December 22, 2008
Got a terrestrial DVB (ATSC) PCIe card (Hauppauge), installed in Ouka.
December 14, 2008
Wow... cold night tonight. It's -7F outside right now.
December 8, 2008
Illness strikes, haven't had a cold this bad for years.
December 5, 2008
Developed a sore throat and generally feeling miserable.
December 2, 2008
UPS delivered Yachiru and Kilala to my sister and father.
Found out that my AVR charger hack has a lot of issues when transplanted from
the 'sheltered' breadboard to the 'ghetto' real circuit...
November 25, 2008
UPSed my sister's laptop to MD, along with a spare machine, hopefully this hard
drive will last another 10 years like the 13.7G disk that's failing in Kagura.
November 21, 2008
Sent out the Hitachi P7K500 disk for RMA, disks have gotten cheaper such that
perhaps it wasn't worth shipping the disk out... costed near $7 to ship the
defective disk back when the disk costed $55 AR. Now I can get the same disk
for $55... wonderring if I should get another anyway to balance out the array.
November 18, 2008
Got a 4-disk hotswap chassis. Found that one of my Hitachi P7K500 disks
died :-(
Spent a lot of time making sure it was the disk that croaked and not due to
the hotswap chassis. The disk just will not spin up anymore.
November 13, 2008
Got the Wrath of the Lich King... urgh
Finally got a somewhat working HFT Charger hack state machine working. The
main things I wanted is to be able to reset each channel independently (and the
per-channel automatic full detection helps too, instead of being purely timer
based.) Started assembling a board to stick into the charger. Removed the old
CMOS 4060 timer chip from the charger. Reverse-engineered the circuit inside
the charger a bit... it looks like the 9V charger isn't really timed,
it's just a trickle charger!
Will have to figure out a way to actually shut off charge
power to the 9Vs as well.
One issue run into: The active LEDs are totally useless after putting the hack
in, as from reverse engineering, they're on if any battery is inserted and the
global timer has not expired. May have to add additional individual
transistors to regain usage of the LEDs. Also not sure how to incorporate the
switch selector...
November 2, 2008
Mowed for the last time this season... grr... hate yellowjacket wasps. Think
I got stung by one...
Moved USB-Serial converter to the USB hub.
Hooked up my last rev of SCORE to the USB-Serial. looks like the converter
is working.
Cleared off a solderless prototyping board for the
harbor freight tools charger hack. Kind of weird, I ended up having to buy
one of HFT's cheap screwdriver sets, dremeled in a notch to make a spanner
screwdriver to open up the charger...
November 1, 2008
Replaced fan in Ouka. Muuch quieter now. Had to hack the fan with a dremel to get it to fit unfortunately, and the tach output doesn't work *sigh* -- not
sure if the fan voltage is high enough to trigger pulses or not.
October 31, 2008
Received DX order. Tested POST cards in a working machine, seems good, have to
send one to my sister.
October 21, 2008
Received the Visiontek RadeonHD 3650 rebate -- 4 months, then again it's on time as I took almost a month to submit the rebate.
October 15, 2008
Placed an order to DealExtreme for a new internal fan with tachometer for Ouka. Will have to reconfigure the fan a bit so I can get the tach output to the motherboard. Also ordered some PCI POST cards, something that I probably should have gotten a long time ago.
October 13, 2008
Shut off Ouka for a few hours as the internal fan got really loud.
October 8, 2008
Worked on my 4x500G RAID. Finally got it to somewhat boot off the RAID with
root on LVM over RAID, but it's still not quite booting properly.
September 25, 2008
Received the 8-port D-Link Gbit DGS-2208 switch and installed it.
Ahh back to the full Gbit central switch.
The switch doesn't seem radically different in terms of heat
generation, and thus power consumption, to the old switch despite being
labelled as "green". The wall wart
however tends to stay cooler (it has a switch mode wall wart). The LEDs
are a bit too far back and makes it somewhat hard to see the LED status when
looking at the switch from above or below, have to look at the LEDs straight
on. Alas, yet another rebate...
