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How To Burn Down A House

January 29, 2005

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So yesterday I was at a friend of mine’s house when I noticed that he was throwing out an audio mixer. Asking why, I found out that someone had smoked it, then attempted to repair it. It’s current state was unknown, so I opened it up. What did I find? Something that made me worry about every single electrical repair the cuplrit may have ever done.

Why? Well, there it is right in the picture at the top… It seems that when the mixer was blown, two caps that are part of the photo preamps cooked. Well, instead of replacing them with the same parts, this “tech” chose to put together a bank of capacitors, then POT THEM WITH CANDLE WAX. Besides the fact that the bank of capacitors worked out to 50μf when the original parts were 47μf, this is so absolutely horribly dangerous. Using a potting compound that melts at a temperature around that of edible food and burns at not much higher? In a type of device which tends to get a bit warm with use? Guh.

It’s a good thing it was never turned on…

Fortunately I was able to replace the fire starters with $3 worth of proper components from Radio Shack. After fixing the cold solder joints on some jumpers that had been installed around burnt traces, I figured it was good. Well, it seems to be, and now this person can have his mixer back.

Still, I just can’t get over the idea of potting together electronics with candle wax… No matter how goth it is, it’s still a fucking stupid idea.

New Camera!

January 29, 2005

[Crossposted to and .]

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As people here might have seen, I rather like to take pictures. Well, back in December I replaced my aging Kodak DC4800 with a Nikon Coolpix 3200. While the Coolpix 3200 is a really nice pocket sized point and shoot camera, I was running into problems with not being able to adjust the aperture, autofocus areas, things like that.

I had been thinking of getting a Digital SLR like the well-known Nikon D70, but the price on them was a bit high.

Well, one day when shopping at one of my favorite good-food stores Costco, I saw they had Nikon Coolpix 5400 cameras for $499.99, with a $200 instant rebate. I ended up picking one up, and I just have to say wow. This seems to do exactly what I’ve been wanting, and for right about $300!

I must recommend that anyone looking for a very controllable pro-am digital camera check out this deal. The price is great and so is the camera. It even supports RAW mode after you upgrade the firmware. Yay!

Here’s some photo links:

· Quick test pictures I took with the Coolpix 5400 while making lunch.
· Example of the depth of field problems I was having with the Coolpix 3200.
· Lacking a center spot mode, this photo was also hard to capture with the Coolpix 3200

Oh, I forgot to mention the noodle bowl. It was very good, although rather high on sodium. It was a nice sesame miso soup with a well-textured noodle. There was whole sesame seeds along with oil, and quite a bit of flavor. I’ll definitely be buying this one again. They are available at Meijer stores in the ‘International Foods’ section, and most likely lots of other stores.

acquired things food moved from livejournal

New Camera!

January 29, 2005

Well, I went and got it after all… A Nikon Coolpix 5400. From what I’ve read it’s a pretty good camera, despite it’s lack of AF assist lamp.

Not a bad price, either. At Costco it’s $499.99 plus tax, then minus a $200 instant rebate. So, $329.99 after tax.

As long as I like it, I’ll still need to get a second battery, 1GB card, and a carrying case. The starter card it came with was only 16MB. Ah well… I would get the 1GB card locally, but the cheapest I’ve found it for was $126 plus tax. That’s a lot when Amazon wants around $100.

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Basement Rearranging!

January 24, 2005

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For some reason I had the desire to rearrange my basement. I’d been thinking about it for a while, so I finally did it. For what it’s worth, I put things in roughly the positions I’d thought they would go had I finished the basement, and in doing so I’ve realized that things wouldn’t quite fit as planned…

Anyway, for those of you that have seen my basement before, you’ll see it’s quite a bit different. I also have plans to have the (everlasting) rod hole leak in the corner fixed, and as you can see here, there wouldn’t have been much room to work on the wall.

So, I did a bunch of rearranging, some cleaning and straightening, made an impromptu run of CAT5 (for the Airport Express) and set the levels on the home theater speakers. I’m going to try to remember to grab some coax from Home Depot tomorrow so I can run a CATV signal over to the TV. So, everything is in order, and I’m pretty happy with where it all is.

