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

Rez

December 15, 2007

Wrong resonator shipped with TV-B-Gone kit.Wrong Resonator with TV-B-Gone

came over tonight to assemble one of adafruit Industries TV-B-Gone kits, his first electronics kit. While he did a great job soldering things, it doesn’t work. Why? This one shipped with the 16MHz resonator seen above, instead of the spec’d 8MHz.

At 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.

electronicsmaking thingsmoved from livejournal

IC Sorting

December 11, 2007

Sorted ICs
(Click for higher resolution image…)

Remember 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…)

electronicsmaking thingsmoved from livejournal

AWS?!?

December 11, 2007

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.

computersmoved from livejournal

Bell’s Two Hearted Mini Keg

December 10, 2007

[Cross posted to and …]

Bell's Two Hearted Mini KegBell’s Two Hearted Mini Keg

This should make NYE a bit more interesting. That right there is 1.32 gallons, or 5 lites of Bell’s Two Hearted Ale (sorry, no direct link available).

At 7% ABV the numbers work out to just under 12oz (or 350mL) of pure alcohol, or about the same amount of alcohol as in a fifth of vodka. It’s a good thing that this is much tastier than vodka.

Oh, and the cost was US$19.99, plus Michigan sales tax (6%), but without deposit. Not bad, when you consider that this is just about as much beer as 14 bottles, and a six pack normally runs right around US$8 – US$9 each.

beermoved from livejournal

U2 Can Celebrate Christmas

December 9, 2007

U2 Themed Flyer from Heritage Church
(Click to embiggen to full res 300 dpi scan.)

A couple weeks ago I received this flyer for Heritage Church, one of the local churches which meets in a rented high school facility.

To quote from the flyer:

Just what does the biggest band in the world have to say about things like faith, hope, joy and peace on earth? I think if you look closer you’d be surprised…

Join us this Christmas season for four weeks as we investigate and unpack the music of U2. We’ll explore the themes, lyrics and Biblical messages found in some of their most popular and enduring songs. You will come away inspired this Christmas… possibly with a new appreciation for U2, but more importantly, for the amazing story and meaning of Christmas. Come check us out, if you’re ready to really rock around the Christmas tree!

[…]

Please note that the band U2 will not be appearing at Heritage Church, but their music will be there.

Looking a bit further, it seems that MTV has picked up on this, and it is being called U2Charist. Per Wikipedia:

A U2Charist (also spelled eU2charist) is a communion service, or Eucharist, accompanied by U2 songs in lieu of traditional hymns and sometimes as part or all of the service music.

found thingsmoved from livejournalmusic

Ginger Beer / Ale / Soda

December 9, 2007

3L of Ginger Beer
(Click to embiggen.)

Yesterday Danielle and I stopped by Cap N Cork so I could check out prices of the champange bottles for when I finally get around to bottling the cider. While there we picked up stuff to make soda (basically, a small funnel, yeast, and some soda flavor).

Today we made it. 383g of cane sugar, a bit of honey, 2.5 tsp of ginger flavor, yeast, and 3L of water went into the three bottles. That’s it sitting right there. The rightmost bottle also has minced ginger in it, to boost the flavor. Hopefully it’ll be good.

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HELO

December 5, 2007

After not receiving the shipping notification for something I received last night, I have decided to try disabling Postfix’s HELO validations on my server. This will likely lead to far more spam being delivered, but it should eliminate odd rejections from non-compliant servers.

I had smtpd_helo_restrictions = reject_invalid_hostname, reject_non_fqdn_hostname set, which can be referenced here. The problem was some sites wouldn’t send a proper HELO, leading to mail not being delivered as it should have been. Maybe it’d be best to have a SA rule which marks down improper HELOs instead of simply blocking them.

If spam levels get too high again, maybe I’ll go back to the old restrictions. They generally work fine.

computersmoved from livejournal