A few of my recoverred batteries seems to regrow their dendrites and short out
again after a while. Had to re-zap a few cells on my cordless drill packs to
make them work again.
Finally got Qwest.net reverse DNS to somewhat work. Mughi now has an official
matching forward and reverse DNS names!
The Bestpower Patriot Pro II 1000VA UPS seems to be no longer cooking
the batteries or something (perhaps charging was what was heating the battery
pack up?) Not sure why the batteries were really warm before. It's
charging the three series-connected batteries at 20.3V. AGM SLA batteries
are around 2.2V/cell charged, so nominal fully charged voltage of 19.8V (for
9 cells).
I measured around 30mA is going through as float,
so less than 1W is being dissapated by the batteries -- which isn't too bad.
September 22, 2008
Orderred D-Link Green Ethernet Switch to replace the central backbone switch.
September 20, 2008
Found my just-turned 3-year old (happy? SAD birthday) center backbone
SMC 8-port Gigabit switch died :-( It just blinks all its port LEDs once in
a while. Assuming heat death - electromigration.
Temporarily replaced it with a 5-port Gbit cold spare
and an 8-port 10/100 for the
rest of the machines that don't immediately need Gbit access (such as the
WoW machine, the DECstation and even the DSL router).
Sheesh, I'm plagued with problems galore lately...
September 14, 2008
Lost q.dyndns.org after some 12 years of it being my address.
Registerred vanade.com as a replacement, at least this one I can claim
some form of ownership. The host q.dyndns.org has no reference to me anymore,
so those who know me of my old ip address should no longer associate it with
me.
I've gotten addicted to battery zapping - using a large charged capacitor to
zap otherwise fatal dendrite and whisker formations inside Nickel
Cadmium batteries. I've been able to rejuvinate my two cordless drill
battery packs (no way in heck I'm buying
new batteries at $40 a pop), my 900MHz cordless phone pack (somewhat hard to
find replacements), and even unshorted the D-sized NiCd batteries in Mako
(a 486dx25 laptop, but the no longer shorted batteries still do not have much
runtime in them, but at least I can now leave the pack in -
the laptop won't run with shorted batteries.)
Though some of these rejuvinated batteries work,
as stated, most of them do not have the same life as a new pack. My cordless
drill packs can still drive a 50W 12V lamp (as well as the cordless drill
itself), but internal resistance is somewhat
higher than fresh packs. Equalizing
the charge on the cells have been difficult as the characteristics of each cell
no longer match after the short.
After a a day of slow charging, the cordless phone pack's cells got equalized
in voltage, hopefully won't short out again...
I've been using a 51,000 microfarad 40V low ESR
capacitor from Sprague/Vishay
charged to around 18V to fry the internal shorts. Sparks fly on the bigger
cells (the sub C-sized cells in the drill packs and the D-sized in Mako).
I was expecting similar with the cordless phone pack, but it seems the internal
resistance of it was high enough to avert the sparks.
Bought two more 500G disks in preparation for upgrading my 1.5 year old 4x120G
RAID5 array. Should be up to 1.5T (4x500GB, RAID5), but the biggest thing
I wanted to do was to reduce the number of "physical"
disk partitions and rely on LVM more -- just to save some memory that would
be better used some other way. Then again the new machine will have 2GB RAM.
More rebates...
September 5, 2008
Oops, forgot to note that I rebooted Ouka around August 26 to button up, seemed
stable enough with the new firmware to discontinue use of the serial console.
Installed internal SATA disk, removed floppy drive since it just won't
fit in the small case, and downgraded the disk to a 200GB (pending
reallocation of its 500G disk to the new 1TB RAID5.)
Also noted I'll need to mod the UPS a bit, seems its float charge is a bit
high and somewhat cooking the three new 6V 12AH AGM batteries I got for it.
August 31, 2008
Bought a 12V 5.1AH SLA AGM battery, wanted to have a "storage" battery that can
be continually be kept charged without degradation. I might
use it to power the Geode in power out situations.
