Category: moved from livejournal

Berry Ale

July 18, 2005

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Well, I guess it could be said that I’ve started on my seventh batch of beer. I’m going to be attempting to make a berry ale, and the recipe which I hope to follow can be found here.

I’ve got two kilograms of berries slowly freezing. It’s one part each blueberries, marionberries, raspberries, and strawberries. The first three berries were part of a frozen blend and the strawberries were fresh, all purchased from Costco. I ended up having far more strawberries than I needed (I purchased a four pound container) so I cleaned and stored the rest for another day.

So, hopefully it’ll be good… I’m hoping for a nice reddish beer with some great berry flavor to it. We’ll see…

beer moved from livejournal

…goes to 11!

July 18, 2005

So that explains the few hours of SA eating my server alive with an load of 11 or 12 on nuxx.net. It seems that someone is spamming as cstansfield1@dingleberrypie.com and lots of folks still have bounces turned on.

By bye mx record for dingleberrypie.com and all email… I don’t really use that domain anymore anyway.

computers moved from livejournal

New Server…

July 18, 2005

Somewhere around two weeks from now I am going to be replacing my webserver. I will be moving from the current machine^† bornslippy.nuxx.net to the shiny, mostly-new^‡ rez.nuxx.net.

Because I will have both servers in place for the time being, I hope to make this transition as smooth as possible. If things go as planned, I will be able to move things over bit by bit without anyone really noticing. As usual, notifications about such work will be posted here, and anyone who I’m hosting should know how to get a hold of me outside of LJ if anything really bad crops up.

With any luck, the new server will provide enough of a performance boost that I’ll be able to run v2 of my favorite Gallery software and that image transformations and such will happen much more quickly. Not to mention SpamAssassin filtering and random DB stuff…

Anyway, yeah. I’m excited. Now I need to get the basement clean so I can get it back on the bench and finish testing it. Right now it’s in the rack burning in…

^† Pentium II 450, 384MB RAM, 2x 80GB disks (mirrored), Intel EtherExpress Pro 100 NIC
^‡ Dual Pentium III 1 Ghz, 2GB RAM, 2x 120GB disks (mirrored root), 4x 120GB disks (RAID0+1 data volume), Broadcom 5701-based NIC which hands off IP/TCP/UDP checksumming to hardware.

computers moved from livejournal

Switch from XP to OS X?

July 14, 2005

[Cross posted to and …]

So I’ve got some ideas about migrating my parents from Windows XP to OS X, specifically on a Mac mini. I’m really thinking there might be some issues here, so I was wondering how people here would address such problems:

· First, I’m thinking that a Mac mini with all options except a DVD writer would be purchased, and 1GB of RAM installed. With US Student discount, this would run about $1K. Price isn’t huge here…

· I feel that OS X requires a user to have a greater understanding of the concept of filesystems, directory hierarchy, and how to manage storage of things. For example, under XP users typically only have to save things where they default to (eg: My Documents, My Pictures, etc). Under OS X, defaults are often the last folder viewed.

· Installing applications on OS X isn’t as simple as it typically is on Windows. For most applications a user has to just pop in the CD, click through the buttons, and then look for the application somewhere under Start. On OS X a user often has to drag the application to the Applications folder — and the right one at that.

· OS X is (obviously) non-MDI. For those most familiar with a typically MDI environment such as Windows, this is often a huge slap-in-the-face change. However, for someone such as my parents (who this machine would be for) who normally run Windows applications maximized, with the single menu bar at the top which changes with app focus, this might not be such a big deal.

So, yeah, I am babbling a lot here, but I’m really wondering how easy the transition would be. Additionally, I’m trying to determine if there would be any benefit to purchasing a Mac mini for them. I can see the iPhoto integration and such being a good thing, along with the quiet machine and the nice hardware warranty. But the retraining issues outweigh the benefits?

computers moved 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.

automotive electronics making things moved from livejournal

Car issues…

July 8, 2005

Well, I was unable to resolve whatever is causing the squeaking sound that I hear coming from my front driver’s side suspension. However, I am able to reproduce it when outside of the vehicle. I think the problem is a worn bushing or something squeaking against some metal, serving only to annoy me. There seems to be no issue with the drivability of the vehicle, but I want this damn noise fixed.

