nuxx.net
Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.

Category making things

Peektures…

August 23, 2005

· The 40 IEEE1394a cables came today, so now I can begin making the iSight Tripod Adapters.
· Cost Plus is a great place to buy good beer for cheap. Their selection swings around, but they always tend to have something that is good. The Arcadia Whitsun was $7.49 for a six pack, and the Bell’s Third Coast Old Ale is underpriced at $8.49.
· Yay! The metadata service in OS X crashed while I was doing the massive sync from nuxx.net. I’m not so sure Tiger can deal with massive influxes of info.

beermaking thingsmoved from livejournal

Learning…

August 15, 2005

Tonight’s shiny happy lesson?

Denatured alcohol is not the same as isopropyl alcohol.

This because readily apparent when the $6 can of denatured alcohol that I just purchased failed to remove the label adhesive from some PVC pipe, yet the isopropyl did the job in seconds.

Doh.

making thingsmoved from livejournal

iSight Tripod Adapter

August 11, 2005

Well, I just sent off payment for 40 15′ long Firewire cables. On the way home from the dentist’s office tonight (I’m going by there to do some computer work) I’ll grab some more PVC pipe, some endcaps, some tee nuts, some paint, and get started on things. Hopefully within two weeks I’ll actually have them ready for sale…

electronicsmaking thingsmoved from livejournal

iSight Tripod Adapter

August 11, 2005

[Cross posted to and …]

So I’ve been thinking of manufacturing about 40 of those iSight tripod adapters and selling them. I’m thinking of making them a bit shorter than the one I have (there’s a lot of air space in there) and painting them black or so.

Price would be US$35 shipped within the US, slightly more to elsewhere.

I’m curious, do you all think this is a good idea? And, would you be interested in buying one?

Here is a shot of the device itself, similar to what would be for sale. Except the ones I sell will likely be painted black.

Right now I’m trying to get prices on Firewire cables, but I’m thinking I’d end up with 15′ cables, leaving about 14.5′ hanging out of the adapter. The extra length is there so that it’s possible to have the iSight mounted on the tripod, and the computer a goodly ways away.

So, interested? Your thoughts?

electronicsmaking thingsmoved from livejournal

rez.nuxx.net

July 23, 2005

(For some reason I’m not interested in posting the pictures themselves to LJ tonight.)

This is what I made to hopefully correct the problems with the new webserver, rez.nuxx.net. It allows me to mount a spare 2U power supply inside of a normal ATX power supply space in my mid-tower server case.

I don’t mean to brag, but I personally think it came out pretty damn good. After mounting everything, this is how it came out. In doing this I ended up moving the fan guard and mains power connector to the outside of the case. Personally, I think it came out pretty good.

As can be seen here, there is also a good bit of room now, plenty of space for the bundling of the cables. Additionally, here is the first shot of the inside of the case, parts installed. This may change around a bit before I install it in the colo facility, but it’s the exact hardware config I hope to use.

computersmaking thingsmoved from livejournal

El-Cheapo Water Filter

July 21, 2005

[Cross posted to and …]


Click for huuuuuge….

So today I was going to brew some beer, and I decided that the best way to dechlorinate my water would be to run it through an activated charcoal filter. Well, ~US$20 and a visit to Home Depot later, and I had what you see above. A 2000-gallon activated charcoal inline water filter for a fridge, garden hose connectors, and enough 1/4″ line to reach easily into the carboy / pot / whatever. It’s really easy to use, and I’d have to strongly suggest that anyone looking to filter their water before brewing do something similar. Or, if you just need a portable filter it works as well.

Now, off to keep this brew going! The water is just coming to a boil now…

beermaking thingsmoved from livejournal

Power… Control!

July 20, 2005

Rawr. So it looks like the new webserver is having power supply issues. I’ve got six disks in there, and I think the power supply isn’t hacking it. When attempting to sync over data to it, it keeps rebooting.

Time to go purchase something much larger.

I’d think it could maybe be something else, but the machine isn’t dumping core (no vmcore* files found on the box) and this is the first time it’s happened. It’s also nicely reproducable…

Blah.

UPDATE: Also, something seems to have happened when the box crashed, and I have an empty directory that I can’t delete. (It’s part of the set that was being sync’d over.) I need to get the box into single user mode, but I can’t really do that remotely. At least it’s at home…

Well, time to price out power supplies.

UPDATE2: I may have an appropriate power supply at home… So long as it’s not too physically long, and I can fit it inside the case, it’ll definitely power the machine. It’s just meant for a 2U/3U/Whatever case, so I’ll have to build a bracket to hold it. Ah well.

computersmaking thingsmoved from livejournal

iSight Car Mount

July 12, 2005

[Cross posted to and …]


Click for more…

While at work yesterday I decided that I’d build a mount for my Apple iSight for my car. This way I could transmit photos of wherever I’m currently at, do stop motion video of driving, and all sorts of other things which the especially nifty iSight allows one to do.

So, as you can see in the picture above, I’ve got a mount built. This is more of my design test / proof of concept mount. I may build another that has a more polished look to it, as well. Probably some matte black paint, etc.

I’ve posted three videos which are the result of testing of the mount. There are two full motion tests which I took last night, and one stop motion† of my drive to work. The mount seems to hold the camera very stable, and the full motion videos almost have a video game feeling to them. Perhaps this weekend I’ll do a stop motion driving around highways somewhere Downtown Detroit, in and out of parking garages, etc.

Regardless, it seems to work as desired. Enjoy the videos. They are encoded with QT7 in 512kbps H.264, so you’ll need QT7 or some other compatable player to view them:

· Car Mount Test 1 – At night, on M-59 crossing old Van Dyke, entering the sunken concrete cavern highway area.
· Car Mount Test 2 – Driving through the parking lot on the southwest corner of Hall Rd. and Schoenherr, ending up on Schoenherr heading north.
· Stop Motion Test 1 – My favorite vid. One of the routes I take to work, start to finish. Each frame taken two seconds apart, played back at 15 frames per second.

† Stop motion footage created by:
1) Use EvoCam to capture a video with no compression, best quality, and best bit depth at .5 frames per second which makes for two seconds between frames.
2) Open resulting .MOV in QuickTime Pro.
3) Export .MOV to image sequence.
4) Open image sequence with QuickTime Pro set to the desired frame rate. In this case I found that 15fps looked best. 30fps was just too quick.

It may be possible to simply change the frame rate at which the QuickTime file is presented, but I was having difficulty figuring out how, so I did it this way.

automotiveelectronicsmaking thingsmoved from livejournal