I figured if I was going to run a powerful computer that requires new electrical wiring, I'd have to find out just how much energy I'm using.
So I got a Kill-A-Watt.
And I have learned some things.
The Xeon LNXI compute nodes consume 130W in "waiting on a shout back from the master node with the rest of my BIOS" mode. I don't know what kind of drain this entails, but I do recall that a computer in BIOS mode is often consuming full power to do nothing.
The Opteron LNXI nodes consume 210W in the same mode.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Thursday, November 26, 2009
11-26-2009 - Straight Trippin'
Woke up this morning to work in the shop a bit before turkey and found the old GFCI had tripped again with nothing connected to it. It must be replaced. I don't want that happening when I'm in the middle of a render job some fine day, making me lose half my farm.
Friday, November 20, 2009
So long, piece of shit computer.
I've been growing both wary and weary of my workshop computer. The hard disk is old, loud and 40GB small. I don't put anything on it because I'm afraid I'll lose the data when it finally dies. That's about to change.
A while ago, I bought a ThinkPad T60 for my wife from a fellow [H]ard|Forum member. I liked it so much I decided I needed one for myself so when he put more up for grabs, I bit. Mine came with the 9 cell battery, a Kensington lock cable and a mini docking station. Mini docking station? Those are routinely lame. Not with Lenovo.
It's got every port my workshop computer has and then some.
I'm moving my entire operation to the T60.
Better still, one of the LNXI compute nodes was packed with a nice Lenovo keyboard while the other two came with Dell keyboards. I'm typing this post on it right now--hooked to the crap computer.
While the workshop computer's hard disk is noisy and the noise is far from consistent, the biggest annoyance I have with the machine isn't the hard drive. It's the cooling fans. The CPU cooler is a Thermaltake Volcano 6cu that spins at something like 8000RPM and the video card is a BFG GeForce FX5900 Ultra with a squirrel cage blower that sounds like a dustbuster.
I don't expect to be able to hear what's happening outside while working in the shop when the server farm is running. I do, however, expect to hear what's going on when it's not since I have no windows.
While the computer has been a pain in the ass, the core of it may serve a purpose in the future. I'm trying to sell off some computers, but nobody seems to be buying anything they have to do a bit of work on. No matter. I can strip the internals out of all of them, bolt the motherboards together and run them as a small cluster, selling the cases and Windows XP stickers to cover the cost of adding memory. 512MB is too small. I need a gig in each one. I'll worry about all of that after I get the server farm running, however, since my workshop computer's CPU is only capable of completing the Yafaray benchmark in half an hour and each of the ten nodes in this potential cluster is slightly slower still.
A while ago, I bought a ThinkPad T60 for my wife from a fellow [H]ard|Forum member. I liked it so much I decided I needed one for myself so when he put more up for grabs, I bit. Mine came with the 9 cell battery, a Kensington lock cable and a mini docking station. Mini docking station? Those are routinely lame. Not with Lenovo.
It's got every port my workshop computer has and then some.
I'm moving my entire operation to the T60.
Better still, one of the LNXI compute nodes was packed with a nice Lenovo keyboard while the other two came with Dell keyboards. I'm typing this post on it right now--hooked to the crap computer.
While the workshop computer's hard disk is noisy and the noise is far from consistent, the biggest annoyance I have with the machine isn't the hard drive. It's the cooling fans. The CPU cooler is a Thermaltake Volcano 6cu that spins at something like 8000RPM and the video card is a BFG GeForce FX5900 Ultra with a squirrel cage blower that sounds like a dustbuster.
I don't expect to be able to hear what's happening outside while working in the shop when the server farm is running. I do, however, expect to hear what's going on when it's not since I have no windows.
While the computer has been a pain in the ass, the core of it may serve a purpose in the future. I'm trying to sell off some computers, but nobody seems to be buying anything they have to do a bit of work on. No matter. I can strip the internals out of all of them, bolt the motherboards together and run them as a small cluster, selling the cases and Windows XP stickers to cover the cost of adding memory. 512MB is too small. I need a gig in each one. I'll worry about all of that after I get the server farm running, however, since my workshop computer's CPU is only capable of completing the Yafaray benchmark in half an hour and each of the ten nodes in this potential cluster is slightly slower still.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
More Power!
I installed the Legacy nodes in their new rack last night and today was spent preparing the shop for the new mains leg to be installed.
Rearranging was the hard part. It turns out running the new cord under the house is going to be easy. While I had been planning to tie a string to a rock and skip it under the house to the other side, I found I already have a string in place in the form of the very extension cord supplying the shop right now. I connect a lesser cord to that and pull it under the house to use for pulling both supply cords back for semi-permanent installation.
Rearranging was the hard part. It turns out running the new cord under the house is going to be easy. While I had been planning to tie a string to a rock and skip it under the house to the other side, I found I already have a string in place in the form of the very extension cord supplying the shop right now. I connect a lesser cord to that and pull it under the house to use for pulling both supply cords back for semi-permanent installation.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Much has been done.
The spider problem has been gone for months now. That's no big deal. What is, however, is the fact that Fragwell Labs, while once intended to receive a makeover, is going to be a barn for my server farm during the cold months.
With that in mind, I need more power. While the lab already has a 20A circuit, it has suffered some regrettable limitations due to the way I set the wiring up. When we moved in, the lab was wired with power via a 20A drop from the breaker panel to a piece of Romex and then to a junction box with a GFCI inside. From there, a grounded 12AWG extension cord was plugged into the box, run under the house and out to the lab. That was fine, for a bit, until I was heating the lab with a bunch of idling computers last winter to try to keep it at a temperature where I could work comfortably and ended up blowing the "15A" breaker on my ten year old power strip. This tripped the GFCI so I had to pull the skirting and push the reset button. Not easy with a foot of snow in my way. I have better power strips now, but there's another problem.
Directly inside the shop, the extension cord has a three-way splitter plugged into it. This splitter has a 13A breaker on it and it's very touchy, especially when the ambient temperature is high as is common during Utah summers. Running my lab computer, lighting, portable A/C unit and laser printer is a recipe for a breaker trip. Not fair.
But there's a way around it. This weekend, I run a second 115VAC line off the other side of the phase. While I can't go directly from a single outlet to a power strip and use all 20A since code is such that no single outlet can use more than 80% of the ampacity of a circuit, I can get a tw0-way splitter and use the full ampacity of both lines. While that circuit won't be enough during the summer months where cooling is a necessity, it will be more than enough for winter, even with the server farm and laser printer, assuming I use the printer all that much.
The compute cluster is meant to be powered by a 230VAC 15A circuit when fully loaded. With the 80% rule in effect, that's 12A peak they plan for. I still have 8A left on each rail, which would be enough for the AC unit and my laser printer to coexist.
I have nine compute nodes. Eight work. The cluster power rating looks at ten nodes.
With that in mind, I need more power. While the lab already has a 20A circuit, it has suffered some regrettable limitations due to the way I set the wiring up. When we moved in, the lab was wired with power via a 20A drop from the breaker panel to a piece of Romex and then to a junction box with a GFCI inside. From there, a grounded 12AWG extension cord was plugged into the box, run under the house and out to the lab. That was fine, for a bit, until I was heating the lab with a bunch of idling computers last winter to try to keep it at a temperature where I could work comfortably and ended up blowing the "15A" breaker on my ten year old power strip. This tripped the GFCI so I had to pull the skirting and push the reset button. Not easy with a foot of snow in my way. I have better power strips now, but there's another problem.
Directly inside the shop, the extension cord has a three-way splitter plugged into it. This splitter has a 13A breaker on it and it's very touchy, especially when the ambient temperature is high as is common during Utah summers. Running my lab computer, lighting, portable A/C unit and laser printer is a recipe for a breaker trip. Not fair.
But there's a way around it. This weekend, I run a second 115VAC line off the other side of the phase. While I can't go directly from a single outlet to a power strip and use all 20A since code is such that no single outlet can use more than 80% of the ampacity of a circuit, I can get a tw0-way splitter and use the full ampacity of both lines. While that circuit won't be enough during the summer months where cooling is a necessity, it will be more than enough for winter, even with the server farm and laser printer, assuming I use the printer all that much.
The compute cluster is meant to be powered by a 230VAC 15A circuit when fully loaded. With the 80% rule in effect, that's 12A peak they plan for. I still have 8A left on each rail, which would be enough for the AC unit and my laser printer to coexist.
I have nine compute nodes. Eight work. The cluster power rating looks at ten nodes.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Shake It Don't Break It
I took delivery of a "new" laptop a short time ago and just recently gave it a much-needed hard disk upgrade from 100GB to 500GB. The machine is still a current model in Dell's lineup and it rather powerful. Dual cores and plenty of RAM. Just what I needed.
As I wrote before, the Dual P4 Xeon 3.2GHz system scored a Yafaray test render time of 10.5 minutes with four threads. I knew I'd have to try the same on the new laptop's T7200 Core 2 Duo. The results surprised me. It was a tie.
If you look at clock speeds, it doesn't make sense. But clock speeds don't mean what they used to back in the Pentium 4 days. The Core and Core 2 CPUs architectures are based on the Pentium M, which was based on the Pentium III Tualatin. The Pentium 4 was abandoned after the Prescott core turned out to be a space heater and little else.
I mention the lineages because it predicted the future. I had a Pentium M laptop of 1.3GHz speed that would outpace my 2.4GHz Pentium 4 laptop in everything but floating point math. That's almost double the operations per clock tick right there.
The Core Duo and Core 2 Duo don't support Hyperthreading. That was brought back with the Core i7. The 15 minute time on the 3.2GHz CPUs when run without Hyperthreading explains the tie. The 2GHz Core 2 Duo in my laptop should be equivalent to a pair of 4GHz P4 Xeons when memory bus fighting is taken into consideration since the Dual Xeon rig is dual channel PC2100 DDR while the C2D is Dual Channel PC2-5300.
At 4GHz, the Xeon rig would complete the render in twelve minutes with Hyperthreading disabled. That's within a minute and a half. Something else is at work here and I don't know what it is, but it says a lot about the improvements made with the Core Architecture.