Oh, I do still have to run power to the arcade games. I almost forgot that, and they are useless without electricity.

around the house moved from livejournal

===

January 21, 2005

In case anyone is interested, here is a rather interesting article about Sports Illustrated’s workflow for digital photography. It’s mostly about how Superbowl 2003 was handled, but it’s really interesting to see the techniques they use for enlarging images, dealing with RAW files, etc.

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The Henry Ford Museum

January 18, 2005

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On Sunday, January 16th I woke up around 8:45am. Suddenly the idea of visiting The Henry Ford Museum, a place I haven’t been to in almost 10 years, popped into my head. I’ve been wanting to head back there for a while, so I decided to go. Well, less than two hours later I was pulling into the parking lot.

For those who don’t know what this museum is, it is a technology-focused historical museum which tends to concentrate on transportation and items from the after the 1700s. It’s a top-notch place to visit, including such exhibits as the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile, the chair in which President Abraham Lincoln was sitting when he was shot, the limousine in which President Kennedy was riding when he was shot, the Rosa Parks bus, and many, many more amazing items. There is all sorts of transportation exhibits, too, from the 1950s tourist / travel culture to locomotives, from stage coaches to bicycles. This museum is well worth visiting.

Per usual I took a number of photos of the trip. These can be found here, and include some of the following highlights:

· Lincoln’s Chair
· Kennedy’s Limo
· The Rosa Parks Bus
· Internet In A Box
· The Dymaxion House
· Brushes and windings of a Generator

In addition to visiting the museum, I took in a showing of a newer IMAX film about Mt. Everest titled appropriately, Everest. This was pretty good, and was prefixed by a very enjoyable IMAX film showing many of the beautiful scenes around Detroit. It was really nice to finally see Detroit shown in such a beautiful light.

found things moved from livejournal travel

ATI HDTV Component Adapter

January 11, 2005

Has anyone here ever tried one of these, the ATI HDTV Component Video Adapter, with their Mac. See, this device can adapt a DVI-I output to be component video out, but supposedly only with certain ATI cards.

Well, with the advent of the Mac mini, and relatively cheap bluetooth mice / keyboard bundles, I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this…

computers found things moved from livejournal

Griffin SmartDeck

January 11, 2005

[Crossposted to and .]

I hadn’t seen this mentioned yet, but it appears to be really slick. Griffin has released a tape adapter that also handles volume level adjustment and bunches of other things. It seems that it detects what your tape player is doing (FF/RW/Play/Whatever) and tells your iPod to do the same.

This just might be *the* cassette adapter to buy, and at $24.99 it’s marginally more than decent-quality cassette adapters originally meant for CD players.

More info available here: http://www.griffintechnology.com/images/products/prod_image_deck.jpg

acquired things found things moved from livejournal

Kernel Core Dumps

January 10, 2005

I hope someone here can help me out with this…

I’ve been reading through Apple TN2118: Kernel Core Dumps and it seems pretty straight forward. There is one thing I’m not quite getting, though. I can’t seem to find a way to make a machine panic and then dump core to the local disk. It only seems possible to dump to a remote machine running ‘macosxkdump’, not the local disk.

And, well, since I’ve only got one Mac at home, and macosxkdump hasn’t yet been ported to any other OSS platforms (an OpenBSD port would be stellar right about now), I’m kinda sunk.

Has anyone else done this, or come up with a way to get dumps to go to a local disk?

UPDATE: It appears that kdumpd from the network_cmds part of OpenDarwin is all that one needs to handle this. I’ve found postings online which say it’s trivial to port, but I don’t have the skill to do it. :( Would anyone else be up to this task?

computers moved from livejournal

SSL Accelerators

January 9, 2005

Has anyone who reads my friends list ever worked with any sort of SSL (or other type) of cryptography accelerator? I’ve been thinking about setting up one to accelerate SSL in my webserver. It seems to be possible to obtain a few fairly cheap via eBay when one uses some inventive searching.

Have you found them to be useful? Did it really speed things up? I’m hoping to use this under FreeBSD…

computers moved from livejournal