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

512MB? Bah!

September 5, 2005

[Cross posted to and …]

I know this rant will probably get me flamed for being somewhat off topic, but hopefully some folks will find it useful:

512MB of RAM is not enough for OS X!

I suppose I should have know this and planned accordingly, but I didn’t and now I’m suffering the consequences.

See, I normally have 1.5GB in this machine, but when running the Apple Hardware Test the other day in order to determine if my Airport Extreme card was bad, one of my 512MB DIMMs tested bad. No problem, it’s a Crucial part, so it’s got a lifetime warranty. Well, I pulled the RAM to ship it back to Crucial, and now this machine is borderline unusable. I cannot wait for the RAM too get back here… Hell, maybe I’ll order another GB in the mean time, just so I can have something usable!

(Note: I could not do a cross ship as I purchased the RAM through a vendor. Crucial still handles the warranty. The machine is a dual 2.0Ghz PowerMac G5, and I installed the extra RAM after unboxing before it was ever powered on, so I hadn’t ever realized low memory would be this painful.)

acquired thingscomputersmoved from livejournal

Corn!~

August 27, 2005

So a friend’s neighbor somehow ended up with a pickup bed full of corn. I think it’s from his field…

Well, my friend kindly brought me a large bag of this corn.

This is good, because I *love* roasted corn on the cob.

Well, after roasting up about three ears, peeling them open, seeing the dimples on the kernels and tasting them I realize what is different about this corn…

This is feeder corn.

It’s really, really different. And no, I do not recommend that people eat animal feed corn. It’s very starchy and thick and untasty.

Hmm, maybe this is what corn syrup is made from…

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PC Needed

August 27, 2005

Can someone help me find a particular PC? I’m looking for an older machine, so long as the CPU is passively cooled. Yeah, I mean one of those giant heatsink things just hanging out there…

I also want to stick a dead quiet hard disk in there and finally have a silent firewall. Mine’s getting old and noisy.

acquired thingscomputersmoved from livejournal

Yay, Acetone!

August 26, 2005


Click for huuuuuge!

There are few things as gratifying as seeing a project starting to come together. In that picture above are two boxes containing two of the three major components which I had to fabricate for the iSight Tripod Adapters. The top containing 40 cut, cleaned, slotted, and prepped body tubes, and the bottom containing the 40 bottom end caps, drilled and fitted with 1/4-20 tee nuts for connecting to a camera tripod.

Please note that the slightly rough slots in the body tubes are okay. The only part which shows in the end is the top of the rounded hole at the end, so those are consistent and nice and smooth. For the rest of the cut I just made certain that it wouldn’t pinch the cable during assembly.

The third part which I have to make is the other end caps, which need to have a precise rectangular hole cut in them in order to accept the moulded vinyl end of the Firewire cables.

After that, I’ll just have to assemble everything, package the adapters, and they’ll be ready to sell! As of right now I’m thinking of US$29.95/ea, shipped to any US destination.

Oh, and did I mention that the only thing I can smell right now is acetone? It seems that acetone not only removes the blue lettering from PVC pipe, it also dissolves the surface slightly, removing any small scuff marks and generally cleaning the pipe. This allows me to make the bodies a pure dull white while leaving the endcaps a nice shiny pure white. I think the contrast, combined with the black Firewire cables, will look pretty nice.

It would have been nice to have white or grey cables, but for a small run I can’t be too picky.

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Icky Hands

August 23, 2005

Well, I finally got started on the actual production of the iSight Tripod Adapters. That is my hand after removing the labels and adhesive from about 30 of the 85 PVC end caps. At this point I had to run to Meijer and grab some more 99% isopropyl. Once I had three bottles here I was able to do a soaking tank type production line, so it went a lot faster.

Tomorrow I drill holes in 40 of them. Five holes per, in fact. Heh.

I think I deserve to stop for the night. My hand-based digits are kinda swollen and sore right now. (I would have worn latex gloves, but I wanted to be able to feel the surface of the PVC to ensure that it was smooth and free of gunk.)

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Peektures…

August 23, 2005

· The 40 IEEE1394a cables came today, so now I can begin making the iSight Tripod Adapters.
· Cost Plus is a great place to buy good beer for cheap. Their selection swings around, but they always tend to have something that is good. The Arcadia Whitsun was $7.49 for a six pack, and the Bell’s Third Coast Old Ale is underpriced at $8.49.
· Yay! The metadata service in OS X crashed while I was doing the massive sync from nuxx.net. I’m not so sure Tiger can deal with massive influxes of info.

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