December 18, 2011
Found and bought a Xerox DocuMate 510 scanner. Noticed it was Linux compatible
through SANE (TWAIN compliant, using avision libusb driver).
But I already had a Linux compatible Mustek 1200UB?
The Xerox has an Automated Document Feeder (ADF)
which means it can scan unattended - just put in a stack of papers to scan and
go. It also uses USB2, and can scan quite a bit faster due to higher
upload USB2 speed (and it uses more power, it has an external 24W max power
brick. My old Mustek is bus powerred USB1 (500mA/2.5W)).
The Xerox uses a CCFL bulb unfortunately, which probably has shorter lifetime
than the Mustek using LEDs. The Xerox bulb is really *white* as it should be,
I was more curious as to the Mustek's very Green LEDs - it likely has
some sort of special method to distinguish colors... Perhaps less accurate
at estimating red/blue colors.
I was a bit hesitant getting it as I 'found' a power brick and wasn't sure it
was the right one. It was the right voltage DC at least, but wasn't sure of
polarity. I also wasn't sure if it was SANE compatible, ADF and all.
But the scanner works, xsane works fine, including ADF.
Now need to scan and dump excess paper trash... and likely also the Mustek,
at least until the CCFL burns out.
December 11, 2011
Found a piece of plastic (old CD case) that I used to reinforce the center
potion of my antenna. Drilled a few holes to attach the balun's connectors.
I tried a few more experiments with adding elements... the didn't appear to
help much at all! Not sure if it's just 2 vs 1, or simply because I need
much more than 2 elements to get a better signal.
December 3, 2011
Went to Best Buy to look for an antenna. They had this weird figure-8 shaped
(Clearstream 2) antenna... Not sure about it,
especially that it costed $100 (it was on sale too. I guess I didn't trust the
design, not sure how well it really would work). So I went to
the local thrift store and found a balun, and attached it to a 2ft piece of
wood with 1ft 30gauge wires extending the length - a rudimentary dipole
antenna. It worked! Well why wouldn't it. Can pick up a few ATSC channels
with my MythTV using the ATSC Hauppage WinTV HVR-1250 card (supports NTSC
tuning but no linux support, nor is there any NTSC channels anymore),
definitely could pick up some locals - but not many. Just could pick up a few
channels and their subchannels (Picked up an NBC affiliate, CW, Fox, ION,
religious, and some Spanish channels).
Need to see what happens if I add a few more elements or make it into a Yagi.
December 2, 2011
It snowed another inch... blah.
December 1, 2011
It snowed this morning... 5 inches.
November 29, 2011
Finally got an initramfs for Linux 3.0.6 that would boot my 500GB x 4 RAID5
in subaru with rootfs on a logical volume on RAID. Now I can
reuse my 750G disk as a cold/hot spare for failures during the
current hard disk shortage crisis due to the Thailand flooding.
November 22, 2011
Was playing with the Ryobi, set my PSU to 10V and max amperes. The burst
current draw is definitely higher than 3.5A and stays at 2A or so minimum.
Not sure if this was the reason why the recell broke so quickly, this is
definitely a very high load.
Forgot to mention I ended up getting a few Neodynium magnets, they're small,
pill sized. And wow do they pack quite a magnetc field. I'm not sure if my
credit cards got erased but they are strong indeed. I got them to have an
alternate method to connecting to the contacts of batteries.
November 20, 2011
I got the HFT Lithium Ion drill yesterday and worked on my fence, where the
rails were falling off the posts. The posts look like they're in bad shape
now, not sure how much longer they'll last. Used a wood screw with a 1/8"
pilot hole to reattach the rails and hammered the pickets back to the rails.
About the HFT/Chicago Electric LiIon drill (#68126): it worked pretty well for helping me reattach the fence. It has a 2-speed transmission, 1 or LOW was great to drive the screws into the wood (350 RPM). The wood was pretty tough to drive a screw in, even with the pilot holes - I needed to put the clutch all the way at setting 11 to get the screws in. I used setting 2 or HIGH to actually drill the pilot holes (1350 RPM) which it did without a hitch. The drill is also fairly light, a bit under 2 and a half pounds, a bit over 1 kg for metric people. My old Ryobi (Home Depot?) 9.6V drill weighed almost a pound more.
