WebLog

December 25, 2014
Merry Christmas for those who celebrate it.

December 14, 2014
I ended up getting another Nextbook8 Windows. This time I tried it in the parking lot, and lo and behold, it booted! I didn't accept the license agreement and promptly turned it off. It seems that a failed boot will trigger the machine to be able to get into BIOS setup, in which there's a GUI that allows secure boot to be disabled along with setup configuration and boot options (InsydeH2O firmware, same base as my Envy4t). Oddly enough, the UI of InsydeH2O's text configuration screens looks a lot like Intel's AMIBIOS from years ago. And sure enough, it requires EFI boot media and makes it clear on the boot screens. Now unfortunately I know my Linux media won't boot as I have not told the kernel what the rootfs is, so there's a bit more to work with. I do wonder if the EFI partition has enough space to put a big Linux kernel that knows how to put rootfs on the microsd card...

December 12, 2014
After returning the tablet, I was looking at other alternatives as apparently there are now a lot of possible machines of the same caliber. The thing that I wasn't aware of first about the Nextbook 8 is how some people were ragging on its display. I know that TN displays have angle issues but I've never had any problems with it.
In any case there seems to be these options that I might be able to get locally:

Unit	Storage	Ports	Display	Price	misc data
Nextbook 8 Windows	16GB	MicroUSB, micro HDMI	8" TFT	$99 Avail?	4AH battery, free 16G MicroSD, 0.35" (measured), RTL8723BS BGN WiFi
HP stream 7	32GB	MicroUSB	7" IPS TFT	$99	3AH battery, 0.39"
Winbook TW700	16GB	USB,MicroUSB, Micro HDMI	7" IPS TFT	$59.99	Separate Charge Port, 0.43"
Winbook TW800	16GB	USB,MicroUSB,micro HDMI	8" IPS TFT	$99.99	MicroUSB Charge, 0.43", battery?
Winbook TW801	32GB	USB,MicroUSB,micro HDMI	8" IPS TFT	$139.99	2GB RAM, MicroUSB charge, 0.43", battery?
Insignia 8" Windows	16GB	MicroUSB, Micro HDMI	8" IPS TFT	$99.99 OOS@local	Free 16G MicroSD

The Nextbook is fairly thin! Looking at the videos and actually holding the device, this thing is starting to get into ipad territory (but not really since it's just about ¼ inch (0.24")).

December 11, 2014
I returned the tablet to the store I picked up from. They didn't have any on stock there so I took the refund. Now I'm not sure if I should go get another one or not.

December 10, 2014
I tried turning on the tablet for the first time after I finally have a decent stage 4.
...
...
...

DOA

December 9, 2014
My friend from CA came out to CO on a business trip.

December 7, 2014
Still trying to build a stage 4 Gentoo install for this tablet PC. As it is supposedly a full UEFI32 machine with no legacy MBR support, this will be kind of tricky to boot. It looks like I will have to use Grub2 or stub boot, and likely will have to try a couple of kernels to see what hardware it has installed...

December 3, 2014
I picked up the $100 Walmart PC. I was surprised, this thing is really thin compared to what I expected it to be. It is however quite dense, it's a lot weighier than it looks. A full 8" display (widescreen). MicroSD pot, Micro USB, Micro HDMI - good. It has a fairly weak 4Ah battery however. I haven't tried powerring it on yet, was trying to setup a full Linux install and boot that as first boot to say "I have never used Windows on this thing" but it may be moot due to needing to use it to muck with the boot settings. Oh well. Hope Secure Boot is disabled or can be disabled. Secure Boot is my bane.

November 30, 2014
Got a few weird items lately to play with.
One is an 50-year old Sony AM cube radio. Not quite a standard design, except internally as a normal superheterodyne. It has quite good selectivity like what superhets should be, unlike the AM receiver in the shortwave radio I have. That shortwave receiver's selectivity is awful.
I found a 7 qt portable refrigerator/warmer with strap. It was meant for nine 12 oz cans and rated for 40W. Its cigarette lighter plug was completely destroyed. I replaced the plug with a spare one I had and went to Radio Shack for a new fuse. Surprise, it works! It does get cold... not bitterly cold like a phase change refrigerator but seems to do as well as I'd expect for a Peltier. In fact I was just wondering about how well Peltiers do... As for heating, it does heat pretty well too. I do wonder what kind of insulation it has. It looks like that it needs a huge air gap on the top, the top does not get cold at all.

November 28, 2014
The flu/cold is finally letting up. PND and coughing slowed to a manageable rate unlike the faucetpour and uncontrollable spasms.
I ended up ordering one of the Walmart $100 PCs, to see what it's like...

November 25, 2014
Caught the most vicious flu or cold. Felt something in my nose on Sunday and it's gotten worse since. Extremely tired, can barely get up. Couldn't even really get to work today.

November 16, 2014
Still thinking about trying to fabricate the PCB for the 7116 test board. I wonder if I should just make it into a complete multimeter circuit for the hell of it.

November 12, 2014
Snow... Bitter cold... Hit -7F, even colder with wind chill. This weekend it will get to freezing, maybe make it above freezing...

November 10, 2014
Wow. Snow cold. This morning it was 60F and dropped into the 20s in a matter of hours. Snow is on the way.

October 20, 2014
I ended up getting a signal generator from eBay. It's an old model, an Eico hobby grade model. It uses vacuum tubes. It seems like a ready built model despite it being available as a kit, and over the years the capacitor dried out causing the modulation to stop working. At first I thought it was fine because the high frequency was working. I swapped the output connector with a more common BNC so I could use it, and was able to verify it working with my 'scope and frequency counter. Both of these however had problems at high frequency, but it may be due to the probe or cabling I used. Or it may just be the output of the generator is really weak at high frequencies.

October 15, 2014
Another item I swiped from the hamfest trash pile was a homemade PCB with an LCD display that was fried, and an IC. I had noticed that IC was actually an TSC7116CPL, which I have been looking for - a 7106 or equivalent. Coupled with the 2-digit LCD displays I got a few years back I plugged this onto a prototype board. Using two of these 2-digit I wired up the reference design and lo and behold, it looks like the TSC7116CPL appears to be functional. Using the 'g' segment as a negative sign, it works for positive and negative voltages with a 1MΩ input impedance. It appears to draw around 1.32mA and I was surprised it stayed around ±000 count.