On top of all that, the Dual Xeon rig cranks out heat like mad, nearly maxing a 380W power supply, while the laptop is hard-limited by an AC adapter brick with a 120W output. And I have twice the RAM in the laptop.
I have yet to try any of my cluster computers. I wonder how they will do.
As I wrote before, the Dual P4 Xeon 3.2GHz system scored a Yafaray test render time of 10.5 minutes with four threads. I knew I'd have to try the same on the new laptop's T7200 Core 2 Duo. The results surprised me. It was a tie.
If you look at clock speeds, it doesn't make sense. But clock speeds don't mean what they used to back in the Pentium 4 days. The Core and Core 2 CPUs architectures are based on the Pentium M, which was based on the Pentium III Tualatin. The Pentium 4 was abandoned after the Prescott core turned out to be a space heater and little else.
I mention the lineages because it predicted the future. I had a Pentium M laptop of 1.3GHz speed that would outpace my 2.4GHz Pentium 4 laptop in everything but floating point math. That's almost double the operations per clock tick right there.
The Core Duo and Core 2 Duo don't support Hyperthreading. That was brought back with the Core i7. The 15 minute time on the 3.2GHz CPUs when run without Hyperthreading explains the tie. The 2GHz Core 2 Duo in my laptop should be equivalent to a pair of 4GHz P4 Xeons when memory bus fighting is taken into consideration since the Dual Xeon rig is dual channel PC2100 DDR while the C2D is Dual Channel PC2-5300.
At 4GHz, the Xeon rig would complete the render in twelve minutes with Hyperthreading disabled. That's within a minute and a half. Something else is at work here and I don't know what it is, but it says a lot about the improvements made with the Core Architecture.
On top of all that, the Dual Xeon rig cranks out heat like mad, nearly maxing a 380W power supply, while the laptop is hard-limited by an AC adapter brick with a 120W output. And I have twice the RAM in the laptop.
I have yet to try any of my cluster computers. I wonder how they will do.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Life, the Universe and Everything
A while back, I hacked together a 32" LCD TV from a wide array of parts. It turned out to be too small. Funny, that, since it's got a widescreen picture the likes of which only the largest old-school tube TVs could approach. I guess it's the HD thing. More detail so you need to be able to see it.
Last Saturday, I got another LCD set. This one had real issues. While it would work correctly with no input signal, any kind of signal would cause it to scramble horribly. I had seen this before. It was power supply related. Replacing the capacitors in the main logic power supply allowed the display to work correctly. Basically, $5 got me a new display. And I grabbed it at the perfect time. The next morning, the ground was wet from fresh rain.
This new display didn't come with a stand of any kind and I knew I wouldn't be able to make one. It was time for a major purchase so I went to Walmart and found a very nice steel and glass LCD stand that would take advantage of the wall mount holes. It only cost me about $170 after taxes so I couldn't complain at all, having ended up with a 42" display for $175.
It doesn't have a tuner so I'll have to buy one. What is does have is a native 1080p image, HDMI input, two component inputs, VGA and the old-school S-Video and composite. It will take a 1920x1200 signal on the VGA input, but it looks noisy. I'll have to try a better cable. I do know that the VGA cable for my XBOX 360 will show a proper display, although it's cut off at the left.
Last Saturday, I got another LCD set. This one had real issues. While it would work correctly with no input signal, any kind of signal would cause it to scramble horribly. I had seen this before. It was power supply related. Replacing the capacitors in the main logic power supply allowed the display to work correctly. Basically, $5 got me a new display. And I grabbed it at the perfect time. The next morning, the ground was wet from fresh rain.
This new display didn't come with a stand of any kind and I knew I wouldn't be able to make one. It was time for a major purchase so I went to Walmart and found a very nice steel and glass LCD stand that would take advantage of the wall mount holes. It only cost me about $170 after taxes so I couldn't complain at all, having ended up with a 42" display for $175.
It doesn't have a tuner so I'll have to buy one. What is does have is a native 1080p image, HDMI input, two component inputs, VGA and the old-school S-Video and composite. It will take a 1920x1200 signal on the VGA input, but it looks noisy. I'll have to try a better cable. I do know that the VGA cable for my XBOX 360 will show a proper display, although it's cut off at the left.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Braaaaaains!
I'm among the undead today after something like four hours sleep last night.
I was cleaning my workshop and then attacked the living room junk collection. I was up until long after 1AM.
I think karma paid me a dividend, though. It would seem there's someone out there who worked for Linux NetworX back in the day. Maybe I can get some advice?
I was cleaning my workshop and then attacked the living room junk collection. I was up until long after 1AM.
I think karma paid me a dividend, though. It would seem there's someone out there who worked for Linux NetworX back in the day. Maybe I can get some advice?
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Expect the Unexpected
Tonight I was looking at a motherboard I had intended to use for the home theater PC in the living room and figured out that it would be a good manager node for the supercomputer. It's only packing an Athlon XP, but that's still fast as hell for what it will be doing (shuffling data around and screaming at compute nodes)
In addition, I have ten computers in my storage bay that are packing Athlon XP 2000+ CPUs and could be turned into a reasonable cluster by themselves. They aren't fast, but that matters for dick, really, since they were $5 each and I can stock them with a gig of RAM per node for about $15 each. I don't know how I will be able to set them for Coreboot, though.
In addition, I have ten computers in my storage bay that are packing Athlon XP 2000+ CPUs and could be turned into a reasonable cluster by themselves. They aren't fast, but that matters for dick, really, since they were $5 each and I can stock them with a gig of RAM per node for about $15 each. I don't know how I will be able to set them for Coreboot, though.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Insert Witty Title Here
I'm just dumbfounded. I have a sense of "No way it's that easy".
The supercomputer I bought is going to be quite easy to deal with, it seems. I found it uses LinuxBIOS, now known as coreboot. That explains why it has no signs of hard disks ever being installed in the machine. This is going to save some energy. It still means I have to have the rigs maxed on RAM and Gigabit Ethernet might not be enough.
The supercomputer I bought is going to be quite easy to deal with, it seems. I found it uses LinuxBIOS, now known as coreboot. That explains why it has no signs of hard disks ever being installed in the machine. This is going to save some energy. It still means I have to have the rigs maxed on RAM and Gigabit Ethernet might not be enough.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Cleanup... Like... Everywhere
It's almost 11:30PM and I'm out in my workshop, de-junking and organizing again.
I have a renewed sense of purpose after discovering a few minutes ago that I have a shot at the Linux NetworX IceBox unit that I need for my supercomputer to get it running. I'm so doing this. I have laptops to prepare and sell off. This will happen.
I have a renewed sense of purpose after discovering a few minutes ago that I have a shot at the Linux NetworX IceBox unit that I need for my supercomputer to get it running. I'm so doing this. I have laptops to prepare and sell off. This will happen.
Rendered Useless?
I started working on Blender 3D rendering tests using Yafaray raytrace render tests. I saw that people were scoring around 3 minutes on an Intel i7 920 with the test scene that features a glass block, semi-glossy floor and two Suzanne the Blender Monkey solid models.
I gave it a whirl and: less than 3 seconds
Okay, but it looks like an early 80s pop music video, all burned out and nothing like the intended output. With that fixed, I ran it again: 27 minutes
WTF? How is it that slow? I looked at Windows Task Manager and saw that my Two CPUs and 4 threads were severely underutilized. So I quit for the night and played World of Warcraft with my wife. Suzanne the Monkey could wait.
Still, I couldn't help but wonder if my rack of Dual Xeon 2.4 nodes would still be woefully underpowered due to age at this rate. 27 minutes a frame divided by six nodes is 4.5 minutes and my workstation is using Dual 3.2GHz 553MHz FSB Xeons. Uh oh. Even slower.
But the test I ran is under Windows XP Pro 32-bit and that's insanely slow compared to Linux, based on the other benchmarks I was seeing.
Today I tried again. This time I understood things a bit better. It would seem the exporter is now required and I have to set the parameters from the right-hand menu that comes up when I select the exporter from the render menu. It's set for one thread. That explains a lot. Since I had disabled Hyperthreading to see if that was the issue, I was running with the two CPUs 1:1 style. This time: just under 15 minutes.
That's a lot better. Now to re-enable Hyperthreading and see what that gets me. Should net a 20% decrease in render time. Time to test for that. Reboot!
10.5 minutes under Windows XP Pro when Hyperthreading. That'll do.
Soon I shall see how Linux fares.
I gave it a whirl and: less than 3 seconds
Okay, but it looks like an early 80s pop music video, all burned out and nothing like the intended output. With that fixed, I ran it again: 27 minutes
WTF? How is it that slow? I looked at Windows Task Manager and saw that my Two CPUs and 4 threads were severely underutilized. So I quit for the night and played World of Warcraft with my wife. Suzanne the Monkey could wait.
Still, I couldn't help but wonder if my rack of Dual Xeon 2.4 nodes would still be woefully underpowered due to age at this rate. 27 minutes a frame divided by six nodes is 4.5 minutes and my workstation is using Dual 3.2GHz 553MHz FSB Xeons. Uh oh. Even slower.
But the test I ran is under Windows XP Pro 32-bit and that's insanely slow compared to Linux, based on the other benchmarks I was seeing.
Today I tried again. This time I understood things a bit better. It would seem the exporter is now required and I have to set the parameters from the right-hand menu that comes up when I select the exporter from the render menu. It's set for one thread. That explains a lot. Since I had disabled Hyperthreading to see if that was the issue, I was running with the two CPUs 1:1 style. This time: just under 15 minutes.
That's a lot better. Now to re-enable Hyperthreading and see what that gets me. Should net a 20% decrease in render time. Time to test for that. Reboot!
10.5 minutes under Windows XP Pro when Hyperthreading. That'll do.
Soon I shall see how Linux fares.
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Fall Surplus Sale Success
YES!
Standing in line for hours on end, and being able to outrun my competition, paid off. My spoils of war are undergoing restoration now.
