I had a client a few years ago that needed incredibly configurable dials as part of the project's display and print capabilities. Due to the nature of the client, no 3rd party software was allowed because they required that the software had to be evaluated line by line for security reasons. I never took trig in H.S. or college. In H.S. my highest was general math. In college my highest was algebra II. The nature of how the dials and needles needed to be displayed was so complicated from a visual perspective that using any existing arc/gradient/line functions in the api were out so I had to build a customized library that worked at the pixel level both for screen and printer devices. I spent a week of doing nothing but learning the parts of trig that applied to my issue. If I were to go back 25 years, I'd take every advanced math course H.S. had to offer, and in college I would have continued to be more math focused. After that experience I've always wondered if I could have solved other problems more elegantly because I'd be equipped with a better toolbox.

I have a Vaio AR870. One of the reasons I bought it (besides the 1920x1200 screen) was because it had the core 2 duo and the processor supported HAV. Behold the day I intalled windows 7 and tried to get XP Mode working to support all my clients that refuse to move beyond 1999 technology. No HAV enabled. No setting in the bios to change it. Sony's custom bios interface doesn't expose the HAV setting and their stance is that they will only be creating bios updates for selected machines. I created a DOS boot CD and I had to dump the bios, hex edit it, and reflash by hand. A sphincter tightening moment to say the least. It all worked and I didn't brick my laptop. But I was irritated during the original attempt when I found out that if HAV wasn't enabled you couldn't install.

I love those things. I saved my money from mowing lawns and bought the 200 in 1 project kit from Radio Shack back around 1981 or 1982. I still have some very large breadboards, my 1950's heathkit oscope, and a bazillion ICs, and components. One of the breadboards still has an audio digitizer I built for my Amiga back in the early 90's. I bought one of the more recent radio shack kits with the built in breadboard for my kids about 5 years ago. But when they were 8 and 9 they had trouble with pushing the wires into the breadboard. I hunted ebay and found a few of the same vintage model that I had with the good old spring terminals. I bought two of them so I would have a backup. The kids drag it out about once a month and build something. They still don't touch the new one. The old one has the typical complement of resistors, capacitors, transistors, relay, transformers, great manual etc... and a 7400 nand and 7476 Dual JK flip flop. Searching on the web, some are trying to sell them as hard-to-find with an $80+ USD price tag. But ebay still has them with $10 bids.

That is my method too, but I give the platters to my kids. They usually end up outside in the mud as building components in their imagination related activities. I did keep a couple of patters around for use as flywheels for low pressure sterling engines though.