October 9, 2014
It looks like Linux 3.12.30 works on the SC520... Alas I can't seem to get the mini PCI slot to work with an AR5212/AR5213.

October 7, 2014
Finally got *some* freshly compiled kernel to somewhat boot on the SC520. It seems very finnicky. For some reason the 3.14.14-gentoo and 3.17-vanilla kernels don't even do serial console and just die right there. When I tried 3.0.101, this one actually got past the initial bootup but died apparently during PCI probe ... for a quirk in another chipset.

October 6, 2014
Well, at least pfSense is now listening to the OpenVPN socket. VPN is still not working yet.

October 5, 2014
Ack. Found my 2GB CF card. I wasted a 4GB card on pfSense... May have to swap pfSense to a smaller card. I installed pfSense on a 1GB CF card so it looks fine, may have to take the 4GB CF card back from one of the units.
Hmm. Did some more testing of the Heathkit MP-10 - it looks like around 48W when there's no load, and 96W when there's a 75W @ 130V load on it (a EconoBrite A19 long life bulb). It draws a full 100W with a 53W @ 120V load on it (a Sunbeam Halogen A19 bulb)... Some efficiency issue or voltage issue.
I took another look at the SC520 board. It had a serial port and I attached it to my power supply. It does something! Printed some notes about its BIOS and even attempted to boot the CF card! Alas it gets stuck trying to read stage 2 of the boot loader of GRUB and hung.
Looks like my neighbor had a party. I guess I'm just being inspired by SciFri's "Observe Everything"... and make a note of it...

October 4, 2014
Finally sort of figured out pfSense. Main reason? Have to put in firewall rules to allow packets to pass. Default is to not pass packets, even to the authenticating agent.

October 3, 2014
Finally got the software Ethernet bridge to work on pfSense. However now the captive portal is eluding me on how to set it up...

October 2, 2014
I fixed the other WG Firebox X1000, same problem. This other one has a white LED instead of orange LED backlight. I tried once again to run Linux (an old install I had on a 512MB CF card) and it didn't work - it hung. So I tried to attach a PCI video card to the lone PCI Card slot. Unfortunately it's really hard to get one to fit while the board is in the case! I had a right angle adaptor but unfortunately it was a "left angle" thus pointing the wrong direction (outside of box), but it was sufficient to let just one of my spare PCI video cards to fit - an old S3 card - that didn't have a skirt on the edge with the vga port.
It looked like any other AMIBIOS. I still didn't have a keyboard so I couldn't get into BIOS setup but I didn't need to - the problem showed up right away. GRUB died while booting. Odd, not sure why grub isn't working. So I tried to boot a virtual machine with the CF card - it also didn't work. Must be a bad GRUB. Reinstalling GRUB let the CF card boot up the X1000. I had to also remove the hardcoded IP address and make sure it didn't start up the irc bot.
I set up the CF card to use serial console and then let it boot all the way. Works perfectly fine, just like the other one. I wonder if I should find a Linux firewall solution just because I'm more familiar with it over BSD.

September 30, 2014
I took the power supply out of the WatchGuard Firebox X1000 out. I found the -12 supply was shorted, and soon found the schottky diode that supplied the -12 rail was shorted! Unfortunately I destroyed the vias while trying to remove the diode. The holes are just too small for the thickness of the leads. Anyway I stuck in a junk 1N5822 in its place and tried powering it up... it went up! But one second later it died once more, same symptoms. The 'new' diode shorted once again. Ugh. I took the diode out and tried to run the Firebox without -12V... it still powered up! I found a 4G CF card and dumped a pfSense 2.1.5 image onto it and restarted the Firebox, and hooked up a serial console. The machine actually came up just fine and ran pfSense. Now need to see what it can do...

September 29, 2014
Shellshock is in the wild! I now see several people trying to exploit this bug. This is terrible, as bad as the old sendmail worm in days past.

September 28, 2014
Went to BARCfest, the Boulder Area Radio Club hamfest. Not too much there, though there were a few people with AA5 radios but it wasn't quite at a price where I'd want to buy one. There also once more was someone selling heatshrink tubing... but misadvertised some! Some were just kynar tubing which I'm not sure what I'd use for. As usual there's the wonderful junkpile. Alas nothing really great there. I did find an old assembled Heathkit MP-10 6V/12V 175W sustained/240W peak AC inverter. It's a squarewave model, so it limits what it can drive. It seems to work, at least it lit a 13W CFL just fine. It drew 48W with no load, which is a bit concerning, and didn't seem to increase power with the 13W CFL attached. I also grabbed a few potentiometers and two WatchGuard Firebox X1000 rackmount firewalls. These unfortunately do not function as their power supplies were toast, but they are Celeron 1200 based Socket 370/i815 with 256MB RAM and 6 10/100 Ethernet ports. Their compactflash firmware were removed so that was unfortunate, as well as likely their PCI risers and internal hard drive attachments. However these should run regular Linux and *BSD, and in fact Zeroshell, M0n0wall, and pfSense will run on these. The LCD on the front is supported as well, they're attached to /dev/lp0 oddly enough - these are full single board PCs. However the power supplies suck. Both are dead, one I pulled out is a Skynet SNP-Z101 130W PSU in a small form factor. This is as big as the other small frame PSUs I have but support almost 3X more power. At 80% efficiency these will still generate more heat than the other 40W PSUs that aren't quite as efficient. Another curious item I got from the junk pile was an single board computer with an AMD SC520. Unsure if it works or not either.

September 25, 2014
The shellshock bourne again shell bug was widely advertised. I quickly patched my server as soon as I knew about it, but it looks like one host may have beat me to the punch. There were three attempts as of the time I write this that checked if my machine was vulnerable. I think the first two attempts were from the same individual but I had patched it before the second attempt.