Linux NetworX Evolocity Supercomputer
10-node cage, six nodes populated
Dual Intel Xeon 2.4GHz CPUs in each node with 3 or 4GB Dual Channel RAM on a SuperMicro motherboard.
It's the supercomputer I was going to build last year times two and then some, packed in about a tenth of the space and with so much more RAM.
I don't know how many "U" tall the whole cage is, but my plan is to get a rack large enough to put two cages into if I happen to be lucky enough to score a second one at any point.
With Linux supporting PAE on the Xeons, I can go over the 4GB limit of Windows and take advantage of the six RAM slots on each motherboard. Even if I only break up the 512MB modules to fill the empty slots in the 4GB nodes and buy eight more 1GB modules to even the system nodes out, that's still 5GB per node and like $100 invested in RAM modules. The same amount of RAM in a desktop system would cost three times that much.
I just can't run Windows on this system. It's not fair in the least. I do have the licenses for it, though. I'd just be severely limited in terms of memory space.
In addition to the supercomputer, I also picked up a Dell D810 laptop with a busted LCD panel. More likely put out of its misery since it was a 1280x800 panel and not one of the good ones. I can have it fixed for about $80 with a WUXGA 1920x1200 panel. Supposedly, these systems are limited to 2GB RAM, which makes zero sense to me, but whatever. It will likely become my Windows PC while the Dual Xeon 3.2GHz rig with Radeon HD2600 becomes my Linux workstation first and Windows gaming system second.
Standing in line for hours on end, and being able to outrun my competition, paid off. My spoils of war are undergoing restoration now.
Linux NetworX Evolocity Supercomputer
10-node cage, six nodes populated
Dual Intel Xeon 2.4GHz CPUs in each node with 3 or 4GB Dual Channel RAM on a SuperMicro motherboard.
It's the supercomputer I was going to build last year times two and then some, packed in about a tenth of the space and with so much more RAM.
I don't know how many "U" tall the whole cage is, but my plan is to get a rack large enough to put two cages into if I happen to be lucky enough to score a second one at any point.
With Linux supporting PAE on the Xeons, I can go over the 4GB limit of Windows and take advantage of the six RAM slots on each motherboard. Even if I only break up the 512MB modules to fill the empty slots in the 4GB nodes and buy eight more 1GB modules to even the system nodes out, that's still 5GB per node and like $100 invested in RAM modules. The same amount of RAM in a desktop system would cost three times that much.
I just can't run Windows on this system. It's not fair in the least. I do have the licenses for it, though. I'd just be severely limited in terms of memory space.
In addition to the supercomputer, I also picked up a Dell D810 laptop with a busted LCD panel. More likely put out of its misery since it was a 1280x800 panel and not one of the good ones. I can have it fixed for about $80 with a WUXGA 1920x1200 panel. Supposedly, these systems are limited to 2GB RAM, which makes zero sense to me, but whatever. It will likely become my Windows PC while the Dual Xeon 3.2GHz rig with Radeon HD2600 becomes my Linux workstation first and Windows gaming system second.
Friday, August 21, 2009
Sounds About Right
I picked up a Dell/Altec-Lansing ADA885 sound system for cheap, not expecting it to work at all since the plastic on the bottom of the subwoofer was distorted from melting. The idea was to build my own system if this one wasn't repairable.
Fortunately, it seems it is. There are two amplifier ICs I presume to be for the four satellite speakers. They are part number TDA7265 and sell for about $5 each.
The weird thing, though, is that these amplifiers are supposed to be protected from shorts and such. And they're actively cooled by the air at the subwoofer port blowing over the thick aluminum heatsink. I wonder what happened? This has shades of the receiver I tried to fix back in 1998. While I was able to replace the STK0050 amp packs on that, it never worked right afterward and had nasty clipping. I know more now than I did back then, however.
Basically, I can spare the money to replace the amplifiers without blinking an eye, but if the work required amounts to much more than that, this system is going to get a retrofit job with better amplifier modules that aren't going to fit inside the case.
Fortunately, it seems it is. There are two amplifier ICs I presume to be for the four satellite speakers. They are part number TDA7265 and sell for about $5 each.
The weird thing, though, is that these amplifiers are supposed to be protected from shorts and such. And they're actively cooled by the air at the subwoofer port blowing over the thick aluminum heatsink. I wonder what happened? This has shades of the receiver I tried to fix back in 1998. While I was able to replace the STK0050 amp packs on that, it never worked right afterward and had nasty clipping. I know more now than I did back then, however.
Basically, I can spare the money to replace the amplifiers without blinking an eye, but if the work required amounts to much more than that, this system is going to get a retrofit job with better amplifier modules that aren't going to fit inside the case.
Monday, August 10, 2009
No Kid Should Be Subjected To That...
My wife and I have gathered quite a collection of Disney movies. The classics we own are simply timeless, except for one thing--the damned ads preceding the movie.
Today, I put The Little Mermaid on for our daughter to watch before being taken to daycare. This version of the tape has the lady who voices Ariel conversing with two fish and waxing all infomercial for half an hour about new Disney stuff. Well, new for 1998 anyway. Yeah, 11+ years ago.
I'm solving this problem. Not only are the tapes going to wear out at the rate we're going, but VCRs are of a rather limited lifespan. I've already licensed Little Mermaid and such so I'm downloading files of each one and putting them on a specialized computer where our kid can watch the movies without the rewind time or ads. Ads in a movie theater I understand. They don't belong on the home version. If the MPAA has a problem with this approach when I've already bought the tape, they can eat shit. No kid should have to watch ads when they want to watch the movie.
Today, I put The Little Mermaid on for our daughter to watch before being taken to daycare. This version of the tape has the lady who voices Ariel conversing with two fish and waxing all infomercial for half an hour about new Disney stuff. Well, new for 1998 anyway. Yeah, 11+ years ago.
I'm solving this problem. Not only are the tapes going to wear out at the rate we're going, but VCRs are of a rather limited lifespan. I've already licensed Little Mermaid and such so I'm downloading files of each one and putting them on a specialized computer where our kid can watch the movies without the rewind time or ads. Ads in a movie theater I understand. They don't belong on the home version. If the MPAA has a problem with this approach when I've already bought the tape, they can eat shit. No kid should have to watch ads when they want to watch the movie.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
A Case of Mischief
The hacked and homebrewed HDTV is now mounted in a proper case that blows the original out of the water. It's not complete, but it's very close
I had wanted to use the industrial steel case, but didn't really like the idea of sticking new standoffs for the new boards on the case. I didn't have to. Soon after the working model stage was completed, I realized that the mezzanine panel for the Vizio boards could be modified to work, leaving less work to be done, overall, than adding standoffs to the case.
I burned through a full pack of cutoff wheels for my aging Dremel while modifying the mezzanine for attachment to the industrial casing, but it worked. I found that my cheap Chinese drill bits with the "Titanium Nitride" coating would actually drill through steel reasonably well. Screw tabs were bent flat or cut off as needed while an entire strip of the steel mezzanine consumed the bulk of the Dremel wheels in the name of making the mezzanine lay flat against the case by evening it out to match the sides. The top was left full-size with the screw tabs bent flat to allow the mezzanine to rest on top of the case with a couple of screws in the flattened tabs to keep it secure. Two screws through the mounting holes for the original LCD module secure the mezzanine to the case.
While I had the boards out for the mezzanine modification, I decided I'd try to fix the tuner input jack. Upon popping the lid of the tuner module, I saw that the jack's signal lead had been torn from the tuner's circuit board but could be soldered easily with the right iron. An inductor had suffered the same fate at one end of it, but this was easy to fix. The jack required re-shaping the steel case of the tuner to allow re-insertion, then bending the steel back over the jack and possible soldering the jack in place around the neck. I had never done this at home and remember how much of a pain it was getting the back-EMF capacitors soldered to the steel-cased motor of an RC car back when I was a kid and I didn't fare too well ten years after that, either. Well, I had a Radio Shack iron the first time and a Tenma the next. Ten more years after that last attempt, it was all about Hakko.
The funny thing is I'm still using the same roll of solder I bought back in 1997, the very same solder I used during my second attempt at soldering to what amounts to a huge heatsink. It wasn't the solder or my technique that was to blame, it was the inadequate 30W Radio Shack iron the first time and the 60W Tenma iron's indirect coupling the second. The Hakko, with the heating element inside the tip, kept the heat on without fail and I was able to run a bead of solder all the way around the jack outside the tuner module and half of the inside. The signal lead was soldered within seconds afterward. 22 analog channels and 34 digital channels were my reward. While the analog channels were kind of weird in the upper range, which I guess is due to the inductors not being tuned right anymore, digital was perfect.
Next, there was the issue of a TV stand. While the mezzanine I had modified was equipped with mounting holes for the standard wall mounts and was secured well enough for wall mounting of the mass, I didn't want to buy a wall mount so I had to add a foot. The Vizio TV had one, but using it would require a lot of cutting to get the piece of the casing down to size for the eight mounting screws to drive into. I used my Leatherman's saw blade for that. It was a noisy job, but it worked. With more holes drilled, I was able to attach the foot. While I had thought the center of gravity would make the set front-heavy and prone to toppling, this was not going to be a problem.
Once the foot was added, more loud work with the saw converted the back cover of the Vizio set to a cover for the high-voltage components of the homebrew one. While it doesn't completely prevent entry, it's not meant to and has very good airflow so the guts stay cool. The logic board has a steel cover over it, but the power supply only has the plastic. I haven't found the steel cover for that yet. As a sidenote, I added a heatsink to the main processor of the logic board. There were two huge BGAs on the board, but the one with holes around it for cooling system mounting got the heatsink.
The work is about 90% done. The last part of this project involves creating a new power status indicator, modifying the speakers for permanent attachment, and mounting the control buttons and remote control receiver. There's a side-mounted Composite video input jack I could add to this version, but I don't know if it will fit the way I want. Once that's all done, I create a front faceplate and covers for the speakers, which will stick out about half an inch beyond the faceplate due to the way they are mounted. For now, however, I just use it.
