Yay! Target over in Utica has Nintendo Wiis in stock. The person who rang up the sale informed me that they had around 75 of them in stock this morning. What I saw was a display case still completely full. So, excellent.
I also picked up both of the newest Skinny Puppy and The Streets discs. I’m not sure about the SP yet, and I haven’t listened to The Streets yet. Hopefully they both end up being good to me.
I’m not sure why I find this so strange, but a 1280×1024 LCD seems really odd to me. It just seems really, really, really square. Then again, I guess 5:4 is… Maybe I’m just more familiar with 4:3, 16:9, and 16:10 displays.
While over at Nino Salvaggio International Marketplace in Troy yesterday I picked up a $0.69 Vietnamese cup of noodles labeled solely Vegetarian Miên Chay. Despite a tremendous 2100mg of sodium per serving, I rather liked this cup of noodles. The saltyness is a bit much and the noodles clumpted together a bit, but it quite tasty with a bit of hot spicyness to it. It even includes a rather ingenious folding plastic fork.
The whole cup had an odd air of cheapness to it, and I have a strange almost-sweet aftertaste in my mouth (communism?), but I must say that it tasted pretty decent. The rest of the photos are available by clicking either the image above, or this link (photo gallery retired).
Well, backups are working. Every night my PowerMac G5 backs its important stuff up to external disks, and then a few hours later rowla.nuxx.net shoves its important bits down to one of the disks. It’d be better if it was all sent offsite, but I do only have a certain amount of space available remotely.
Wow, I can’t believe it’s come this far. Starting a few months ago with a pile of PCBs and a couple of ROMs and a microcontroller I got to work building Trevor Page’s 9090, a clone of the sound creating bits inside the Roland TR-909.
I’ve been working on it here and there, ordering all the resistors one day, a bunch of caps another, etc. Except for my screwing up and failing to acquire (in the course of three separate rounds of ordering) enough .47uF electrolytic capacitors and an IC (CA3080) which I’m waiting to receive in the mail, the PCBs are complete.
In addition to the two above, there is also a board with ten separate 1/4″ mono jacks which handles audio output for each of the ten separate instruments. The component side of that board can be seen here and the solder side here.
So, what’s left before it is done? Quite a bit, unfortunately. Let’s see…
· Get the missing three parts and fit them in place.
· Decide on an enclosure and design the front and rear panels so they fit the pots, knobs, LEDs, power switch, audio jacks, MIDI jacks, and mains connector.
· Order remaining parts.
· Design indicators / artwork and figure out the best way to apply / fit them.
· Cut the enclosure to fit all the externally-fitted components (pots, jacks, etc).
· Physically assemble the enclosure and mount the boards inside.
· Cable everything together.
· Test everything to be sure all instruments and switching jacks work as expected.
· Troubleshoot, if needed.
As you can see, there is quite a bit more to go, although I think this is a good stopping point for now.
Well, despite owning the actual thing, I finally got around to buying the Gescom Mini Disc from bleep.com in MP3 format. $9.99 for all 88 tracks in 320 kbps is rather nice. I must say, BLEEP sure does the online music buying / download thing right. And with a few dollars laying around in my PayPal account from someone buying something from me, it was even easier.
Hell, I think I’ll snag The Sounds Of Machines Our Parents Used next.
Cranberry Granola BarLast night Danielle came by and her and I (in addition to eating some wonderful Thai food) made some cranberry granola bars based on the Good Eats Granola Bar recipe from the Power Trip episode.
What was done is the recipe above was used, with the following changes:
· Salted sunflower seeds were used, and the normal salt in the recipe was cut back slightly.
· Only cranberries were used, and they were chopped relatively finely.
· Toasted wheat germ, all that was available, was used.
· Due to my mistake a bit of extra honey (perhaps 8oz. was used).
· A 8″ x 8″ glass pan was used, as a 9″ x 9″ (as called for in the recipe) was unavailable.
Other than that, the recipe was made as described. Next time I’ll do a few things differently:
· Use hulled sunflower seeds. In-hull seeds contain more fiber, but don’t crisp up enough to be comfortable for all to eat.
· Line the dish with parchment, as it was difficult to remove the bars.
· Let the bars cool part-way after baking, then remove them from the dish, then cut.
· Possibly use a larger dish so that thinner bars can be made.
Also, a detailed photo of the texture of the bar can be seen here.
After acquiring the MS PELENG 3.5/8A fisheye lens a few weeks ago I went in search of a dedicated EOS mount for one. The ‘B’ variant of the lens comes with them, but at almost $100 more than the ‘A’ variant (which typically just comes with an M42 to EOS adapter) I didn’t think they were worth it. Still, I wanted to try the dedicated mount. After sending $30 off via PayPal to a seller in Canada, one was en route to me.
Remember my complaining about the set screw which wasn’t threaded along the whole body? It’s not a set screw, but a stop, which is part of the EOS mount. So, in attempting to screw it in and damaging it I actually damaged the mounting bits of the adapter. Whoops. I realized this when the dedicated mount had a similar screw, and then I looked at my 24-78 f/2.8L (photo gallery retired) and saw a similar one on there. Ah well.
Second, as you can see above, the dedicated EOS mount is the same size as the focus ring. With the M42 mount and adapter the focus ring stands out from the lens body and is easy to find by feel. When the dedicated EOS mount is used it no longer stands out and I found myself inadvertantly attempting to turn the body of the lens to change the focus. That said, because I normally set the focus without the camera to my eye, this isn’t a problem. And with the differing textures of the dedicated mount and focus ring, I don’t see this actually being a problem.
So, I’d say that if you have a MS PELENG 3.5/8A with the M42 to EOS adapter, just stick with that. It’s not really worth picking up the dedicated EOS mount. It’s not a bad addition, and it makes the lens look a bit more tailored to the camera, but it’s definitely not really needed.
At the end of last week I ordered two 320GB hard disks and a Macally PHR-100AF FireWire 400 (1394a) disk enclosure so that I could handle all of my backups straight through my PowerMac G5. Well, today I received the parts and while the outer box had the right labeling on it, the inside was the PHR-100ACB, a combination USB 2.0 / FireWire 800 (1394b) enclosure, along with all appropriate cables. Seems like there was a mix-up somewhere. Whoops!
I don’t mind, I just hope that this doesn’t mean that there is a mixed up package elsewhere and someone else will inadvertently receive an enclosure which is a bit less than they had hoped for.
To everyone who uses rowla.nuxx.net to some degree: This machine is going to be moved at some point within the next few weeks, hopefully within the next few days. The colocation provider I use is getting their new building / data center going, and I’m going to move in there sooner than later. Because of this I will have to switch to a new IP address and have the server down for a few hours while it is driven to the new building, but after that things should be fine. It should just come back up once turned on.
Email deliveries attempted while the server is off should be queued by the last-hop mail server and delivered after things come back online.
I’ll post more info (and more specific dates / times as I have them) here, but for now just know that it’ll be happening.