September 7, 2014
Still a bit more testing. It looks like the generator behaves much better when fully warm. I tried hooking up a mini stove burner, my heat gun on 'low' and continued to try the hair blowdryer along with the Kill-a-Watt. I found that I could not get over around 750W out of the generator for some reason. It should be 900W, no? Alas I forgot that I needed to account for being "mile high" and had to dock off 14% or so due to the lack of air up here. 85% of 900W is very darn close to 750W, so that makes sense. Maybe I need to design a turbocharger for this thing to make up for the air loss...
Alas this thing is probably running too rich. Not sure how to safely adjust it just yet.

September 2, 2014
More testing of the generator. I mixed up another 250mL of gasoline+2 cycle oil mix (about 40:1) and started it up. It was a bit tougher to start, not sure why. There is a warning to not start the generator with a load attached and I think I know why now - it makes the recoil harder to pull and thus adds to wear and tear of the recoil mechanism which is known for breaking. I noticed the generator does have problems with heavy loads - it will stall. At 100W it does't have problems but:

August 24, 2014
I finally got a chance to play with the generator. It appears to be used but not too many hours, it's still very clean. I swiped some gas that I had premixed in my string trimmer and started the generator up. It's a lot quieter than I thought it would be - it's quieter than the typical 2 cycle small engines, likely due to the relatively large muffler. I only had a 100W lamp to test it with, and it was able to light it without trouble. I then shut off the fuel and ran it until it stalled, draining the fuel from the carburetor. I think it's a fairly decent little portable/backup generator for its price, but it's not going to be generating a lot of power. I got another gallon of gas for the remainder of the mowing season, this year it rained a lot more than previous years and therefore a lot of more grass growth.
It looks like one of my neighbors started to replace their wooden fence. It's in pretty bad shape, and I suspect it's probably in as poor shape as the broken fence segment that we share. A broken post is there as well. I really should go replace that post or something...

August 23, 2014
I went to the Harbor Freight Tools sidewalk sale and saw two open box specials of their 800W 63cc portable generator. It was marked initially at $100 but that was the cost of the new one. They then marked them down to $50. I ended up grabbing one to play with.

August 17, 2014
Went to the Denver Radio Club Hamfest. Some curious things there but tried to resist the temptation. The main thing I wondered if I should have bought was a 16-port rackmount Gbit switch. It was 3Com branded, alas, it had a fan. It seemed to be managed but unsure. Hope that I don't regret passing up on it, then again I don't really need it ever since I got DSL modems with 4-port switches in them, which adds a few extra ports to the Ethernet congested area. Still nowhere near the 16 ports provided...ugh maybe I should have bought it.
Also curious was a IBM PS/2 model P70 - a 386 "lunchbox" portable. I passed on it too as I wasn't sure what I'd do with it since it likely does not have enough RAM to run Linux. I ended up getting a few analog galvanometers: a 50 µA, a 100µA, and a 20A panel meter. Wanted to swap out that piss poor 200 µA unit in my ESR meter with something else as it's hard to zero with the limited slew of the op amp output. I also got this weird contraption in a "grab bag," which the seller gave up in trying to sell. It looked like a homemade control unit of some sort. I parted the unit, I picked it up mainly for the BNC connectors I was so desperately needing. With the BNC connector and a meter of RG-174, I attached two alligator clips so I can use it with my oscilloscope. It also had two relays that I recoverred and a bunch of random odd low value components.
Another interesting thing I saw was someone selling a DDS VFO or Direct Digital Synthesis Variable Frequency Oscillator. I opted against buying it too as it looked like it was an incomplete homemade device, and thought about making such device - I've always thought about building one as I've always needed an oscillator of sorts. I also wonder what kinds of waveforms do I really need - a square wave and sine wave are givens up to many MHz (for digital clocking and fundamental radio work, respectively), but triangle and sawtooth I may only need up to 1MHz at most (these are for power supply work, and possibly no more than 100KHz!). The problem with power supplies is that as switching frequencies go up, I then have to deal with skin effect. Having these high frequency losses during switching defeats the purpose of having high efficiency of switching power supplies. I may need to make just a low frequency DDS for these, and a regular PLL VFO for square/sinewave, though having one for both would be best.

August 16, 2014
Ended up getting an old CB radio. Well, it was virtually unused in its original box. It's a old, mass produced 23-channel unit that was made in 1974 - making it 40 years old this year. It was made for automotive use and is semiconductor based (mostly transistors, but the sole IC is for amplifying the speaker). The local oscillators are additive/subtractive crystal referenced where it will use a combination of two crystals to get the right frequency (versus using one crystal per channel or using a PLL). It only supports amplitude modulation and appears to be a heterodyning receiver... at least at first look of its schematic that was included, printed in the user guide! Full schematics... something that people wouldn't dare to include nowadays.
Turning it on, it seems to work... but all I hear is static. It definitely makes a difference if an antenna is hooked up, but could not hear anyone using CB nearby. I suppose most people have switched away from CB for cellular, a pity of sorts. But it still may be a bad receiver, or the attenuation of having an antenna inside is greater than I thought...

August 14, 2014
Hmm... Large hiatus in updates, been busy at work, not much time to do anything.
Found that Walmart sells an $8 LED 25000 hour. It uses 11W. I was tempted to get one to play with but was a bit hesitant on the quality - its heat sink wasn't even finned... Will it last the full 25000 hours? I have my doubts...

July 19, 2014
Well, I found out why they swapped my meter. The electric bill I got this month was significantly lower than what it should have been. Not sure if it broke or something but it was unexpected. I wish they told me about the power outage service, but at least the server came back up without a hitch. I still need to setup the UPS again.

July 16, 2014
The electric company swapped out my meter suddenly for no apparent reason that I could discern, causing a short outage and hence the disruption of web service around noon. At least they were true to their word that they swapped meters, but the question remains: why?

July 12, 2014
Autopsy of the Commercial Electric 23W bulb:
It looks like corrosion got this one. The tube's wires broke right off while opening (if they weren't already broken hence it doesn't light anymore). Rust on steel parts inside. I guess the garage is more humid than I thought, possibly because I didn't have it turned on enough to prevent condensation. I parted the ballast but realized it probably was still working and should have kept it. It looks like the Commercial Electric ballasts are fairly robust after all. Though most of my failed bulbs at this point have been Commercial Electric branded (because I have a lot of them), I think that they're OK. Now we'll see if these cheap Greenlites hold up or not.