I gave my wife an Xbox 360 for her birthday and we played Saints Row 2 for about twenty hours total over the weekend and had the TV going on various channels for another ten or so whether watching or not. It's safe to say it works and should work for a long time.
I had wanted to use the industrial steel case, but didn't really like the idea of sticking new standoffs for the new boards on the case. I didn't have to. Soon after the working model stage was completed, I realized that the mezzanine panel for the Vizio boards could be modified to work, leaving less work to be done, overall, than adding standoffs to the case.
I burned through a full pack of cutoff wheels for my aging Dremel while modifying the mezzanine for attachment to the industrial casing, but it worked. I found that my cheap Chinese drill bits with the "Titanium Nitride" coating would actually drill through steel reasonably well. Screw tabs were bent flat or cut off as needed while an entire strip of the steel mezzanine consumed the bulk of the Dremel wheels in the name of making the mezzanine lay flat against the case by evening it out to match the sides. The top was left full-size with the screw tabs bent flat to allow the mezzanine to rest on top of the case with a couple of screws in the flattened tabs to keep it secure. Two screws through the mounting holes for the original LCD module secure the mezzanine to the case.
While I had the boards out for the mezzanine modification, I decided I'd try to fix the tuner input jack. Upon popping the lid of the tuner module, I saw that the jack's signal lead had been torn from the tuner's circuit board but could be soldered easily with the right iron. An inductor had suffered the same fate at one end of it, but this was easy to fix. The jack required re-shaping the steel case of the tuner to allow re-insertion, then bending the steel back over the jack and possible soldering the jack in place around the neck. I had never done this at home and remember how much of a pain it was getting the back-EMF capacitors soldered to the steel-cased motor of an RC car back when I was a kid and I didn't fare too well ten years after that, either. Well, I had a Radio Shack iron the first time and a Tenma the next. Ten more years after that last attempt, it was all about Hakko.
The funny thing is I'm still using the same roll of solder I bought back in 1997, the very same solder I used during my second attempt at soldering to what amounts to a huge heatsink. It wasn't the solder or my technique that was to blame, it was the inadequate 30W Radio Shack iron the first time and the 60W Tenma iron's indirect coupling the second. The Hakko, with the heating element inside the tip, kept the heat on without fail and I was able to run a bead of solder all the way around the jack outside the tuner module and half of the inside. The signal lead was soldered within seconds afterward. 22 analog channels and 34 digital channels were my reward. While the analog channels were kind of weird in the upper range, which I guess is due to the inductors not being tuned right anymore, digital was perfect.
Next, there was the issue of a TV stand. While the mezzanine I had modified was equipped with mounting holes for the standard wall mounts and was secured well enough for wall mounting of the mass, I didn't want to buy a wall mount so I had to add a foot. The Vizio TV had one, but using it would require a lot of cutting to get the piece of the casing down to size for the eight mounting screws to drive into. I used my Leatherman's saw blade for that. It was a noisy job, but it worked. With more holes drilled, I was able to attach the foot. While I had thought the center of gravity would make the set front-heavy and prone to toppling, this was not going to be a problem.
Once the foot was added, more loud work with the saw converted the back cover of the Vizio set to a cover for the high-voltage components of the homebrew one. While it doesn't completely prevent entry, it's not meant to and has very good airflow so the guts stay cool. The logic board has a steel cover over it, but the power supply only has the plastic. I haven't found the steel cover for that yet. As a sidenote, I added a heatsink to the main processor of the logic board. There were two huge BGAs on the board, but the one with holes around it for cooling system mounting got the heatsink.
The work is about 90% done. The last part of this project involves creating a new power status indicator, modifying the speakers for permanent attachment, and mounting the control buttons and remote control receiver. There's a side-mounted Composite video input jack I could add to this version, but I don't know if it will fit the way I want. Once that's all done, I create a front faceplate and covers for the speakers, which will stick out about half an inch beyond the faceplate due to the way they are mounted. For now, however, I just use it.
I gave my wife an Xbox 360 for her birthday and we played Saints Row 2 for about twenty hours total over the weekend and had the TV going on various channels for another ten or so whether watching or not. It's safe to say it works and should work for a long time.
Saturday, August 1, 2009
A New Record
Last night I completed the biggest hack I've ever done.
Some months ago, I bought an industrial 32" LCD monitor from the Logan DI store. They had priced it at $80, but I found that it didn't actually work. While it would display a frame when turned on, the image didn't move at all. I opened it up at the store to have a look and found that the controller board had been messed with at some point by a tech who didn't have a clue and probably used a $2 Radio Shack soldering iron. Since it didn't work, they were going to trash it but I offered $20 in the name of just having the panel for later use since I knew it worked well enough.
And then it got in my way and would continue to do so for a long time until yesterday.
Thursday night, I spied a flat TV sitting behind the local home theater store and wondered if they would let me have it. Yesterday I went in and asked and was allowed to take it. Vizio 37" with a cracked panel and the coax jack ripped out. No tuner love, but there were plenty of inputs to make the project worthwhile.
I plugged the set in at home to see if it would light up and it did, with the interesting patterns that only come from a cracked panel. At least the guts still worked and the viewing angle of the panel had me thinking S-IPS technology. Maybe an LG/Philips panel?
I removed the back panel and had a look around. The LCD panel looked like a larger version of the 32" panel and the power supply and inverter boards were LG branded. LG/Philips panel. Had to be and it was.
So it was time to check pinouts to see if I could hack the two together. The connectors were the same type on the inverters, but the 37" panel had 14 pins on one board where the same had 12 on the 32" panel. Fortunately, reverse-engineering was cake. The 37" panel inverters had a pinout silk-screened onto the boards and, while the 32" panel didn't, it was real easy to figure out because the boards the cable connected to did have silkscreened pinouts.
It took me half an hour to pull and reorganize the pins to the inverters, double-checking my work, but they looked production-grade when I was done. The signal cable for the display was a different matter. It didn't have enough conductors on the controller end so I thought I'd have to use the panel-side board from the 37" panel to make it work. No. After turning the display on and seeing no change then plugging the inverters and seeing a bright blue LED light and then dim on the main inverter board with no backlight action, I figured I'd go back to the original panel-side board and just use the 37" controller-to-panel cable and see what happened.
It would seem that the system was designed to take several configurations because I was startled when it fired up to a blue screen after I plugged the inverter with the power still on. Slight spark from the 24V line and slight flicker from the blue LED.
Blue screen means nothing. I hit the menu button (it was silkscreened as menu, but it was the source switch button) and the OSD came up. The hack worked, but what about taking a signal? Easy was to check. I hooked my Xbox 360 up to the VGA input and went for it.
It worked. I played Saints Row 2 for a couple of minutes to check response time. No problems, solid response. Excellent.
Now how the hell am I going to put it in a case? My work is half done.
Some months ago, I bought an industrial 32" LCD monitor from the Logan DI store. They had priced it at $80, but I found that it didn't actually work. While it would display a frame when turned on, the image didn't move at all. I opened it up at the store to have a look and found that the controller board had been messed with at some point by a tech who didn't have a clue and probably used a $2 Radio Shack soldering iron. Since it didn't work, they were going to trash it but I offered $20 in the name of just having the panel for later use since I knew it worked well enough.
And then it got in my way and would continue to do so for a long time until yesterday.
Thursday night, I spied a flat TV sitting behind the local home theater store and wondered if they would let me have it. Yesterday I went in and asked and was allowed to take it. Vizio 37" with a cracked panel and the coax jack ripped out. No tuner love, but there were plenty of inputs to make the project worthwhile.
I plugged the set in at home to see if it would light up and it did, with the interesting patterns that only come from a cracked panel. At least the guts still worked and the viewing angle of the panel had me thinking S-IPS technology. Maybe an LG/Philips panel?
I removed the back panel and had a look around. The LCD panel looked like a larger version of the 32" panel and the power supply and inverter boards were LG branded. LG/Philips panel. Had to be and it was.
So it was time to check pinouts to see if I could hack the two together. The connectors were the same type on the inverters, but the 37" panel had 14 pins on one board where the same had 12 on the 32" panel. Fortunately, reverse-engineering was cake. The 37" panel inverters had a pinout silk-screened onto the boards and, while the 32" panel didn't, it was real easy to figure out because the boards the cable connected to did have silkscreened pinouts.
It took me half an hour to pull and reorganize the pins to the inverters, double-checking my work, but they looked production-grade when I was done. The signal cable for the display was a different matter. It didn't have enough conductors on the controller end so I thought I'd have to use the panel-side board from the 37" panel to make it work. No. After turning the display on and seeing no change then plugging the inverters and seeing a bright blue LED light and then dim on the main inverter board with no backlight action, I figured I'd go back to the original panel-side board and just use the 37" controller-to-panel cable and see what happened.
It would seem that the system was designed to take several configurations because I was startled when it fired up to a blue screen after I plugged the inverter with the power still on. Slight spark from the 24V line and slight flicker from the blue LED.
Blue screen means nothing. I hit the menu button (it was silkscreened as menu, but it was the source switch button) and the OSD came up. The hack worked, but what about taking a signal? Easy was to check. I hooked my Xbox 360 up to the VGA input and went for it.
It worked. I played Saints Row 2 for a couple of minutes to check response time. No problems, solid response. Excellent.
Now how the hell am I going to put it in a case? My work is half done.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Along Came a Spider...
...so she picked up her spoon and beat the hell out of it.
The door is sealed. I used my rolled bubble wrap screwed to the frame technique. Redneck fabulous and very effective.
Looks like I'm going to have to build my own door when it comes time for a new one. Nobody makes a 48" wide by 70" tall door. Weather-stripping is not going to be easy by a long shot.
Additionally, I invested in some bug killer with Cyhalothrin as the active ingredient. It's a Permethrin-like insecticide that sticks around longer. Spiders don't like it at all. In addition to bringing out one of those gnarly red legged ones that eat rolly-poly bugs and a standard smaller grass spider, it also brought out a huge wolf spider with egg sac in tow. Nuked!
