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

Birmingham, MI to Ann Arbor, MI via Train

September 21, 2007

Train Arriving at Birmingham Platform
(Click for more photos (photo gallery retired)…)

Back on July 7th Danielle and I decided to head to Ann Arbor for the evening. However, instead of driving there, we decided to take the train from Birmingham at around 5pm, then back at about Midnight. While the ticket cost was around $80 for the two round-trip first-class tickets and gas would have cost around $18, it was a nice diversion from the normal drive.

Along the hour-ish ride we passed through some rather interesting areas, seeing everything from a state trooper attempting to drive around the gates and TURTL graffiti to someone with a pickup slinking around an abandoned building (stealing copper?) and a giant chicken on KIDZ PLAYLAND. There was also the typical landfill, rail yard, and wetlands.

Once we arrived at Ann Arbor we walked up the stairs and road to Zingerman’s Deli and Next Door where we had dinner. I actually ate a rather substantial bacon-laden sandwich, Zingerman’s lovely Jen’s Pimento Parti.

After eating we wandered around the town a bit, eventually meeting up with and a very tired (and lost) . After a bit more wandering around, including back to the train station, waited until it arrived, then made our way back to the Birmingham station, where we arrived just after 1:30am.

By the way, the Birmingham platform is pretty crappy. It’s nothing but a track-level concrete platform located at the end of a road, and is fitted with a very uninformative information display and a “shelter” which does little but retain heat and stink of urine.

The train itself was decent, but nowhere as nice as UK trains. The ride was smooth, but slow. Staff was courteous, although not particularly friendly. The inside of the train feels like sparse 70s engineering. I’m not sure if I’ll take it to Ann Arbor again, but I’d definitely consider it for transit to Chicago. Without all the hassles of air travel (able to bring whatever you want on board, no security, etc) is rather nice, and the ticket cost is about the same as flying.

(Yes, I did just get these pictures uploaded this week. If you’d like to see all of them, please look here (photo gallery retired).)

foodmoved from livejournaltravel

Heritage Harvest Days

September 20, 2007

Water-cooled engine powering a reciprocating saw.
(Click for more images (photo gallery retired)…)

After hearing about it from Danielle and I headed up to Seven Ponds Nature Center in Dryden, MI (map) for Heritage Harvest Days. We were supposed to meet up with and , but due to some confusion we went on Saturday instead of Sunday and missed them.

Seven Ponds is a private, non-profit nature center, and Heritage Harvest Days is one of its fundraisers. The event consists of a number of people demonstrating their crafts, music, and a few people selling things. Admission is US$5, and it’s very worthwhile. There were lots of nifty things to look at, trails to wander, and it was just an all around good time.

Here are some highlight photos:

· Tractor-powered sawmill.
· Guys sitting on the tractors which are powering the sawmill.
· Studebaker Pickup Truck.
· Frustrated-looking magician after getting out of a straight jacket.
· Danielle in the herb garden.
· Hummingbird clearwing moth.
· A sheep named Piggy being sheared.
· Cute sheep!
· Goat with a cast on its leg! (It got caught in a fence…)
· Reciprocating saw powered by the engine pictured above.
· Corn on the cob being steamed in a barrel.
· Danielle eating corn on the cob.
· Lake, at the bottom of the hill behind the festival.
· Raccoon poop.
· Cute goat reaching under the fence for leaves.

Of course, the rest of the photos can be seen in the Heritage Harvest Days at Seven Ponds (photo gallery retired) album.

When looking through the gallery you might notice that things look a bit… better. In order to make the page look fuller and cut out some whitespace I set the thumbnails to fit within a bounding box of 300 x 300 (up from 150 x 150) and made the default resized images fit within an 800 x 800 box. Around 30% of visitors to the site are at 1024×768, and when tested on a monitor running IE at that resolution, things were still plenty usable. A little bit of scrolling to the right was required, but only maybe 20% of the screen wasn’t visible without scrolling. As almost all other users were using a resolution above 1024×768, this seems like a safe sizing.

moved from livejournaloutdoorstravel

Dinner: Pretzel Bread Sandwhich

September 18, 2007

Here is my dinner. Having too much salt throughout the last few days I figured I needed some fresh veggies to help sort me out. Yes, I know there is actually a reasonable amount of salt in this, but it sure seemed to help.

