No man should be without the ability to grill his food. No man should be limited to hot dogs and burgers.
Today, I learned how to grill Salmon. I learned the Cedar plank method and will be doing it again. It was easy. I soaked the plank for an hour, preheated the grill, brushed the fish with olive oil on both sides and coated both sides with Old Bay Seasoning. I had to use the training wheels of grill skill, aka: a meat thermometer, but the results spoke for themselves. Excellent.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Dumpster Diving? Not really...
So I dropped by the cardboard recycling dumpsters at the local walmart today on the way home from cleaning out the old apartment the rest of the way. After dumping the boxes and flipping a turn to get to the other side of walmart (needed Rockstar drinks), I saw something next to a randoms dumpster close to the recycle area.
I slowed down and looked to see what it was, thinking I was looking at a mini-fridge. On the front: "Haier"... Yup. I checked it out, noticing the box to a brand new mini fridge in the dumpster. There was a partial bottle of Lipton iced tea inside. Interesting. There was also condensation inside, making me think the fridge had recently been used. I loaded it in the car without giving it a second thought.
Upon arriving home, I plugged it in. Nothing. I felt the compressor and it was crazy hot from the sun. I decided to let it cool while looking at the hardware connected to it. It had two pieces of gear on it: A Klixon thermal protector and some strange module. I pulled the Klixon, thinking it was the problem. It clicked. Well, thermal protect was off now. Test again. Still no go.
What was the strange module? It had a number on it: p6r8mc. I looked it up and saw it was a starter. Compressor won't start without it. One datasheet later, I saw that I could disassemble it. I used a knife blade to pop the clip off. Inside, it was obvious what the problem was. One side of the PTC pill was fine, but the other was burned badly. The contact was also fried.
I scraped the oxidation off of the contact and put the starter back together with the contact on a small patch of still-functioning PTC plating. With the assembly back in place, I plugged the fridge back in to hear the compressor start back up. I had diagnosed the issue. Would the jerry rig hold? Nope.
I need to get a new starter. Not so easy, but if I can't find one, I will be able to build a circuit to perform the same function while using the original starter case as the connector for it.
Fragwell Manor needs a mini fridge for snacks. The thermo-electric one I had before the move died. It wasn't that great, anyway. This one will get cold under any ambient temperature condition and even has a freezer in it. And, it's bigger. This one will hold a lot more than 36 cans of soda.
To whomever left it behind (probably an RV traveler, from the look of things) , thank you.
I slowed down and looked to see what it was, thinking I was looking at a mini-fridge. On the front: "Haier"... Yup. I checked it out, noticing the box to a brand new mini fridge in the dumpster. There was a partial bottle of Lipton iced tea inside. Interesting. There was also condensation inside, making me think the fridge had recently been used. I loaded it in the car without giving it a second thought.
Upon arriving home, I plugged it in. Nothing. I felt the compressor and it was crazy hot from the sun. I decided to let it cool while looking at the hardware connected to it. It had two pieces of gear on it: A Klixon thermal protector and some strange module. I pulled the Klixon, thinking it was the problem. It clicked. Well, thermal protect was off now. Test again. Still no go.
What was the strange module? It had a number on it: p6r8mc. I looked it up and saw it was a starter. Compressor won't start without it. One datasheet later, I saw that I could disassemble it. I used a knife blade to pop the clip off. Inside, it was obvious what the problem was. One side of the PTC pill was fine, but the other was burned badly. The contact was also fried.
I scraped the oxidation off of the contact and put the starter back together with the contact on a small patch of still-functioning PTC plating. With the assembly back in place, I plugged the fridge back in to hear the compressor start back up. I had diagnosed the issue. Would the jerry rig hold? Nope.
I need to get a new starter. Not so easy, but if I can't find one, I will be able to build a circuit to perform the same function while using the original starter case as the connector for it.
Fragwell Manor needs a mini fridge for snacks. The thermo-electric one I had before the move died. It wasn't that great, anyway. This one will get cold under any ambient temperature condition and even has a freezer in it. And, it's bigger. This one will hold a lot more than 36 cans of soda.
To whomever left it behind (probably an RV traveler, from the look of things) , thank you.
Fragwell Manor Introduction
The original Fragwell Manor was a three-story house built in the early 1900s. The new Fragwell Manor is a 1996 Champion single-wide mobile home.
