MATLAB bench() on 11" MacBook Air Part II

It was reccomended that I run bench() five times to get a better picture of of the Air’s ability to run MATLAB. Apparently, there’s a bit of overhead involved in loading the bench code that is included in the score, but only for the first run.

MATLAB Bechmark on 11” MacBook Air from Jay Kickliter on Vimeo.

Eagle CAD and FreeRouting.net

Eagle Cad is a necessary evil to me. It’s the only usable PCB design software  I know of for OS X. Plus, there’s an abundance of parts libraries out there. Beside its sometimes horrible user interface, my biggest complaint is its autorouter. Luckily there’s a website, FreeRouting.net, that has an excellent online autorouter. It takes a little trial and error to learn how to use it, but it does a much better job than Eagle. Here’s a video I made showing you the basics to routing your Eagle design at FreeRouting.net.

Eagle CAD from Jay Kickliter on Vimeo.

Update on Monday, July 16, 2012 at 7:41 by Jay Kickliter

Update. I’ve since moved on to Altium Designer. It’s much more expensive, but I was able to get a student license for about $150 if I remember correctly. On the negative side, I have to run Windows in Parallels to use it. Although its autorouter is a little better than Eagle’s, I hardly ever use it. Altium has pretty good semi-auto routing with push and shove, allowing me to hand route almost anything. Mind you, I haven’t yet tried to route a board with a 320 pin BGA yet, but with fan-out and a multi layer board I suppose even that is hand routable.

The real test come when my student license runs out. I don’t know what I will use then. Someone who’s opinion I respect swears by CADInt. I downloaded it. It seems almost primitive in it’s simplicity, but maybe that’s good.  I might give it its day in court again.

Mercedes Diesel Oil Change

I made a new video today. It’s a short HOWTO on changing the oil on a 1995 Mercedes E300D. I’m trying to get in the habit of making videos of stuff I do, especially if it could be useful to someone else.