July 8, 2014
I finally installed the Actiontec Q1000 and took out the old PK5000 router along with the WRT54G 3.0. I think it pretty much does what I need it to do now, except provide a good guest network and 802.11n in the 5GHz band. This should be a lot easier to segregate the network during a power outage, I just need to power Subaru and the Q1000, the 8-port Gbit switch can be off now as the Q1000 has Gbit ports. However it reports bytes transferred oddly, it doesn't seem monotonically increasing making logging really messy.

July 4, 2014
Happy Independence Day (USA)! At least there is power maintenance going on at work, don't need to login, because we can't.

June 30, 2014
I noticed the garage lights was a bit dimmer than expected. Turns out a 23W (100W-equivalent) CFL (Commercial Electric branded) I had been using in the secondary area burned out. It was also one of the first bulbs I ever bought, this one probably is around 10 years old. As I don't usually have my garage lit, I don't think I have gotten 8000 hours on the bulb, but the fluorescent coating has blackened quite a bit. I replaced it with the larger Sunbeam 20W (75W-equivalent) I had been using in the inspection lamp, and placed a smaller, lightweight Greenlite 13W (60W-equivalent) into that lamp.
Now pending a few fluorescent bulbs that need to be disposed of. Want to do an autopsy of the 23W bulb and see what the true failure mode is.

June 24, 2014
It hailed fairly hard. There were definitely golf ball sized hail, but there were reports of having tennis ball sized hail. Quite a bit of damage to trees and thin brittle plastics outside. I had a broom with some plastics on it, the hail cracked the plastic and dented the metallic handle. It looks like a neighbor's car got her back window bashed in, and another car that got its hood and body all dented up. I wonder how bad my house's roof suffered from the hail, though the wooden deck (horizontal) and fence (vertical) held up OK. I noted that one of my north windows cracked from the hail impacts. Ugh.

June 21, 2014
I ended up buying the 3 ton low profile HFT jack. This thing is heavy! Alas I don't have to lift it often, I just need to slide it around on the floor. It works! Did a test lift and was able to jack up the Jeep and slide one of the ramps underneath the tire. Took it down. The jack definitely lifts the saddle up a lot faster than the K-mart jack I had. Alas the Rally/K-mart jack is still a good jack to have around as it was designed to be a temporary jackstand as well - It has a heavy duty pin that I can slide into the arm that will prevent the arm from coming down even if the hydraulic fluid bleeds down.

June 14, 2014
I ended up buying a 35Ah 12V SLA battery for backup power.

June 12, 2014
The VM host, Subaru, got upgraded to xfce4. Now I can use portage to upgrade its software once more. Current status.
I ended up getting a coupon for the 3 ton low profile HFT jack that has a lower minimum height (2 7/8") AND a higher maximum height (19 3/4"). Will likely get this though it's yet another few pounds heavier than the other one (5" and 18 1/4" - a full inch higher). But I'll need to try to lift this at the store, and I mean the literal not colloquial meaning of "lift". My existing 2.5 ton jack is 25 lbs, one third the weight - it's heavy but in the bit unmanageable. At three times the weight, 75 lbs, this is heavy and I hope I can still at least move it around a little. My existing jack has a minimum height of 5" which works for my two passenger cars so technically the minimum height of the standard version is fine already... just having a higher maximum height would be good...

June 8, 2014
Was thinking about buying that new sensor and a new floor jack for the Jeep. I was thinking about the 5" to 18.5" 3 ton jack that HFT has, but what I really want is that low profile jack that HFT sells...and sometime for the same price as the 5" version. Sigh. The parking lot sale ended when I was thinking I should just go ahead with the 5" version. Well, at least I have coupons to get it at that price, but the 3" low profile one seems like a better deal. Need to measure to see if the 5" version will work under my Subaru and DSM as well.

June 7, 2014
I drained out the water and weak glycol mixture from the Subaru and refilled it with yet another gallon of fresh Ethylene Glycol. I hope it's around 50% once more, may have to do some quantitative analysis on it. Of the used EG I have I ended up boiling as much water I could - used a outdoor range and a beat up old pot I got from a thrift store. I got a specific gravity of 1.13 which is close enough to 90% glycol which now I can dilute it to however I want. It is kind of brown however, despite multiple filterring efforts, possibly due to a mixture of different dyes (not sure if there's any OAT/Dexcool in it). Of the new fluid extracted I expected to have very little glycol content. It looks much greener than the brown crap I have. I do wonder why it's brown if it's not dye mixtures - iron oxides is the obvious other possible colorant reason, but iron oxide isn't very soluble and I've passed it through fairly tight filters. Most of the old extracted fluid was from the Jeep during its water pump replacement, though some is also from the Subaru as well. The use for the old glycol? I flushed out the overflow resevoir and filled it with the old, used glycol and filled it slightly with water to the full mark. Should be fine? I think it should...

June 6, 2014
Been thinking about buying a large battery for backup power. Also thinking about why my floor jack wouldn't jack up my Jeep very well. Well, it makes sense. With its 29" tires the axle center is 14.5" off the ground. The axle tube is about 2.5" thick, so half of that is subtracted - so the axle bottom is about 13.25" off the ground. The floor jack I have can only lift 14.75" so theoretically I can get a whole inch and a half. May have to get a taller jack...

May 28, 2014
Had a power outage... And now found out for sure that I need to work on how to get Doujima/Subaru to come up in harmony. Subaru takes a very long time to boot and there's a race condition when starting up the virtual machines. It's also starting to get quite warm. CPU Fans are turning on more often...

May 19, 2014
Bought new hose. Had to cut it carefully to get it to not hit the fan. But now it could hit the power steering pump. Argh. Probably less of an issue though since now the hose should flex itself away from the pump. Now need to dump the highly dilute antifreeze again. Too lazy... leave it in for a few days...