The idea with Fragwell Manor has always been ninja-stealth. The outside should look kind of plain, but nice. Inside, however, should look great. Choosing a trailer scored a lot of plainness points. What was interesting is the fact that it doesn't look like any trailer I've ever been in. It looks like a house inside.
Perfect project house, but it needs a lot of work outside. The grass isn't grass at all. It's a bunch of weeds and morning glory plants holding hands.
I have already done a bit of work. The cost so far:
a gallon of Roundup spot-killing the worst weeds and clearing the walkways
one cheapass Weed Eater trimmer. It died a horrible death with much smoke and arcing. IT didn't even last through the original trimmer line spool it came with. Piece of crap.
One can wasp and hornet killer to take out the nests on the back door and the wood frame that holds the swamp cooler up.
New swamp cooler pump. The original one was the cheap kind that you have to replace every season. The new one is a lot more robust and has a motor four times the size of the dead one.
A block of unknown... something... that you put in swamp cooler reservoirs to make them smell better and keep mineral scale off of the cooler pads.
Things to come soon:
new water line to the cooler since the one on it now is taped in five places and still leaks. At least I can recycle the copper for money. The new line will be plastic.
swamp cooler needs to be moved from the kitchen window to the living room window. It keeps blowing out the pilot lights on our gas range. Not much gas to speak of, but it's still dangerous. Other than that, the new position will allow the air to blow more evenly.
new gas range. Even with the pilot lights saved by relocation of the cooler, pilot lights still use fuel and are still an open flame. We want electric ignition.
Weeds must die. Short of taking a propane ditch torch to them all, they must be killed.
The idea with Fragwell Manor has always been ninja-stealth. The outside should look kind of plain, but nice. Inside, however, should look great. Choosing a trailer scored a lot of plainness points. What was interesting is the fact that it doesn't look like any trailer I've ever been in. It looks like a house inside.
Perfect project house, but it needs a lot of work outside. The grass isn't grass at all. It's a bunch of weeds and morning glory plants holding hands.
I have already done a bit of work. The cost so far:
a gallon of Roundup spot-killing the worst weeds and clearing the walkways
one cheapass Weed Eater trimmer. It died a horrible death with much smoke and arcing. IT didn't even last through the original trimmer line spool it came with. Piece of crap.
One can wasp and hornet killer to take out the nests on the back door and the wood frame that holds the swamp cooler up.
New swamp cooler pump. The original one was the cheap kind that you have to replace every season. The new one is a lot more robust and has a motor four times the size of the dead one.
A block of unknown... something... that you put in swamp cooler reservoirs to make them smell better and keep mineral scale off of the cooler pads.
Things to come soon:
new water line to the cooler since the one on it now is taped in five places and still leaks. At least I can recycle the copper for money. The new line will be plastic.
swamp cooler needs to be moved from the kitchen window to the living room window. It keeps blowing out the pilot lights on our gas range. Not much gas to speak of, but it's still dangerous. Other than that, the new position will allow the air to blow more evenly.
new gas range. Even with the pilot lights saved by relocation of the cooler, pilot lights still use fuel and are still an open flame. We want electric ignition.
Weeds must die. Short of taking a propane ditch torch to them all, they must be killed.
The Fragwell Project
Almost every guy has had a clubhouse of sorts when he was younger. You need a place to hang out with your friends. As you get older and grow, you need more space. Luckily, your resources grow with you.
In 1999, we had our new clubhouse. We called it Fragwell Manor. It was an investment property bought by my mother and adoptive dad. During renovation, my brother, our friends and I used this house as our clubhouse... with running water, a toilet and a big screen TV. We would cook pizzas elsewhere (no oven on-site) and haul them to the house for movie nights. The plan was to eventually host LAN Parties there, but when my half-brother, Rick, started living there, we no longer had the location available.
Flash forward to 2008.
Times have changed a lot. The original Fragwell group has spread out. Some have children of their own--myself included.
Fragwell Manor wasn't just a clubhouse. It was intended to be a place where, like Wonka, some of my dreams become realities and some of my realities become dreams. To spell it out, it was supposed to be a laboratory of sorts.
Now that my wife and I are homeowners, it can finally happen. And, in fact, needs to. My lifetime passion (addiction?) has become my career. I need to take my game to the next level.