I learned there's a really easy way to spot spiders. If you have a small light that can go between your eyes without obstructing your vision, like my LED light with the lamp on a flexible steel neck, you can watch for the reflection from the spider's eyes. It's like the effect you see when car headlights shine into a cat's eyes. Worked like a charm.
The door is sealed. I used my rolled bubble wrap screwed to the frame technique. Redneck fabulous and very effective.
Looks like I'm going to have to build my own door when it comes time for a new one. Nobody makes a 48" wide by 70" tall door. Weather-stripping is not going to be easy by a long shot.
Additionally, I invested in some bug killer with Cyhalothrin as the active ingredient. It's a Permethrin-like insecticide that sticks around longer. Spiders don't like it at all. In addition to bringing out one of those gnarly red legged ones that eat rolly-poly bugs and a standard smaller grass spider, it also brought out a huge wolf spider with egg sac in tow. Nuked!
I learned there's a really easy way to spot spiders. If you have a small light that can go between your eyes without obstructing your vision, like my LED light with the lamp on a flexible steel neck, you can watch for the reflection from the spider's eyes. It's like the effect you see when car headlights shine into a cat's eyes. Worked like a charm.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Glass Cockpit
I like free broken stuff that I can fix. Even better is repairable free stuff that's still quite modern. As I've mentioned before, I often rummage through the scrap bins at work and find the occasional shiny thing. Recently, there was a large amount of broken desktop computer LCD displays so I took it upon myself to rescue as many as possible.
I've fixed three so far. My wife had one until I swapped it out for a better panel from my own stock and gave the fixed one to the coworker who tipped me off about the trash treasures. I'm keeping the pair of 19" panels I fixed. They almost match. While true I didn't think to look for the plastics so they would be cased properly, it doesn't matter. I have the bare panel modules, with their control circuitry mounted to the back, positioned right next to each other. Based on the bezel that was still attached to one of them, my gap of less than 1" is far better than the 3" between panel active areas I would have had with the bezels still in place.
I do need a permanent mount, though. The panels became rather hot while in use before I taped computer card slot blanks to the tops to keep air flow to the panel and keep the exposed Kraft paper facing of my insulation from overheating. I think I'll build a wood frame with a channel cut up the center of the frame to hold the panels, a few tiny cooling fans and hooks for wall-mounting. Finish off with a strip of black tape on the steel frame sides in the center and that's that.
I was able to repair two of the three Dell 1800FP panels I've had around for a while. The remaining one will require a new logic board to regain functionality.
I think my next trick will be to fix the 32" LCD monitor I still haven't gotten to. If I pull the processor and solder it back on the right way, it should work again. I just haven't done it yet. I need to, though. That display is getting in the way a lot.
I've fixed three so far. My wife had one until I swapped it out for a better panel from my own stock and gave the fixed one to the coworker who tipped me off about the trash treasures. I'm keeping the pair of 19" panels I fixed. They almost match. While true I didn't think to look for the plastics so they would be cased properly, it doesn't matter. I have the bare panel modules, with their control circuitry mounted to the back, positioned right next to each other. Based on the bezel that was still attached to one of them, my gap of less than 1" is far better than the 3" between panel active areas I would have had with the bezels still in place.
I do need a permanent mount, though. The panels became rather hot while in use before I taped computer card slot blanks to the tops to keep air flow to the panel and keep the exposed Kraft paper facing of my insulation from overheating. I think I'll build a wood frame with a channel cut up the center of the frame to hold the panels, a few tiny cooling fans and hooks for wall-mounting. Finish off with a strip of black tape on the steel frame sides in the center and that's that.
I was able to repair two of the three Dell 1800FP panels I've had around for a while. The remaining one will require a new logic board to regain functionality.
I think my next trick will be to fix the 32" LCD monitor I still haven't gotten to. If I pull the processor and solder it back on the right way, it should work again. I just haven't done it yet. I need to, though. That display is getting in the way a lot.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Eight-Legged Freaks
I hate spiders. While I understand they serve a purpose in the food chain, I have zero use for them and don't want them inhabiting the same space I am. House spiders and jumping spiders are annoying, but my hatred of what we call Garden Spiders around here knows no bounds.
The spider I'm talking about is the Desert Grass Spider. The most obvious sign you're dealing with one is the funnel web in grass or a pile of debris or whatever. They can get rather large, scare easily and can cover a lot of ground in a very short time. That, and they love to hide in stuff that doesn't move very often. That's a huge problem when inventory and test equipment is stacked on shelves.
They get into the workshop via the huge gap at the bottom of the door. Perfect entryway for anything that crawls. I witnessed this twice last night. I see motion out the corner of my eye and picked out the well-camouflaged spider on the floor. Female. Fat with eggs. Great, just like the one a few days ago. So what did I do? Grabbed the vacuum and sucked it up. Just one problem: The spider's fat abdomen got stuck in one of the air channels. I kept the vacuum running and tried some tricks to change the airflow. Man they're tough. As I was dealing with this, I saw a twin of the now-dismembered spider go running from the door crack to just outside the space under my shelving. A quick hit with the vacuum was unsuccessful as I didn't strike fast enough
With the persistent spider done for, my attention turned to killing the newest unwelcome guest. I swear those things are intelligent. I played the waiting game and it came out, but the moment I grabbed the vacuum nozzle, it ran back under the shelving. Waiting again resulted in the same thing. I wasn't about to miss the third time. And I didn't. I shot her with brake cleaner. She didn't like that at all. It's funny watching spiders stumble around.
The beast went back under the shelving and probably died there. I'll find out eventually.
I'm sealing that gap and then bug bombing the hell out of the shop before I do any drywall work.
The spider I'm talking about is the Desert Grass Spider. The most obvious sign you're dealing with one is the funnel web in grass or a pile of debris or whatever. They can get rather large, scare easily and can cover a lot of ground in a very short time. That, and they love to hide in stuff that doesn't move very often. That's a huge problem when inventory and test equipment is stacked on shelves.
They get into the workshop via the huge gap at the bottom of the door. Perfect entryway for anything that crawls. I witnessed this twice last night. I see motion out the corner of my eye and picked out the well-camouflaged spider on the floor. Female. Fat with eggs. Great, just like the one a few days ago. So what did I do? Grabbed the vacuum and sucked it up. Just one problem: The spider's fat abdomen got stuck in one of the air channels. I kept the vacuum running and tried some tricks to change the airflow. Man they're tough. As I was dealing with this, I saw a twin of the now-dismembered spider go running from the door crack to just outside the space under my shelving. A quick hit with the vacuum was unsuccessful as I didn't strike fast enough
With the persistent spider done for, my attention turned to killing the newest unwelcome guest. I swear those things are intelligent. I played the waiting game and it came out, but the moment I grabbed the vacuum nozzle, it ran back under the shelving. Waiting again resulted in the same thing. I wasn't about to miss the third time. And I didn't. I shot her with brake cleaner. She didn't like that at all. It's funny watching spiders stumble around.
The beast went back under the shelving and probably died there. I'll find out eventually.
I'm sealing that gap and then bug bombing the hell out of the shop before I do any drywall work.
Monday, July 20, 2009
The Heat, Mon, The Heat
Okay so I lied. The heater isn't a 450/900W unit, it's a 900/1500W unit. That amounts to 3000/5000BTU per hour. Nice balance, I think. It will be even better once I have the structural work completed and the drywall up. Blast it all, I'm going to need a new door as well.
For now, I'll settle for clearing out more of my packrat gear.
For now, I'll settle for clearing out more of my packrat gear.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Keep A Cool Head
Thermal control is ever so important. While spring was uncharacteristically wet this year, with plenty of cloud cover as a side-effect, summer came in like a sledgehammer. The lab would run nearly 100F without computers running, let alone with them on.
Air conditioning was the only solution. While I had the chance last weekend, sheerly out of desperation, to run the swamp cooler blowing into the shop, lowering the temperature into the mid 80s, that was wasteful and, once the sun started shining onto the floor, woefully ineffective.
Well, solutions are rather easy to come by when you're a packrat like me. I had saved a window air conditioning unit I bought back in 2006 after coming back from California and while it served duty in the living room, as an attempt to see if the swamp cooler's massive airflow wasn't necessary, it turned out to be horribly underpowered for that application.
What to do... we needed 10,000BTUs of cooling capacity to be able to control the temperature of the living room/kitchen airspace, but doing that would require a dedicated electrical circuit I wasn't willing to install. The swamp cooler had to go back in, freeing the AC unit up again.
Fortunately, there's a checks and balances thing with cooling like that and the portable AC unit we bought brand new for our daughter's room was both overpowered and taking up much-needed floorspace. The window unit was the solution and that freed up the portable unit, which had the necessary capacity and only required a 4" exhaust hose.
Inside Fragwell Lab, there's a corner that sees absolutely zero use. I have part of a plastic shelving unit there with two concrete form plywood squares (thanks, Dad!) sitting on top as a stable platform. While my rather large laser printer takes up a chunk of space, the rest is obscured by my large desk and loudspeaker for that side. But with a load-bearing capacity of 300lbs, it was the perfect place for a certain rollaway air conditioner.
One trip to Lowe's later, I had a kit for clothes dryer installation procured and was ready for the job. With my Lithium drill and oldschool AC jigsaw ready, I cut the hole and mounted the louvered faceplate with some leftover screws. It went very smoothly, with the hole cut the perfect size and the snap-together aluminum pipe cut down and punched for the condensation spray nozzle holder.
I had read instructions online saying that a dryer vent is a bad idea because the flapper that seals the elements and bugs out puts too much backpressure on the exhaust stream. Simple logic involving levers told me this was only a serious problem for the cheap units with a single flapper. I saw one with eight, but it required a thick wall I didn't have. The one I got has three louvers and it's perfect. Tests show that the louvers close most of the way during the first three seconds after power shutoff, only staying open a little bit while the blower spools down. They don't flap in the wind, either. They're blown open rather sternly by the exhaust, even on low speed.