May 18, 2014
It looks like the bottom resevoir of the radiator (which I kind of feel is dead waste and should not have been designed that way) holds about 0.7 gallon of liquid - as I emptied out the the water and refilled it with antifreeze. I could only get around 1.7 gallons of new fluid in before it filled up. Oh well I guess there will be some tap water still in the system, but not really that big a deal. I put in a full gallon of antifreeze and probably should put in more to get the ratio up to 1:1, likely need to simply fill the rest of it up as I burp the system...with antifreeze.

Horrors. On a test drive, the upper radiator hose grew long enough due to heat or whatnot to hit the fan. Car leaked out most of the coolant and overheated. Luckily I had water and futzed with the sleeve to get a few more miles to civilization where I got some duct tape to seal it a bit better and get home with it. I filled it up with tap water and will have to buy a new hose on Monday.

May 17, 2014
Installed the radiator last night. Now I know what the complaint about the thread matching - the threads in the radiator are machine threaded but the original radiator, being made of plastic, had self tapping screws. Not wanting to buy new screws and seeing no need for it, aluminum is soft enough to just use those self tapping screws - they went in to the holes just fine despite ruining the machine threads. It's up to you which way to do it. The RA-WRX02-2 is a tad thicker than the original radiator and the upper radiator hose is a bit too long to fit, so I trimmed off about a quarter of an inch so that it wouldn't hit the fan. I also noted the thin return line hose from the top of the engine to the top of the radiator is a bit loose because the nipple is a bit smaller than the plastic nipple on the old radiator, so a new clamp is needed else it will leak. It leaked pretty badly for me, I was a bit worried the radiator was leaking but fortunately it was the clamp.
With the system completely drained, I filled the cooling system with about 2.5 gallons of tap water - a bit more than I thought mostly because of the larger radiator - and am going through a flush cycle. Though the radiator is new, the block still has crap in it. There's a lot of caked on crap in the hoses.
Now have another 2 gallons of highly dilute, used antifreeze I need to deal with.

May 13, 2014
After a bit of concern that the radiator wouldn't get shipped, I got it. UPS said the radiator weighed 2 lbs, which is way too light for such unit. I measured the unit to weigh just under 10 lbs.
The radiator appears to be a really common CHEAP "performance" RA-WRX02-2 unit, possibly from DPT. It's a dual row and appears like it was hand-welded. I hope all the bolts fit from the old radiator, heard some anecdotal notes that the threads don't match. I hope not. It was advertised as bolt-in.
I will need to probably flush it with water to make sure there's no swarf still lurking in it. Also need to buy more ethylene glycol. I wonder how much I'll need as reportedly this radiator has higher capacity than stock, likely due to the larger end tanks.

May 12, 2014
It appeared to not have gotten cold enough to freeze luckily enough. Plant life looks ok.

May 11, 2014
Happy Mother's day.
Looks like we got greeted with snow on the front range. It's freaking... not April... but MAY... and we get snow. At least it's not June? They say 4" or so. My poor irises probably will wilt and die again like last year. However last year's snow was coupled with bitter cold, this year it will still get cold but not nearly as much...then again 24°F is still freezing.
I ended up ordering a new all-aluminum "performance" dual core radiator from eBay to replace the leaking unit.

May 4, 2014
Sigh. My Subaru's radiator is leaking. Looks like the plastic gave way.
I ended up getting an 'Utilitech' branded (appears to be Feit Electric) 60W-replacement LED light bulb to play with from Lowes. According to the Kill-a-Watt, this thing is indeed around 10W, and it is quite bright, definitely in the 60W incandescent range. It's even heavier than a CFL so if your lamp fixture is top heavy, this is even worse. Fortunately this thing doesn't get very warm, not even near the base. It unfortunately claims a 18000 hour lifetime which is low for LEDs. I'm surprised this thing also has a decent power factor, almost unity - which is unlike CFLs. This thing works like an incandescent. Now I'll need to see how much this thing heats up...and lasts...
However, at 18000 hours and the cost for the bulb it's not much better than CFL. A CFL that lasts 8000 hours and costs a small fraction of the cost of LED, and only uses a little more power has a faster payoff.
LED: 18000 hours 10W bulb $8, Elec: 10W * 18000h = 180kWh * $0.10/kWh = $18, total = $24
CFL: 8000 hours 13W bulb $1 * 18000/8000 = $2.25, Elec 13W * 18000 h = 234kWh * $0.10/kWH = $23.4, total = $25.25
True, just 3 watt difference but LED still turned out to be a better deal... but not by much. I don't know how often you can get these 800lm bulbs for $8, most are well into the $9 range (albeit dimmable) even on Amazon.
Though the LED does get to full brightness virtually instantly, this bulb I have takes about 0.5 second to turn on if it has been off for a minute.

April 29, 2014
Really windy outside these couple of days. A part of my fence blew down, kind of expected because the post had been broken for years. Need to go replace that now.

April 20, 2014
I was wonderring what was up in the nearby MMJ store. Looks like they had a party...Figures, didn't realize April was month 4.
Was wonderring about how to hack the HL 6226A PSU. I was able to fix the control dials that were bashed in and jammed and the pots (pun intended) still look good. Had to reattach the threaded port to the body for one but that went OK. I was also wonderring what would happen if I instead use the PNP germanium transistor on the positive rail instead (making it common emitter instead of emitter follower) with a npn transistor to make it controllable by a low voltage. This probably would have a huge gain and may have problems with ringing if I also had an op amp to do current/voltage detection. Hmm. I really should see if I can get a lower gain and have the op amp provide most of the gain.

April 12, 2014
Found a parts list for the Harrison Labs 6226A PSU. I was somewhat surprised but not really with it having a "diff amp" in it - a differential amplifier - a key piece of circuitry in an operational amplifier. Nice. Unfortunately chances of getting the transistors are almost nil - these are old Germanium units. I may have to throw out the top board and put in my own IC op amp version, though I'm not sure yet how to deal with 40V with an op amp that will fry at that voltage. I also was surprised (but once again may be not so much) that these older PSUs that have series dissipative designs have emitter follower designs - thought that's not really uncommon - but it uses PNP Germanium transistors... so that means it needs to pass on the NEGATIVE rail instead of having Silicon NPN transistors!

