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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Fun fact - some soldering irons regulate their temperature using the curie point. There’s a disk of ferromagnetic material with a particular curie point in the tip. A magnet in the barrel of the soldering iron is attracted to the tip, and when it sticks to the tip, it switches the heating element on. When the disk hits its curie temperature it’s no longer magnetic, and the magnetic switch opens and shuts off the heating element (it’s on a weak spring). When the tip cools down enough it becomes magnetic again, and the magnet is pulled to it and turns on the heater. You can have different tips with different curie temperatures, so one soldering iron can do multiple temperatures with very cheap internal electronics (basically, just a switch).






  • The towel is not a loop. When you pull down you get fresh towel off of a roll. The used towel goes onto a different roll and when the clean roll is used up they change it and wash the dirty one. They are geared together so the amount hanging down is pretty constant but sometimes they got out of sync and the “loop” was either huge or so tight you couldn’t really dry your hands.