If you’d like to chime in about what the issue might be (please-please-please-please-please!), watch the following two videos. They show the two ways I have been able to reproduce the noise and isolate where it is coming from:

Now I guess I’ll go clean up my office and maybe get to work on an automotive mount for my iSight.

automotive moved from livejournal

Petroglyphs and Ann Arbor

July 8, 2005

Click for huuuge…

As promised earlier, here’s a shot of the petroglyphs. Check out all of the photos here. Or, for the overview, here’s some of the other notable photos from yesterday’s wanderings:

· The modest sign at the entrance to the Petroglyph parking lot.
· The main sign at the entrance to the park.
· A beautifully fern-covered area one has to walk through to get to the petroglyphs.
· The petroglyphs are in a roofed, caged area to stave off rain and help prevent vandalism.
· The dome of rock which holds the petroglyphs.
· Goose, wind arrows…
· Some interesting graffiti.
· A peace pipe.
· The thunder storm which caused the guides and myself to hastily leave the area. It also made driving hard.
· A tasty ice cream cone I purchased from Moore Ice Cream in Marlette, MI.
· Some menacing clouds as I drove along US-23.
· Frank taking a picture from the top of a parking garage in Ann Arbor.
· Another impressively large cloud along US-23.

Oh, I must strongly recommend visiting this site… It’s rather interesting, seems to have a nice trail near it, and is staffed by friendly folks. One of the people there is a student at CCS and the other person lives somewhere near Flint.

So, yeah. Now I’m going to go eat my porridge with blueberries.

moved from livejournal outdoors travel

Daylight Bulbs

June 30, 2005

Click for huuuuge…

Okay, remember the bit about daylight bulbs before? Here’s a perfect example of why. This is the florescent fixture on the ceiling of my laundry room, with the cover removed. On the outside are the two new daylight bulbs, and on the inside are the two standard “cool white” bulbs.

I set the camera’s white balance to ‘daylight’ in order to be consistent and shot this in program mode so the exposure would be a nice, even middle ground.

See how yellow those center tubes are? Gah. No wonder things never looked right in that room. Walking in there with the light on now just looks and feels better. Things just seem right.

Unfortunately, when I installed the bulbs in the kitchen I found they are about 2cm too short, so they are up in the housings a bit. I don’t think this will cause a problem, but I’m going to wait until after dark to experiment with them and the remaining working old bulb. I might even have to return these (at $9.something a piece I’ll definitely return them if I don’t like them) and find something else.

Guh, this is a pain. All I want is bright daylight colored bulbs! Heh…

around the house moved from livejournal

Fixed Car and Lights, Woo!

June 30, 2005

Click for moblog…

Well, it seems that the new battery has taken care of the problem. Provided nothing crops up with the alternator, things will remain good. Thinking back, my car hasn’t started this promptly in a year or two, so I think the battery may have been going for a while. Whatever the length of time the problem was happening for, I’m just glad it’s fixed.

I also snagged some daylight-color halogen spotlights for the kitchen. One of my old bulbs had burned out, and the GE Reveal bulbs I picked up simply weren’t bright enough. So I swung by Lowe’s and picked up a pair of daylight-color halogen PAR30 spots to take their place. I then returned the Reveal bulbs to Home Depot and picked up two more daylight fluorescent bulbs for the laundry room. I had picked up two the other day, but it turns out that it’s a four bulb fixture. I’d been wanting to replace the standard tubes with daylight ones, but I’d kept forgetting.

Can you tell that I like daylight colored bulbs? Good. I like them a lot. In fact, I try to only use them. Things look proper colors under them, and I’m fairly convinced that bright, daylight-colored light does a good job staving off SAD during winter or just periods of time where I stay inside.

around the house automotive moved from livejournal

Car People… Help!

June 30, 2005

All the people who read this who know something about cars, can you provide me with some suggestios? I believe that the battery in my car is dying, but I’m not completely convinced.

What’s happening is that after the car has been sitting for a bit, it’s really sluggish to turn over. It cranks slowly, but after a few revolutions it starts up like normal and runs just fine. After starting slowly, the idle speed will swing back and forth between ~600RPM and ~1500RPM for about 10 seconds.

If I drive the vehicle for a few minutes and then shut the engine off, it’ll start right back up like normal. If I let it sit for a few hours, it’s sluggish to start again.

To me this sort of sounds like a battery which is reaching the end of it’s life. The battery is the original, and the car is a bit over five years old, with 120,000 miles on it.

It should also be noted that there are no engine or electrical problems while the car is running, so it’s definitely not an issue with the alternator not charging the battery.

So, does it sound to you like the battery is what’s going?

Thanks!

automotive moved from livejournal