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Broken Spoke II

Published August 21, 2011

Today I broke another spoke; the same one that was quickly fitted as a replacement before the Hanson Hills XC race by a guy from Grayling’s The Bicycle Shop. I guess 2.5 months of riding on a quick (and much appreciated) fix isn’t too bad. The wheel is wobbling a bit so I won’t be riding this bike until I can get it fixed up.

I was surprised by how it broke. Much like the last time I was riding along pretty trivial single track, a short and relatively smooth uphill section at Stony Creek and not going over anything more difficult than a front lawn. Suddenly I heard a BANG sound, stopped to look at the wheel, and saw one end of a spoke hanging into the center near the hub.

Oh well, that’s life I guess. I can’t complain too much, as I’ve got at least 2466 miles (likely more, as not all were logged) on these wheels. I’ve got some 291mm spokes here from building up a wheel set back in April. DT Swiss’ Spoke Calculator is recommending a 293mm spoke, but hopefully I’ll be able to make do with something 2mm shorter.

UPDATE: The replacement spoke did the trick. Wheel’s held up for ~30 miles thus far.

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New Shrubs, Successful Flowers

Published August 21, 2011

Thanks to a suggestion from Bill Edgerton and Danielle’s concurrence there are now two Althea / Hibiscus Syriacus / Rose of Sharon bushes planted on each side of the sidewalk, next to the driveway, replacing the two dead shrubs. Two different colors were purchased a Chiffon (blue) for closest to my place and an Aphrodite (pink) for the space across the sidewalk, next to my neighbor’s place. They were planted in decent size holes, placed on a cone of clay, surrounded potting soil, sprinkled lightly with slow-release fertilizer, and topped with the sand/clay/dirt mixture that was dug out of the holes. Each has been been watered and lightly rained on, so hopefully they’ll take and fill in these spaces nicely.

Click here if you’d like to see all the photos of the new shrubs, including the tags.

On the topic of growing things, this year’s flowers (and herbs and such) have come along very nicely since they were planted back on May 22nd. The sage went from forlorn to full, Danielle’s Meyer lemon tree has lemons on it, the nicotina around the tree has filled in, and the purple plant has practically exploded. Compare this photo of the porch from three months ago with this one taken this afternoon.

If you’re interested, the rest of the 2011 Flower photos can be seen here.

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Dead Shrubs

Published August 20, 2011

Near my condo along the driveway there are were two rather large, pleasant looking shrubs (old photo here), but over the last two years they’ve become increasingly sickly, and this year they simply failed to grow. The one furthest from my house is shown above, and the one next to my bedroom can be seen here. This evening I found myself sufficiently tired of seeing the dead sticks coming out of the ground and decided to replace them.

Armed with a Pulaski that I keep around for trail work I put on steel toe boots and headed out to remove the stumps. All of this wasn’t needed, as with a gentle wiggle and a slight tug I was able to remove the bulk of each one; no tools needed. A little bit of work with the adze end of the tool helped remove the decayed roots, and after a bit of raking it’s as if they disappeared.

Tomorrow Danielle and I will look for some replacement shrubs, likely something that grows 6′ – 8′ high and around 4′ – 6′ wide so that it’ll nicely fill that space. A plant which flowers would be nice, but something like a burning bush might do nicely as well.

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The Bruery’s Mischief

Published August 20, 2011

Here is a bottle of The Bruery’s Mischief, given to me by my sister and brother-in-law (Sarah and Josh) as part of a wedding gift. Because of the 750mL bottle and 8.5% ABV I’d been saving this for a bit, and last night was the perfect time to try it. I really enjoyed this beer, and it was a spot-on hoppy Belgian ale. I really enjoyed this, and if it were available in Michigan I’d definitely pick it up sometime in the future. I guess I’ll just have to keep an eye out for it next time I’m in Ohio.

(Oh, and yes, I way over-exposed the photo. Bringing it back to normal levels left the top of the blass almost completely blown out. At least the bottle is nicely visible and the beer is its proper color.)

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Lunch Time Bleeding Shoulder

Published August 19, 2011

One advantage to occasionally working from home is being able to get out for a bike ride at lunch time. Yesterday after a string of meetings I took a quick drive up to River Bends and rode a couple laps during lunch. This worked out wonderfully and was a nice way to break up the day.

At one point while riding I clipped a tree with my shoulder. While it didn’t really hurt (no more than when one normally brushes a tree with a shoulder), a few miles later I noticed blood soaking through my shirt. I imagine this has something to do with how damp my shirt was with sweat, and the wicking material did it’s job and spread moisture nicely. Funny, that.