Issues: I have to lay the drill on the side (the Ryobi can stand up), carry screwdriver bits separately (the Ryobi had built in holders for driver bits), and there's no "green liquid" level on the Chicago Electric. I suppose the largest issue I've seen so far with the drill is that there is a slight bit of shaft play that I don't see on my Ryobi or drill press (there better be none on a drill press!) The drill also wasn't perfect when I first got it, the (-) spring connector for the battery in the drill was bent wrong. It unfortunately bent even further inwards when the battery is inserted, which of course leads to a nonfunctional drill. I bent it back, and could start working on the fence. The drill appears to not drain any appreciable power when locked off, so it's probably OK to leave the pack in the drill unused. The battery itself seems to be a Lithium Ion Cobalt Oxide (LiCoO2) as a guess as its charged, open circuit terminal voltage seems to be on the high side for lithium cells (12.4V / 3 cells = 4.13V/cell). Unfortunately this means likely I'll get at most a couple hundred cycles if I'm careful. (Luckily a couple hundred cycles is still a few years as I'd at most be using it once a week or so, a hundred weeks is a while.) The ideal cells would be Lithium Ion Iron Phosphate (LiFePO4)... These are much more durable and could stand a thousand cycles or so with brutal conditions such as the light use in mere power tool. I haven't completely discounted that the cells could also be Lithium Manganese Oxide (LiMn2O4) which also have a bit higher reliability and lower internal resistance. At least it does appear to have battery overdischarge protection, if in high gear and you try to stop the chuck, it will cut off instead of keeping on trying and potentially kill the batteries (I only tried it at the store with their discharged one). Not so with my Ryobi and NiCd's.
The huge charger seems to be microcontroller controlled, and will shut off after charging. The initial charge the cells did not get appreciably warm. The charger, after noticing its whine when unloaded, is most definitely a high efficiency switching type design. I'm sure some people would get annoyed by the whine when there's no cell plugged in, just unplug it to stop... Or maybe just leave the battery in it, since it does not appear to overcharge.
I was wonderring whether or not to get the cheaper drill from Big Lots, which also is lithium ion. However it's only 0-500RPM and does not have a transmission, so it can't achieve faster drill speeds (which is desireable for narrower bits so they cut faster and therefore have less chance of breakage.) It's cheaper though. My Ryobi is also a single gear, 0-900RPM IIRC.
Found out what went wrong with my bench PSU - the LM317T that I reused from the old incarnation of the supply was exhibiting the problem I saw with it once more, except it's much worse with the current configuration - the TIP42 transistor is amplifying the error. After replacing it (and finally throwing that LM317T in the trash where it belongs), the supply works correctly once more. Luckily I have plenty of extra LM317T's, and if I run out, I have LT1086 LDO adjustable regulators's which should work just as well.
November 19, 2011
My bench PSU broke after leaving it on drawing a "small" 200mA load at 3 volts
without the fan on... Suspecting the current pass transistor burned out.
Failure mode is that the voltage can't be reduced below 10V... At 200mA,
(18-3)*.2=3W of power dissipated by the TIP42... hmm... not particularly
much... need to investigate further. If it were 3V 1A, it would be dissipating
15W, and that would get hot fast.
November 18, 2011
I put a 250G into the array as a spare, but it was pure awful. Turns out, the
Promise Ultra66 did not want to go full speed with it; only wanted to go 33MHz,
making it really slow. I tested the kicked disk in another machine... no SMART
errors! The disk seems fine... Also MUCH faster than the 250G on the Ultra66.
I put in the Promise Ultra133 board and attached the 250G as a pseudo
hot spare. The Ultra133 seems to work better with the 250G.
I ended putting the disk back into the array. It's working once more,
November 17, 2011
One of my HDDs got kicked from my primary RAID array again.