April 11, 2014
Sent out a fairly huge sum of checks to pay Uncle Sam and company - federal income, state income, and property taxes. Sigh. Probably enough to buy a new transmission or at least put a good dent in one, or definitely a rebuild or used unit.

April 8, 2014
Sigh. Tranny is still not shifting, and it seems worse now - it will stall in gear...

April 6, 2014
Replaced the Governor Pressure Solenoid (shift solenoid) in the Jeep, along with filter, and adjusted the rear band. I thought the water pump was miserable, no, this is worse. The instructions in the Factory Service Manual says to "lift vehicle" and I didn't take that advice... Well, I should have! I'm thin enough to actually slide underneath the Jeep as it's fairly high for a passenger vehicle (the "pumpkin" (i.e., the differentials), control arms, and the center crossmember appear to be the lowest parts of the vehicle. My head barely can fit under the center crossmember and easy enough to avoid the differentials and the control arms. The toughest part was trying not to make a mess on myself. The tranny fluid keeps on dripping, dripping everywhere once you thought it stopped.
I could not pull the governor pressure sensor out of its receptacle, but the solenoid came out with some resistance. The screen on it looks a little dirty but not unserviceable. However there's so much crap in the tranny, I don't recall if I cleaned out the donut magnet but there was a lot of black crap everywhere, even small metal flakes in the pan. Not a good sign. Despite the tranny not locking when the pressure was too high, the ATF still was mostly reddish apart from the blackened areas.
Unfortunately I got the wrong sensor. It appears the 1G ZJ and the 2G ZJ used different sensors. The WJ used yet another sensor. Grr. Shouldn't have taken a guess and do more research. Returning the wrong sensor and I hope I didn't really need to replace the sensor anyway. It didn't really seem like it though. I hope. Another fluid drainage will suck.

April 5, 2014
Went to the Longmont Area Radio Club Hamfest. Nothing that great there. They also didn't have the big pile of crap that they usually had - but eventually started dumping some stuff there. I passed on an HP scope as it didn't seem to want to show at least a dot indicating the high voltage was intact - the reticle screen was cracked hinting at possibly other internal damage including a dreaded CRT breakage. Picked up a Harrison Labs 6226A power supply but it appears to have been gutted. Oh well, perhaps I can design new guts for it, it does have the transformer, meters, connectors, etc., just need to add in control. Maybe convert the discrete transistor based control to a RRIO IC control? Hmm?

April 3, 2014
Completely done with replacing the water pump in the Jeep and it appears to not be leaking! Lots of annoying things while doing it:
Removing fan and shroud "together"
Removing studs from water pump hub
Removing heater return metal pipe
Scraping old gasket off
Tightening the fan nuts onto water pump
Refilled with about 50-50 antifreeze, but could take a little more antifreeze.

April 1, 2014
I bought an iphone and forked over its rights to my employer so I could receive mail on it.

April Fools!

On a more serious note, I started replacing the water pump on the Jeep. The fan and the shroud were one major PITA to remove, but got that out. Drained the coolant, and now it's just removing the PS pump and the water pump itself.

I hope the tranny problem is easy to fix...

March 29, 2014
Well, I got all the tranny parts, but noticed the Jeep was leaking coolant badly. Ugh. Was planning to swap the tranny parts but didn't want to deal with the coolant mess on the floor - it leaked at least a gallon or so. I hosed off the floor with a garden hose. Bought a new water pump and need to go swap it at some point as a higher priority fix than the tranny. Also note that buying the ATF+4 was annoying, I ended up checking four Walmarts to get four quarts - which completely depleted all four stores' stock. I was watching a couple Youtube videos on people swapping their pumps and it made me drool over an air ratchet, which I promptly bought from Harbor Freight. No more 1/16 turn per swipe ratchet spinning to remove a loosened bolt, one revolution per second should speed things along.
I am still waiting for my Ungar 9925 heating elements.
A few of my machines got updated from Gnome 2, finally.

March 24, 2014
I ended up pulling the trigger and orderred a new GPS and GPS. Err... Governor Pressure Sensor and Governor Pressure Solenoid. Apparently these are also known as shift solenoid (and the sensor, I don't know...). Bought from Amazon.com along with filter and gasket. Now I just need to get the oil which I'll probably get from Walmart B&M, need the Chrysler ATF+3/ATF+4/Type 7176 stuff.
I found out that my "button battery store" - JD Dollar, a apparently sole proprietor dollar store in Downtown Fort Collins, is closing shop, apparently due to retirement. I usually could get button cells like AG3, AG13, CR2016 and CR2032's fairly cheaply. I guess now I have to resort to Dollar Tree or Harbor Freight which don't nearly have as good deals.

March 19, 2014
I saw someone posted Ungar heating elements on eBay, and quickly orderred to repair the burnt out element in my rework station.

March 10, 2014
Despite being warm today, the Jeep tranny didn't want to shift this morning. Hmm. Noticed the tranny temp sensor input voltage was a bit higher than yesterday when it was working well. Maybe some nonlinearity in the temp sensor? Don't know.

March 9, 2014
Since it was warm today I decide to take a look at why the transmission on my Jeep was behaving so badly when cold. I took the TCU out of my Jeep and opened it; drat nothing obvious like a bad capacitor. Also noted the Jeep is leaking coolant. Ugh. Looks like radiator hose or water pump.

March 8, 2014
I replaced the front brake pads and rotated the tires on my Subaru. The brake pads are nice and quiet once more like when it was new. Now I don't know how pad longevity, dust generation, and most importantly braking performance will be (still doing break-in) but so far the Autozone Cmax brake pads get a thumbs up.

Pads	Material	Miles	Brake Dust	Noise	Stopping power	Comments
Subaru OEM	Ceramic?	60000	Medium	Quiet	Good	Came with car
Advance Auto Wearever Gold	Semimetallic	25000	Heavy	Squeaky	Good	I don't know why it didn't last very long, at least I thought it was semimetallic - but now they seem to have changed the formulation recently to ceramic. The fronts squealed from day one, not sure why. Might be bad quality lining. I had replaced all four corners with these and the fronts wore out. I probably would not buy again but who knows.
Autozone Duralast Cmax	Ceramic	TBD	TBD	Quiet	TBD	So far so good.

