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Another Sequentix P3

Published April 2, 2008

Thanks to the analogue-sequencer Yahoo! Group, a discussion group for individuals interested in the Sequentix P3, I ended up getting in touch with a guy by the name of Mark Pulver who was in need of having his Sequentix P3 kit assembled. I sent him a link to my Sequentix P3 page at nuxx.net and photos of my P3 assembly (photo gallery retired) and I imagine he liked what he saw because he asked me to assemble his.

After languishing in transit for a week and a half between his place and mine, I stopped off on the way to work and picked up the package from the post office. It was a quite large, well-packed box which should be just about right for safely shipping it back to him once it’s assembled.

Before getting to work I had to dig around for a while and locate the old Sequentix P3 assembly instructions. See, Mark actually has a kit for one of the original P3s, serial number 008, before the restyled and rackmountable case. These older versions also had a different PCB layout and BOM, so I couldn’t use the normal DIY instructions. I find this quite interesting because I’ll now have built both versions of the P3. I’m not sure how many people besides Colin Fraser, the creator of the P3 have actually gotten to see both of them in such detail.

Tonight I managed to assemble most of the easier parts of the PCBs. As can be seen above (or here full size) I fitted the sockets, resistors, caps, diodes, sockets, and other small parts. Tomorrow I hope to get to the pots, switches, LEDs, and other parts which are considerably more particular about placement. Since they are what the user actually interacts with I want to be particularly careful about them. After that it should just be a matter of completing the major component assembly, testing everything, ensuring that the firmware upgrades work as expected, getting the MemX memory expansion working, testing it all thoroughly, then sending it back. Hopefully by the end of the weekend that’s where it’ll be.

After this I may be doing some similar assembly work for another P3 (newer case style), an ASM2, and possibly some Blacet modules.

If you’d like to see all of the photos from this P3 assembly, check out this gallery: Sequentix P3 for Mark Pulver (photo gallery retired)

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First Multi-Blog Post

Published March 31, 2008

Well, here’s my first multi-blog post. I’ve been wanting to move more content over to nuxx.net, so I set up a blog here to do so. However, as discussed here I didn’t really want to move away from the social network aspects of LiveJournal, where I’ve been posting things for six or seven years.

So, what did I do? I set up a copy of WordPress at https://nuxx.net/blog and took the Fluid Blue 1.0.1 theme and changed it to better match the rest of the site. I used this AdSense widget for the side bar. To tie it all in nicely with LJ I first took ljxp, the LiveJournal Crossposter, got it working with WordPress 2.5, then stripped off the crappy (ala ) automatically inserted header.

As part of using the crossposter, and this is the biggest part of continuing to use LJ, I’ve left comments enabled at both locations. This means that the social network is still wholly in place at LJ, but the blog posts will also exist for more… general consumption.

I’ve also implemented LJ user ex so that I can still use <lj user=foo> tags in both places. (This plugin is going to require a bit of tweaking, but it shouldn’t be too difficult to do. I don’t like how particular it is for the tags…)

I’ve also put WP-Cache in place, just in case of a Slashdotting or Digging or something like that, and Google XML Sitemaps is running because… Well… Sitemaps are a good thing.

Currently I’m thinking that I’ll only use this dual-posting system for the more technical / photo oriented / non-personal content, while posts which talk about what I’m thinking, politics, memes, and other crap like that will remain solely at LJ.

Well, here goes… Time to hit publish and see it all in action for once.

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Cateye Update

Published March 31, 2008

Oh, I forgot to mention something. Remember the Cateye bike computer bracket problems I had? Cateye has replied to my email message saying that they’ll send me a new bracket as soon as they get in stock.

Also, the Sequentix P3 that I’m building on contract has been delivered. I think I’ll have something to do tonight.

Oh, and here is where I’m working on the theme / stuff for a blog over at nuxx.net, if any of you are interested. I think I have an idea for what I’m going to do…

(I’ll crosspost important/technical things, and for more personal-ish stuff I’ll just post directly here.)

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Time Machine

Published March 28, 2008

I’ve managed to break Time Machine.

How?

This morning I briefly woke my machine, ejected a flash drive, then put it back to sleep. When I came home it attempted to start a backup then declared itself broken. I think Time Machine was in the middle of mounting its sparsebundle, or something like that.

This thread suggests that DiskWarrior can be used to fix the problem. Unfortunately I don’t have a copy of it.

I guess I’ll just axe the file and let it recopy everything.

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Move to WP?

Published March 28, 2008

So, for eight months or so now I’ve seriously considered moving posts from here to an actual hosted blog install. I’ve always been rather against email and photo hosting which I don’t wholly control, so why should I keep a blog here, where I can’t control it?

This post here seems to show how easy it would be to move to a WP install… I might set one up on dingleberrypie or something as a test, just to see how it goes.

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Go Adobe!

