Category: making things

External Intel 320 SSD

Published August 17, 2012

A couple weeks back, the Intel 320 SSD in my iMac failed, leaving the machine unbootable and the drive appearing as an 8MB volume. This drive was replaced with a new 256GB Crucial M4 SSD and the Intel drive was returned for warranty replacement.

Having no immediate need for another SSD but not wanting to have this one laying around I decided to put it in a Macally PHR-S250UAB external enclosure and use it as another piece of fast storage on my Mac. While the installation went well I’m not quite happy with the performance. Despite being connected via FireWire 800 (IEEE 1394b-2002) couple of benchmark tools report only around 80 MB/sec read and 65 MB/sec write while the spinning piece of rust inside the computer reports something like 105 MB/sec read and 107 MB/sec write. It’ll be much lower latency than a spinning disk, but I’m not sure it’ll provide improvement over the internal disk, especially for things I was hoping to do with it like running VMs.

Maybe I’ll give it a try on my work laptop for VMs there, or maybe I’ll see if it’d work out well in Danielle’s Macbook Pro.

The photo above shows the external enclosure with an Intel-provided case sticker applied to the top in place of Macally’s branding. Except for the residual curved blue logo pieces at the end that didn’t fall outside of the cutoff area, I think this worked pretty well. Here is a photo of it all being assembled.

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Résumé Updated for 2012

Published July 20, 2012

Updating one’s résumé can be quite a pain especially if done under duress, so I like to periodically update it so that a fairly fresh copy is readily available. This afternoon I put the finishing touches on the most updated version, one which takes into account some changes at work, stuff that I’ve done with CRAMBA and the MMBA, and a few other newly-acquired skills.

If you’d like to see a copy of my resume it can be found at nuxx.net/resume.

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A Place For Stinky Clothes

Published July 12, 2012

With a few minutes to spare at lunch today I tackled a problem that has been bothering Danielle (and me, to some degree) for a while: stinky bike clothes. After riding I’ll hang up my sweaty clothes in either the bathroom or basement so that they can dry. This keeps them from becoming too pungent, but even after drying they still have a lingering funk until they are washed.

Since the smell in the bathroom is a bit unpleasant and Danielle has been spending a fair bit of time in the basement on some weekdays (it’s darker and cooler down there), another place to hang the clothes was needed. The solution? Hang them up in the garage.

By purchasing $7 worth of shelving brackets from Home Depot and using some PVC pipe and fasteners that I had sitting around home I had everything needed. Now there is a 58″ long rack in the garage, right above where our bikes are kept, perfect for hanging up clothes. It’s also large enough that I’ll probably be able to use it for drying clothes and blankets after they are washed.

I think I may add a end cap on where the Headsweats cap is hanging and add a pair of hooks for the cap and my hydration pack. This’ll keep these out of the way and give them a place to hang and dry as well.

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Clinton River Park Trails MTB Map: Complete

Published July 11, 2012

This evening I wrapped up another mapping project; this one for Clinton River Park Trails in Sterling Heights. After getting a nice workflow nailed down this map was pretty easy to make, taking only around 30 hours to get it complete.

I can see a couple small changes coming down the line such as the addition of sponsor logos and a few tweaks as trail development continues, but for now it should be pretty set.

Click here if you’d like to view a copy of this map: ~~CRAMBA_CRPT_MTB_Trail_Map_2012-Jul-10.pdf~~ latest.pdf

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Excited Hefeweizen

Published June 29, 2012

After work yesterday I brewed a very simple hefeweizen and put it to ferment. This morning I found that it had blown out of the airlock, even though it’s not a particularly thick beer. Nor was the yeast pitched at a particularly high temperature (~75°F), so the yeast shouldn’t have gotten too excited.

The Activator pack did inflate quite quickly yesterday so maybe the yeast is particularly strong, but I still wouldn’t have expected this to happen. A blowoff tube has since been fitted so everything should be fine. Now I just need to wait for it to ferment.

The recipe I’m using is as follows, as told to me by Andy, the owner of Cap N Cork Home Brewing Supply:

· Six Pounds of Wheat Dried Malt Extract
· One Ounce of German Hallertau Hop Pellets (@ 60 Minutes)
· Wyeast 3056 Bavarian Wheat Blend Yeast

Ferment for ~11 days in primary (until it’s done, plus a few more days), transfer directly to the keg, carbonate, and drink fresh.

I’ve got pretty high hopes for this beer. Much of what I’ve brewed lately has been reasonably complex (for extract brewing) so I’d like to have some simple, easier recipes like these tested and available.