March 5, 2014
I got the new STK4191V amplifier module and replaced the malfunctioning STK4191II-GS. The Fisher works like new once more. Listening to the radio, it sounds good now. Recently I started listening to 1310 KFKA so it's good to have a good receiver. While removing the old STK4191II-GS I noticed one pin was broken, which would explain why the thing was not working correctly. Glad this project is complete. Just some incandescent lamps that may or may not need to be replaced.

March 1, 2014
Argh. Another cold weekend. More indoor activity to be done.
I debugged the Fisher tuner to a bad connection in the RF oscillator coil, a somewhat lucky find as after I slightly flexed the board while trying to remove it, it started working. Reflowing the solder and probably internal connections in the coil as well fixed the problem for good. The amplifier however is apparently shot, the conclusion was made after viewing waveforms of the output as the load was changed. I ordered a new STK4191V amplifier module as it seems to be a fairly common and cheap part. It should arrive within the week. It's not exactly the same but hopefully with its plusses (lower THD due to better input stage) and minuses (no phase control) it should sound as good as new.

February 24, 2014
I bought new ceramic front brake pads for the Impreza. Trying a different Autozone branded Duralast. The Wearever "Gold" Advance Auto Parts pads barely lasted 25000 miles and completely contaminated my wheels with brake dust. Actually I thought these were semimetallics and not ceramics as the current websites indicate.
The Duralasts do not look like semimetallic at all but does not look crystalline as I'd expect from a ceramic though. Looks polycrystalline...

February 23, 2014
The Fisher tuner appears to have no input going into the PLL that controls the tuning capacitors. The local oscillator in the shield is currently the main suspect.
Chii got completely upgraded to xfce, so now I can use Portage once again, with no blockers.

February 17, 2014
Well, it's about time to finally upgrade the Gnome 2 boxes to something else. While I had upgraded one box from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3, installing Systemd was kind of dangerous. I had upgraded "Peorth" - a 200GB HDD in an external chassis - to XFCE. It looks like it's working OK and running about as good as it was with Gnome2.
Next will probably be diskbox, and then Chii. Subaru likely will go with XFCE some day after all the wrinkles are cleaned up as I won't need to go to systemd. Likewise with Mimori and Rukia as they are remote and don't want to deal with moving to systemd.
Ouka - I don't know yet... this is a real problem
Fujiko - DONE - Gnome3
Mimori(remote), Rukia(remote) - likely XFCE
Subaru - DONE - XFCE
Doujima(VM) - fvwm2, no change
Mughi - fvwm2, no change, X11 broken
Kei - DONE - XFCE
Trinity, Yuri - ?
Hinoki - DONE - XFCE
Geode - No change, no desktop interface
Diskbox - XFCE
Toshiba(30GB 2.5" HDD x86) - DONE moved to XFCE
Peorth(200GB 3.5" HDD x86-64) - DONE moved to XFCE
Chii - DONE - XFCE
Mikuru - DONE - Gnome3

February 16, 2014
I ended up getting a Fisher RS-851 receiver. Unfortunately it's really broken. AM barely works and FM is dead. Suspecting double failure - the amp and the tuner will need to be debugged separately... If this thing were working, it's a 50W per channel amplifier. It uses an STK4191-II hybrid module to do final amplification.

February 9, 2014
Went to the Aurora Repeater Association Hamfest. Not much good there, was hoping to find a solder iron or something. Ended up grabbing a 0-18V 0-15A Harrison Laboratories "HP" 6427A rackable linearSCR switching PSU (270W).

It's heavy (about 30lb) and huge with its large transformer, capacitors, and heatsink. Seems to have no problem lighting a 12V 50W headlight at full brightness - something my homemade adjustable power supply won't do. No fan in this device at least, just the occasional buzzing of the transformer.
Had to make a edit. This rack power supply, because it uses switching SCRs, is actually much higher efficiency than a linear PSU and actually stays fairly cool despite driving several watts of power to the load. Unfortunately as a SCR switcher, its load regulation is fairly dismal. Not horrible but not very good compared to modern IC regulators. I can see its voltage jump and droop a volt or so when applying a heavy load.

February 5, 2014
Bitterly cold. It got to a full 1°F today and will hit -7°F tonight with wind chills of -15 to -25°F.

February 3, 2014
Another CFL burned out in my dining room light fixture! Lo and behold, it turns out it was yet another Commercial Electric CFL bulb that burned out just like the one a few days ago!! It looks like I had 4 of these 14W units installed instead of having the Sunbeams. So what does this mean? That last CFL will go any time now. Could be days, weeks, months, but it's probably reached its lifetime. I replaced the dead one with a 23W 100W-equivalent "Eco Smart" bulb at least for a little while as it was readily on hand. It will be replaced with a 60W-equivalent when I get another.
Funny, with the 1200W ceramic heater, it caused enough current to pass through a 15A power strip that it tripped the power strip's breaker. Not only that, the power strip actually got slightly warm. THAT's a lot of current going through...

February 2, 2014
Ha... the Broncos lost 43-8. Wow, I actually watched part of the SB. But not really. I ended up finding an Actiontec Q1000, an indoor antenna, and a ceramic heater. The Actiontec Q1000 will probably replace the PK5000 which replaced the GT701WG that replaced the GT701. The good thing about the Q1000 is that it has Wireless-N as well as Gbit ethernet, which will relieve some of the port congestion on the primary switch.

February 1, 2014
I found a DTV receiver STB. It looks like it's very simple, and it was $10. It has NTSC out, stereo, and a channel 3/4 output, and has a remote control. It seems to take ATSC channels 2-69 and is about the size of a small DVD player. It seems to be a bit more sensitive than the HDTV PCIE receiver card in Ouka, but has of course has no pvr functionality.

January 31, 2014
Got around 8" of snow last night. Lot of shovelling. It's not too bad, staying just around the freezing point but next week will struggle to stay above single digit degrees Fahrenheit. And possibly go negative...

