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

Fixed Car and Lights, Woo!

June 30, 2005


Click for moblog…

Well, it seems that the new battery has taken care of the problem. Provided nothing crops up with the alternator, things will remain good. Thinking back, my car hasn’t started this promptly in a year or two, so I think the battery may have been going for a while. Whatever the length of time the problem was happening for, I’m just glad it’s fixed.

I also snagged some daylight-color halogen spotlights for the kitchen. One of my old bulbs had burned out, and the GE Reveal bulbs I picked up simply weren’t bright enough. So I swung by Lowe’s and picked up a pair of daylight-color halogen PAR30 spots to take their place. I then returned the Reveal bulbs to Home Depot and picked up two more daylight fluorescent bulbs for the laundry room. I had picked up two the other day, but it turns out that it’s a four bulb fixture. I’d been wanting to replace the standard tubes with daylight ones, but I’d kept forgetting.

Can you tell that I like daylight colored bulbs? Good. I like them a lot. In fact, I try to only use them. Things look proper colors under them, and I’m fairly convinced that bright, daylight-colored light does a good job staving off SAD during winter or just periods of time where I stay inside.

around the houseautomotivemoved from livejournal

Car People… Help!

June 30, 2005

All the people who read this who know something about cars, can you provide me with some suggestios? I believe that the battery in my car is dying, but I’m not completely convinced.

What’s happening is that after the car has been sitting for a bit, it’s really sluggish to turn over. It cranks slowly, but after a few revolutions it starts up like normal and runs just fine. After starting slowly, the idle speed will swing back and forth between ~600RPM and ~1500RPM for about 10 seconds.

If I drive the vehicle for a few minutes and then shut the engine off, it’ll start right back up like normal. If I let it sit for a few hours, it’s sluggish to start again.

To me this sort of sounds like a battery which is reaching the end of it’s life. The battery is the original, and the car is a bit over five years old, with 120,000 miles on it.

It should also be noted that there are no engine or electrical problems while the car is running, so it’s definitely not an issue with the alternator not charging the battery.

So, does it sound to you like the battery is what’s going?

Thanks!

automotivemoved from livejournal

iSight Capsule

June 27, 2005

[Cross posted to and …]


iSight Capsule — Click for step-by-step pictures…

As some of you might remember, I posted last Friday about the iSight Tripod Adapter that I pieced together in order to mount my iSight on a standard 1/4″ camera mount on a tripod.

Since making it, I’ve decided that the hot glue spilling from the top and the cable hole in the back were rather unsightly, and the whole iSight Tripod Adapter had an overall low-quality feel.

Because of this I went ahead and built another this evening, putting into practice the ideas I had for various improvements. As part of building this, I took pictures of most every step along the way and added captions so that it can serve as a tutorial. So, if you are interested in a tripod mount for your iSight, be sure to give this series of photos for what I call the iSight Capsule a look. It has all the important steps for manufacture and assembly detailed in text and high resolution photos. Someone who is fairly mechanically inclined should have no problem building one based on this. It really is a simple, fairly low-cost project.

I held off for a few hours on posting this for a few hours as I debated selling them†, but I just don’t feel like doing the work, and I think that everyone (in LJ and beyond) can benefit better from having the text and photos out there and available.

So, I hope everyone enjoys this, and that if you make one, it comes out well. I personally think that the iSight Capsule looks a whole lot better than the original iSight Tripod Adapter. (Old iSight Tripod Adapter · New iSight Capsule)

Enjoy this project. I know I had fun making it. To begin, just click this link and keep clicking >> to step through the pictures one at a time. Or you can just click here to hop right into a JavaScript slideshow of all the images.

† I can imagine that it wouldn’t be unfair to ask $25-$30 (USD) for these. People already charge pretty steep prices for crap products (DVForge, I’m looking at you, especially after my experience with the build quality of the SightFlex), so this would work well for hand-made small lot products. For the time being, though, I’m not going to consider selling the iSight Capsule.

electronicsmaking thingsmoved from livejournal

Digital Camera Archiving

June 26, 2005

Hopefully someone here who does a lot more professional photography than me can answer this.

In short, how do you archive your digital originals? Currently I upload them to a photo gallery which keeps original copies, then just back that up. However, I find that sometimes I may take ten or fifteen shots and only want to upload three. I’m thinking that it would be prudent to start saving all images, just in case some may come in handy down the line.

So, how do you do it? I’m thinking that maybe using a directory structure with all photos taken in a particular month dropped in there. Then all I need to remember is the month if I want to dig something up.

I’ve also been thinking about is captioning all photos and embedding this data in either a EXIF or IPTC header. The problem I’ll have is that I’ll need to somehow re-caption around 7000 images in order to bring things up to date. However, this would ensure that as long as the original image is kept intact, the caption won’t be lost.

So, what do you do?

computersmoved from livejournal

iSight Tripod Adapter

June 24, 2005

[Crossposted to and …]


Click for more…

As a number of people who own an iSight know, there really is no easy way to mount it to a tripod. While there are a number of hacks out there for doing this (eg: 1 · 2 ), I wanted something a bit more stable. There is a commercial product sold as part of the Kaidan Accessory Kit, but that requires one to use a thin Apple FireWire cable, and those are prohibitively expensive.

