Disclaimer

The content of this blog is my personal opinion only. Although I am an employee - currently of Nvidia, in the past of other companies such as Iagination Technologies, MIPS, Intellectual Ventures, Intel, AMD, Motorola, and Gould - I reveal this only so that the reader may account for any possible bias I may have towards my employer's products. The statements I make here in no way represent my employer's position, nor am I authorized to speak on behalf of my employer. In fact, this posting may not even represent my personal opinion, since occasionally I play devil's advocate.

See http://docs.google.com/View?id=dcxddbtr_23cg5thdfj for photo credits.

Sunday, December 11, 2011

Lifehack: Binder Clips help Debug Chistmas Lights

Fixing Christmas lights today.

Figured out the binary search approach - e.g. as described by http://www.squidoo.com/howto-fix-broken-christmas-lights#module12970984.

My own embellishment: I find it hard to track where I am in checking the Christmas lights, and/or strand continuity.  Even leaving empty sockets behind doesn't help that much, since the empty sockets are hard to see.  And since I have a small work space, so had to fold the string of lights back on itself 3 times.

So I marked my position with binder clips.  I happened to have at least 4 colours of binder clip. I used four clips to dedfine the boundaries of the interval where I was searching for a duff lightbulb - two clibs at each boundary.  Two clips at each boundary because, given the folding ofg the string of lights, it became hard to tell which direction was towards the end, and which inside the interval.  So I used two colours of binder clip at each end.

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