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Category: acquired things

Paved Night Ride

Published October 9, 2008

Everyone who was on the ride around Mt. Clemens except for me. Left to right is Perry, John, Marty, Nick, and Mike.

Here, have a photo of everyone who went for a ride tonight from Mt. Clemens High School to Metro Beach and back, except for me. It’s not a very good photo. This one of Marty and Nick is better, despite the huge amount of noise from the high ISO.

After getting home from the ride I stuck the extra RAM in the printer and my Mac, and everything seems to be working great. The printer (Xerox Phaser 6130N) got a 1GB Crucial SO-DIMM (CT12864AC53E) to bring it to 1.1GB and the Mac Pro got 4GB of RAM bringing it to 7GB. I now can run multiple VMs with ease and deal with multiple large image files without a bunch of paging.

It’s been a good day and a good evening.

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Xerox Phaser 6130N

Published October 7, 2008

Xerox Phaser 6130, which was $249 via Costco.

A few weeks back I mentioned that I really needed a new printer, as my old HP LaserJet 5L had mostly ceased working. Well, last week Costco had a Xerox Phaser 6130N listed on their site for $249 shipped, with a Tripp Lite surge protector and USB cable.

I ended up jumping on this deal, because it has all the features I was looking for in a printer, except a duplexer, which really isn’t that important anyway. In short, this is a networked color laser which speaks real Adobe PostScript 3 (Wikipedia PostScript article), making it properly usable from any OS without silly Gutenprint (GIMP-Print) drivers and their crappy dithering.

The price was also outstanding, as Newegg sells this printer for $359.99 and most other places want even more than that. I also made a quick trip over to Crucial for a $16.99 piece of CT12864AC53E should bring the total RAM in the printer up to 1152MB. That ought to make printing complex documents fast.

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NiteRider TriNewt Beam Shots

Published October 5, 2008

NiteRider TriNewt Wireless: High

Having acquired a NiteRider TriNewt Wireless headlight for biking I wanted to compare it to my other lights, so I put together a small setup in the garage to see how they all compare.

In short, none of the other lights I have compare to the TriNewt.

These test shots were taken in my garage with both the light being tested and camera set up on my workbench 30 feet from the garage door. A Robin Myers Digital Imaging Gray Card (buy them here) was propped up along the base of the door for use as a color reference, if needed. All comparison photos were taken with a Canon EOS 20D and a Canon 24-70 f/2.8L lens at 24mm, ISO 100, f/11, six (6) second exposure, with the white balance native (aka “As Shot”). This exposure was based on an automatic test exposure of the target using the NiteRider TriNewt on high and chosen to set an upper limit of brightness.

Here’s the items and their results:

NiteRider TriNewt Wireless: High · Low
Planet Bike Blaze: Single Setting (On)
2D Cell Mag Lite w/ OEM 3W LED Upgrade: Single Setting (Focused As Narrow As Possible)
Planet Bike Superflash: Steady Mode
Reference Overhead Lighting: Two 300W Incandescent Bulbs

It’s pretty obvious that the TriNewt on either Low or High blows everything else I’ve had away. I can’t wait to try this out in the woods.

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NiteRider TriNewt Wireless

Published October 3, 2008

NiteRider TriNewt mounted on my helmet. It's a bit heavy, but should work well.

Today I received my new bike light, a NiteRider TriNewt Wireless. I’ve been needing a head light of my own if I want to do any riding after work and this one should work pretty well. It’s a lithium ion battery powered helmet or bar mount 486 lumen LED-driven bike light, and based on my initial tests it’ll work very, very well. The on/off switch is on the battery itself, which would normally be a hassle, except that this version comes with a keyfob-like remote control switch and hardware for mounting it on the bike.

I plan on posting beam shots comparing it with some other lights I have around the house later on, but for now if you’d like to see photos of the bundle as I received it, please feel free to take a look at my NiteRider TriNewt Wireless photo album. Here’s one photo I find particularly interesting, a macro shot of the LEDs themselves in the lamp assembly. I don’t dare look at these while they are illuminated.

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Daily Dose of Bigotry

Published September 25, 2008

This nice piece of bigotry, Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against The West showed up in the mail today.

Today I received two nifty things in the mail. The first was these Olympus knock-off batteries from Eforcity for my new Olympus Stylus 850 SW.

The second is the winner, though; that DVD up above there, of Obsession The Movie. In order to form a proper, informed opinion of it I’ll be giving it a viewing, but I suspect that it’ll live up to its reputation of being a neocon-backed piece of anti-Islam propaganda. We’ll see, though. My understanding is that its production has a bunch of neocon backers and copies of it are being mailed out en masse in swing states. Yes, that’s how it came to me… Completely unsolicited, via the US Mail.