Designing a charger/float charger for it that I can plug and forget, and always
have 12V power available.
August 16, 2008
Picked up a trashed UPS (will need to buy new batteries for it) and a 500G disk.
Going to setup a RAID,
and put Doujima on
UPS. I feel like I'll bump the power on Doujima by mistake and take down the
server, this should alleviate some fears.
August 4, 2008
Upgraded firmware on Ouka, hopefully with new ACPI DSDT.
July 14, 2008
Aha! Found that one of the cores on Ouka is hitting soft lockup,
via the serial console. Since soft lockup is fatal if it really can't
resolve, it triggers kdb (had it compiled in to try to help debug the ACPI hang
on startup) and thus a full fledged hang waiting for input from the console. However, it appears
that it's not totally fatal, if I tell kdb to simply continue running,
the machine comes back up and alive! Suspecting an ACPI issue, for some reason
it isn't finishing before the 10 seconds before hitting soft lockup,
but not sure, at least it's in the call stack.
Likely will stick RAM back in, and also an internal SATA dvdrw,
seems so fitting for it.
July 6, 2008
Bought a Visiontek Radeon HD 3650. Another rebate.
Installed in the C2Q for now.
July 2, 2008
Ouka crashed twice in the past 10 days or so, suspicious. Never put the RAM
back in. Underloaded PSU? Something more sinister?
Hooked up Hinoki to serial console with minicom through screen,
and a normal keyboard so I can see the LEDs (kernel panic?).
June 23, 2008
Ouka crashed again (just for logging...)
Guess RAM and the power converters wasn't the problem, putting memory back in.
June 14, 2008
Ouka still crashes.
Not sure what's wrong anymore :-( Took out 2GB RAM to see if it helps,
perhaps some power converter is marginal. Also moved the secondary 750G backup
disk external via IEE1394/firewire to relieve some of the power consumption and
heat generation.
May 29, 2008
Ouka crashed again. Noticed the chipset heatsink was getting quite warm, stuck
a fan near it to cool it a bit. Going to see if this helps out on long term
stability. Moved Ouka underneath the TV - from beside the TV to where it
should have always been.
Carefully monitorring general heat (specifically, hard drives and
their longevity), it gets quite warm...
May 22, 2008
Watched Kingdom of the Crystal Skull with the rest of my coworkers.
Painful scientific inaccuracies.
May 20, 2008
Ugh...my C2Q crashed at 3GHz, backing down to 2.7GHz and it's stable again...
May 19, 2008
Ouka is now in a much smaller, low profile micro-atx case (InWin),
300W PSU (InWin/Powerman), and should fit underneath the TV now.
It now looks like some sort of set top(bottom?) box.
Still the same speed as before, just lost the floppy drive because
it wouldn't fit. Things still working as before, no network visible changes.
Old micro-atx full height tower case is going to be used as a test platform.
Not sure how long the RaidMax 380W PSU would last anyway.
May 6, 2008
Ack. Bought a small drill press so I can get started on the CNC project.
And Yuri's x86-64 Linux install broke again. *sigh*
April 13, 2008
Finished with taxes and mailed out. Ouch. Big tax bill from both Uncle
Sam and the State. :-(
Sigh. This month has been full of expenses from taxes (Income and Property).
Plus auto insurance was due this month too. Sigh...depressing bills...
At least Yuri's Linux install (x86-64, ATI AIW Radeon 8500DV) is working...
April 6, 2008
Need to get started on taxes...grr.
March 16, 2008
Hmm... I'm very irritable lately. Not sure why.
March 9, 2008
DST Begins.
February 19, 2008
Well, not much going on recently. Ouka (my PVR) is crashing frequently
and not sure why, getting annoying. Might be bad m/b again. Really need
to think about reallocating hard drives or something, would like the
backup disk to be more available than a dead computer...
January 25, 2008
Forgot to mention, yes, you can now run x86 binaries on Mughi. Patched kernel,
added x86 libraries, and now it seems to work fine.
January 1, 2008
Happy New Year!