January 26, 2014
One of the "island" keys on Mikuru broke, took me two tries but finally epoxied it back on and it works fine once again. I'm not sure if I will need to buy a new keyboard or not. It's a backlit keyboard which may add additional cost in replacement.
Tonight it got real cold. Snow tomorrow. No more star photo experiments (it's cloudy! and cold... then again it was cold trying to take a picture of the Big Dipper.)

I took apart my old Logitech desktop keyboard and put the top half through the dishwasher. I got a whole heck of a lot of hairs and dirt while scraping out the junk between the keys. After removing that junk and the dishwasher cycle, the keyboard looks much better with the crud gone. The silkscreen keys won't come back of course, but it's gone.

January 25, 2014

It looks like my other Commercial Electric CFL bulb burned out in my dining area light. Odd. Bad bulb? Commercial Electric seems like a "house brand" for Home Depot which I believe I bought them from. The bulbs were used for several years for average 5 hours per day (longer during winter, shorter during summer, but always turned on for a few hours at least). Interesting that both bulbs burned out 4 months within each other - now the second bulb I had burn out (that wasn't a crappy dud/infant mortality). At avg 5 hours/day, around 365 days/year, I rack up 1500+ hours/year. Given the bulbs have around 8000 hours, I think it did last 5 years or so, it's very close to estimated lifetime. I found the original recept for these bulbs and found I purchased these bulbs in 2005! They did last their expected life. Again, replaced it with another Greenlite from Dollar Tree: now the fixture has two 13W Greenlites, two 20W Sunbeams, and a 25W incandescent ballast. Now prediction: Will the 25W incandescent burn out next or not?
I also upgraded Mikuru to Gnome 3.8 as portage dictates... Other than some generic hiccups it generally worked. The irony is that Bluetooth broke again... and it looks like Gnome 3.8 causes a lot of interrupts making power consumption go up compared to Gnome 2.32.1... Sigh. Need to get that fixed.
Tried to take a photo of the night sky with my Nikon... It looks like I should be using my AF-S 18-55 F3.5-5.6G VR lens and not the AF-S 55-200 F4-F5.6G VR, as it cuts off a lot even at shortest focal length. I got the pan of the Big Dipper/body of URSA Major, but light pollution is bad. Was trying to shoot for 30s and ISO100 as much as I could, but it looks like I will have to bump ISO, put weight on the tripod, and get a remote shutter release. At least the Nikon I can go to ISO3200 and the picture won't "add extra stars" like the Olympus did at ISO400.

January 23, 2014
It snowed a little last night. Mighty chilly but still in the 10s at least. It'll be warmer for the weekend.

January 20, 2014
Uranium glass collection
Well, at least I think they are uranium glass. Photographed under a CFL UV-A blacklight. Why am I collecting? For a geiger counter project of course!

January 13, 2014
Weird, by today the flu-like symptoms appeared to have disappeared. Glad I am not going to have to suffer several days of misery.

January 11, 2014
Felt awful all day today, slept all day. Flu like symptoms, threw up in the morning. Not sure what malady this is but it's miserable.

January 7, 2014
I hacked the Norwood Micro 19" 's EDID a bit and made it unique compared to the I-Inc CY199D. Kind of funny too, I heard the I-Inc can lose eeprom contents too, I wonder if it's the same eeprom that can be reprogrammed over i2c. I saved a copy of the EDID unmodified of course, so if that day comes, it's worth to try it... I wonder if it's worth to capture EDID of all of my monitors. Both ports if it has both DVI and analog... Except I need to make sure I capture it without a KVM in the way.

January 5, 2014
Today was bitterly cold. It will hit negative temperatures tonight.
I found my Ungar solder iron's heater burned out. Ugh. I guess now the other heater broke after my desolder heater burned out earlier. Finding a replacement has been troublesome.
I finally found out why my Norwood Micro 19" 4:3 CompUSA LCD monitor never worked with DVI: It looks like the EDID got corrupted. I copied the EDID from another monitor and it fixed this issue. Finally can use the DVI port. For now I hooked up the DVI port to the DQ45CB's DVI-D port.
Also finally: the Bluetooth RFCOMM bug gets completely rootcaused. Since Linux 3.8, rfcomm was broken in NetworkManager. But a patch came by against 3.12.6 that restored the status quo.

Machine	Arch	Class	Kernel	UDEV Upgrade
Doujima	KVM x86	Server	3.10.7-gentoo-r1	Done
Chii	x86	Netbook	3.8.13-gentoo	Done
Fujiko	x86_64	Workstation	3.9.2	Done
Geode	x86	"Server"	3.7.10-gentoo	Done
Hinoki	x86	Laptop	3.2.12-gentoo	Done
Kei	x86	Dev Workstation		Done
Mikuru	x86_64	Ultrabook	3.12.8	Done
Mimori	x86	Workstation	3.5.7-gentoo	Done
Mughi	ia64	Test Server	3.10.5	Done
Ouka	x86_64	PVR	3.7.9-gentoo	Done
Rukia	x86	Laptop	3.8.13-gentoo	Done
Subaru	x86_64	Server	3.12.7	Done
Tornado	x86	Test	3.5.7-gentoo	Not Done
Trinity	x86	Dev Workstation	3.2.12-gentoo?	Done
Yuri	x86_64	Spare	3.2.12-gentoo?	Not Done
r.jajcs.net	KVM x86	Server	3.10.7-gentoo	Done
Peorth	x86_64	Disk1	3.7.10-gentoo-r1	Done
wd205a	x86	Disk1	3.7.10-gentoo-r1	Done
Kotoko	armel	Phone	2.4.28-kp52	N/A Maemo
WWWA	mipsel	router	2.4.32-OpenWRT	N/A DD-WRT
actiontec	mipsel	router	2.4.17-mvl	N/A MontaVista

I updated the DQ45CB to the newest BIOS but it didn't help the VT-d problem. Have to disable it. I also measured the power consumption to be about 89W when idle. This is significantly less than the old Douijma, especially with it now using onboard video... The old doujima (Athlon XP 2200+/SiS735/ATI Rage Pro Turbo/120GBx4) was running near 120W somehow.

January 1, 2014
Happy New Year!
Alas I don't think this year will be a happy one for me...

older 2013 entries