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Does anyone who reads my journal have any experience doing GIS work? I need to make a map of Mackinac Island for this week. I think the maps are available from the state for free in electronic format, I’m just having trouble figuring out where to go from there.
:(
Okay, so tonight I managed to smoke my GPS. The cable is made per the published pinouts as well as those found online in various places. I hook the GPS up to the car for power, it lights up, and slowly gets warm. Peering inside, one of the ICs now has a smallish hole in it. Suck. The power was obviously hooked up correctly, as it lit up. The voltage specified for it is 10v to 35v (or something like that) so that’s right. I guess it’s time to buy a new GPS. There’s another $70 down the hole. Suck. I did manage to find a 6.4GB hard drive for my grandparents computer. That means I can take the 120GB that I got from Best Buy back and save a bit of money.
This is just getting frustrating. I do things right and they blow up in my face. Ah well.
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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.
:)
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.
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[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?
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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…
:(
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?
Review: Falafel King
:(
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.