November 13, 2011
I noticed one of my bulbs in my car burned out again. Upon closer inspection,
meaning, removing the bulb, I found that the bulb suffered meltdown and
completely shattered! I was out at a store when I first investigated, the cold
wind made it very uncomfortable to try to remove it, I was thinking about just
going to Walmart and buying another lamp while I was out but succumbed to
the cold and went home to work on it.
All that remained attached was the wedge in the socket.
I suppose the glass all fell into the bottom of the
lamp fixture. The wedge of the 7443 bulb melted into the plastic socket and
was impossible to remove. I ended up shattering the rest of the glass by
prying it and scraped out some of the reflowed plastic. I would have to
replace the whole wiring harness if it melted any more.
Sort of annoying - this bulb that burned out, it's the tail light night
indicator lamp -- not the brake light. It's a weaker 5W. However ... it's the
7443... using the 5W filament only! The 21W filament is completely unused!
What a waste of a perfectly good 21W filament...
The Impreza uses five tail bulbs per side, one 7440 for reverse, one yellow
bulb with bayonet for signal (which can be inserted only one way despite
there being just being one contact...), one 7440 for a brake only light, one
7443 for a brake/tail light, and the kicker, a 7443 for the tail only light.
November 12, 2011
Very windy today...
November 11, 2011
Well it's 11-11-11. But that's just another number.
I had a bit of curiosity when I noticed a particular
vending machine decided
to take money and not give product.
Decided to reformat Yuri's 64 bit install as well. This machine also has
troubles with X11 - stopping X11 and restarting it ends up in a crash.
Yuri has a Radeon 8500 AIW, and being 128-bit it's one of the faster of the
8500/9000 series. Disabling AGP fast writes seems to have helped it a little
because sometimes X11 wouldn't even start, causing a hard crash.
Used Ouka to distcc since it was now of the same architecture.
Yuri is quite a bit slower than Ouka, but not just because of its 3.4GHz
single core/HT Prescott 4 while Ouka has a 2.66 GHz Core2 Duo.
The second core in the Core2 Duo definitely helps, but it was
the fact that Yuri only has 1GB RAM DDR versus Ouka's 4GB DDR2 that
made the difference.
Ended up also needing to add xrandr commands to /etc/X11/gdm/{Init,PreSession}/Default to work around an apparently KVM issue where it would return that the
monitor supports 56Hz refresh, and it does not. Also /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc
for not gdm operation.
November 10, 2011
Incorrectly found that disabling APIC helps Ouka boot. However, found that
it's some sort of initialization issue - once Ouka can boot once without ACPI
enabled, the next boot ACPI will work... This is a broken bios on the Foxconn
G9657MA-8EKRS2H motherboard.
November 8, 2011
Decided to reformat Ouka.
Going to install 64-bit Linux on Ouka. Ran into ACPI issues again...
October 30, 2011
Snow mostly gone, just shaded regions left.
Finally got around to building a SEPIC DC-DC converter using a LT1070CT. Not
sure why SEPIC designs weren't included in the data sheet or application notes,
but it seems to be well suited and works.
I used the 1:1 noise filtering transformer from a dead power supply as
the inductive storage elements (it's fairly large!), and a 2.2µF
ceramic capacitor I got from a hamfest as the capacitive storage element.
A schottky diode swiped from another dead PSU serves as the switching diode.
Initially I left out the input
capacitor which made the PSU oscillate badly, it's mandatory... I put in a
330µF electrolytic which made the oscillations go away.
The result? A seemingly stable SEPIC PSU. It seems to work pretty well
'boosting' from about 7V to 'bucking' at 16V. Output stable at ~12V which I
set it to. At low voltages the switching frequency seems to get into the
audio range making it squeal. I could drag the voltage down to even 5V and it
would still try to 'boost' to 12V but the LT1070CT started to heat up fast.
The schottky diode doesn't seem to heat up much, and luckily the capacitor
doesn't either.