Over the next year, Fragwell Manor will be reborn. And it's going to be an interesting journey.
I'll be starting a new blog dedicated to Fragwell progress.
In 1999, we had our new clubhouse. We called it Fragwell Manor. It was an investment property bought by my mother and adoptive dad. During renovation, my brother, our friends and I used this house as our clubhouse... with running water, a toilet and a big screen TV. We would cook pizzas elsewhere (no oven on-site) and haul them to the house for movie nights. The plan was to eventually host LAN Parties there, but when my half-brother, Rick, started living there, we no longer had the location available.
Flash forward to 2008.
Times have changed a lot. The original Fragwell group has spread out. Some have children of their own--myself included.
Fragwell Manor wasn't just a clubhouse. It was intended to be a place where, like Wonka, some of my dreams become realities and some of my realities become dreams. To spell it out, it was supposed to be a laboratory of sorts.
Now that my wife and I are homeowners, it can finally happen. And, in fact, needs to. My lifetime passion (addiction?) has become my career. I need to take my game to the next level.
Over the next year, Fragwell Manor will be reborn. And it's going to be an interesting journey.
I'll be starting a new blog dedicated to Fragwell progress.
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Wow...
So I went to another sale the other day and, once again, didn't get exactly what I was after so I took my frustration out on the quintessential pile of broken laptops... by buying eight of them.
One that had caught my eye turned out to be a really good deal. It was $20 Inspiron 8200 and said the display didn't work, but would show an image on an external monitor. Cocky as I am (when I have a cache of Dell parts), I knew I'd be able to make it play nice so I snapped it up. Well, it and three other Dells ($1 each for a broken Latitude C840, Inspiron 4150 and Inspiron 5000).
As I was making my way through the line, I saw a docking station and power supply sitting on a cart. I checked the price and noticed they were $20. Checking the item number showed they were both included with my Inspiron 8200 purchase. Sweet bonus as the dock was the smaller one. I didn't have one of those.
Upon arriving home, I took the 8200 apart to find out what the deal was. The video board wasn't sitting straight so I suspected that to be the problem. With a reseat of that and the display connector (which looked more elegant than usual, I put a near-comatose battery in an started the system. I noticed that the display had a yellowish look to it while off, as well as a more glossy appearance. This was unique. I wondered what Setup would have to say about it.
Then the panel started up. I was outdoors when it happened so the difference wasn't as dramatic as it would later prove to be. In setup, I saw that the system had a 32MB Geforce4 440 Go GPU and the display was listed as UXGA Ultrasharp. Ultrasharp, eh? That's what my desktop LCD is. I thought it was some slight improvement that Dell played the marketing game with, but when I went inside and started the system again, I saw it was no ordinary notebook LCD. Additionally, UXGA isn't a common display resolution for a laptop.
When the panel was on and black, I had to look closely to see whether the backlight was even on. O RLY? Usually, I would see a horizontal band of darkness with grey at top and bottom when the screen was painted black and each eye would see a different image due to viewing angle problems. Not this time. What was going on here?
It turned out that this display was an expensive option on some of the systems which shared the same chassis, mostly because of the M50 workstation model. It was intended for the graphical design market. I will say this: It's the best laptop computer display I have ever seen. It's more bright than the display on my Alienware M9700, has the same apparent black level despite the extra brightness, and has colors that are way more rich. For a five year-old system, that's truly impressive.
My only wish is that this display was in a faster computer. The Pentium 4-M is not my favorite CPU by any stretch of the imagination, but I'd sooner have a Pentium 4 than a Pentium III. I'd rather, however, have a Pentium M.
I had to move the entire upper display assembly from the Inspiron 8200 to the $1 Latitude C840 since the 8200's fixed optical drive bay wasn't working. The casing doesn't match so I will have to change it over to the Latitude display casing. That will be where I will really have to be careful. Combining the two systems, I ended up with the following:
Dell Latitude C840:
Pentium 4 1.8GHz
1GB RAM (came with the $1 system)
30GB hard disk (came in the Inspiron)
Geforce4 440 Go 32MB
15" Ultrasharp UXGA LCD
24/24/10x CD-RW/DVD fixed bay drive
floppy drive module
Dell Inspiron 8200
Pentium 4 1.6GHz
256MB RAM
no hard disk
Geforce4 440 Go 32MB
15" UXGA LCD
24/10/10x CD-RW/DVD fixed bay drive
floppy drive module
While I was at the sale, I also picked up a stripped Dell desktop that still had the CPU in it. Yes, it was a Pentium 4, but it wasn't for me. It was for my wife. She was running a 2GHz Pentium 4 with the old 400MHz frontside bus. The chip from the stripped rig? 3GHz with an 800MHz frontside bus and Hyperthreading support. 50% better from the start, in addition to letting dual-channel RAM make a difference at long last and allowing her to play videos on her system while loading it down with other work due to Hyperthreading making the system think it has two CPUs. It really improved her World of Warcraft experience.