This is half of a piece of pretzel bread (a “walking stick”) from Nino Salvaggio with Dill Havarti, sliced Roma tomato, and cucumber on it. I also ate it along with some of the olives I picked up, as the olives are really tasty.

This was a very, very good dinner, and just the right size.

foodmoved from livejournal

Splitting Ground

September 17, 2007

Here’s a quick electronics question:

How can I couple two groundplanes together, but isolate noise between them?

The reason I ask is because I’ve got a really noisy USB connection coming from my work laptop, and while I can feed it’s data lines right into the DAC, the ground connection for it is the same as the one for the outputs. I’m trying to figure out how one can couple those two grounds together, but cut off noise between them.

Best I can tell that’s just done with a ferrite bead… Is that right?

electronicsmoved from livejournal

Sheepie Preview…

September 15, 2007

More photos coming later…

This is just a preview of the Heritage Harvest Festival in Dryden, MI.

Due to some confusion Danielle and I attended the festival today instead of with friends tomorrow, but that’s okay. It was really nifty. There was a good bit of farm equipment, sawmills, animals, steam-roasted corn on the cob, trails to wander on, and stuff like that.

Anyway, more later. For now you get a really cute, freshly shorn sheepie. (By a multi-generation shearer who seemed to really care for her animals and made things from their wool.)

moved from livejournaloutdoorstravel

rowla.nuxx.net Problems

September 14, 2007

Oh boy. I don’t need this now:

c0nsumer@rowla:~> dmesg
[...]
ad0: FAILURE - device detached
subdisk0: detached
ad0: detached
GEOM_MIRROR: Device hotbackup: provider ad0 disconnected.
c0nsumer@rowla:~>

No SMART warnings, nothing. On Sunday the disk reported a clean healthcheck with 17970 hours of power-on time. ad2 had 24195 hours reported in the same log file. I’d expect it to go soon, too.

Thankfully ad0 is one of the first two disks on a secondary pair of disks in the box which aren’t critical. I first copy backups to those disks then copy them from there down to my house each night. Having half of that mirror set gone isn’t horrible, but I’ll have to take care of it at some point.

Maybe I’ll just throw one of the 320GB disks I have here on there in its place and finally get around to moving all my backup drives here internally. Time to check prices on new disks at Newegg I guess.

UPDATE: For $120 I can get a 500GB Seagate which would go nicely in my Mac Pro as a backup volume. I could then use one of the 320GB disks it would be replacing it as the hot backup in rowla.nuxx.net. I’d then have a spare 320GB I could leave attached to the Mac Pro via the FW800 enclosure, turned off, as an offline backup of photos.

Or I can leave it and wait until the other half of the hotbackup mirror set (ad2) falls over. The replacement 500GB disk will probably be cheaper at that point and it’ll require no work to be done right now.

This will be decided tomorrow.

around the housecomputersmoved from livejournal

Alien DAC: Built

September 13, 2007

Assembled Alien DAC w/USB Power (Top)
(Click for more photos…)

I decided that I’m going to build another one of those Millett Hybrid Maxed headphone amplifiers, except this time I want to build one using a bit more specialized parts, stick it in a case with wooden end panels, and fit both a USB audio adapter and input switch in the housing. As you can see here, the two PCBs will easily fit in the case. (The Elna RFS / Silmic II capacitors can also be seen there.)

Today the Alien DAC kit arrived from Glass Jar Audio, so I set to work putting it together. It really wasn’t too difficult, most of the parts were either through-hole or 1206 / 0805 SMT. The SOT-8 voltage regulators were real easy to solder as well, and I had very little trouble with the SSOP28 PCM2702E. The board is reasonably well laid out, but there are a couple of things I would have changed. I’m really not sure what the designer was thinking (I think he wanted to save space / make things more compact), as hand-soldering SMT IC legs to ground without thermals is a huge pain in the ass. Regardless, it worked out.

Oh, and the bottom of the board can be seen here.

electronicsmaking thingsmoved from livejournal