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Plain HobNobs, my favorite biscuits.
(Click for more moblog photos…)
Thanks, Jungle Jim’s. I now have plain HobNobs, my favorite biscuit. I wish the normal importers brought them in, not just the chocolate-coated varieties.
Now, to mentally prep for a phone conversation with a recruiter. And do some electronics work.
Would any of you happen to have any eight-conductor stranded cable, preferably shielded?
I need to make some cables for part of the Honda Music Link stuff I’m working on, and I’m having difficulty finding this sort of cable in quantities less than 500′ or 1000′ rolls. I only need maybe… 20′ or so, at most. Even 10′ would be usable for my prototype stuffs.
Thanks!
Groundhog in Elizabeth Park (Trenton, MI)On the way home from Ohio yesterday I stopped off at Elizabeth Park in Trenton, MI to meet up with Danielle. She had procured a My Little Pony kite and was wanting to get out of the house and fly it. Well, after some kite flying we were getting cold, so we started to walk over towards the water.
As we got closer to the river we noticed a groundhog near the sidewalk. As I walked closer to the groundhog I knelt / sat on the ground, and the groundhog kept getting closer, and closer, and closer, seemingly wanting some food. Well, Danielle ran back to her car and grabbed a small packet of Cheetos Flamin’ Hot Crunchy snacks that she had in the car.
Sure, these aren’t the best thing to be feeding a groundhog, but it can’t be anything worse than what the groundhog would forage out of the garbage cans and from beneath picnic tables in the park. The groundhog happily ate the Cheetos, taking them from our hands and wrapping it’s little paw(s) around them, eating them one at a time, sometimes standing up right next to us.
At one point the groundhog was so close that the only way I could get a photo of it. The photo above was at 24mm, with the camera sitting on my knee and the groundhog about 1.5′ (or maybe less) from the end of the lens hood.
Eventually we were getting a bit cold, so after letting the groundhog nose around in the bag a bit, we decided to give it the rest of the Cheetos. Unfortunately, the seagulls in the park were being a bit of a bother, so the remains of the bag (but not the bag itself) were instead deposited deep into one of the openings to the groundhog’s burrow. Hopefully the seagulls weren’t able to get the bits there.
More information on Marmota monax, (groundhog / woodchuck) is available from this U of M site or this Wikipedia article. All of the uploaded photos from time in Elizabeth Park yesterday can be found here (photo gallery retired).
If things go as I hope, the following will take an iPod with it’s serial RX line connected to RB0 and skip it forward one track when the tactile switch RA0 on my dev board is pressed:
program ipod_next_track_test
dim buttonstate as byte
Soft_Uart_Init(PORTB, 1, 0, 9600, 0)
main:
while true
if Button(PORTA, 0, 1, 1) then
buttonstate = 255
end if
if buttonstate and Button(PORTA, 0, 1, 0) then
Soft_Uart_Write(0xFF 0x55 0x03 0x02 0x00 0x08 0xF3)
buttonstate = 0
end if
wend
I just have to make an appropriate cable and I can test it. (The one I had made broke.)
Now, if that works I can get to work on making the EUSART on the chip respond to the Honda Music Link with enough intelligence to make it think that an iPod is present.
Then, if that works I can get to work on making some of the commands received from the HML act as the aforementioned button press, and I’ll have negated the function crappyness of the HML.
After that point I can make up a cheesy little PCB for the circuit and a PIC16F688 (the smallest PIC I could find with an EUSART) to sit permanently in the car. It shouldn’t need much more than the PIC, a crystal (because I’m not sure the mikroElektonika stuff can set the frequency on the internal oscillator), either a LM78L05 or small switching regulator, headers for the DIN connector cables, and a couple of caps. If I’m bored enough I might even make it my first SMT board.
So, I purchased an LCD TV earlier today via Costco’s website. (This one, if you are curious.)
Well, I need a stand for it. I think I’m going to make one, using a spare part from my desk. Due to a somewhat complicated story I have a spare right hand side desk surface from this shelf. I think I’m going to use it to make the LCD TV stand, but I’m not certain how to make the base.
First off, I think I want the base to be around 20″ off of the ground, so there should be room for a shelf in the middle. I’m thinking I’ll make the base out of black iron pipe, with a shelf supported with tees in the center. The shelf will probably be a random piece of melamine-covered stuffs from Home Depot / Lowes, fastened to the black iron pipe with some manner of pipe clamp.
Or, I could use multiple sets of flanges between some large, flat boards.
I was also thinking of large round PVC uprights, notched, with the shelves set into that.
Hmm. Any better ideas?
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Looking towards my workbench in the clean, more-empty basement.
(Click for more photos…)
Well, after dragging my feet on it for a while, I finally finished up cleaning my basement this evening. I still have a pile of things to take to Salvation Army (hopefully tomorrow) and a whole bunch of bottles to get rid of. Anyone who wants to return them to Red Wagon — where they will all be accepted — is welcome to have them all, and any deposit obtained from returning them. I just don’t feel like it. There is probably $20 worth, too.
While I know it won’t sound as good as it could, I also hung the rear speakers from the ceiling in the basement, getting them off of stands, wires out of the way, and generally making things look nicer.
As can be seen here I also did away with the very large green ping pong-like table thing, and turned what was the rack of computers into a shelf for things. This shelf wasn’t needed as I spent a good bit of time earlier in the year condensing many of my computing things on to my desktop, saving power, cutting down on maintenance, etc.
So, all in all this is a good thing. Hopefully I’ll get to cleaning the bathroom(s), kitchen, and doing a general dusting and vacuuming sometime this holiday weekend.
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NES Internal Screw Removal
After acquiring some replacement NES 72-pin edge connectors to fix NES’ for both replika and I, I decided to take step-by-step photos of the replacement and write up a tutorial on it. So, I give you my NES 72-Pin Edge Connector Replacement Tutorial.
This is actually really easy to do, fixes the blinking-gray-screen problem which plagues almost every front-load NES (you know, the problem which were supposedly resolved by blowing on the connector in the cartridges), and can be done with just a screwdriver and replacement connector. There is no soldering or electrical repair skill needed for this.
Also, please Digg this story.
I took some time today to write up information about archiving Atari 800XL floppy disks. This is as simple as copying them from an Atari 1050 to images on a PC using some special hardware and software, but I hadn’t found any this-is-what-I-did writeups, so I figured I’d do one.
After I’ve had time to sort through the images, carve out personal data, and come up with a template for the pages about the disks, I’ll make them available to others.
For now, though, feel free to read the article in its current, mostly-unedited form: http://nuxx.net/wiki_archive/A/Atari_800XL_Disk_Archiving
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Danielle and I headed over to Point Pelee National Park yesterday. I’ll post photos of it later, but for now I wanted to post the photo of an order of poutine acquired at HARVEY’S in Windsor, just before crossing back into the US. This was part of our dinner, where I had a veggie burger (with onions, lettuce, and hot peppers), poutine, and 7-Up, while Danielle had a normal burger, poutine, and root beer.
