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

beefcake

February 23, 2003

Okay… So how was tonight you ask? Well, everything started off great… More dinner at Pete and Michelle’s place. Mmm… Anyway, for those of you that aren’t within 100 miles of Detroit, this area got hit with snow tonight. Hit hard. We’re talking about 6″ – 10″ on the ground. This is *not* an exaggeration, I was just out in it.

That’s where the problem started. I left the Ferndale area at right about midnight. Except for the obviously slow conditions, the drive was very uneventful. I stopped on the way for a bottle of water and a candy bar, no big deal. Quite a bit of slipping, problems leaving stop lights, etc, but everyone who braved the roads seemed to be driving safely.

Anyway… I get home, well, no, back up a bit. I get in to my subdivision, right to the end of my driveway, and get stuck. See, I live on a court with a rather long, slightly hilly, driveway off the main subdivison road. I try to go up the hill, I get stuck. Not stuck as in ‘my car is stuck in a ditch’, but stuck where my car couldn’t continue forward, as the road was too slippery to continue. I think this was compounded by the hard pack snow underneath the fluffy stuff, but I digress… Anyway, what ended up happening was that I had to shovel ruts down to the pavement for three to five feet, use that to get my car going, continue until I stopped, lather, rinse, repeat. This snow ranged in depth from six inches to drifts that were over a foot deep. Needless to say, it sucked. Anyway, after all the fun with that there was another two foot drift in the middle of the court, and a four foot drift in front of my garage door. I snowplowed through the two foot drift and shoveled away the four foot one. Oh, and I just looked outside, here’s the plows. Uggh. Ah well, at least I got a workout.

To detail the shoveling distance I grabbed random satellite photo and drew some lines. The yellow line in the road is where I originally got stuck, the red line indicates the distance that was shoveled. You know something is seriously wrong when you can detail the distance you shoveled on satellite images.

automotivemoved from livejournalweather

Woo! Nukes!

February 20, 2003

A few weeks ago I started getting really interested in the Shelby Township area Nike Surface to Air missle (SAM) site. This place used to exist in the area between 22 Mile, Ryan, and Shelby roads. (More information here.) Well, I came across the email address of someone who works at the site. Read below for our email correspondance… I’m really excited.

>Raye,
>
>I found your name when searching around online for information on the
>old Nike missile site in the Utica / Shelby Township area. I’m curious
>if you have some more information as to the exact location of this
>site. I’m interested in visiting the site and seeing what remains.
>
>Thanks very much…
>
>-Steve
>
>Steve Vigneau EDS Technical Advisor Group 1075 W. Entrance Drive –
>Mailstop 4N – Auburn Hills, MI Office: (X-XXX) XXX-XXX-XXXX Pager:
>XXX-XXX-XXXX / XXXXXXXXXX@epage.arch.com
>

Steve,

I teach aerospace science for Utica schools called Project INSPIRE. We
are located on the old NIke site, housed in the three remaining barracks.
I would be happy to have you visit sometime. I work school hours plus
many nights. On occasion, we meet on Saturdays for rocket launches. We
are closed this week for school vacation, but I’ll be back next week. I can share what I know of the site, and can show you blueprints of the layout and demolition plan from the 70’s. I have always been interested in preserving the history of the site.

Raye

Raye Klopfenstein
rk4mucs@ucs.misd.net
Director – Project INSPIRE
UCS Shadbush Center
4681 Riverbends Drive
Shelby Township, MI 48317
(XXX) XXX-XXXX
FAX (XXX) XXX-XXXX
www.macomb.k12.mi.us/utica/inspire/
www.ucsinspire.com

—
[This E-mail scanned for viruses by Declude Virus]

found thingsmoved from livejournaloutdoors

:(

February 6, 2003

Gah, what a time for /var/storage/Large to start clanking. :(

And, broadq QCast Tuner seems to crash jdk1.3.1 under FreeBSD 5.0. Hmm. Moving back to 4.x wouldn’t be that hard, but recompiling Java would be a chore.

computersmoved from livejournal

Maybe it’s the caffeine…

February 6, 2003

I just had an interesting idea:

You all know that random number generators are not truely random, as they generally get their input from something that could theoretically be predicted (temperature, radio background noise, etc).