Published March 26, 2008

Well, it looks like Adobe has rather screwed up the Lightroom 1.4 release.

Last week (or so) I fired up Lightroom and was asked if I wanted to install the 1.4 update. The change list looked harmless enough, so I went ahead and allowed it. Everything seemed fine, but I started noticing some oddness with the EXIF Date/Time stamps being exported.

Tonight I decided to look into it a little more and realized that all the files were being exported with the proper date stamp, but a timestamp of 00:00:00. This was confirmed with jhead.

I first went looking to Adobe’s support site, in the Lightroom forums, and one of the first things I found was a link to this post detailing problems with Adobe Lightroom 1.4 and asking people to revert to 1.3.1.

From the details of the post and replies to the comments by Tom Hogarty of Adobe who writes the Lightroom Journal:

...raw files consist of two essential pieces: the block of data that was captured by your sensor and metadata to describe that image data. In this case, Lightroom would incorrectly update the metadata when you explicitly update the metadata. If you're not planning on using Lightroom you can certainly wait for the subsequent update and install it over Lightroom 1.4 if you prefer. -TH

What. The. Fuck., Adobe? You change the original RAW files?

Yes, it seems that they do:

Lightroom has written the time stamp EXIF field back to raw files since the product was launched. This is intended to provide compatibility to other products that ignore the same field written to XMP metadata. -TH

Er… wow. It’s supposedly only the metadata, but still… Wow. This is kinda not good.

I can somewhat understand why they do it, as if a user changes the metadata of the file it gets written back so that all apps which use those raw files can see the changes. But still, that’s a bit odd.

I don’t think the result for me is too bad, except when you look at the metadata of images exported with 1.4, the timestamp is zero’d out. (Example)

This kinda sucks. Hopefully Adobe won’t screw this up again.

(There are quite a few angry replies about this here and here.)

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Fix-A-Flat

Published March 26, 2008

My First Repaired Flat
(Click for full size…)

I repaired my first bike tube flat today. I was able to use one of the wide patches to cover both holes from Saturday when a sheet metal screw damaged my tire, tube, and rim.

Repairing a flat tube seems to be pretty easy. I just removed the valve stem, flattened the tube, cleaned the area with isopropyl alcohol, scuffed it up with sandpaper, cleaned it again, applied the rubber cement, waited for that to dry, peeled the patch from the backing, solidly squished the patch in place peeled the protective top layer off, and called it done.

I then pumped up the tube a bit and let it sit for a while to see if it’d lose pressure, and it didn’t. I then re-flattened it, folded it up, tucked it in an old sock, and put it in my bag as a spare. Yay!

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Broken Cateye Strada Wireless Bracket

Published March 25, 2008

Broken Clip on Cateye Strada Wireless Bike Computer Bracket

Back when I got my bike I also ordered a Cateye Strada Wireless bike computer. It’s simple, but did just what I wanted: time, speed, average speed, multiple odometers, multiple stored wheel sizes, and a couple other little things. It also did all of this wirelessly. Nicely, the computer latches into a quick release mechanism, allowing the computer itself to be removed easily.

I would generally leave this mounted on my bike, taking it off only for washing, adjustments, transporting the bike on the car, and locking it up. I would imagine that the computer has been latched and unlatched, at most, 75 times since I got the bike. As you can tell from the wear marks above, it hasn’t been inserted and removed very much.

Today when I went to put it on my bike I noticed that it didn’t snap into place this time, and didn’t stay put particularly well. Looking at the mount (above), I noticed that the small retention clip is broken. This is really disappointing, as I rather like this computer. It doesn’t sit particularly snugly without the clip, so I’m going to have to either modify the clip, or acquire a new one. I could probably put a bit of epoxy in the groove the computer fits into. That may very well make it a tight enough friction fit that it won’t come loose.

I do wonder if this is a consistent problem, as the Cateye Small Parts Store is out of that part. Maybe I’ll just try contacting Cateye to see if they’ll just send a free one. After all, this is practically brand new.

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Free TiVo

Published March 25, 2008

I’m going to ask again:

Would anyone like my old TiVo?

If not, I’ll take it to the Salvation Army. I’m sure someone there will get good use out of it.

18 Comments

Tire / Wheel Damage

Published March 24, 2008

Tire and Wheel Damage
(Click to embiggen…)

Oh, also, here’s the damage which was done to my brand new bike tire and the wheel when I got a flat tire on Saturday. You can clearly see where the sheet metal screw went into the tire, along with where it exited the sidewall / bead area and damaged the rim. When riding along I suddenly heard a thump and slight scraping sound right before the decrease in pedaling ease, and this must have been the cause.

Being kinda busy and tired today I still haven’t patched the tube, but I’ll probably do that and grab a photo of the screw (yes, I saved it to photograph) and the patching tomorrow. Or Wednesday. Or something.

Now I’m going to contemplate sleep. Despite the large amounts of food I just ate, I feel pretty tired.

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