When at the (very crowded) post office this afternoon a man came in, saying that he thinks he may have just dropped his cell phone in the mail box, but he wasn’t sure. After lots of berating the employees to look for his phone, they took his number and tried calling it to find the phone in the piles of mail. The man answered, saying that he’d found it in his truck.
Also, while on the way to Chicago on Tuesday morning, we saw the engine from this Amtrak accident a few weeks ago. This was the GE Genesis locomotive, front crumpled under, sitting on another train car, inside of a rail yard. Unfortunately we passed it too quickly for me to get a photo.
We’re back from Chicago. Let’s see… If I can remember right…
+ Swissotel Chicago is generally nice and our room had a great view.
– Swissotel Chicago could use more comfortable beds. Their computer service also went down so we had to wait a while to check in. Bathroom was clean and huge, but had a bit of mildew in the caulk and grout.
+ CTA seems to be pretty easy to navigate, if once can figure out the route needed. Hotel concierge is good for helping with this.
+ Downtown Chicago seems pretty nice and walkable. The bums trying to pull the hand-you-a-newspaper-then-demand-money scam would immediately stop asking if told “No, thanks.” Same with people fliering.
+ Amtrack seems nice, except for the waiting area in Chicago Union Station (crowded, not well designed), being 40 minutes late getting back to Birmingham, the REALLY rough tracks on the return trip, and the smell of burning tires coming from the train every time it stopped. Also, some of the passengers:
· The noisy two mother / grandma combo on the way to Chicago who let the kids eat lots of sugar, watch DVDs out loud, and generally run amok.
· The three beachball-shaped, oily, smelly people (mom and two sons), and another who didn’t genetically match them, but was consistently bossed around by the others.
Erm… That’s it for now. Photos coming later.
15pF caps cobbled into Ben’s TV-B-GoneSo, that TV-B-Gone problem from last night is sorted. Just after coming in from shoveling snow† I remembered that I had an 8MHz crystal hanging out on the EasyPIC 4 I acquired about a year ago (photo gallery retired). I just dropped the crystal on the board, squeezed in some 15pF caps on the back of the board (not sure if these are the right value, but they should be close enough), and tested it. As expected, it was now working. Also, because we used no-clean flux there wasn’t anything more to clean off. That was quite nice.
To make it a little more pocket-friendly I put some 1″ Harbor Freight Special heatshrink tubing around the main part of the body. This makes it nice and smooth, and parts are less likely to be accidently torn off. (Danielle accidently knocked one of the transistors off… Oops… This will get replaced next time I order something from Mouser or Digi-Key.)
Anyway, it’s working good now. Now it just has to get back to Lapeer and in
† This is normally handled by the condo association, but because of the heavy snowfall I decided to do my porch and in front of my garage myself, instead of waiting for the snow clearing company to get to it.
Wrong Resonator with TV-B-GoneAt first I thought this might be okay, as a new v1.1 of the kit was released, and I figured that maybe the BOM hadn’t been updated. However, after things didn’t work, I did a bit more digging and realized that it’s just the wrong part. The microcontroller won’t even run at that 16MHz speed, the firmware says that 8MHz is required, etc.
That’s now a total of three kits I’ve ordered from there, two of which had missing parts. I hope I’m the only customer with these issues.
Materva Yerba Mate SodaI feel a bit twitchy. This stuff has caffeine, sugar, and yerba mate in it. It’s quite tasty too…
Special Edition Alzheimer’s Memory CardsI came across this the other day in Best Buy.
Sorted ICsRemember the SOVTEK ICs and random other electronics I received as part of an ITT toolbox from a coworker?
Well, tonight I decided to go through and sort through the ICs, tossing out the noticeably physically damaged ones, and cataloging the rest. That scan up above shows all of the ICs, about half 74xx series, on foam. If you’d like to see a list of what is there, I put it all in Google Documents and shared it here. (And yes, Google Documents works pretty darn well.)
The yellow things are resistor arrays / networks, and those aren’t in the catalog.
Maybe now I can get to putting together that synth-like thing, or something else nifty. (Perhaps a LED clock or something…)
Wow, I just received this piece of email:
Added the following hosts to /etc/hosts.deniedssh:
72.44.44.9 (ec2-72-44-44-9.z-2.compute-1.amazonaws.com)
Looking through auth.log shows 18 attempts before things were blocked. Looks like people have taken to using AWS for scanning. Great.
So, Google Maps Street View has gone live for Detroit and a bit of the west side.
Unsurprisingly, at the second random place I decided to look, the intersection of Gratiot and Iroquois, found random people riding bikes in the middle of Gratiot in the middle of the day.
Welcome to Detroit, eh?
Unfortunately it looks like The Heidelberg Project hasn’t been driven yet.
