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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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Moving Rice

Published August 14, 2011

Over the last week there’d been an increasing number of fruit flies in the house, which I originally blamed on a plantain which Danielle had purchased a week ago. I suspect that by the time it was placed in the under-counter compost bin there were fruit fly eggs in the skin of the plantain, and it’s likely that others eggs were laid in the normal garbage can.

Friday morning when I opened the compost bin to deposit coffee grounds I was greeted by a liberal sprinkling of small, wriggling maggots, pupae (as seen above), and a fair number of flies which immediately took flight. The container was quickly sealed back up and placed in the garage to be dealt with later. This morning when throwing away coffee grounds the normal garbage can was found to contain another illustration of the fruit fly life cycle, so it was time to take action.

Every fruit fly-containing bag was sealed inside of a larger garbage bag which had it’s top folded over and sealed especially well. Each can was scrubbed with painfully hot water and sodium percarbonate and left to dry in the garage, and I used isopropyl alcohol to entrap and kill any lingering flies. There is a black foam activated charcoal filter located in the top of the compost bin, despite the cleaning with hot water I suspect that it too may have live eggs in it. Fruit flies have a relatively short lifecycle, so I’ll leave it in the garage for a few days then clean it again, keeping an eye out for larvae.

Since this afternoon’s cleaning and extermination efforts I haven’t been pestered by flying insects I think that I’ve won war on fruit flies in the house. I guess I’ll know in a week.

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Another Day, Another Downed Tree…

Published August 11, 2011

After one of the recent windy days another dead tree fell on the trails at River Bends, and thankfully I was able to remove this one with just a hand saw and a bit of creative thinking. The tree was partially rotted, so there was only a solid core to saw through. Fifteen minutes of actual work and it was gone.

Once the tree was cleared I spent some time wandering around some undeveloped parts of the park, and from what I can tell there’s a really great opportunity to build some more single track heading generally north from the end of the current loop. this needs a little more thought, but I think we may be able to build a return trail so that most of the route north back to the trail head can occur on single track.

Here is a (blurry) photo of the downed tree and some tools right after I arrived to remove it.

There were a surprising number of people out riding the trails today, and this was rather nice. It’s really great to see a bunch of people out enjoying them.

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Cancelling Cable TV

Published August 10, 2011

After putting it off for over a year, the whole time thinking that I might hook the service backup, I finally cancelled Cable TV service. This will decrease my monthly Wide Open West bill by ~$40/mo. As part of this I’ll need to return the multi-stream CableCARD (aka M-Card) seen above. This had previously been fitted in a TiVo HD to allow recording two encrypted digital CATV channels at the same time.

While I originally thought that something would demand Danielle and I to hook broadcast TV back up, all video watching that we do comes from legitimate streaming sources online. A mixture of Hulu, Netflix streaming, and BBC iPlayer has provided more than enough content to meet our limited entertainment needs. With a small Atom-based computer hooked to the television we’re able to stream anything to a TV, or (more typically) we watch things in a browser while doing other stuff.

Now I just have to handle returning the CableCARD. I can either drop it off at the Wide Open West office in Madison Heights or wait for a tech to show up on Saturday evening and collect it.

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How To Decrease Grip

Published August 8, 2011

The orange plastic shown above is the pull-off / snap-on cap from an Elmer’s All-Purpose Glue Stick, the same one which I’ve been using to glue labels on to SDrive NUXX packaging. For some reason the packaging designers for this glue stick saw fit to add vertical serrations to the cap, oriented in the direction that one pulls to remove the cap. These serrations would be useful if one had to twist the cap to remove it, but as it simply snaps off they only serve to make the cap harder to use than necessary.

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