October 27, 2011
Used MeterBasic to
print out new scales for my analog PSU. Now it displays
actual numbers instead of having to mentally prescale. The scales don't seem
very accurate either, but analog meters never were. I suppose before I
selected scales that were divide by 10 to get actual readings, so it wasn't
way too hard to mentally get the correct reading. At least now the markings
on the ammeter are in 0.5A increments instead of 0.7A, so that's better...
October 26, 2011
Snow! 8" fell. A lot of broken trees.
October 17, 2011
First freeze? Not sure if it actually froze but it did get into the 30s.
October 11, 2011
Hooked up a switch to the fan of the PSU. That fan was annoyingly loud,
it was poorly designed... Now whenever I know I have a light load I can
just leave the fan off, or if there's heavy dissipation, the fan will
help draw away the excess heat. Of course, low voltage high current is when
I need the fan on. Seems a few watts (like 5W or so) the metal heatsink is
sufficient but getting into the 10W range, the fan needs to be on. What
applications needs the fan to be on? Charging low voltage cells/batteries.
I really need to get the switcher working again, which is much better suited
for low voltage high current, as it doesn't burn excess voltage as heat.
October 4, 2011
Added a fan to the PSU, couldn't fit it internally so outside it goes.
I'm not certain it really helps yet, it still gets
wicked hot when dissipating excess voltage, then again, it has to throw away
20W, one way or another. I figure that I won't use this for low voltage use
for long periods of time but it would be nice to make it stable in case I do.
May have to relocate or use a different heatsink for the series pass
transistor, the LM317 surely does not dissapate much heat according to
calculations (it can only pass 15mA or so before the TIP42 PNP series pass
takes over, and assuming if the output was shorted to ground,
power = 19V * 15mA = just over a quarter watt.
Not even sure if it even needs a heatsink, unlike the TIP42! Currently both
are attached to the same heatsink... I do notice some voltage error as the
heatsink heats up, perhaps thermally isolating the two power devices will
reduce error.
I still continue to be impressed at its versatility, I don't know how I could
have done so long without such tool on my workbench. I might also have to
add a negative supply to it too for powering bipolar opamp circuits.
October 3, 2011
Ripped up my homemade adjustable linear supply and hacked in the guts to the
new version. Tapped off a halfwave rectifier for the negative voltage for
constant current shutdown. Seems to work! Except it gets really hot, which is
expected from a linear supply. Deciding whether or not to install a fan...
but regardless it seems to work much better at constant voltage than the
previous supply... likely due to properly adding stability capacitors and lower
(0.2Ω vs the old 0.5Ω) current sense resistor. A bit of downgrade
though, the 0.2Ω is 5% tolerance and the 0.5Ω is 1%. Still better
than the 0.1Ω 10% resistor in the switching PSU.
In any case, it's mostly the reference design from
the National Semiconductor LM117 data sheet, modified to use the parts I had on
hand (24V 2A CT transformer, TIP42 series pass transistor
(the transformer is only good for 2A anyway!),
50KΩ current adjust potentiometer and related circuit changes
(was 250KΩ, which I did not have),
a TO220 dual diode I salvaged from a dead PC PSU, and other stuff).
But I should have used a single LM741 or LF356 op amp instead of using a "good"
single-rail LM324 quad since I needed the negative supply anyway... Have too
many crappy 741s dying for a good use...
October 2, 2011
Started hacking up a second version for my linear adjustable PSU using a
reference design. Hope to do away with a switch I was using to select CC/CV
mode, and have it automatically limit voltage or current as needed depending
on the settings of the potentiometers.
Unfortunately it looks like I have to use a negative supply
to bias the op amp properly to shutdown the regulator when over current...
September 27, 2011
Probed around why my homemade switching PSU failed, it looks like I didn't
expect the transistor to be so crappy when gate voltage is not much higher
than source for turnon! Seems like the IRF640 I used needs a good 10-12V VGS
to really turn it on for the currents I needed. Well, the transistor was
in forward active region instead of saturation which I expected, and thus was
dissipating quite a bit of power, melting the bushing and some solder.