One that had caught my eye turned out to be a really good deal. It was $20 Inspiron 8200 and said the display didn't work, but would show an image on an external monitor. Cocky as I am (when I have a cache of Dell parts), I knew I'd be able to make it play nice so I snapped it up. Well, it and three other Dells ($1 each for a broken Latitude C840, Inspiron 4150 and Inspiron 5000).
As I was making my way through the line, I saw a docking station and power supply sitting on a cart. I checked the price and noticed they were $20. Checking the item number showed they were both included with my Inspiron 8200 purchase. Sweet bonus as the dock was the smaller one. I didn't have one of those.
Upon arriving home, I took the 8200 apart to find out what the deal was. The video board wasn't sitting straight so I suspected that to be the problem. With a reseat of that and the display connector (which looked more elegant than usual, I put a near-comatose battery in an started the system. I noticed that the display had a yellowish look to it while off, as well as a more glossy appearance. This was unique. I wondered what Setup would have to say about it.
Then the panel started up. I was outdoors when it happened so the difference wasn't as dramatic as it would later prove to be. In setup, I saw that the system had a 32MB Geforce4 440 Go GPU and the display was listed as UXGA Ultrasharp. Ultrasharp, eh? That's what my desktop LCD is. I thought it was some slight improvement that Dell played the marketing game with, but when I went inside and started the system again, I saw it was no ordinary notebook LCD. Additionally, UXGA isn't a common display resolution for a laptop.
When the panel was on and black, I had to look closely to see whether the backlight was even on. O RLY? Usually, I would see a horizontal band of darkness with grey at top and bottom when the screen was painted black and each eye would see a different image due to viewing angle problems. Not this time. What was going on here?
It turned out that this display was an expensive option on some of the systems which shared the same chassis, mostly because of the M50 workstation model. It was intended for the graphical design market. I will say this: It's the best laptop computer display I have ever seen. It's more bright than the display on my Alienware M9700, has the same apparent black level despite the extra brightness, and has colors that are way more rich. For a five year-old system, that's truly impressive.
My only wish is that this display was in a faster computer. The Pentium 4-M is not my favorite CPU by any stretch of the imagination, but I'd sooner have a Pentium 4 than a Pentium III. I'd rather, however, have a Pentium M.
I had to move the entire upper display assembly from the Inspiron 8200 to the $1 Latitude C840 since the 8200's fixed optical drive bay wasn't working. The casing doesn't match so I will have to change it over to the Latitude display casing. That will be where I will really have to be careful. Combining the two systems, I ended up with the following:
Dell Latitude C840:
Pentium 4 1.8GHz
1GB RAM (came with the $1 system)
30GB hard disk (came in the Inspiron)
Geforce4 440 Go 32MB
15" Ultrasharp UXGA LCD
24/24/10x CD-RW/DVD fixed bay drive
floppy drive module
Dell Inspiron 8200
Pentium 4 1.6GHz
256MB RAM
no hard disk
Geforce4 440 Go 32MB
15" UXGA LCD
24/10/10x CD-RW/DVD fixed bay drive
floppy drive module
While I was at the sale, I also picked up a stripped Dell desktop that still had the CPU in it. Yes, it was a Pentium 4, but it wasn't for me. It was for my wife. She was running a 2GHz Pentium 4 with the old 400MHz frontside bus. The chip from the stripped rig? 3GHz with an 800MHz frontside bus and Hyperthreading support. 50% better from the start, in addition to letting dual-channel RAM make a difference at long last and allowing her to play videos on her system while loading it down with other work due to Hyperthreading making the system think it has two CPUs. It really improved her World of Warcraft experience.
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