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Locking Pliers, Furnace Issues

Published December 11, 2008

A pair of Craftsman pliers with locking jaws found in the road around my condo complex as I was leaving for work this morning.

This morning I found this pair of Craftsman locking pliers in the road as I was leaving my condo. I’ve been wanting some of these but haven’t purchased them, so this is a nice find.

Before that, I found that my house was 58°F (14.4°C) when I woke up this morning. The thermostat was calling for heat, but the furnace wasn’t igniting. This has happened in the past, requiring a quick reset of either the thermostat (Heat -> Off -> Heat) or the furnace (power cycle) to make it work again, but in the past couple of weeks it’s been happening with alarming frequency. I’m afraid that an electrical component of my furnace is starting to go wonky. I may end up just calling Mike’s Heating & Cooling who did a nice job installing a new air conditioner in 2006. While I normally wouldn’t mind fixing such electronics myself, reproducing the issue is difficult I can’t exactly wait for parts when it’s regularly below freezing outside.

Oh, and welcome to my first post from WordPress 2.7. Hopefully it’ll continue working nicely. As long as it goes well I’ll probably be upgrading the rest of the blogs I host sometime this evening.

UPDATE: Some things are a bit weird, and plugins like StatPress Reloaded and AdSense Manager need their management / control portions tweaked so that they show up under the right part of the Dashboard, but they still seem to work.

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Palazzo di Bocce

Published December 10, 2008

Playing bocce with some coworkers. Brad is on the left and Doug just rolled a ball.

Today some coworkers of mine and I went to Palazzo di Bocce to play some bocce as a group Christmas-ish outing. It was much nicer than the last times I went with work, because we had smaller teams which allowed everyone plenty of time to play. The last time we went there was a tournament-style game, fewer points needed to win, and four players per team which meant that I was only able to bowl six or eight times the whole day.

After work I ran to Trader Joe’s, then Danielle and I met up for some nice dinner here at home of sweet potato fries, mayo and Clancy’s Fancy dip, organic chicken sausages, wheat buns, and tapioca pudding. At TJs I was able to get some of the 2008 Vintage Ale, which being brewed by Unibroue will hopefully be good. I acquired quite a bit of it last year’s 2007 vintage and if this year’s batch is just as good I’ll probably get a bunch more.

Tomorrow I’m hoping to build up the hardware portion of a replacement PC for my grandparents, a meeting about some volunteer computer-ish work, normal work, and… whatever else comes up. This is right in line with how busy my days have been lately. I guess this is a good thing… I think?

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I Got To Say It Was A Good Day

Published December 9, 2008

Today I didn’t even have to use my AK.

As opposed to yesterday when all sorts of things seemed to be going wrong, today was all right. I got a bunch of stuff done at work, got to hang out with after work, ate good curry, and had things go reasonably well with my server and moving some data around (more news on this later).

Thanks very much to everyone for the kind words last night when I was feeling more than a little bit poopy. The problems are looking up, and I think I know how I can sort through them. I should be (and am) really glad that they are as basic of problems as they are, too. No one was hurt, relationships are good, and all the problems are really not that big of a deal when looked at in a proper light.

Now it’s time for bed. Goodnight, everyone.

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NGROUPS_MAX to 64 under FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE on banstyle.nuxx.net

Published December 8, 2008

Just so everyone knows, I’m changing NGROUPS_MAX on banstyle.nuxx.net to 64 shortly, which will require rebooting the box. Everything should come back up okay after this.

This change is being made so that a user can be a member of more than 15 groups, which will allow me to add far more local web hosting users under the lighttpd / PHP privilege separation model which I prefer. Due to some incoming sites this is needed in order to best host them. As far as I can currently tell this will only break NFS, which I don’t use.

I’ll update this post once the reboot is complete.

UPDATE: Well, that seemed to have gone as expected. Per usual, please let me know about any problems you are having with the server.

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Bad Mood

Published December 7, 2008

After failing to get my grandparents iMac G5 working again and with an overwhelming feeling like I haven’t been accomplishing anything, I started to get in a bad mood this afternoon. Fast forward to this evening and I’m feeling downright awful. I think I’m just acting cold, not very talkative, and extremely pessimistic all while feeling like little matters and I can’t fix the problems I’ve created. I wish I knew how I could make myself be in a better mood, but absolutely nothing sounds like it’ll help.