This morning while laying in bed I decided that I wanted to solve this problem so I could use my iSight on a tripod. So, I came up with the idea you see above and stuck one together this afternoon. In short, it’s a piece of 3/4″ PVC, a domed cap, a 14-20 tee nut, a 3m Belkin FireWire cable, and some hot melt glue. The PVC and hot melt glue were just laying around the basement, and I had originally purchased ten of the 3m FireWire cables on eBay about two years ago for $20 shipped. The tee nut cost $0.25/ea at Home Depot (read: overpriced) when purchased four at a time in a small plastic bag. PVC is cheap, so for a total of less than US$5 and about an hour’s worth of planning and building (and waiting for the glue to cool) I had the adapter.

There’s a good bit of room for improvement. If I were to make another, the first thing I’d change is the hot melt glue. While it works well, it’s hard to control. I’d try to find a way to apply it more smoothly, or I may dump it for a very thick epoxy. Second is the large hole cut in the back. I’d instead cut a slot and run the cable up through that, hiding all of the slot beneath the cap, leaving only a bit at the top where the cable comes out. It might also have been nice to use a cap on the top as well, with a simple cut-out for the FireWire connector. This may also allow me to use less hot melt glue / epoxy overall.

Hopefully people will find this useful. I know the iSight isn’t anything new, but being able to finally point it wherever I want and having a reasonably long cable should be extremely useful.

I’ve got a few more pictures up here which should be useful if anyone here wants to build one for themselves, or if you just want to look around:

· The iSight tripod adapter and cable.
· Detail of the back of the adapter.
· The bottom of the adapter showing how the tee nut is mounted inside the PVC cap.
· The FireWire connector end of the iSight tripod adapter.
· A tee nut, just like the one used in the adapter.
· My iSight mounted on the tripod adapter.

electronicsmaking thingsmoved from livejournal

Rochefort 10 Clone-ish is Complete

June 24, 2005

Well, the Rochefort 10 Clone-ish is finally bottled. Now, 10 weeks of aging… That means this nice, strong winter-time beer will be ready to drink on Labor Day weekend. Hrm, that doesn’t seem right… That’s okay, maybe there will be some of the next batch ready for then.

If you take a look here you can see all 49 bottles. They are filled almost exactly the same amount each, capped, etc. You may wonder why 49 bottles… Well, the first I tend to set aside because it contains the little bits of sanitizer that was pushed out of the lines and bottling kit was the beer first ran into the bottle. I tend to mark this bottle then set it aside for… Well, just to make sure that I don’t get it to anyone intending it to taste spot on. As I use commercial food grade sanitizer the beer is very safe to drink (one can drink the sanitizer straight, although it’d probably cause heartburn) and it’s probably just fine tasting, but I don’t want to risk anyone accidently drinking something unpleasant.

There’s also a shot here of the kitchen as I typically have it set up for bottling. Bucket on counter siphoning the beer down to a bottling wand. Then I sit on the floor, case of empty (and washed and sanitized) bottles in front of me, filling them one at a time and setting a cap on top. The caps are soaked in cheap vodka (Crystal Palace) four at a time in order to sanitize them but not inadvertently use up the oxygen-reactive lining which (supposedly) helps preserve beer.

So, uhm…. Yeah. The beer is bottled. That shot up above is something which I noticed when drying the bottles towards the end of the night. See, after bottling I’ll rinse the bottles in room temp water and then hand dry them, just to get any remaining sanitizer or drips or whatnot off the outside. This ensures that they look nice. Anyway, I saw my Kubrick Pill Tofu peeking distortedly through the Crystal Palace bottle, so I grabbed that image too.

Now I’m done, which means bed time soon. No work tomorrow, but I’m still really sleepy, and a good night sleep will (hopefully) do me well.

beermoved from livejournal

Help?

June 23, 2005

Does anyone local happen to have a Nikon MC-EU1 that I can either buy or have? The only place I can find them is online, and I’d like one for Monday…

It seems that Adray Camera in Canton has them for $100/each. Hrm.

Thanks!

UPDATE: Hmm, I almost wonder if I’m going to buy one, if it’d be better to get a Harbortronics DigiSnap 2000. It does a lot more, and using it I’d be able to eventually connect it to a D70 or whatever camera I get next.

acquired thingsmoved from livejournal

Alignment of Saturn, Mercury, and Venus

June 22, 2005

So it seems that as seen here Saturn, Venus, and Mercury are aligned tonight.

Well, on the way home from my parents house tonight I grabbed a shot of this alignment. The shot is just a quick RAW snapshot that I quickly converted with dcraw, dumped into photoshop, tweaked the color, the exported to a JPEG.

If you’d like to see this image, take a quick look here: http://www.nuxx.net/images/saturn-venus-mercury_alignment_test.jpg

I’ll probably get a better one uploaded later, but you can clearly see the alignment in this shot.

I would have just posted the image itself, but it doesn’t look good too small, and I want to go watch some Frontline right now, not mess with the image. So, just click the link.

UPDATE: Better version behind the cut, or at this link: http://www.nuxx.net/images/saturn-venus-mercury_conjunction_wide.jpg

Click for a nice version of the aforementioned photo… It’s not huge, but I don’t want to post a 1024px wide image to people’s friends pages.

found thingsmoved from livejournaloutdoors