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Manual Trail Work

Published December 5, 2010

This afternoon Erik, Nick, and I headed out to River Bends to remove the fallen tree mentioned here and to check out another reported downed tree. The other tree turned out to be this conflagration comprised of five downed trees and various broken limbs and deadfall, all in one spot. Thanks to Erik’s 4′ bow saw and his ability to quickly cut (Picture 1, Picture 2) what’s seen above was cleared in just under an hour and now looks like this.

This was a rather nice day for working outside. With the temperature just above freezing it was definitely cold, but being appropriately dressed once we got walking and working it was quite comfortable.

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Apple Magic Trackpad and MiddleClick

Published December 3, 2010

Unlike the Magic Mouse (which hurt my hand within minutes of beginning to use it), Apple’s Magic Trackpad is a rather nice cursor input device. It’s identical to the touchpad in Apple’s newer MacBook Pro family, where multi-touch is used in conjunction with an entire touchpad that clicks, eliminating the need for both buttons and tap clicking. I personally cannot stand tap clicking on touchpads, so I will normally disable it and either have one hand on the button and the other on the pad (when I need to work quickly) or lift my finger to move it to the pad to click. With this device one can simply use multi-finger gestures for scrolling and app switching while clicking the entire pad with one (or more) fingers.

As the Magic Trackpad ships, Apple has support for scrolling, primary and secondary clicking (left and right), application switching, and Exposé activation. What Apple (stupidly) did not include is any method of sending a tertiary (middle) click which is the de-facto method for opening links in new tabs in all modern web browsers. Without this one has to either hold Command (⌘) and click (a two-handed affair) or secondary/right click and select open in new tab (slow). Both of these make quickly reading web pages difficult.

Thankfully a guy by the name of Clement Beffa wrote a MiddleClick, a utility which makes three-finger taps (or clicks), an input not captured by Apple’s software, send a middle click. The version (currently) on the main page (MD5 checksum e7a7e1b5f5e55cb5ffac6d091f03f8c9) is slightly broken and the 3 Finger Click option in the menu doesn’t work. However, this version (MD5 checksum 1b02e356684c40bbbb21cf83f70c52ca) does work properly and I’ve been using it to three-finger click for a few hours now. This makes basic web browsing and reading pages a one-handed affair

The only complaint that I now have about the Magic Trackpad is that the pivot for clicking is near the top of the pad, which makes clicking the pad near the top more difficult than when it is pressed near the bottom. This isn’t terrible, though, as clicking the pad near the bottom does not feel abnormal and is what I (currently) find myself doing naturally.

For the time being I’ve unplugged my mouse, and I’m quickly finding the Magic Trackpad to be quite comfortable to use. It’ll take another week or three before I’m sure that I’m comfortable with it, but for now things seem to be going quite well. I’ll need to go back the a classic mouse when using EAGLE for PCB CAD, but that’s a special case because quickly using it requires the one to do things such as hold one mouse button while clicking another.

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Apple Damaged My 27″ iMac’s LCD

Published December 3, 2010

Trying to resolve the apparent smudge inside my iMac’s display resulting from a recent Genius Bar repair I bought two of these $2.99 suction cups (item number 46900) from Harbor Freight† and used them to open the display per these instructions.

Opening the display is trivial, as gently lifting on the suction cup handles popped the glass face upward and allowed it to be lifted off. Unfortunately, the mark noticed last night is not a smudge on the panel or glass, but instead appears to be in the panel itself. I spent time cleaning the panel because it also had a number of hand and finger prints on it, blew out some dust, then closed it up. It now looks perfect, save for the mark in the upper left corner. (Note, cleaning a display before closing it up is non-trivial and simply not fun.

Since this wasn’t there before the repair job I can only presume that something done by the Apple tech damaged the display. I guess I’m going to have to take it back again and see what they’ll do.

I’m rather disappointed by this.

† These suction cups, Harbor Freight item number 46900, appear to be identical to iFixit item IF145-023-1. The color, description (lifts 15 pounds!), and even details of the molding are identical between the two.

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27″ iMac Display Smudge after Genius Bar Repair

Published December 2, 2010

On Monday I took my 27″ iMac in to have its optical drive replaced. While at the Partridge Creek Apple Store Genius Bar being repaired the techs noticed that a fan wasn’t behaving as it should, so they replaced that as well. When I picked it up today everything seems fine, except there’s now a small smudge in the upper left corner of the screen (seen above) and a thin smudge line across the main panel a few inches below that. Both of these appear to be on the LCD itself, which is located just behind the flat glass front.

I’m a bit disappointed, but I may end up just cleaning this myself as removing the glass to access the inside of a late-model iMac is apparently not particularly complicated. I’ll need to do this myself in the future if I ever want to upgrade the hard drive, so I may as well buy some small suction cups now and do it.

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(Somewhat?) Fixing a Gristleizer

Published November 26, 2010

I recently did a bit of work on the original version of this kit, a clone of Chris Carter‘s original Gristlizer; an analogue effects unit used by Throbbing Gristle. This one seemed to have the wrong type of LED on it (a blinking one), fitted backward so it wouldn’t illuminate.

