MAME Cabinet
January 4, 2007
So… My MAME cabinet is working great again. It’s at the point where I just have to finish the physical clean-up, resoldering of some connections in the control panel, and photography. As
January 3, 2007
It works!
(Click for more moblog photos…)
1) I have Founder’s Breakfast Stout.
2) My MAME cabinet (photo gallery retired) is working again, this time running completely from Compact Flash. I played Bubble Bobble!
As soon as I figure out why the sound card keeps failing (it’ll just cease to work suddenly, for no apparent reason) and fix that, everything will be good. Oh, and once I get all the controls / display stuffs sorted out. But that’s not too difficult.
I just bid on another card on eBay. I think it’s the card failing, so it’s best to replace it.
Expect more on the MAME cabinet soon. There will likely be photos and a write-up in the projects portion of nuxx.net.
Also, today I:
· Smoked a power supply after replacing the fuse inside. I guess more than the fuse was bad.
· Diagnosed a motherboard bearing a rather nice AMD Athlon XP 1700+ chip as no longer powering on. I hope I can figure out why, as it was working fine a few months ago. (It’s not the power supply.) This was to be the board in the MAME cabinet. Fortunately I still had my trusty nine year old Abit BH-6, formerly of many different computers including bornslippy.nuxx.net (photo gallery retired). Seems to be working well enough with MAME.
· Ate Kraft Macaroni and Cheese w/ curry powder for dinner.
· Played with Compact Flash to IDE adapters, which work great.
· Installed DOS a few times.
· Ate an enormous salad for lunch which had completely too much blue cheese on it.
· Learned that RAMDRIVE.SYS RAMdisks can’t be more than 32MB.
· Found that AdvanceMAME runs horribly from flash unless you turn on write caching. (Not sure of why yet.)
Moon’s Milk
January 2, 2007
Halo around the moon.
As
I don’t have a wide enough lens to get the whole halo (the Tokina 12-24 would have been great about now), but I did get a fair bit of it. After seeing the blinding glare of the moon I went to take another photo with something (me?) blocking out the moon, but it was too late and the halo was gone.
So, there you go. Not a great photo, but it’s a halo none the less. I just hope I get to see another 3-4 ring halo like I did one night when I was little. That was amazing.
iSight Car Mount
January 2, 2007
I know this is old news, but I finally banged together a page about my iSight Car Mount.
There are embedded videos of the tests I did, both driving around a bit and a stop-motion video of my drive to work.
And yes, this is related to the silly Flash question I had earlier. I was able to find a newer version of the player which has a click-to-play button available, so that should a noisy video be clicked on my the user, it doesn’t immediately deafen them.
I think there is still a lot to do with Gallery and it’s video support, and I need to figure out a better way to transcode files consistently and add hinting needed for lighttpd’s flv streaming support.
But, for now, it works. :)
Gallery Sitemap Problem
December 25, 2006
For some reason (probably because of the size of my gallery and the number of sites hosted on the box) I’ve been having problems with Google being able to pull an XML sitemap for the gallery. Google was apparantly timing out while attempting to download it. I’m not sure if some change was made on their end recently regarding the length of time which could be spend during sitemap downloads or what, but I think I found a solution:
#!/bin/sh
newfile=~/www/nuxx.net/gallery/sitemap.xml.new
oldfile=~/www/nuxx.net/gallery/sitemap.xml/usr/local/bin/curl -Sso $newfile http://nuxx.net/gallery/main.php?g2_view=sitemap.Sitemap
if [ -d ~/www/nuxx.net/gallery/sitemap.xml.new ]; then
mv $newfile $oldfile
fi
Yes, I know it’s a hack, but running it every six hours should work around the problem.
UPDATE: Yep, I just realized this won’t work. The test argument needs to be changed to -f (or -e) because it’s not a directory. Doh!
110 Slide / 35mm Negative Scanning & Custom Cables
December 20, 2006
Well, I finally started something and finished it! Earlier today I began writing up a overview of how I’ve been handling scanning my 110 slides and 35mm negatives. It’s still in a sort-of rough draft state, but all the photos are there and such. So, if you are interested in how I’ve been handling the scanning, along with enough info to do it yourself in a similar way, go ahead and give this article a read:
I also spent a bit of time putting together info about the materials and such which I use for making custom audio and video cables. It currently only covers component video cables, iPod connectors, and subwoofer cables. More info will come later. The article can be found here:
It’s nice to feel as if I’ve finally managed to get something done.
UPDATE: Also, please digg this story.
Honda Music Link
December 10, 2006
The Honda Music Link communicates with an iPod at 9600 / N-8-1, and I can successfully sniff it.
Eg: 000043 17:16:12.750 FF 55 04 04 00 29 04 CB FF 55 04 04 00 29 01 CE
This can be looked up here: http://ipodlinux.org/Apple_Accessory_Protocol
UPDATE: As an exercise to myself, this is as follows:
FF 55 – Header
04 – Length of Command
04 – Mode 4 / AiR Mode
00 29 – AiR Playback Control
04 – Skip– Command
CB – Checksum calculated as: 0x100 – (FF + 04 + 04 + 00 + 29 + 04)
FF 55 – Header
04 – Length of Command
04 – Mode 4 / AiR Mode
00 29 – AiR Playback Control
01 – Toggle Play / Pause
CE – Checksum
.1μF
December 10, 2006
How can a place called Radio Shack not even have .1μF polarized caps?
I need five to build this MAX232 circuit because the level shifters from Spark Fun don’t work for some reason.
Bah. This is absurd.
Cookies and Car
December 9, 2006
· Windshield wiper blades changed. (Pain in the ass.)
· Air filter changed. (Easy.)
· Tires at 32psi after cold weather. (Will likely have to redo with arrival sub-zero temps.)
· Chocolate chip cookies baking.
· Packages sent off to Australia and Scotland.
Now, to balance my checkbook.
Presto Chango
December 8, 2006
Yay! The RS232 to TTL level shifters from Spark Fun arrived today. That means I can build what I hope will be a PC-based sniffer for the Honda Music Link.
But first? Dinner.