but this pancake one that you see on the homepage here was pretty damn funny.

Currently, I only have a few posts from the old blog transferred over to the new one but the goal is to get it all over here. I had XAMPP running on my desktop under Windows 7 RC and was in the process of transferring content (and designing a site for my aunt) when my Gigabyte EP45UD3R mobo went out on me. It would get to the memory initialization, then reboot and continue that loop. It’s been three weeks and I haven’t heard anything from Gigabyte yet, so expect an article on that soon.

So in the meantime, I’ve been using my HP NX6125 (Turion64 ML-37 / RadeonXPress 200M / Broadcom WLAN, GBit Lan) for pretty much everything. I have another desktop, but I don’t really feel like screwing around with it since it’s so dated (2002). As you can tell by the screenshot, I’m running Ubuntu, Jaunty to be specific. I tried importing the database and setting up the site on the latest xampp package, but MemHT is just too crappily written and relies on so many deprecated PHP functions that it didn’t even work right. I had to install xampp version 1.6.5a from a couple years ago to get it working right. I also had to modify my /etc/hosts file to serve freshme.at and www.freshme.at so I could use the site since the author thought it would be wise to use url’s when he could have used relative links. What a genius.

Well, I’ll have more content ported over soon plus a plethora of new posts that I’ve been waiting to write. There’s just so many ideas and so little time. I don’t even know which one to start with, but I do know I have a math test to study for so I think I’m going to get back to that!

Network access: Where the books come from…

By the process of elimination you can easily figure out that the Kindle connects to some sort of cell network, the question is who’s? Sprint’s EVDO network! Of course, and it’s commendable since Sprint is more on the open source bandwagon than anyone else. I think I heard somewhere that they have more licensed devices on their network than any other. Not sure how roaming works, but I’m sure it does. We’re not talking huge amounts of data here… it’s just a book.

The screen:

The Amazon Kindle’s screen is an LCD screen as you might suspect. Nothing special here, except for the fact that it only displays 4 shades of gray. It has been “optimized” to be more readable (less glare, more like paper) than other devices though.

Competition:

A few years ago the Sony Reader came out, and I actually wanted it pretty bad at the time. It didn’t originally have network access, but the new Sony Daily Reader is licensed to work on AT&T’s 3G network, just like the iPhone does. You can check out the latest edition’s of the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle at eWeek and CNet respectively.

Commentary:

A recent podcast by the guys over at Stack Overflow focused on Craigslist and how it is contributing to the downfall of the press, and therefore a part of our democracy. They stated that Craigslist holds probably over 90% of the market at this point and because of the fact that it’s free, it’s destroying value. Let me re-phrase.

The newspapers used to charge a lot for a classified ad or a job posting. Craigslist doesn’t charge except for in rare cases where they need to in order to prevent spam and other BS e.g. in the Job postings section of several U.S. cities including SF and Chicago.  The fact that these ads are moving to Craigslist raises some problems, two that were brought up in the podcast were: A. The free press is dying, therefore we are less aware of what our government is up to, and B. Craigslist basically took a billion dollar industry and made it free, thereby destroying it. If Craigslist didn’t want the money, they could still do something with it that would benefit society as a whole.

I think this relates to these mobile-reading devices like the Kindle and the Sony Reader. If the trend continues, almost every book and publication in print should be available on-line at some point. That would mean that hopefully, we as consumers will have a decent choice in products and we’ll be able to eliminate our bulky text books, magazines, newspapers, et cetera and replace them with a device that can hold as many as we want, and will allow us to buy them for cheaper and where and whenever we like.

If things move in the right direction, it should be fairly easy for anyone to publish to the world instantaneously which could prove to be a more efficient, and less biased free press. I really hope it works out that way, because without a free press we don’t have much of anything.

-Dan

See also: previous video on the Kindle (kind of) – “Casual Discussion of Amazon’s Kindle”

We’d love to have your feedback on this one. The trend towards an electronic press is a very controversial one, especially when Amazon pulled thousands of copies of 1984 right off of the Kindle – an ironic action for sure. Do you like lugging around textbooks, or would you rather pay $300 for a Kindle? Do you think publishers would charge less for books if they were distributed electronically? There’s so many questions, and so little answers.

