Well, with a 28.8 years half life it should glow a while. BUT, the largest license exempt quantity one can get iirc is 0.1 uCi. Plus it’s a fission product so good luck making it yourself. :) I don’t recommend the radioactive Boy Scout approach.
Along with a book (lots of good recommendations to choose from here), I recommend getting yourself some basic tools for practical experimentation: breadboard, multimeter (even a cheap Chinesium model will be fine for low voltage DC work), an oscilloscope (entry level DSO models from Chinese OEMs such as Siglent and Rigol can be had very affordably), a bench power supply (Siglent and Rigol also offer these), and some components (Joe Knows kits that are sold on Amazon are a great way to stock up on decent quality resistors, capacitors, and semiconductors to help you get to building circuits).
If you get to wanting to experiment with faster circuits, you can ditch breadboards and their parasitics for Manhattan style construction[1] and be able to build _much_ faster circuits with better success. Or you can fall down another rabbit hole, learning how to design your own PCBs. With PCB services becoming mainstream nowadays, you can learn a tool such as KiCad (free software) and send out your gerbers to be manufactured for cheap.
While AoE (and the newly released X-Chapters!) is an excellent handbook to keep around, I would agree with the other commenters that it is not a particularly friendly textbook for a beginner.
This is from the perspective of a hobbyist who does _not_ do industrial quantities of soldering, but rather the occasional build or the occasional repair of a piece of old test equipment.
I use eutectic 63/37 Kester solder in several sizes for everything. With my temp controlled Weller station, it's the bee's knees for making quality joints quickly.
As far as worrying about safety, it's really down to common sense. In long time scales, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. If you apply common sense, you can have fun while you're around and not have problems from lead solder.
Here's my "hot takes":
1) There's a reason why food and drink isn't allowed in professional labs of various kinds. Follow their example. Don't use your kitchen table as a workbench. Don't eat and drink in your work area. Don't lick solder. etc. etc.
If your living arrangement is so small that you can't separate them adequately, seek out a local hacker space or a friend who does have space.
2) Wash your hands thoroughly after soldering (and if you are doing projects with your kids, instill in them the instinct to wash their hands, too!) If I'm finding myself doing a lot of soldering/desoldering for a repair, I take frequent breaks and wash then, too. It also helps reduce mistakes.
3) At a minimum, use a desk fan to blow fumes away from your face. Better yet, invest in a fume extractor unit. I'd say the latter it's a necessity if you do a lot of soldering.
The bottom line is, choose what you prefer and what you are willing to risk using, and take appropriate precautions. Chances are, even if you eliminate lead solder from your hobby work, there's likely something equally as hazardous in your local environment that you are more systemically exposed to. Radon gas, naturally occurring drinking water contaminants (or sometimes unnaturally...), etc.
Externalities matter. Eventually that stuff is going to be handled by other people, in a year or ten or a hundred. The risk is not just to you, and is not just based on your own safety procedures.
Please stop advocating for people to use leaded solder at hackerspaces, which are generally frequented by children.
Scale matters too. As I clearly stated, I am not making electronics at industrial scales, nor am I generating large quantities of e-waste.
As for hacker spaces, why on earth would anyone in their right mind assume that it would be ok to not wash hands, eat, drink, etc in that environment _and_ let their kids work there without the same precautions, leaded solder or no?
What would you say is the final model that "has it"? Besides my vintage HPs (HP15C, 2xHP16C, HP45) I also have the 50g and the modern 35S. For me, the 50g's lack of a proper ENTER key ruins it. I'm sort of on the lookout for a nice 48 series to replace it for that reason. The 35S at least has a proper ENTER.
> What would you say is the final model that "has it"?
For me, at least, probably the combination of the 48GX and 42S. Both represent the end of the line of HP's traditional hardware engineering, which is such a significant part of using these devices. The software gaps between the 48GX and the later 49 can be made up by installing software into a 48, if that turns out to matter for you.
One of the more significant new parts of the 49 software is the "Meta Kernel", which was externally developed by Jean-Yves Avenard as a 48 extension. IIRC, Avenard ultimately wound up working for HP on their calculators, which I believe is how MetaKernal wound up as part of the core 49G ROM. IIRC, this was also a bit of a reconstitution of HP's calculator engineering effort, as the previous team had been disbanded a few years prior. (ie; William Wickes, who was heavily involved in the 41 and 28/48, wound up at some point working on video conferencing systems for HP.)
The reason I'm also including the 42S is that it's a lot more traditional in the way that it operates. If the 28/48/49/50 series feels like a small handheld computer with a custom programming language, the 42 feels more like an actual calculator (with a lot of capabilities).
I have both the HP15C and two HP16Cs, though I am not old enough to have bought one new. :o) Truly awesome calculators, even if they are a bit slow sometimes. The form factor of the Voyagers is amazingly perfect; in fact the ratio of the length to width is approximately the Golden Ratio if I recall.
I use mine regularly as I prefer a tactile instrument. Plus the mental challenge of implementing programs in a constrained environment is invigorating.
If you're interested in following these things, the Deep Space Network Now page [1] is a fun one to keep bookmarked. It displays the real time status of each DSN station and what spacecraft they are communicating with. [edit] you'll want to click on "more detail" on the lower right to see the technical information about the signals for each antenna.
Right now, Canberra has both an uplink and a downlink going to New Horizons.
Even more fun is when they get a downlink from one of the Voyager probes. The signal strength is so incredibly small, it's testament to very skilled engineers developing the signal processing they use.
Typing this from my 2017 12" MacBook...have not had a single issue with the keyboard. In fact, I have grown to quite like it. Sure it's not my beloved WASD Code with the Cherry Clears, but it's one of the better portable keyboards in terms of typing experience of late, in my opinion.
