Reading the 24LC256 in the Zenith DTT900Reading the 24LC256 EEPROM in the Zenith DTT900 without removing it from the board doesn’t work. It wouldn’t have gotten me much anyway. Really, only the initial program of the FPGA. Oh well.
Also, here’s a more detailed photo of the micrograbbers on the chip.
Inside of the Zenith DTT900Remember back when I got my DTV Deputy certificate? Well, today the DTV2009 coupon arrived, so I went out to Circuit City, waited an infuriating 15 minutes to pay, then acquired a Zenith DTT900 DTV converter box (photo gallery retired). I haven’t actually tried it yet, but I did tear it apart.
So, want to see the inside of a DTV converter? Click here (photo gallery retired).
My Old BeltThat’s my old belt. A rather worn US military issue belt and belt buckle. Today I finally grew tired enough of it to put together a new one from these parts, literally a new belt and buckle.
Also, this Adobe Lightroom to Gallery plugin works well. I’m going to add the setting of summary field from metadata when I get some time to poke with it, but it shouldn’t be hard to do.
Tonight Danielle and I watched The Lives of Others. There are two notable things about this.
One, it’s an excellent film. Probably one of the best I’ve seen in a while.
Two, this movie was rented via Netflix a week ago, but I ripped it using HandBrake because Danielle wanted to return it. Dropping it into ~/Movies and playing it on my Xbox 360 via Connect360 worked out very well. Ripped at an average bitrate of 1500kbps with 2-pass encoding, turbo first pass, and no deinterlacing (samples of the movie in the transcoder GUI showed this to be unneeded) they played just fine and looked to be of the same quality as movies played using my upscaling OPPO DV970HD (photo gallery retired).
Danielle’s Townie and my bike on my car.Today the gigantic box containing the Thule 917 T2 bike rack which I had ordered from backcountry.com arrived today. Upon opening the box I found that the contents were a bit disshoveled and the instruction manual was missing. Also, a few of the parts were scratched a bit, and there was a rather scuffed up, but spare, pipe end cap in the box. After looking the rack over, based on the wear on the nuts, I figured that someone had purchased it, assembled it up to the point where it had to be put on the car, then put it back as it was, and returned it. This meant that it really didn’t have any wear except. The parts kit hadn’t even been opened.
The scratches (example) aren’t too bad, and being a car part I figured it would eventually get a few scratches on it anyway, so I decided to go ahead with assembling it.
I finished putting things together, fit both Danielle’s bike and mine on there, then used a plumb bob (really, a washer and some sort of high tension fishing line I found in a park) to measure the distance between the end of each wheel and the center post. I then moved the bike racks side to side, and now both bikes fit, nicely centered on the vehicle, with plenty of clearance between them.
All in all, I’m quite happy with it. The rack doesn’t take a standard hitch pin, instead coming with a bolt and lock washer which should hold the rack very securely in the hitch. One particularly great part is the fit of Danielle’s bike. Because of the fender on it I was afraid that the mechanism for holding the front wheel down would require removal of the fender. Well, as can be seen here, I was able to securely fit the clamp in front of the fender where it still securely holds the wheel. Yay!
If you’d like to see more photos of the bike rack on my car, please take a look at then end of this page (photo gallery retired) and all of this page.
Hrm. It looks like I’m going to be doing contract assembly of two Sequentix P3s for $300/each. One is the very original old case kit, the other is the newer design. One of the guys may want me to build up a modular for him as well…
This should satisfy my wanting-to-assemble-something itch, while at the same time getting me a bit bigger savings account.
See that Change the default console to zstty0? [no] line? That’s the result of OpenBSD Problem Report #5732 which I had submitted a few weeks back. Two days ago Ken Westerback, one of the OpenBSD devs emailed me a patch which was about to be committed in order to resolve the problem, and a request that I test it on macppc. Well, I did, and it works great.
In short, it looks through your dmesg for the console and sets up whatever serial port is used for that as your console.
This makes me happy. OpenBSD really is a great OS.
Yesterday morning I received a patch which should fix OpenBSD PR #5732. It’s a patch for all platforms, which has (supposedly) been applied to the 4.3 family which should be released on 01-May. I’ve been asked to test it, so it looks like I’ll be doing a reinstall on my firewall this evening, this time from the latest snapshot. Hopefully it’ll all go well. Good thing I’ve got my pre-made config files files to base everything off of. I just hope I did them right. ;)
Oh, that also means I’ll be spending quite a while sitting in front of a cold rack in the basement at a serial console. Ah well.
Exhaust Mounting around New HitchEarlier this week I received the new hitch for my car. Despite being sick I spent a couple of hours today getting it installed. The directions claimed 30 minutes for an installation, but I imagine that’s for an experienced hitch installer with a lift. I just had a ~45°F garage, a tarp to lay on, and a fluorescent light to set on the ground beneath the car.
It took a bit of effort to get installed, but it was overall simpler than the Honda Music Link. There was some manipulating of the exhaust to be done (namely, lowering it and fitting the hitch over it), and some odd position lifting of an awkward 38 pound steel beam, but I’m happy with it. I’m really glad I was able to talk to
There are a bunch more photos of the installation here (photo gallery retired), or just click the image up top. The rack itself, a Thule 917 (1 1/4″ T2) is scheduled for delivery on Thursday. That should be a lot easier to get together, as it shouldn’t require any laying on the ground / wrenching on the car. Photos of that will be up once it’s here.
Also, I need to clean my camera’s sensor. And take another shower.
mailgraph.pl on rowla.nuxx.net after PostgreyAs mentioned yesterday I set up Postgrey on rowla.nuxx.net in order to implement greylisting and hopefully address the spam problem I (and others hosted on my box) have been having.
Well, it’s still less than 24 hours out, but it seems to be having a really big impact on the spam levels, with my personal accounts receiving only seven pieces of spam (all of which were flagged by SpamAssassin hitting my personal inbox. I’ve had no false negatives, and I haven’t yet seen any false positives. (Yes, I’ve been testing this and checking… Everything seems to work as designed.) For reference, I’d normally receive 300-500 automatically flagged pieces of spam per day, with 3-10 false negatives slipping through.
From that graph up there, one can see that Postgrey really seems to be doing the job. What can be seen (in the second graph) is that the rejected messages are way up, flagged spam is way down, meaning that the messages are being rejected and then not retried. The received messages (in the first graph) are way down, which directly correlates with the rejections.
Here is a snapshot from this morning of the daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly graphs. If you’d like to see the mostly-live graphs, here is rowla.nuxx.net’s mailgraph.pl.
Oh, and that dip on Saturday? That was the aforementioned outage caused by Waveform moving my server unexpectedly.