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16GB of RAM in my iMac

Published August 15, 2011

Along with the SSD I also upgraded the RAM in my iMac to a full 16GB. It’s amazing to me, but a full 8GB (2x 1333 MHz SO-DIMMs) is only US$59.99 from Crucial. It wasn’t long ago that an 8GB flash card cost this much.

Sure, I don’t need this much RAM very often, but I did find that with 8GB and a bunch of design programs open (such as when doing PCB or mapping work) the machine would occasionally page. At today’s prices I don’t mind buying a bit more ram so that swap is almost never used.

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Shell Variables Not Expanding in %PATH% on Windows 7 Non-Administrator Command Prompt

Published August 15, 2011

I recently ran into an interesting issue on Windows 7. Users running a non-Administrative Command Prompt on Windows 7 would find that Windows’ programs which are supposed to be in their %PATH% (eg: ipconfig.exe, xcopy.exe, etc) weren’t. Checking the path showed that shell variables inside of the PATH variable weren’t being expanded:

Path=%SystemRoot%\system32;%SystemRoot%;%SystemRoot%\Wbem;%SYSTEMROOT\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\;C:\Program Files\Microsoft Windows Performance Toolkit\

However, if Command Prompt is run as an Administrator (Start → Right Click Command Prompt → Run as administrator) %PATH% will be set correctly:

Path=C:\WINDOWS\system32;C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\Wbem;%SYSTEMROOT\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\;C:\Program Files\Microsoft Windows Performance Toolkit\

Thanks to a coworker, online research, and the helpful folks over at serverfault the cause of this was found to be an incorrect value type in the registry (discussion here). Specifically, the Path value in HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment must be set to REG_EXPAND_SZ so that it’ll expand shell variables that it contains. If (incorrectly) set to REG_SZ the symptom above will be seen because the variables aren’t expanded.

What doesn’t (yet) make sense to me is why this issue is only visible with the incorrect type in a non-administrative Command Prompt.

For reference, per this MSDN article entitled Registry Value Types the difference between REG_SZ and REG_EXPAND_SZ is that the latter will expand shell variables that it contains; literally “A null-terminated string that contains unexpanded references to environment variables”. The former (REG_SZ) is just a string.

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SSD Installation in a Mid-2010 27″ iMac

Published August 14, 2011

This weekend I fitted my 27″ iMac with an SSD and I now have that running as the boot and OS drive, with large-stuff-storage on the internal 1TB drive. I’ve been considering an SSD for a while, and with prices finally becoming reasonable (~$225 for 120GB) it was time to give it a go. Due to Apple’s screwup last year I ended up with a mid-2010 iMac; a model which could have been ordered with an SSD from the factory. While this 27″ iMac didn’t come with an SSD, thanks to this post by Tobias Müller I found that it was possible to buy the plastics and cabling and add one with a factory-type fit. So, I did.

After receiving the parts and reading through Tobias’ post and the Apple factory service manual I set about fitting the drive. I won’t go into details of the install here, but it would easily rate 4 out of 5 for difficulty of non-custom computer work that I’ve done. Because the SSD sits in a carrier behind the logic board I had to remove the display, power supply, LCD power supply, Airport card, a blower, hard drive, optical drive, logic board, and an IR receiver to get the job done. The SSD, mounted in the pressure wall / plastic carrier and connected with a new wiring harness, settled nicely into the case and everything went back in.

Beyond the SSD, if you’d like to try this modification yourself you’ll need the following Apple parts:

922-9531: Power Cable / Wiring Harness
922-9485: Pressure Wall
922-9538: SATA Cable

I purchased all of these new from Usedmac for a total of $84.24 shipped and installed them along with a 120GB Intel 320-series SSD. These parts, with the SSD attached, can be seen here. If you don’t want to pay ~$20 for an Apple-specific SATA cable, a 10″ cable with a right angle connector on one end (only) which bends towards the top of the drive will suffice.

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Flat 400 Pound Monkey

Published August 14, 2011

One of the Colorado beer that I was given was a bottle of Left Hand Brewing Company’s 400 Pound Monkey. Unfortunately, it opened without a hiss and turned out to be flat. The label reads that it is “English Style”, so while I initially thought that maybe they going for the idea of a bottled cask-ish ale, the photo on the beer’s product page shows a rich head, so I think that bottle just happens to be flat. Like the other Left Hand Brewing Company beers that I’ve tried I can tell that it’d be good with an appropriate amount of CO2 in it, but instead this is a bit more like a malty/hoppy wine.

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