I swapped it for a more modern NTB75N06 which requires less of a VGS to turn
on solid. (Since this is a high side driver, I'm using a charge pump to
generate the VGS needed, but it's pretty crappy - an oscillator,
a bipolar output driver, and diode-capacitor charge pump.)
I also probed into why the current sense was sometimes wrong, causing the PSU
to shutdown. Turns out the offset of the LM358 seems to be able to flip the
positive feedback to get it stuck in certain states, like when it's in
shutdown... Ouch! Not sure how to fix this yet,
need to somehow deal with the offset...
September 25, 2011
BARCfest today. I love BARCfest, tends to be a cart where people dump stuff.
Swiped a whole bunch of MOS field effect transistors that apparently
were manufacturer samples that were never used... Unfortunately they were
in a "trash bin" so not sure how many fell out of their protective antistat
bags, possibly damaging their gates.
Bought a bunch of panel mount "LEDs" that actually were incandesent
(boo hiss... got ripped off here... at least there were some switches)
and a 100-pack of 1W 0.2Ω resistors which are good for
current sensing... Also got
an analog 100µA 2KΩ meter, and a 200mV ICL7107 based digital panel
meter. I probably should have swiped some more meters.
The DPM has an internal negative buck-boost to generate the -5V needed.
I hacked the digital meter to a more useful-to-me 20V fullscale,
keeping the original 100 mV reference, and added a
7805 so I can feed it random wall wart power (the thing eats 200mA with its
LEDs so the 7805 gets somewhat toasty with 11V source). I didn't add a heat
sink, wasn't enough space for one.
I also found an ancient GI SP0256-AL2 speech synthesis chip and a LT1070CT.
Also got some power transistors, even got an 'antique' Motorola 2N174 PNP
Germanium power transistor.
I got a bunch of defective parts too, it kind of figures,
they were free anyway so who cares...
September 23, 2011
I found the bad transistor in one of my old atx PSUs. Found a replacement,
luckily it was an exact replacement, probably from another PSU I parted. Well
it's working again! One less unfinished project...
September 20, 2011
After a few hours of rest to get rid of the surface charge,
I measured the Jeep's battery to be 12.6V which implies it is fully charged.
September 19, 2011
Blah. Found my Jeep battery was pretty much fully discharged when I decided to
start and drive it today. 11.8 volts.
Hooked up charger ("2A mode") and let it charge while I was at work.
Disconnected it after letting it bubble a bit, about 12 hours.
Found a bad capacitor (68µF 35V) in my LCD monitor's PSU,
replaced it with a 100µF 35V and it works once more. Sneaky
little thing, capacitance is good, but I suspect leakage and/or ESR was bad.
| Machine | Board | Standby/Suspend | Hibernate | Wake On LAN |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Subaru | Gigabyte EP43-UD3L | S3/STR Usually works | Works (swapfile)! | Works |
| Chii | Asus eeePC 900A | S3/STR Works | Works (swapfile)! | ? |
| Hinoki | Dell Inspiron 600M | S3 resume fail | Works (swap partition) | ? |
| Kei | Tyan Trinity400 | S1/POS/Stop Grant works | Works (swap partition) | Works with 2.6.34, 3.0.4 fails :( |
| Kei | Tekram P6B40D-A5 | No ACPI | ? | ? |
| Mimori | Gigabyte G31M-ES2L(1.1?) | untested | untested (swap partition) | ? |
| Ouka | Foxconn G9657MA-8EKRS2H | S3/STR works | Works (swap partition) | onboard not working |
July 26, 2011
Another "planned" outage at 10:00 AM to fix the issue on Sunday... Power came
back on around 11:30 AM.
probably some stopgap fix needed to be made more permanent.
Repurposed a 12V HP Omnibook 800 docking station brick that I was using for my
EEE as my monitor PSU. I'm glad I rescued this PSU, so useful... Wish the
polarity was swapped though, it's positive to barrel...
