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

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August 29, 2003

Ahh… New Klipsch ProMedia 2.1 speakers came today. I’ve now replaced my older Altec Lansings from 1995. The ALs were really, really nice, better than most other speakers, but they had a bad 60Hz buzz coming from the subwoofer. I got these speakers as refurbs for $99 for the pair, with sub. They retail for $179 – $199. Not a bad deal… I’ve only had two problems. First, they forgot to ship the speaker cables with them. A phone call later and they are on their way. I’d been wanting to make some custom 16 gauge cables for them anyway, so I got out two 3.5mm mono plugs (yes, the back of the speaker accepts 3.5mm plugs for the amped signal, for some unknown reason…) and the speaker wire, then made up the connectors. I thought about putting six-way binding posts on the back of each speaker, but I can probably leave this work for another day. If it’s even worth it… Anyway, I hook everything up and they sounded like shite. After some troubleshooting it looks like there might be a problem with the input line, some wiggling around in the iMic (USB sound device for the G4 Cube) and everything is good. These speakers sound real, real nice. Definitely worth $99 for the pair. Now I only need to rearrange the office… And find a new place to mount the iSight, as it had sat on top of the old speaker.

acquired thingsmaking thingsmoved from livejournal

:)

August 28, 2003

Ahh… Tonight I went to my first day of college. Ever. Tonight’s class was HIST-2000 (formerly HIST-200) which is all about the history of invention and technology in America. Tonight’s class wasn’t anything special, just a hand-out of the class syllabus, a schedule, things like that. The class seems interesting, and judging by the students, shouldn’t be too hard to pass. There were a bunch of fresh high school grads, a couple older people, and me. It seemed like there are a few other twenty-something students, but they didn’t really stand out.

After I got back home I decided to start in on staining wood again. I applied the second coat of stain to all the table tops and bottoms and one set of the legs. That leaves only eight more table leg sets to receive their second coat of stain. After that comes the top coat… This will be the hard part. I think I have a plan, but we’ll have to see how it works out. It’ll likely involve eight or ten separate sessions of urethane application. That’s a lot. At least it’ll be worth it in the end. Tonight I took a test piece of oak that I had stained and then applied four or five coats of urethane to. I let my intentionally very wet glass set on the surface. No ring. Then I dropped the corner of the glass from a height of about five inches. Slight dent, but no cracking. Obviously the parawood would dent a bit more, but what I was looking for was a lack of cracking. The only test left is a very hot bowl or mug of tea. If this passes the test, I might forgo the glass surfaces. If not, all horizontal surfaces will have custom cut pieces of glass fitted to them. It ought to be nice to finally be able to sit in my living room, listen to music, and have tables to set things on.

around the housemaking thingsmoved from livejournal

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August 28, 2003

[Yes, this has been cross posted. Sorry, but I’m trying to get lots of opinions.]

Sometime around the end of October I should be receiving a Apple PowerMac G5. I want to build a stand for it… I’m curious what people think of this idea:

– 1/2″ thick aluminum plate
– sized approximately 1/2″ larger than the G5 on each side
– Wire brushed or sand blasted to apply texture to metal
– Lacquer or epoxy coated to prevent corrosion
– Thin piece of glass on top of Al block
– G5 setting on top of assembly
– Possibly casters, if I ever decide to put it all on the floor

So, how do people think this will turn out?

computersmaking thingsmoved from livejournal

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August 25, 2003

So I just emailed IBM… I’m hoping for some help from their historical / archive department. I’ve got the bit of core memory that I think came from an IBM machine. See, I want to frame these pieces, but it’d be nice to add a tag crediting where these pieces actually came from. Maybe even some photos of the machine itself. Hopefully they’ll write me back…

computersmaking thingsmoved from livejournal

:(

August 25, 2003

Hmm. I can’t seem to make my plain old generic standard Compact Flash reader work with OS X. The card works fine on a PC, the reader shows up in Apple Device Profiler, but the disk doesn’t seem to work. It’s plugged into a powered hub which is connected to a root port on the cube itself. I’ve also tried it passed through the keyboard. No go.

Any ideas?

computersmoved from livejournal

:(

July 27, 2003

After using a Mac at home for the last week, and being here at work and needing to work quickly on a PC, I’m really starting to think that while Macs are nice, a PC workstation and a FreeBSD file server are what I need to get the kind of work done that I want to do. I’m having problems with the OS X interface not having the kinds of keyboard shortcuts I want, mostly due to lack of availability of flexible instant messengers, and the difficulties with Finder as opposed to Explorer.

computersmoved from livejournal

:)

July 20, 2003

Wow, tonight was definitely a night of getting work done. Let’s see what got done:

– Shuffled hard drives in the file server (\\golgotha). There was a 20GB as /var/storage and a 40GB as /var/storage/Audio. The 40GB is now /var/storage and a new 80GB is /var/storage/Audio. All data shuffled over intact.

– Installed a DDS-1 drive in \\golgotha to augment the DLT and handle small nightly backups.

– \\golgotha uses smbtar to pull a copy of my email, cookies, favorites, and chat logs off of my desktop (nuxx) every night at 3am and once on the first of each month, creating nightly and monthly archives.

– \\golgotha dumps the database for thefest.org‘s bbs at 2am, using a nightly/monthly scheme.

– Golgotha takes the files from \\nuxx and the various important files from \\golgotha, including financial and website stuff, and backs it up to DDS drive.

– Wrote scripts to back up the various important directories on \\golgotha to DLT (eg: /var/storage/Audio, /var/storage, /var/storage/Video) and created appropriate tape sets.

– Hooked a second UPS to the network rack down in the basement. The previous single UPS couldn’t handle more than a 30 second load.

– Put a second coat of paint on the trim around my living room and hallway. Also patched a couple more nicks and dents in the walls that I found.

Wow, yeah, quite a busy night. At least I got stuff done for once. hehe. Tomorrow afternoon I’m supposed to head over to my sister and brother-in-law’s house and show them how to hang moulding up around rooms the same way I’d done it. It’s not hard, it just helps to have someone to show you.

So, yeah. With that I think it’s bed time. Well, in a minute… I need to finish watching this backup script run manually, then I’ll add it to root’s crontab and things will be good.

around the housecomputersmoved from livejournal

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July 18, 2003

For what it’s worth, WebDAV seems pretty cool. I still need to work on the authentication stuff, but as soon as that’s resolved I should be able to edit my site easily from work. Thanks, Windows XP, for supporting WebDAV right smack dab in the OS, like mapping any old drive.

…just need to get security working properly.

computersmoved from livejournal

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July 17, 2003

Remember not too long ago when I posted something about all the tubes I acquired? Well, as part of that I acquired some plans for the HAL-4096, the first computer ever used to demonstrate the synthesis of music. Anyway, just now I received some email back from one of the people who worked on it, Dave Cox:
Click here to read…

computersfound thingsmoved from livejournal