I was sort of cleaning house in my lab/office today - I do that about once a year, whether it needs it or not ;-) - and came across this headset that I got a couple of years ago when I bought a now-dead laptop off Ebay; Anyhoo, I'm thinking, hey, this could be cool to play with. It's got two ordinary 1/8" (3 mm?) phone plugs, one red and the other black. So, I wondered, which is which? So I googled:
which, it turns out, is fascinating! More on the telephone schtuff maybe later, but I was looking for a color code, and they say: "So, if your plugs and sockets are color-coded you are in luck. Just plug the green plug into the green socket and the pink plug into the pink socket and you're away. (If your plugs and/or sockets are other colors, read on...)."
Well, mine are black and red. What to do, what to do?
So I read on: "If your sockets are color coded but your plugs are not, you may be able to work out which is the microphone plug by looking at the outside of the plug - it may have a picture of a microphone on it."
So I got out my trusty RS 5X magnifier, and lo and behold! Who'da thunk it! Little pictures only visible under 5X magnification, molded right into the plastic!
It was a real kewl feeling. :-)
I also stumbled on a few LM386s and a couple of LM393s, and, of all things, a 2N3019!
I think I might build a little bootleg AM station or something! ;-)
Anyways, it was great fun, especially discovering this skype stuff - imagine talking to your friends and rels for free!
Hmmm - maybe I'll get real drunk and give Osama Ben Laden a call. ;-)
Cheers! Rich