Also cleaned out Doujima of dust...Wow was there a lot of dust everywhere in
doujima. Used compressed air, dust collected everywhere from PSU to fans to
everywhere... hope I extended the life of the machine now that it can cool
better without the dust.
July 24, 2011
Power outage at 6:29 PM, Restored 10:40 PM.
There goes my five 9's.
Glad my springs are fixed, would
be dangerous to mess with a garage door with a hacked broken spring without the
opener helping out.
Was in WoW and died with no user control...
Ended up seeing two battery backed up clocks with wrong time, need new
batteries. Doujima's RTC also doesn't seem to advance with no power, found
that Doujima's CMOS CR2032 battery needed replacing too. Worst off, Doujima's
17" LCD monitor won't turn on anymore. Found it was the power supply that
broke. Need fix or replace this 12V, 4A supply that outputs to a 5.5x2.1 coax
plug, positive tip.
July 13, 2011
*Huge hail storm*
July 10, 2011
Changed oil in my car and installed my vise to the chest of drawers in the
garage. Bought 3/8" bolts that use 9/16" (15mm) heads to attach. Now don't
have to worry about it falling off or attaching it to the table better with
C-clamps.
July 5, 2011
Oh my. I got my springs finally, Pro Door Supply seems slower than what they
wrote on their webpage, took two weeks to get, thought it would take only a
week. Apparently the springs are drop shipped from another
company, I suspect that Pro Door Supply may actually queue up a bunch of orders
and perhaps that's why they are slower than expected on shipping the parts.
I installed them
and my garage door is happy once more.
There was a ridge that ended up on the bar that I had to file
off so I could slide the drums off. Keeping the drums and cables taught before
and while winding was the other annoying issue, ended up winding one spring one
turn and then fully tightening the other before tightening the first one the
rest of the way. And having many sets of locking pliers is really helpful.
I also installed heavier/longer springs than what they replaced, hoping they
will last longer. It was also very hot in the garage in the midst of summer,
having the garage door closed it was really danged hot! Had a fan blowing to
help cool things off a bit. I opened the other garage door and side door in
hopes some air would circulate but the hot air where I was working was simply
trapped there. At least if there was a mishap someone could hear me...
July 4, 2011
Went around town looking for a spot to watch fireworks at City Park for
Independence Day, but didn't really. Need to get a bicycle or something.
June 22, 2011
To do a temporary fix for my spring,
I bought a tiny 3/16" U-bolt clamp (apparently measured side to side on the
baseplate, not the bolt) normally used to bind two 3/16" steel cables
together. It was $0.83 from Ace Hardware. Normally to bind cables,
you would use 3 or so, but there's not much space. It also seemed
a little small
compared to the spring - 0.2187" is 7/32" which is larger than 3/16", but it
seemed to fit fine (the next size up was 1/4" which is "HUGE").
One portion of the broken spring on bottom and one on top
into the U-bolt to attach them together. Tightened the U-bolt, and
wound the main spring. At first I wound it 5.5 turns, and see if the U-clamp
slips...then I wound the spring another full turn. At 6.5 turns the sum of the
two springs are getting close to the full weight of the door, and the garage
door will open again, without herculean strength.
Stolen
idea was from this link.
June 20, 2011
After looking into how to deal with the broken spring, I orderred larger,
new springs in hopes it would reduce wear/increase longevity, from
Pro Door Supply.
June 19, 2011
I bought a 3" high speed air cut off tool (once again from HFT) and a
36" x 1/2" rolled steel bar from Home Depot.
I cut the bar in half to use as winding bars for the garage door springs.
The cut off tool worked pretty well, it sliced through the 1/2" steel bar
fairly quickly with its aluminum oxide 3/64" cutting disk. I think my
(HFT 8-gallon) air compressor
needs to be a bit stronger though, but it managed. (I was wonderring why there
were two cut off tools with different SCFM requirements at the same price,
ended up buying the one with the smaller SCFM. I think they both might
actually be the same SCFM after all.) I used my HFT earmuffs and
some non HFT goggles while cutting, sparks flew and the bar split into two,
fairly cleanly. I don't know how long a hacksaw would have taken.
