Press "Enter" to skip to content

nuxx.net Posts

Toilets of the World 2011

Published December 24, 2010

Someone, signing their name as S.C., and mailing from the Flint ZIP code has sent me a 2011 calendar containing photos of numerous toilets from different places around the world. Immediately upon seeing the return address being the same as the from address I knew something untoward was awry. Knowing a few folks up Flint way I have my suspicions about who this might be, but I’m not (yet) sure.

This will be perfect to hang up at work where I’m (almost) constantly needing a calendar to glance at.

Leave a Comment

Thanks for the Snow, Neighbors!

Published December 23, 2010

Today I headed out for an afternoon ride up to River Bends on the Titus fitted with studded tires. Thanks to my neighbors who seem to feel they have no obligation to clear the path/sidewalk that runs along their house, much of the riding near my house was absolutely terrible. The lack of snow clearing was not the issue as I can easily ride through 5″ of snow, but with most of the sidewalk being partially frozen, lumpy footprints covered with dusty snow riding on this segment was simply unfun. Due to the balance, constant pushing, and careful pedaling required riding this stuff was more difficult than the hard climbs at Holdridge.

After making it to River Bends the ride was rather uneventful and typical for the park. The pavement was snow covered but smooth, and the two track had a nicely worn 12″ wide flat section perfect for riding. I attempted to ride the single track, but it was snow covered, soft, loose, and generally unfun. I think I’ll leave that to the hikers until things thaw or melt a bit.

While out in the park I saw fresh trails and the car of a friend who I know from MMBA group rides, but I wasn’t able to catch up to him and only saw him driving out of the lot as I finished riding through the park. It’s good to know that there other folks who are getting out there to ride this time of the year, even if it’s not on the single track.

As residential streets and some sidewalks (mostly business and township-owned) were cleared the rest of the ride was uneventful. I encountered the typical surprised drivers who didn’t expect to see someone at a crosswalk, much less someone on a bicycle, but there were no notable encounters. Weirdly cars seemed very cautious about passing me on the residential streets, but perhaps they saw me riding on icy patches were afraid of me falling in front of them. I’m really glad they chose to be cautious of just plowing past.

Final stats for today’s ride were departing at about 14:30, traveling 13.08 miles over 1:22:50 for an average of 9.47 MPH with a max speed of 19.97 MPH.

Leave a Comment

Successful Ceiling Fan Modification

Published December 21, 2010

For the last two or three works the ceiling fan in my bedroom hasn’t been responding to signals sent by the remote control leaving us with only a dim table lamp to illuminate the room. Not long after cleaning the contacts in the remote the fan would occasionally fail to respond to signals from the remote unless its power was cycled by the light switch under the remote holder. After flipping the switch off then on it would then work for a few days before needing another reset, but this failing state only lasted for a few weeks before the system simply failed leaving neither the light nor fan usable.

Frustrated by this I decided to bypass the wireless entirely and switch the unit to a typical fan/light dual switch setup on the wall. I figured that the light kit and fan motor itself were still fine so I set to work eliminating the failed fan control module. Having a spare dual-switch for the wall and a third (red) wire already between the electrical boxes made the house wiring part easy, but I still had some work to do modifying the fan. By reading Ken L. Klaser’s article Ceiling Fan Capacitor Solutions I was able to understand the basics of fan speed control, but this this schematic which he linked to was most helpful.

After looking over the control board to understand how the wires to the two coils in the motor were connected I came up with this schematic of how I felt the fan would be powered when set to run slow and in reverse. Removing the capacitors and building a test assembly showed that my initial thought was right, and this resulted in my building the assembly shown above. The fan now runs in reverse and on slow speed when powered and the wireless circuitry has found its place in the trash.

I could have purchased a new selector switch and capacitor assembly to have variable speeds and fitted both it and DPDT switch into the housing to offer the original control selection, but throughout its life the fan was almost exclusively used on low and in reverse, so I didn’t see the need. The fan also looks as it originally did with no new switches sticking out of the side or bits hanging off. I may add these selectors in the future if they are needed, but I don’t see that happening. Thus this was a $0 modification, costing only a few hours of time to learn something new and then redo the wiring.

(Yes, I realize that I should have used a longer piece of clear shrink tubing to better facilitate potting the ends. By the time I realized this I had most of the harness together and decided that simple stress relief and a bit of insulation should be sufficient.)

15 Comments

XC Skiing in Roscommon

Published December 19, 2010

This Saturday (yesterday) Erik, Kristi, and I headed up to cross country ski on the trails across the street from Cross Country Ski Headquarters. This ended up being a really nice location where we were able to ski ~7 miles on nicely groomed trails. There were even a few bigger (for me) hills where I got to play around with different techniques for climbing, snowplowing, and skiing down hills without tracks. It was really fun and makes me anxious for more skiable snow to fall in this area.

To split up the trip we drove to Kristi’s parents’ place in Frankenmuth on Friday night, stayed there, then drove up to Roscommon and the skiing on Saturday morning. This worked out very nicely, as it was nice to sleep in for a bit, get breakfast, and then go skiing as opposed to simply driving up and back in one day. We then headed back home-ward after eating a nice (but very filling) dinner of pasta-covered pizza (from Tiffany’s Food and Spirits), curry soup, and apple crisp with vanilla ice cream.

Here’s a few more photos from this trip:

· Riding in Kristi’s car (with Erik driving) heading up to Roscommon for XC skiing.
· Kristi and Erik looking at the wooden map for the R and L Trail Network across the street from Cross Country Ski Headquarters in Roscommon.
· Me / Steve on the Manitou loop after taking a photo of Erik and Kristi.
· Kristi showing an icicle that developed on the neoprene sleeve covering her CamelBak hose while skiing.