At the moment, the lab is sitting at 76.2F. Ten degrees lower than the swamp cooler effect is a huge bonus and that's certainly not the lowest it will go. I'm confident this cooler would easily allow 60F.
At one point in time I wanted a split-system for climate control like a Mitsubishi Mr. Slim. Then I saw the prices and nearly died. No way was that going to happen. While they are very quiet and have dual modes with heat provided during winter, the price premium would not be overlooked. Heat would have to be provided a different way.
Heat is taken care of. This winter will not require a huge number of computers running 24/7. I found a decent ceramic-core heater for $10 used and it has plenty of heat output with switchable 450 and 900W modes. I'll wire my own thermostat and leave it at that. With 900W of pure heat on-demand, I won't be stuck taking two days for heat to build back up after opening the door of the lab to get in and out.
Now I'm thinking about winter. I seriously need drywall, a new subfloor, carpet and a proper electrical system. I do believe I'll have to run that new electrical connection. I get nervous when the air conditioner is on and I have to print shipping tags on the laser printer. Looks like I'll be going with a 220V 30A feed. While I had thought I would need 50A, that's not the case and would be really expensive. Digging trenches is no fun, but not being able to work for four months out of the year is worse. It's time for conduit, copper and magic.
But first, Permethrin. Damned Grasshoppers.
Air conditioning was the only solution. While I had the chance last weekend, sheerly out of desperation, to run the swamp cooler blowing into the shop, lowering the temperature into the mid 80s, that was wasteful and, once the sun started shining onto the floor, woefully ineffective.
Well, solutions are rather easy to come by when you're a packrat like me. I had saved a window air conditioning unit I bought back in 2006 after coming back from California and while it served duty in the living room, as an attempt to see if the swamp cooler's massive airflow wasn't necessary, it turned out to be horribly underpowered for that application.
What to do... we needed 10,000BTUs of cooling capacity to be able to control the temperature of the living room/kitchen airspace, but doing that would require a dedicated electrical circuit I wasn't willing to install. The swamp cooler had to go back in, freeing the AC unit up again.
Fortunately, there's a checks and balances thing with cooling like that and the portable AC unit we bought brand new for our daughter's room was both overpowered and taking up much-needed floorspace. The window unit was the solution and that freed up the portable unit, which had the necessary capacity and only required a 4" exhaust hose.
Inside Fragwell Lab, there's a corner that sees absolutely zero use. I have part of a plastic shelving unit there with two concrete form plywood squares (thanks, Dad!) sitting on top as a stable platform. While my rather large laser printer takes up a chunk of space, the rest is obscured by my large desk and loudspeaker for that side. But with a load-bearing capacity of 300lbs, it was the perfect place for a certain rollaway air conditioner.
One trip to Lowe's later, I had a kit for clothes dryer installation procured and was ready for the job. With my Lithium drill and oldschool AC jigsaw ready, I cut the hole and mounted the louvered faceplate with some leftover screws. It went very smoothly, with the hole cut the perfect size and the snap-together aluminum pipe cut down and punched for the condensation spray nozzle holder.
I had read instructions online saying that a dryer vent is a bad idea because the flapper that seals the elements and bugs out puts too much backpressure on the exhaust stream. Simple logic involving levers told me this was only a serious problem for the cheap units with a single flapper. I saw one with eight, but it required a thick wall I didn't have. The one I got has three louvers and it's perfect. Tests show that the louvers close most of the way during the first three seconds after power shutoff, only staying open a little bit while the blower spools down. They don't flap in the wind, either. They're blown open rather sternly by the exhaust, even on low speed.
At the moment, the lab is sitting at 76.2F. Ten degrees lower than the swamp cooler effect is a huge bonus and that's certainly not the lowest it will go. I'm confident this cooler would easily allow 60F.
At one point in time I wanted a split-system for climate control like a Mitsubishi Mr. Slim. Then I saw the prices and nearly died. No way was that going to happen. While they are very quiet and have dual modes with heat provided during winter, the price premium would not be overlooked. Heat would have to be provided a different way.
Heat is taken care of. This winter will not require a huge number of computers running 24/7. I found a decent ceramic-core heater for $10 used and it has plenty of heat output with switchable 450 and 900W modes. I'll wire my own thermostat and leave it at that. With 900W of pure heat on-demand, I won't be stuck taking two days for heat to build back up after opening the door of the lab to get in and out.
Now I'm thinking about winter. I seriously need drywall, a new subfloor, carpet and a proper electrical system. I do believe I'll have to run that new electrical connection. I get nervous when the air conditioner is on and I have to print shipping tags on the laser printer. Looks like I'll be going with a 220V 30A feed. While I had thought I would need 50A, that's not the case and would be really expensive. Digging trenches is no fun, but not being able to work for four months out of the year is worse. It's time for conduit, copper and magic.
But first, Permethrin. Damned Grasshoppers.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Before It Dies, You See The Ring
There is no escape and it was only a matter of time. My Xbox 360 just succumbed to the dreaded Red Ring of Death today. I'm kind of bummed, but it's fortunate since my system's manufacture date on the rear indicates it was made September 5, 2006. I dodged a bullet by less than three months here.
Here's hoping I get a Jasper-based system in return.
Here's hoping I get a Jasper-based system in return.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Do you have any TP?
While I was recovering from my surgeries, I bought a ThinkPad X41 Tablet to play with. Well, it didn't arrive until I had already gone back to work.
While the unit came with a Windows XP Tablet Edition license, I couldn't get the version I had on-hand to install. Okay, so it was for HP machines. With that being the case and me unable to pirate (is it really pirating when you have the license?) a system restore disc, I was left with one option: To test Windows 7.
A DVD and a couple of hours later, I was running 7 and it actually worked with little trouble as it was. With the wired network chip identified and installed from the get-go, I plugged it into the network and hit Windows Update to see if it had any drivers for me. Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full.
The only things I don't like at all about Windows 7 right now is the fact that ClearType is not only Tablet-impaired in that orientation of the screen really screws with the Nyquist stuff at work in ClearType and, unlike XP, there is no ClearType Rotator (which is worth the Earth in XP), but it also can't really be turned off!
Other than that, there's the switch to Tablet mode and the snail-pace of the automatic rotation. 30-40 seconds to switch? I'd rather do it manually, thanks. When I switch, it's because I'm doing it to save time. Microsoft would do well to take another page from Apple's book and put effort into streamlining the bullshit of the interface if they want people to upgrade from XP in a direction that doesn't involve Linux and OpenOffice.org, which I use.
Sun really should have the OOo folks come up with something like OneNote. That app is just plain nice.
The X41T came to me with a bad battery that actually saved me about $90 off of the sale price versus the others offered by the same seller. I was planning to buy a third-party pack anyway. I did have a scare for a moment where I thought the charging system of the machine was burned out when the battery was showing as good, but after examining the pack, I found that a fuse was blown inside it. I was able to get it working enough to test the system on battery power, but it wouldn't charge due to the way the unique fuses trip interlocks in the circuitry. Clever, but annoying for people like me who know WTF they are doing poking around in an explosive battery pack.
I will say this: The display is the highlight of the machine. Boy howdy, I had heard of the awesome that was the IPS panels in ThinkPads, but I wasn't expecting the improvement brought on by AFFS. I will forgive the fact that the panel is only XGA for image quality like that. It reminds me of the image I got from a Trinitron CRT I had the better part of a decade ago. It's just that nice. And this was new tech in 2005. I hear improvements have been made and are featured in later models.
I wish I could try this machine outdoors, but I need a battery for that... and good weather.
I was able to get the machine maxed out at 1.5GB RAM with a 60GB hard disk. I'll be pulling and selling the hard disk to fund an upgrade to a solid state disk. I want that surreal effect only a completely silent computer can provide. I remember when I had my old Toshiba T1850 set to shut the hard disk off after a certain amount of time and would work in silence until it was time to save the file I would be working on. No fan to make other noise. While the X41T has a fan, it only very rarely turns on in stock form, let alone after I installed RMClock and dropped the operating voltages down to hilarious levels.
Were it not for the chipset, I'm dead-certain this machine would run as cool as that T1850 did. And that's saying a whole hell of a lot as it has never happened since that machine. I might change the thermal compound on the chip if it won't cause the fan to come on more often. No machine I own has ever gone unmodified. This will be no exception to that rule.
In fact, I must try the 2GB RAM upgrade some people were having success with. While it's only another 512MB, that's my entire base RAM usage from boot in Win7 as extra memory.
While the unit came with a Windows XP Tablet Edition license, I couldn't get the version I had on-hand to install. Okay, so it was for HP machines. With that being the case and me unable to pirate (is it really pirating when you have the license?) a system restore disc, I was left with one option: To test Windows 7.
A DVD and a couple of hours later, I was running 7 and it actually worked with little trouble as it was. With the wired network chip identified and installed from the get-go, I plugged it into the network and hit Windows Update to see if it had any drivers for me. Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full.
The only things I don't like at all about Windows 7 right now is the fact that ClearType is not only Tablet-impaired in that orientation of the screen really screws with the Nyquist stuff at work in ClearType and, unlike XP, there is no ClearType Rotator (which is worth the Earth in XP), but it also can't really be turned off!
Other than that, there's the switch to Tablet mode and the snail-pace of the automatic rotation. 30-40 seconds to switch? I'd rather do it manually, thanks. When I switch, it's because I'm doing it to save time. Microsoft would do well to take another page from Apple's book and put effort into streamlining the bullshit of the interface if they want people to upgrade from XP in a direction that doesn't involve Linux and OpenOffice.org, which I use.
Sun really should have the OOo folks come up with something like OneNote. That app is just plain nice.
The X41T came to me with a bad battery that actually saved me about $90 off of the sale price versus the others offered by the same seller. I was planning to buy a third-party pack anyway. I did have a scare for a moment where I thought the charging system of the machine was burned out when the battery was showing as good, but after examining the pack, I found that a fuse was blown inside it. I was able to get it working enough to test the system on battery power, but it wouldn't charge due to the way the unique fuses trip interlocks in the circuitry. Clever, but annoying for people like me who know WTF they are doing poking around in an explosive battery pack.
