nuxx.net
Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.

Advance America Redux

February 15, 2008

Remember my mentioning Advance America last month?

Well, here’s a little more direct about their usury: Advance America’s 10-K for FY2006

Highlights:

· Just over $4 billion in loans in 2006.
· Average payday cash advance was $353.
· Average loan length was 16.2 days.
· Average fees paid was $55. (Yes, that’s ~15% over the course of two weeks.)
· Average principle amount outstanding on loans during the period: $448
· Average principle amount of installment loan: $486
· Average charge to customer for originating and processing installment loan: $357
· 2853 locations across the US,
· “Our business is seasonal due to the impact of fluctuating demand for advances and fluctuating collection rates throughout the year. Demand has historically been highest in the third and fourth quarters of each year, corresponding to the back-to-school and holiday seasons, and lowest in the first quarter of each year, corresponding to our customers’ receipt of income tax refunds.”
· Net income: $70.15 million
· Total fees and interest charged to customers: $659.9 million

financesmoved from livejournal

OpenBSD Bug Report

February 13, 2008

Yay, the bug report I submitted, #5372, for an issue I experienced during a headless install of OpenBSD/macppc has been posted. My workaround is here in the Trashwall article.

(In short, everything for a headless / via serial console install works automatically except setting up /etc/ttys so that the console goes to the serial port.)

computersmoved from livejournal

Merging .reg Files

February 13, 2008

Do any of you have a good way to merge .REG files together?

I’ve got four files and I want them to all become one. Key values don’t need to be merged, the lines can simply be duplicated if they are different. I just need to slam four files together and get rid of the duplicate lines.

computersmoved from livejournal

Trashwall Failure

February 12, 2008

Hrm, the Trashwall failed sometime during the night.

I think it may have bad RAM… I’ll have to hang a serial console off of it so I can actually watch it go down.

<sigh>

This stuff is never as straightforward as it should be.

computersmoved from livejournal

500 Days

February 11, 2008

c0nsumer@rowla:~> uptime
 5:23PM  up 500 days, 5:14, 8 users, load averages: 0.19, 0.28, 0.26
c0nsumer@rowla:~>

Today marks over 500 days of uptime for rowla.nuxx.net.

Also, work is horribly busy lately. I guess that’s what I get for attempting to move into Engineering.

computersmoved from livejournalwork

Starburst, without the drool.

February 11, 2008

Lovely Unintentional Starburst

I love the unintentional starburst on this image which was taken while acquiring photos for my Trashwall article.

I didn’t do anything special for that… It’s just my standard Tokina 100mm macro lens at ƒ/18 pointed into the case of the computer, and no other processing.

Ah well, now it’s time for bed. My alarm rings in seven hours, and I have a long day of work ahead of me.

making thingsmoved from livejournal

Compact Flash in the Trashwall

February 9, 2008

So, I won this eBay auction for some Compact Flash to IDE adapters. As you can see in the image, those adapters are supposed to plug right into a 40-pin ATA port. In the Trashwall I was hoping to plug one of these right into the main board and use it for booting the OS from a compact flash card.

Unfortunately, the seller instead sent me a normal end-of-cable mount adapter, similar to the one used in my MAME Cabinet, except without the second slot. At least it was the newer version which supports DMA transfers, which was one of the big things I wanted.

This evening I took the adapter, screwed some old motherboard standoffs into it, then screwed it into one of the Power Mac G4 AGP’s drive trays. Despite being something other than what I wanted to use, it has worked out pretty well.

It turns out that the two fastest (specification) cards I have are my Sandisk Ultra II 2GB and the el-cheapo Micro Center-branded 2GB card, which are both DMA Mode 2 devices. While this isn’t too slow, it’s not as nice as what I’d get if I were to shove one of the newer Transcend 133x as did with his IBM z50. But, being cheap and trying to keep with the spirit of the Trashwall, I’ll use the spare, leftover Micro Center card.

Now, I just need to install OpenBSD on it again, fit it in the rack, and get it integrated into the network here. Hopefully I can do that tomorrow. For now, beer and relaxing.

computersmaking thingsmoved from livejournal