I guess it’s time to cue Göring:

Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

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Olympus Stylus 850 SW

Published September 24, 2008

My shower head, taken from inside of the cone of spray. One of the first photos from my new Olympus Stylus 850 SW, it was taken in the shower after a bike ride.

Here’s one of the first photos out of my new Olympus Stylus 850 SW which was purchased so that I’d have a decent pocket-sized ruggedized point and shoot camera. It is the business end of my shower head, taken from within the cone spraying water, while taking a shower after today’s bike ride.

I’ve been wanting something like this for when out on my bike, traveling in the expectantly rainy UK, and other random places where I don’t want to bring or risk my DSLR. (Here are a bunch of photos of the Olympus Stylus 850 SW and the SanDisk 8GB microSDHC which make up this camera setup. Thus far it all seems to work well together and holds 1992 of the highest quality photos the camera can take.)

Today was a mostly-day-off from work, in exchange for some rather frustrating work this weekend. While leaving my parents house at 10:30pm on Saturday I was called into an issue which I worked on until 7:30am on Sunday. This was not fun and pretty much ruined my Saturday evening and Sunday, so I needed another day to do stuff. Today worked out well, though, as I ended up…

…buying what I believe to be an undervalued stock.
…getting banstyle.nuxx.net installed. (More on this later.)
…receiving my Stella 180-N head light, which I may return as a better deal may have come along.
…receiving and photographing my new Olympus Stylus 850 SW and the SanDisk 8GB microSDHC card and taking the aforementioned photo in the shower.
…going for a nice evening / night time bike ride at Stony Creek with the MMBA.
…using a bike headlight for the first time, although it was borrowed (thanks, Mike!) as I don’t want to use the one I received.

So, all in all it’s been a good day, even with attending a few conference calls here and there. Now I just need to sort out what’s going on with me and bike headlights, relax a bit more, then get a good night sleep. This shouldn’t be too hard as it’s only 11pm or so.

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Black and Shiny

Published September 14, 2008

Set up to polish my boots in the laundry room. One boot is done.

After eating some really nice Skillet Baked Ziti (recipe from America’s Test Kitchen) that Danielle made for dinner I avoided working on my server by polishing my boots. As you can see above or at this close-up of the toes of my boots, they needed it.

Now I get to go back to figuring out why twe(4) in FreeBSD 7.0 seems sluggish. It may just be my perception, so I’m double-checking this by comparing the new 3ware-based array to the old gmirror(8) version. Or, it may be that it’s one of three drivers (the other two are ohci(4) and atkbd(4)) which indicate that they are GIANT-LOCKED, which means that they use the old SMP locking method.

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Esquire Is Good For Something

Published September 10, 2008

The front page e-ink display and PCB from the cover of the October 2008 issue of Esquire magazine.

Yes, I too picked up a copy of the October 2008 issue of Esquire. The magazine itself is going in the trash, but I pulled the front panel apart so that I could poke with an e-paper / Electronic Paper / E-Ink display. I must say, this is a very nice, very high contrast display. If this were put in some more portable, more durable, more cost effective form than the Kindle (and without the data network crap) I could see myself getting one to use for reading.

When the magazine was sitting on the front seat of my car, glancing over at it reminded me of $RANDOM_NEAR_FUTURE_SCIFI where magazines are shown sitting on tables and racks blinking and flashing away. To be honest, I found it as irritating as a banner ad. I hope this isn’t where things actually go tech-wise.

Also, when I arrived home today I noticed a lot of dust and cut marks in the asphalt near my garage door, which makes me believe that something is being done about the sunken area there. What’s strange is that it’s been like this for years without issue. I’m not sure why it’s being fixed now.

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Wheels Go ‘Round Again

Published September 1, 2008

The rear of my bike, with new a SRAM PG-850 cassette, SRAM PC-870 chain, and Shimano Deore RD-M531-L rear derailleur.

This afternoon I made a quick run to REI (yes, they were actually open) and was able to pick up a Shimano Deore RD-M531-L rear derailleur for the must-be-MSRP price of $54. This, along with a new SRAM PC-870 chain and an SRAM PG-850 cassette purchased as-new from someone on the MMBA forums got my bike working great again.

After getting everything together and set up I went for a short test ride around my neighborhood, which turned into a 15 mile loop up through River Bends Park to Ryan Road. In short, practically all of my shifting problems are gone. I still have to replace a bent front chainring, there’s still spoke noise, and I think I the bottom bracket may be making a rubbing sound, but none of that makes it difficult to ride.

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