Leave a Comment

Bottom Bracket Failure

Published December 17, 2010

Today I headed out towards River Bends to try out the studded tires on the single speed (VooDoo Dambala), but as the sidewalk was more impassible than I’d thought I ended up riding around the partially-iced roads in local neighborhoods. The Nokian Gazza Extreme W294 studded tires worked out very well, but problems on the sidewalk showed that a geared bike is likely a better choice for deep snow winter riding. (Being able to shift down to a very low gear and slowly push forward through deep snow is rather nice.)

While riding around the neighborhoods I was able to get a bit over 10 miles in and explore some areas I hadn’t been to before. Not long before getting back home I felt like I was having a harder (than normal) time pedaling, but wrote it off as winter riding on super-knobby tires making me tired. It was only once I got home that I noticed an extreme amount of drag when pedaling backward. removing the chain showed that the cranks were rather hard to turn; a sign that the bottom bracket has failed. After sitting and warming slightly things are moving a bit more freely, but I think I’ll be replacing it before the next ride. Unfortunately it’s an Octalink [Edit] ISIS Drive, which may be a little harder to find.

One upside was that the CamelBak Podium Chill bottle that I was given at Iceman did a fine job of keeping my beverage from freezing during the ride. I’m still not convinced that insulated bottles are useful during the summer, but if they keep beverages from freezing in winter I’ll probably keep using them.

Leave a Comment

Video Ads in Angry Birds on Android

Published December 17, 2010

Angry Birds (Rovio’s Site), the extremely popular (and quite fun) physics / artillery / puzzle game, is only available in ad-supported format on Android. Initially I didn’t mind this, as the ads started out as simple banners taking up a small portion of the top of the screen. Within the past few days (perhaps after an update?) there are now video ads present in the game. One plays on game launch and then another will play every few levels.

While the video ads can be skipped I find the idea of them terribly irritating. They play sound even if the game itself has been muted and eat up bandwidth. I’d much rather pay for the game than have to see this crap in order to play, so I’ve uninstalled it.

UPDATE: Rovio has responded to the note that I send about this, and apparantly starting some time in 2001 it will be possible to pay to circumvent the ads in Angry Birds.

6 Comments

Google Talk Doesn’t Like application/x-javascript-config for PAC Files

Published December 16, 2010

After a bunch of frustration I found an interesting quirk in how Google Talk uses Proxy Autoconfiguration (PAC) files (Additional Documentation). There are two MIME types which can be set for PAC files when serving them, application/x-javascript-config and application/x-ns-proxy-autoconfig, and both work with most browsers, but only the latter works properly with Google Talk.

It turns out that if the MIME type is application/x-javascript-config for the PAC file and the browser does not look directly to the PAC file itself, Google Talk will fail to connect. Looking deeper at it in a network capture (partially pictured above) I’d see the client closing the connection before it was done downloading the PAC file and thus the client would never receive a complete PAC file. Inspecting the TCP stream via Wireshark would show the data simply ending part-way through the PAC file. This resulted in a mysterious failure to connect with no useful error returned from Google Talk. If I simply changed the MIME type back to application/x-ns-proxy-autoconfig for .pac files and restarted Apache, Google Talk would then download the whole PAC file and login fine.

In both of these cases I am serving a typical PAC file off of Apache using RewriteRule ^/$ /internet.pac [R] to ensure that all requests to http://server.local/ go to http://server.local/internet.pac via an HTTP 302. Using a DirectoryIndex directive specifying internet.pac as the index file for the site also resulted in the same issue. In both cases the client was configured to look to http://server.local/ for a PAC file.

Complicating things further I found that if instead of relying on a RewriteRule or DirectoryIndex I instead pointed the config directly to the PAC file itself (in this case http://server.local/internet.pac) then the problem would not occur; Google Talk would download the entire PAC file (confirmed in a network capture) and sign in successfully regardless of MIME type.

For purposes of this testing I used the latest released version of Google Talk, 1.0.0.104, running on Windows 7. Google Talk was also set to Detect proxy automatically which reads the system’s proxy settings. In this case it is the PAC file setting is defined in either Internet Explorer or Control Panel under (Internet Options → Connections → LAN Settings → Use automatic configuration script).

2 Comments

Pontiac Has Terrible Roads

Published December 14, 2010

Pontiac is the first town in which I’ve worked where I also have to pay a city income tax. It is also the worst city I’ve had to deal with road-wise. Two days after a moderate winter snowfall there is still an inch of ice on all roads making even the most gradual uphill difficult to drive. Pulling away from a stoplight is almost always a matter of frustration involving 10-15 seconds of figuring out how to acquire traction.

Maybe I should just buy myself some snow tires. It’d make driving (all around) much nicer during winter.

(Another road photo, and a view from near my new desk on Monday.)

1 Comment

XC Skiing from Home

Published December 13, 2010

Having my own cross country skis and with this weekend’s sudden snow fall frozen into hard pack I decided to see how well skiing the field next to my condo would go. Two laps (roughly a mile) later and I can say that I’m now able to have an enjoyable (albeit short and flat) ski from my house. There was even sufficient moonlight to make skiing perfectly fine without a headlight.

The snow is so firmly packed that it could be cut with a saw which allowed me to easily glide along on top of it, only occasionally sinking through recently-drifted powder. It was also deep enough that only once did I run into brush sticking through the snow and have to deviate course. Hopefully this means that the trails at Stony Creek will be open and groomed for skiing this weekend.

(Oh, and the footprints next to the ski tracks? Those are from Roxie heading out to go to the bathroom and then my fetching her deposit from the snow.)

Leave a Comment