Maybe I just need some better food and a good night sleep. The bowl of potato chips in front of me do not qualify as good food, so I’ll have to eat something else soon.

On a related note, I think the only realistic solution to my screwing up my Grandparents’ computer is to build them a PC out of spare parts, locate a (working) monitor, and get that to them. It’s not as elegant as an iMac and likely won’t be as easy to use, but at least it should work. I’ll then part out the iMac and sell the pieces on eBay. I know the display, RAM and various small cables work properly.

This means more work for me. Hopefully I won’t screw this up somehow too.

(No, I didn’t get it working, even after attempting to reflow some of the connections, checking for any solder droplets or wire pieces on the board, ensuring all cables are right, etc.)

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Dirty Bike

Published December 7, 2008

My bike got very muddy during some late autumn / early winter slushy riding. Most of this is from 26-Nov. It was all washed off on a 20°F day.

After some slushy / muddy riding on 26-Nov my bike needed to be washed. As today was the first sunny day I’d been home, I decided to wash it off, 20°F (-6.66°C) weather be damned. Having a straight hot water line from the house kept the job from being too cold, and I was able to keep ice from forming on the bike. Now the bike is mostly dried off and sitting behind me in my office drying the rest of the way.

The lockout on the fork seems to be broken, so I’m going to try and take it into the shop this week and see about having it fixed. I purchased the bike just after Christmas last year, so hopefully it’s still under warranty.

I think I need to look into some clip-on mountain bike type fenders for future poor weather riding. Here is another photo, this one of the down tube, BB, crank, etc area. That night was really muddy for this area.

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iMac G5: Worse Than Before

Published December 6, 2008

Image of the machine in Open Firmware showing video glitches present after recapping. I suspect that there are cold solder joints and the video card isn't getting proper power.

Well, I managed to get all the capacitors I previously complained about desoldered and the new parts fitted. However, the iMac G5 now displays video glitches while POSTing, and it never boots past a plain blue screen with an artifacted cursor. As can be seen above, video glitches are also present in Open Firmware.

Looking at this photo (large size here) and seeing what may be some cold solder joints I suspect that some of the caps — specifically those for the video controller / memory — aren’t doing what they are supposed to. This means that I’m going to be taking the machine back apart tonight or tomorrow and attempting to reflow those joints.

I’m disappointed. It really frustrates me when I screw something up.

UPDATE: I think I should probably take a look at the display cable and its connector as well.

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I Fail At Desoldering

Published December 6, 2008

Another view of the domed caps, after some of the dried electrolite had fallen off.

My grandparents computer is an older iMac G5. When installing an Airport card in it last weekend I noticed that a number of the capacitors were domed, and some were leaking electrolyte, a sure sign of failing capacitors, possibly because of the capacitor plague. After digging around through Digi-Key, Mouser, et al I found that the cheapest way to get a set of replacement caps is to order them from The Cap King. He sells a set of the 25 needed caps for $16 shipped, and the set arrived earlier this week.

After sorting the caps, tearing down the iMac, and removing the logic board I identified which caps needed to be replaced, marked them by type, then set about desoldering two of the most accessible ones. This is where I began to have problems.

Normally I’m pretty decent at soldering, but getting these first two caps out was difficult. The first one left a lead sitting in the board, and the other three holes still contain solder. I presume its because of the number of layers in the board and the giant planes of copper near them, but I cannot seem to get enough heat on the board to melt the solder all the way through and wick it out.

Here are two photos of where things currently stand: 1 · 2. I think the next thing I’ll try is pre-heating the board with a hair dryer, then leaving the hot air flowing over it while attempting the desoldering. Hopefully that’ll help.

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Defective Toilet Paper

Published December 4, 2008

The toilet paper in the middle stall near me is defective, as if someone spilled glue on the roll. It comes out in multiple narrow strips.

The toilet paper in the middle stall at work is currently broken. It seems as if glue (or something) ended up on the middle of the roll at the factory, which results in the paper tearing off in four thin strips. One for each half, then the separated layers. This was a hassle.

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