After replacing the LED I hooked it up to my x0xb0x and ran some audio through it. It definitely seemed to be doing something to the sound, but I’m not completely sure what. I’m also not sure how it’s supposed to sound, so I don’t know if it’s working quite right or not. Since it’s analog and a lot of the pots and switches ground through their chassis, it’s hard to say what it’s supposed to do until it’s all buttoned up in a case. I have a feeling that some (or all) of the op-amps on the board might be cooked, but I don’t know enough to tell right now. At <$1/ea it's also easiest to test them out by just replacing them. (After looking over this PCB and photos of the v2, I can't help but want to pull an SDrive NUXX with it and release a much-improved, CC-licensed PCB / BOM / end panel set. I think I could do a much cleaner job on the board design and incorporate very useful connector footprints that allow flying wires to be terminated at headers, direct-mount pots, etc. I’d also like to do an end panel set that fits right into a nicely solid off the shelf enclosure. This would make assembly easier for kit-builders easier resulting in far more elegant devices with less room for assembly mistakes. Maybe this will be a winter project.)

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Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson, 1955 – 2010

Published November 26, 2010

This morning I woke to read on MetaFilter that Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson died yesterday (November 24, 2010) in his sleep in Krung Thep (กรุงเทพฯ / Bangkok), Thailand.

As he himself stated a few months ago:

“…remember we are all only temporary curators of our present bodies, which will all decay, sooner or later. In a hundred years or so ALL the humans currently alive will have died. I take great comfort in knowing, with certainty, that thing that makes us special, able to enrich our own lives and those of others, will not cease when our bodies do, but will be just starting and new (and hopefully even better) adventure…

(The photo above was taken this past summer and borrowed from Chris Carter’s Photostream.)

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Snow! (Late Autumn 2010 Version)

Published November 25, 2010

Well, there it is; the first that I’ve seen near home this season. En route to Traverse City for Iceman we drove through a quite-strong snow squall between Kalkaska and Acme, but this is the first bit here. It won’t be long before it’ll be time for winter biking season and cross-country skiing! Yay!

(Hmm, I should get those 29er Nokians broken in soon. I keep putting it off. Maybe Saturday…)

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St. Brendan’s Driving Kit

Published November 25, 2010

As seen last night at Meijer, the St. Brendan’s Irish Cream Liquor gift pack for Christmas 2010 comes with a travel mug. The very same kind of mug that is commonly sold for easy and spill-resistant coffee drinking while driving. I suspect that this mug, full of coffee, along with some (particularly fragrant once warm) DaVinci Irish Cream syrup could be employed with great effect around the workplace or other places where alcohol consumption is frowned upon.

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Late Autumn Riding

Published November 24, 2010

Today’s ride was probably the hardest I’ve done this year. At 51.71 miles (in 3:35:34) it was about a mile shorter than Massive Fallout and my route made it mostly flat and paved, but the conditions were not particularly hospitable, and there was no real opportunity to stop and get food. I started out by heading up to River Bends, then over to Clinton River Park before ducking out through Dodge Park to ride the paved path out to Metro Beach. After consuming the only two gels and finding that my favorite trail mix wasn’t being particularly satisfying I was concerned about running out of glycogen so I headed up Schoenherr towards home. I normally would have brought more food, but I erroniously thought I had three gels in my bag when I really only had one.

Schoenherr is terrible riding between Metro Parkway and 18 Mile as there’s no paved path, no track worn in the grass, and the road is shoulderless and 50MPH, but I still took that route (via the grass) in the interest of time. From there I took the usual route of 19 Mile to Hayes, up to 21 Mile, over to Milonas, then back home via 22 Mile. The next time I ride through the Hall Rd. area along Hayes I need to find a better route, because I had more than my share of car issues. I think that simply cutting through the parking lot of Meijer and the plaza containing Sherwood Brewing Company would save me a bunch of hassle. Unfortunately there isn’t any other option for getting through the shopping centers along this area. The next feasable crossing is Schoenherr (which is worse) or heading over three miles west to the tunnel to downtown Utica.

With overcast skies and roughly 34°F air it was cool out, but the ~14MPH wind out of the southeast made the ride down the Metro Parkway path brutal. Still, the tights, shoe covers, windproof gloves, Under Armor shirt, and windbreaker that I was wearing did a fairly good job of keeping me warm. My fingers were a bit cold at times and I probably should have opted for Moose Mitts and summer-weight gloves, but things worked out just fine.

The photo above shows a newly-downed tree on the trails at River Bends. At ~40′ long the tree will need to be sawed out, so I’m hoping to give it a go this weekend. If I’m not able to remove it by hand I’ll just have to ask the park to cut it out with a chainsaw. Previously I’d mentioned not wanting to be near a small tree that was falling, but this one would have been much worse to be around. While not quite visible in the photo, a piece roughly 8″ across is also lodged in the dirt trail surface so deeply that I can’t see the end of it.

Here’s three more photos from today:

· Titus Racer X 29er sitting against the gazebo at the end of the path at Metro Beach during a long, cold ride.
· Lights were brought on the long, cold ride just in case I got stuck outside after dark.
· Standing at the end of the Metro Beach path near the gazebo a bit more than half-way through a long, cold autumn ride.

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iMac Goes To The Hospital

Published November 23, 2010

My desk looks pretty sparse without the 27″ iMac sitting on it. A few months back I noticed that the optical drive wasn’t working correctly, so today after calling support I have a 1pm appointment at the local Apple store to have the problem assessed. Since the drive simply doesn’t read disks; making slight clicking and whirring noises before ejecting them, I believe that the drive probably needs to be replaced. Hopefully there is a spare drive in the store and the techs will be able to replace the drive quickly, as this machine is pretty core to my network at home.

At least this will give me an easy chance to clean behind where it normally sits. A fair bit of dust has built up back there in the last year.

UPDATE: A new optical drive has been ordered, and Apple will call me when it’s in the store so I can bring the iMac back in to have the replacement done. Until then I’ve got my iMac back at home.

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