I think it would be interesting to see if a person could be used as a random number generator. The data could be fairly easily gathered by sitting a person down at a speech recognition device that will respond to ‘one’ and ‘zero’ or ‘yes’ and ‘no’, recording them as bits in a key. If the person were to rattle off 1024 yes/no or one/zero answers, then you would have a 1k key. My presumption is that if you told a person to randomly pick one of the possible answers, they would tend to get fairly random after a while. But, it would be interesting to see. Standard tools for analyzing randomness of data could be used to see just how truely random the person is. It wouldn’t be hard to collect a number of high-bit samples from an individual, nor would it be difficult to collect samples from any number of people, allowing for proper analysis of a human-based random number generator. It’d also be an especially geeky way to generate PGP/GPG keys.

computersmoved from livejournal

:(

January 27, 2003

Also, WeatherBug says that it is 0°F outside right now. I’d confirm this, as about an hour ago I was buying gas somewhere in the 9 Mile and Woodward area and I was just standing there, shaking, being amazed at the stillness of Ferndale and how crisp and dry everything seemed. At those temperatures snow is almost like gravel. It’s no longer slippery, it’s almost like the dirt on a freshly plowed country road, crunchy, blowing in bizarre egg-dipping-oil-like patterns across the highway.

moved from livejournalweather

Ah hah!

January 22, 2003

Ahh… So I finally found information on the weird fenced in hazardous waste area that borders Riverbends Park and Waldon Lakes (or Waldon Ponds or whatnot) Park in Shelby Township: http://www.epa.gov/R5Super/npl/michigan/MID067340711.htm

There were oil lagoons!!!

UPDATE: Scratch that. This is the place I’m thinking of: http://www.epa.gov/R5Super/npl/michigan/MID980410823.htm. Note the water treatment plant… That’s right in the back of the Waldon Lakes park. Unfortunately the park is all fenced in, so I can’t get to the rest of the recreation area.

found thingsmoved from livejournaloutdoors

Hurray!

January 20, 2003

Yay! I *FINALLY* have a functioning laser printer at home. See, in 1995 my parents got me a LaserJet 5L for Christmas. The thing always worked fine. It prints great, everything, but after a while it developed the typical LaserJet 5L/6L feed problem, much like they all did. It turns out that there is a place called fixyourownprinter.com which sells kits and instructions for fixing common printer problems. So, $30 and about half an hour’s worth of work later, my printer works fine. Woo! I also threw in a spare toner cartridge I’d had since 1996/1997 and physically cleaned the printer up a bit, and now it’s like new.

computersmaking thingsmoved from livejournal

HDD for PS2

January 19, 2003

Okay, so I did it. I put a hard drive in my PS2. And guess what? Nothing happened. The disk spun up and there would be occasional activity on the IDE bus, but nothing beyond that. I was hoping there’d at least be a new menu option or something that showed up. Oh well…

Just FYI in case anyone feels like playing with it, a Quantum 840MB disk fit in there perfectly. I would have tried something bigger, but that is all I had to play with. See the previous post for information on the Maxtor disk.

electronicsgamesmoved from livejournal

PS2 HDD

January 19, 2003

Hrm… So I got a Playstation 2 network adapter. The curious thing is, it seems that there are connectors for an IDE hard drive as part of the adapter. It doesn’t fit a Western Digital hard drive that I have, but maybe another? Possibly Quantum… They seem to make a lot of disks for OEM applications like Tivos, etc.

UPDATE: This picture make it look like a Maxtor disk along with a bit of hardware to mount the drive more securely. I just need to see if I have a Maxtor disk around anywhere…

UPDATE PART DEUX: Okay, I should do a little more digging next time. The PS2 Linux dmesg output from this page indicates the following:

PlayStation 2 IDE DMA driver
hda: Maxtor 4D040H2, ATA DISK drive
ide0 at 0xb4000040-0xb4000047,0xb400005c on irq 41
hda: Maxtor 4D040H2, 38146MB w/2048kB Cache, CHS=4863/255/63, (U)DMA

So… Yeah. It is a Maxtor. And since the PS2 Linux kit ships with the same network adapter, all I need to do is find one of these drives. Or any old Maxtor. I wonder what the machine will look like then… Or how the disk needs to be formatted for games to support it… It’d be nice to have the QCast Tuner also support playing from a local disk. It’d be nice to be able to play off of both the network and the local disk. Or imagine if there was support to rip audio right into the local disk… Mmm… I wonder how fast the PS2 would actually be at doing audio compression?

computerselectronicsgamesmoved from livejournal