I will say this: The display is the highlight of the machine. Boy howdy, I had heard of the awesome that was the IPS panels in ThinkPads, but I wasn't expecting the improvement brought on by AFFS. I will forgive the fact that the panel is only XGA for image quality like that. It reminds me of the image I got from a Trinitron CRT I had the better part of a decade ago. It's just that nice. And this was new tech in 2005. I hear improvements have been made and are featured in later models.
I wish I could try this machine outdoors, but I need a battery for that... and good weather.
I was able to get the machine maxed out at 1.5GB RAM with a 60GB hard disk. I'll be pulling and selling the hard disk to fund an upgrade to a solid state disk. I want that surreal effect only a completely silent computer can provide. I remember when I had my old Toshiba T1850 set to shut the hard disk off after a certain amount of time and would work in silence until it was time to save the file I would be working on. No fan to make other noise. While the X41T has a fan, it only very rarely turns on in stock form, let alone after I installed RMClock and dropped the operating voltages down to hilarious levels.
Were it not for the chipset, I'm dead-certain this machine would run as cool as that T1850 did. And that's saying a whole hell of a lot as it has never happened since that machine. I might change the thermal compound on the chip if it won't cause the fan to come on more often. No machine I own has ever gone unmodified. This will be no exception to that rule.
In fact, I must try the 2GB RAM upgrade some people were having success with. While it's only another 512MB, that's my entire base RAM usage from boot in Win7 as extra memory.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Trash Into Treasure
When I get bored with the shiny things I buy, I like to sell them on eBay. I heard recently that there's going to be a new policy in effect come 2011 that sales totalling over $20,000 with over 200 transactions will be reported to the IRS. I really don't understand that since all the shit I have sitting around that I bought for fun is probably worth twice that if I sold all of it. And the crappy part is it cost me more than that to get it over quite a long period of time.
I guess what it means is I need to clear it all out before 2011 because I don't need the IRS taxing me again for stuff I already own, or at least trying to, anyway. Were I making a profit, I could understand it, but selling my garbage is merely damage control and loss mitigation on my part. Fortunately, I'm able to keep my losses rather minimal. All my gains are of the intellectual variety. If those are ever able to be taxed, I'll be screwed but Bubba Funderburk and his sistercousinwife, Tanqueray, will hoot and holler in triumph.
Maybe one day I'll have my own business going, but I would need like ten times the volume and a little thing called profit for that to happen. It irritates me to see people on those infomercials talking about how they "did $500,000 in sales last year" without going into detail about profit.
I'm sick of posers mentioning gross sales as their profit. When you see some unshaven fuck in dirty old clothes claiming to have made $200,000 in the past year he needs a crowbar to the grille.
I guess what it means is I need to clear it all out before 2011 because I don't need the IRS taxing me again for stuff I already own, or at least trying to, anyway. Were I making a profit, I could understand it, but selling my garbage is merely damage control and loss mitigation on my part. Fortunately, I'm able to keep my losses rather minimal. All my gains are of the intellectual variety. If those are ever able to be taxed, I'll be screwed but Bubba Funderburk and his sistercousinwife, Tanqueray, will hoot and holler in triumph.
Maybe one day I'll have my own business going, but I would need like ten times the volume and a little thing called profit for that to happen. It irritates me to see people on those infomercials talking about how they "did $500,000 in sales last year" without going into detail about profit.
I'm sick of posers mentioning gross sales as their profit. When you see some unshaven fuck in dirty old clothes claiming to have made $200,000 in the past year he needs a crowbar to the grille.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
You Can Learn A Lot From The Past
Case-in-point, the "Where Are They Now"s.
Eight years ago I met this girl whose mean trick totally backfired on her. She created a fake profile at some long-gone dating site just to mess with people. Well, to make a long story short, she falls in love with me and then has to come clean, saying she'll tell everyone how wonderful I am if I'll love her despite that pretty much being the worst I've ever been lied to in my life before or since.
I told her to beat it and she got all pissy saying I wouldn't love her for what was on the inside. That crutch of a line again... nothing good ever comes after that card's been played. Usually, it's a land-whale playing the card and playing the victim. This was one of those times, much to my dismay. I'll be honest, I was allowing this relationship to spark at long distance thinking I was getting involved with a cute, punky black-haired living-ball-of-energy chix0r who was an inch taller than me, aspired to work in a technical field, needed an escape from Pocatello, Idaho, was turning 18 in a few months and smiled all the time. And she liked me. Schweet! Even better, she was a Linkin Park fan without being all depressed and shit, unlike, for example, the mejority of Nirvana fans I've met.
What I got was not as advertised in any way. She was 16, four inches shorter, dark blonde hair, obviously never smiled, merely "liked computers" as opposed to being a code-poetess with a knack for databases, 180 pounds, and created the profile with malicious intent from the get-go. And all of that topped off with a voice deeper than mine. Wow, what a catch, right?
My heart was broken. It was bad enough she came clean in a letter in the mail, but to get a phone call not a minute after my mom handed me the letter and have to get a taste of the shit about to hit the fan made me want to cry out of frustration, anger and just plain having my heart broken. I remember it like it was minutes ago. She introduces herself and I hear the deep voice. Trying to be nice, I say "Wow, you _sound_ six feet tall." in my cheerful tone and not even regretting it the moment I realized what had happened, only moments before my heart broke and all my plans came to a shitty halt.
Well, to make a long story short, in the aftermath I got an attention-whoring mass-email some time later with her saying how she almost killed herself and feels like nobody likes her and all the usual garbage. As much as I have always held women in high esteem (sugar and spice, you know), my first thought was "try harder next time". It's really hard to make someone as happy-go-lucky as I was back then come to view someone as little more than the water and carbon from which the overwhelming majority of their living body is made--but she managed to do exactly that.
Well, some time later, as I'm working on the computer I was using during that whole thing, up pops an AOL IM window with her at the other end. I play nice because I'm really tired. Didn't last long. She sends me a JPEG and I'm detecting some pride in how she's chatting. I'm thinking it's one of those "I look good now" things, having had such an experience a year before.
Well, while the girl I crossed paths with had lost at least fifty pounds and looked freaking cute as hell, this was not the case with the liar. She was frowning, yet again, and had maybe lost a couple of pound recently after putting on another thirty since the photo she gave me when the cat was let out of the bag was taken.
She asks me if I think she looks better. I respond, "No, if anything you look worse. Would it kill you to smile?" And of course she blames me for making her feel bad. Insensitive as hell on my part, maybe, no, fuck that, yes, very and I'm glad. Old wounds don't like to be picked open, much less so with a rusty fishhook. It didn't help that my job (not the one I had when I met her. I got screwed out of that when being twisted became terrorism post 9-11) was turning me into an alcoholic at the time. I got plastered as hell that night.
It's always best to face down your issues in order to learn from them. I've been ready for years to post-process that whole debacle and see what is to be gained from it, just never really found myself that bored until I was stuck with two weeks of recovery from surgery and having my memory jogged by testing my old IM accounts and such told me it was a good time. And she had a unique enough name to make a Google search sound promising.
While I harbor resentment and ill-will toward her because I'm sure I'm not the only one she's treated like this, I'm not going to reveal her name here to save headaches. She'll know who she is and I doubt she'll ever read this. I'm not writing it for her.
A Google search turned up her Myspace blog and her entire Myspace page merely a click after that. I'd never forget the name and I'd never forget that soulless face no matter how hard I try. She's of the group of people I half-jokingly refer to as Pumpkins. He face carries the shape and expression characteristics of a typical Jack-O-Lantern, with the lack of a neck being the most garish characteristic.
A look at her blog page showed there was an aftershock to this quake, namely, her age. I did the math when it didn't look right. Uh oh, she was non only not almost 18, she wasn't 16, either. She was barely 15 when we "met" (never did meet face to face).
Her blog went back three years. That's quite a window into a person's soul.
There's poetry on the page. She's not a bad poet, but knowing what extra I do makes bullshit real easy to spot.
Here we have it, dishing about school, growing up, moving out, work, relationships and then the excuses and anger start flying with "let's just be friends" as the catalyst. She alienates her entire target audience in one fell-swoop just because she somehow thinks not being a Size Zero is worse than being a depressed basket-case who probably sucks every ounce of happinesss out of the room upon entry. And no eyes look good without a smile.
"Let's just be friends" means get your shit together and we'll talk. Until then, I'm waiting in the wings. If you follow that with what she did, it's your own damn fault. What gets me is she thinks a boob job is going to fix her problems, but is too self-righteous to consider it. She needs to move that evaluation up a foot or four to her head.
Almost a year later she posts lamenting about some fling with a guy who was drunk and searching for a place to park his Peter Griffin, throwing in that she swings both ways, which, she implies, goes without saying. News to me. Reminds me, fishing seasons starts soon. I'm seeing a pattern. She's banging the guy for half the week, flips out on him, blames it on depression and then wonders why he doesn't show back up. I feel bad for the dude. He didn't know what he was getting into.
And again with more of the excuses about how he doesn't like her because she's intimidating him sexually and isn't a skinny supermodel. I bet his actual words were "fat and scary".
She goes on to complain about how guys can't just like her for who she is. Yeah, I've experienced that first-hand and it's very self-explanatory. She talks about how she must be okay because she's okay enough to bone, overlooking the fact the guy wasn't sober once during their brief relationship. Then she complains about mind games. Oh the irony. Karma's a bitch.
She concludes that entry with an open "screw you" to all men. Well, at least she can still munch rug, but I'm sure the Blood Alcohol Content is really no different.
Things get deeper later. She talks about suicidal thoughts and claims she's never been suicidal. Either she's lying about that or she's lying about this being any different from any other time she's almost killed herself.
Another post and she's talking about loving someone with all her hear and then, in the same run-on sentence, bashes him. "Let's Just Be Friends!" again... maybe he's waiting for her to drop a couple hundred pounds in hopes her hormones won't still be all fucked up afterward?