System Board

• Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R
• Intel P45 Chipset
• ICH10R (Raid 0,1,510) 6 Ports
• Integrated Gigabyte SATA/RAID Controller w/2 Ports
• Capable of 1600MHz FSB but running at 1333
• 1 PCI-x16 2.0 slot
• 3 PCI-x slots
• 3 PCI slots
• Realtek ALC889A Sound (The usual 6 Ports)
• 1 gigabit lan port (Realtek 8111c)
• 8 USB 2.0 Ports
• 1 IEEE 1394a (Firewire 400) port
• ATX Form Factor
• 2oz Copper PCB for heat dissipation
• Great board, no problems so far.  I don’t like “FakeRaid” controllers, but pretty much all manufacturers do this so I can’t complain.  The RAID0 is a big performance increase based on the benchmarks I did.

Processor

• Intel Core2 Duo E8500 (1333 FSB, 3.0GHz, 6MB L2 Cache)
• Stock Intel heatsink / fan which is quiet, but sucks to install.
• Had this OC’d to 3.6 GHz without a problem, but I put it back
• Socket LGA775

Memory

• 4GB Patriot Viper PC2-8500 (1066MHz) with green heatsinks. Dual channel DDR2.
• Was able to improve the timing on this by a notch, and it was stable but had to increase the voltage slightly.  I ran memtest86+ for about 4 hours with no errors.  I also put this back because this memory is actually based on the PC2-5300 standard and is overclocked out of the box.  They should tell you about this beforehand IMO.

Graphics Card

• PNY Verto 8600GT 512MB

Drives

• 2 Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250GB SATA hard drives. 250GB, 7200RPM, 16M cache, NCQ, Sata2. They were in a RAID0, but not anymore due to OSx86 compatibility issues.
• 1 Western Digital 500GB 7200RPM PATA drive (16M Cache) from my old computer.  It’s now in an external eSATA enclosure w/fan.
• 1 Western Digital OEM 250GB SATA2 hard drive (7200RPM)
• 1 Western Digital OEM 80GB SATA2 hard drive (for swap and pagefile space)
• 1 Lite-On EIDE DVD-RAM drive.
• 1 OEM DVD burner, unknown specs – EIDE.
• Countless other notebook drives in USB enclosures, thumb drives, SD cards ,etc.

Power Supply

• Antec EarthWatts 650W PSU. Awesome PSU – very quiet.

Case

• Rosewill R6AR6-BK.  I thought it would suck because it was cheap, but it’s actually an awesome case.  The only complaint I have is that the front bezel wants to come off all the time.
• One 120mm fan in the rear (one of those quiet-flow fans)

Other Cards

• KWorld PlusTV HD. Kind of a POS, but at least I can watch TV and record it too.
• Dell wireless PCI to Mini-PCI card with a wireless-n card.  Not sure exactly what it is but it’s compatible with Linux and OSX!

Monitor, Keyboard, Mouse

• Acer AL2216W 22″ LCD (DVI).  Not a bad monitor, there are a couple annoyances and it’s nothing really special, but it is a very nice monitor for the price and everything looks great on it.  Pretty damn good for a college student – it was a birthday gift from my girlfriend. Thanks Samantha!
• Dell 17″ CRT (black to match everything) that I got free from work. It’s nice to have dual monitors, but it would be better if it was an LCD.
• Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer 2.0. Microsoft keyboards and mice are legendary – as Chris Pirillo put it.  For one time, I’d have to agree.
• Microsoft ComfortCurve Keyboard 2000.

I also have all my USB peripherals hooked up to a powered USB hub that has very bright blue and red LED’s. This is then plugged into a USB switch which is hooked up to my PC and laptop dock.  My monitor has DVI and VGA inputs, so I use the VGA for my laptop dock and just switch over using the monitor.  A poor-man’s KVM switch.

That’s about all I can think of at this point.