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Improvised Lock Picking Tools

Published June 27, 2012

Walking out of the house to the Wednesday Night Stony Creek Ride I realized that I didn’t have my keys seconds after pulling the locked door shut behind me. After running through a number of ideas (most of which involved calling for help and missing the group ride) I ended up fashioning a half-diamond pick from a cable tie, then using it along with and using a plastic sword toothpick (as a tension wrench) to pick one of the house locks and get back inside.

I have a set of lock picks and while they were (unfortunately) locked in the house with the keys, experience playing with them in the past let these tools be used successfully. The white nylon pick was quite flexible and too thick to easily use, but I was still able to use it to rake the pins and open the lock in a couple of minutes. I then made it to the group ride on time.

This shows just how easy it is to pick the cheap house locks from Schlage, Kwikset, and the like.

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MTB Trail Mapping Workflow with OpenStreetMaps

Published June 5, 2012

With recent map drawing activities (1, 2, 3) I’ve been asked about the process I use for creating maps. What follows here is the workflow I used with OpenStreetMap (OSM) for the CRAMBA Stony Creek MTB Trail Maps, and hopefully others will find it useful.

I expect I’ll be following this same workflow for the next maps created, and even possibly revising previous ones using this process because it provides more solid base data than my previous method which consisted of little more than manually tracing SVGs of GPS tracks in Illustrator. It also helps get more map data in OSM, which is basically the cartographic version of Wikipedia.

One note, using OSM data in your maps requires that the resulting map be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) license. This basically means that anyone else can redistribute and reuse the map (or portions thereof), as long as they provide appropriate attribution and license their version in a similar way. As I’m intending these maps to be freely used by the general public (as part of my work with CRAMBA) I’m happy to do so, but others should be aware of these restrictions before getting too far along in the process.

Here’s the workflow:

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New Stony Creek MTB Trail Maps

Published June 5, 2012

I’ve been unhappy with Stony Creek’s official mountain bike trail map for a while now, as its routing is a bit physically inaccurate and missing some trails used during races. This led me to want to draw my own, and with recent forays into OpenStreetMap proving quite successful I’ve been able to get working on the map itself.

Tonight everything came together and I was finally able to publish the maps, and as a bonus I also documented three of the more popular routes. The more-formal announcement for these was made over on CRAMBA.org, but each map can also be seen here:

· Regular Map
· Fun Promotions 6 & 12 Hour Race Route
· Tailwind XC Race Route
· Wednesday Night MMBA / CRAMBA Group Ride Route

I’m sure some changes will be needed down the line, but for now I’m quite happy with how they came out. Making maps is fun.

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Down the OpenStreetMap Rabbit Hole

Published May 25, 2012

I’ve been interested in making mountain bike trail maps for a while now, resulting in my drawing the official River Bends and Addison Oaks maps. Stony Creek Metropark has some great trails as well, but it’s MTB trail map is unfortunately lacking. It is missing some segments used during races, has some one-way markings that don’t match what’s actually signed on the trail, and isn’t geographically accurate enough to be used for trail planning.

My original intention was to record all of the trail segments at Stony Creek myself using a GPS then draw a map similar to the ones for Addison Oaks and River Bends, but after looking on OpenStreetMap (OSM) I found that most of the trails at Stony Creek were already mapped. Thus if I am willing to license my map in an appropriately open manner I can use this data, saving myself a bunch of time.

Since a few small connectors that I wished to include were missing I headed out to Stony Creek this evening and recorded GPS data for only the missing segments. Most of these were connectors used primarily during races, but as they are passable throughout most of the year I wanted to include them. I then brought the GPX into JOSM, edited the map, and submitted the changes. This is a pretty easy task if one is familiar with basic CAD tools.

While the changes aren’t yet reflected in the main online map, the changes have been submitted and it does show when new data is manually downloaded, so I imagine it’s only a matter of time before it’s visible to the public. I will then use this OSM to make my MTB-specific map, complete with markers for things such as log piles, rock gardens, etc.

I suspect that this ease of editing is going to change my mapping workflow in the future. There’s a very good chance that any new maps which I do will first go into OSM, then this data will be pulled out to generate the actual map. Barring any license constraints, of course.

Looking further it appears that River Bends’ trails aren’t yet on OSM. Looks like I’ve got some work to do there as well…

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U+1F4A9 Successfully Deployed

Published April 26, 2012

Today I successfully employed one of the new characters in Unicode 6.0, U+1F4A9, also known as PILE OF POO (dog dirt). (See the table and list of names here.)

Needing a separate, sealing garbage can for Roxie’s collected poop I grabbed a spare one from the basement, but I figured it needed some manner of appropriate labeling. This did it. I printed it on a full-page label, sealed it with packing tape, cut it out, and stuck it in place. Hopefully the can will also help keep the garage from smelling like fresh poop on warm days.

Check out this page for more information on this character and to see if your browser and installed fonts support it. Hopefully it does.

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