Don’t ask. Just read.

• Zany
  I still don’t have any internet at home. Grrr. That’s the boring one, that was thrown in mostly just to make the title look kinda cute
• Zener

  I unpacked my D-Link wireless router, got out the matching adapter, put it into a 220-120V transformer, plugged it in, and smelled smoke. I forgot that I had both a 12V and a 5V adapters that shared the _exact_ same plug. I tried the proper adapter, but no luck… something burned out.
  I popped off the cover, and sure enough, there’s one little component all blackened and burned out right by the power supply. It was impossible to tell what it was, but it appeared with the silkscreen designation of ZD1. Hrmm… ZD1… Zener Diode 1? A Zener Diode can be used to power a circuit, although it is fairly inefficient, since it maintains voltage by shunting excess current (that the circuit it not drawing) through the diode– i.e., the circuit designed for a max of (say) 50mA will always draw 50mA.. even if the circuit only needs 5mA, the diode will take the other 45mA. Dumb.
  Anyway, armed with this idea, I set of to the nearest electronics store (a tiny place in Jerusalem named Kashiof or something– right near the bell tower). I picked up the closest thing to a 5V diode I could find, soldered it in (annoying because it was SMT: surface mount technology, which are really tiny. Click on image for a picture– for reference, that entire part of the board shown is probably not much larger than a quarter).
  End result: lights come on, router routes, wireless wirelesses. Ding.
  P.S. Interesting note: the inside of the router was basically a PCMCIA card, a tiny microprocessor, and support hardware. Interesting.

• Zenith

  I found quite a nice program, called TheSky, to display star positions. As the skies here are much clearer than in America, it’s quite nice to be able to look up at night and know what’s going on. (Zenith is a term for the “Top” of the sky, and also the name for projections that display the entire sky in a circular format).