My air tool collection is now a 1/2" impact wrench (works fine),
3" cutoff (at limits of air compressor), tire chuck, blow nozzle, and
liquid sprayer. Accessories are a 10' rubber hose, 25' rubber hose,
25' plastic hose, inline oiler.
June 12, 2011
Even more HFT reviews: The HFT "5-in-1" Stud Sensor #92375. I bought this a
while ago to
try to find a place to cut a hole in the wall to check for insulation and
add a heater, but decided against it. Now just tried it for the heck of it.
It has two "volume knob" switches on the sides, to turn on "wood" mode and
to turn on "metal/voltage" mode. Turning on the wood mode on the left
you can change the sensitivity, just sliding across the wall will light the
LED if it detects a change in density. The metal/voltage mode works similar
for metals. Voltage mode, it seems to be able to detect if a wire is connected
to mains/120V whether if the wire is loaded or not, as long as it's within 1cm
or so from the sensor. Seems to be able to detect the 60 cycle AC hum
radiating from the wire as it goes through the wire. It seems to operate the
same regardless of the rotation of the "M/V" dial as long as it's on. As in
the manual, make sure you check a live wire and a dead wire to make sure a
wire is really dead.
The other "in-1" are a 3 ft tape measure (imperial and metric) and a LED light,
just about everything has an LED in it now. The LED is about 20cd if my 13cd
LEDs are used as a reference.
It uses a 9V battery to power the works.
My left-wound spring on my garage door broke. It made a really loud and quick snap sound when it broke (almost like an electrical spark). I was in the house when I heard that really strange noise from the garage. Now I can't open my garage door with the opener anymore.
June 11, 2011
I bought the noise isolation earmuffs from HFT so I didn't have to use my
stereo headphones which also isolates ambient noise.
I was surprised, the earmuffs
works significantly better than the headphones in terms of noise isolation.
I can barely
hear any ambient noise with them on, and surely drowns out a lot of the noise
from my gas weedwhacker. I also ran out of trimmer line on my weedwhacker.
Ugh.
May 30, 2011
Wow, used the HFT tennis racket bug zapper. It worked! Zap! killed a Miller
moth without me having to get it drunk with isopropanol (normal method I was
using, soaking it with alcohol) or smashing it (which is messy).
May 26, 2011
Friends arrived from CA to go to another friend's wedding.
May 21, 2011
Wanted another junk camera, got a Canon Powershot A60 2MPx. Seems to be a cute
camera. Seems to behave better with NiMH batteries than my Olympus C3040Z.
Going to be my "toss" camera. Just need to get a "toss" memory card for it.
April 7, 2011
Just 18 years of Linux for me though... I started using Linux 2 years after
first release, in 1993.
March 13, 2011
Yes this is postmortem. Was admitted to hospital because doctor thought it
was important, and released on the 17th. Really dumb. I should not have went
in for the headache.
March 11, 2011
Went to doctor due to having a headache for the past two and a half weeks that
would only go away with pain relievers.
February 1, 2011
Bought some 23W/100W CF bulbs and got rid of the
incandescent bulb. Laundry room is once again bright as it needs. Used the
polystyrene-acetone goo to make a knob for the lamp.
January 23, 2011
Bought a shaded table lamp at a second hand shop for $1, it works just fine,
but probably it was really discounted because it was missing the power knob.
It came with a 100W incandescant bulb, which I don't really want but since
I was low on CFs I moved it into the laundry room which had a 14W CF that I
thought was a bit too dim. Anyway, used a 4-40 nut as a makeshift power
knob. Using in the spare bedroom instead of
a clip-light that I decided to use as a task light.
January 22, 2011
Put the G9657MA-8EKRS2H back into its low profile microatx case, and seems to
work again. The custom PSU I had replaced a few caps to give it a new lease
on life, so this machine should be good again for a while.
January 15, 2011
Went to the NCARC Hamfest
Disappointing...
January 1, 2011
Happy new year!