Another post she's talking about attracting perverts. Hate to break it to her, but when a guy worships the ground you walk on solely because of a biological problem you possess, that's a perversion. The FA type aren't too fringe to have their own CSI episode, but Feeders are and that fetish is basically torture and murder with different packaging.
Another post and she's trying to convince herself she's a great person... just keep telling yourself that.
New years mean new goals and she's got some. I hope it works. I only require seven years bad luck.
Next post she's playing What if games. Those are never a useful way to spend time when they are about the past.
Interesting she keeps mentioning Oregon. That was where I wanted to eventually move to when I thought she was the punky cute girl in the photos she provided. Don't know if I ever mentioned that to her, though. Why would that be a sticking point anyway? Oregon isn't all that special. If you want special, there's Washington.
Moving on, it seems she's doing what I did once, allowing feelings for a member of the opposite sex influence faith. And she's treating this like it's her last chance at love and already planning life out. Oh I feel so bad for this guy.
... and like that she's a Jehovah's Witness. Better yeat, it sounds like they were made for each other.
This sounds like the ending to an absurdist parody story. However, if there's one thing I've learned about JWs, it's that becoming one is merely the beginning. Oh boy howdy is it ever! I think the rest would pretty much write itself, but it's kind of boringand I'm out of monkeys and typewriters. They went Union on me.
Eight years ago I met this girl whose mean trick totally backfired on her. She created a fake profile at some long-gone dating site just to mess with people. Well, to make a long story short, she falls in love with me and then has to come clean, saying she'll tell everyone how wonderful I am if I'll love her despite that pretty much being the worst I've ever been lied to in my life before or since.
I told her to beat it and she got all pissy saying I wouldn't love her for what was on the inside. That crutch of a line again... nothing good ever comes after that card's been played. Usually, it's a land-whale playing the card and playing the victim. This was one of those times, much to my dismay. I'll be honest, I was allowing this relationship to spark at long distance thinking I was getting involved with a cute, punky black-haired living-ball-of-energy chix0r who was an inch taller than me, aspired to work in a technical field, needed an escape from Pocatello, Idaho, was turning 18 in a few months and smiled all the time. And she liked me. Schweet! Even better, she was a Linkin Park fan without being all depressed and shit, unlike, for example, the mejority of Nirvana fans I've met.
What I got was not as advertised in any way. She was 16, four inches shorter, dark blonde hair, obviously never smiled, merely "liked computers" as opposed to being a code-poetess with a knack for databases, 180 pounds, and created the profile with malicious intent from the get-go. And all of that topped off with a voice deeper than mine. Wow, what a catch, right?
My heart was broken. It was bad enough she came clean in a letter in the mail, but to get a phone call not a minute after my mom handed me the letter and have to get a taste of the shit about to hit the fan made me want to cry out of frustration, anger and just plain having my heart broken. I remember it like it was minutes ago. She introduces herself and I hear the deep voice. Trying to be nice, I say "Wow, you _sound_ six feet tall." in my cheerful tone and not even regretting it the moment I realized what had happened, only moments before my heart broke and all my plans came to a shitty halt.
Well, to make a long story short, in the aftermath I got an attention-whoring mass-email some time later with her saying how she almost killed herself and feels like nobody likes her and all the usual garbage. As much as I have always held women in high esteem (sugar and spice, you know), my first thought was "try harder next time". It's really hard to make someone as happy-go-lucky as I was back then come to view someone as little more than the water and carbon from which the overwhelming majority of their living body is made--but she managed to do exactly that.
Well, some time later, as I'm working on the computer I was using during that whole thing, up pops an AOL IM window with her at the other end. I play nice because I'm really tired. Didn't last long. She sends me a JPEG and I'm detecting some pride in how she's chatting. I'm thinking it's one of those "I look good now" things, having had such an experience a year before.
Well, while the girl I crossed paths with had lost at least fifty pounds and looked freaking cute as hell, this was not the case with the liar. She was frowning, yet again, and had maybe lost a couple of pound recently after putting on another thirty since the photo she gave me when the cat was let out of the bag was taken.
She asks me if I think she looks better. I respond, "No, if anything you look worse. Would it kill you to smile?" And of course she blames me for making her feel bad. Insensitive as hell on my part, maybe, no, fuck that, yes, very and I'm glad. Old wounds don't like to be picked open, much less so with a rusty fishhook. It didn't help that my job (not the one I had when I met her. I got screwed out of that when being twisted became terrorism post 9-11) was turning me into an alcoholic at the time. I got plastered as hell that night.
It's always best to face down your issues in order to learn from them. I've been ready for years to post-process that whole debacle and see what is to be gained from it, just never really found myself that bored until I was stuck with two weeks of recovery from surgery and having my memory jogged by testing my old IM accounts and such told me it was a good time. And she had a unique enough name to make a Google search sound promising.
While I harbor resentment and ill-will toward her because I'm sure I'm not the only one she's treated like this, I'm not going to reveal her name here to save headaches. She'll know who she is and I doubt she'll ever read this. I'm not writing it for her.
A Google search turned up her Myspace blog and her entire Myspace page merely a click after that. I'd never forget the name and I'd never forget that soulless face no matter how hard I try. She's of the group of people I half-jokingly refer to as Pumpkins. He face carries the shape and expression characteristics of a typical Jack-O-Lantern, with the lack of a neck being the most garish characteristic.
A look at her blog page showed there was an aftershock to this quake, namely, her age. I did the math when it didn't look right. Uh oh, she was non only not almost 18, she wasn't 16, either. She was barely 15 when we "met" (never did meet face to face).
Her blog went back three years. That's quite a window into a person's soul.
There's poetry on the page. She's not a bad poet, but knowing what extra I do makes bullshit real easy to spot.
Here we have it, dishing about school, growing up, moving out, work, relationships and then the excuses and anger start flying with "let's just be friends" as the catalyst. She alienates her entire target audience in one fell-swoop just because she somehow thinks not being a Size Zero is worse than being a depressed basket-case who probably sucks every ounce of happinesss out of the room upon entry. And no eyes look good without a smile.
"Let's just be friends" means get your shit together and we'll talk. Until then, I'm waiting in the wings. If you follow that with what she did, it's your own damn fault. What gets me is she thinks a boob job is going to fix her problems, but is too self-righteous to consider it. She needs to move that evaluation up a foot or four to her head.
Almost a year later she posts lamenting about some fling with a guy who was drunk and searching for a place to park his Peter Griffin, throwing in that she swings both ways, which, she implies, goes without saying. News to me. Reminds me, fishing seasons starts soon. I'm seeing a pattern. She's banging the guy for half the week, flips out on him, blames it on depression and then wonders why he doesn't show back up. I feel bad for the dude. He didn't know what he was getting into.
And again with more of the excuses about how he doesn't like her because she's intimidating him sexually and isn't a skinny supermodel. I bet his actual words were "fat and scary".
She goes on to complain about how guys can't just like her for who she is. Yeah, I've experienced that first-hand and it's very self-explanatory. She talks about how she must be okay because she's okay enough to bone, overlooking the fact the guy wasn't sober once during their brief relationship. Then she complains about mind games. Oh the irony. Karma's a bitch.
She concludes that entry with an open "screw you" to all men. Well, at least she can still munch rug, but I'm sure the Blood Alcohol Content is really no different.
Things get deeper later. She talks about suicidal thoughts and claims she's never been suicidal. Either she's lying about that or she's lying about this being any different from any other time she's almost killed herself.
Another post and she's talking about loving someone with all her hear and then, in the same run-on sentence, bashes him. "Let's Just Be Friends!" again... maybe he's waiting for her to drop a couple hundred pounds in hopes her hormones won't still be all fucked up afterward?
Another post she's talking about attracting perverts. Hate to break it to her, but when a guy worships the ground you walk on solely because of a biological problem you possess, that's a perversion. The FA type aren't too fringe to have their own CSI episode, but Feeders are and that fetish is basically torture and murder with different packaging.
Another post and she's trying to convince herself she's a great person... just keep telling yourself that.
New years mean new goals and she's got some. I hope it works. I only require seven years bad luck.
Next post she's playing What if games. Those are never a useful way to spend time when they are about the past.
Interesting she keeps mentioning Oregon. That was where I wanted to eventually move to when I thought she was the punky cute girl in the photos she provided. Don't know if I ever mentioned that to her, though. Why would that be a sticking point anyway? Oregon isn't all that special. If you want special, there's Washington.
Moving on, it seems she's doing what I did once, allowing feelings for a member of the opposite sex influence faith. And she's treating this like it's her last chance at love and already planning life out. Oh I feel so bad for this guy.
... and like that she's a Jehovah's Witness. Better yeat, it sounds like they were made for each other.
This sounds like the ending to an absurdist parody story. However, if there's one thing I've learned about JWs, it's that becoming one is merely the beginning. Oh boy howdy is it ever! I think the rest would pretty much write itself, but it's kind of boringand I'm out of monkeys and typewriters. They went Union on me.
Life is pain or something
I'm sidelined. Holy crap. I thought my scabs were started yesterday, but no such luck. The pain medicine basically does nothing and I'm running on two hours sleep. I can't even nap so I'm working on computers as usual.
I finished the laptop I have been working on for my Dad. I can say entirely without ego that it's the finest machine I've built. It will serve him well. It's not every day you can kill a clan of ninjas and check your email with the same device.
Right now, I have a PDF reader and the Maintenance manual for my Tecra M7 open on my C840's UXGA screen to figure out how to get it apart to do the thermal compound right the second time around (first time being the factory).
Well I'll be damned. No freaking thermal compound left on the dies of either the CPU or GPU to speak of. I'll fix this.
While I've got the system open, I'm going to get some data on the VRAM chips to see exactly what the hell they are rated for: SAMSUNG K4N56163QG-ZC2A
According to Samsung, themselves, the chips are GDDR2 and are rated for 350MHz. Really? I've had them running 418,5MHz. I got some serious creampuffs here. Each one is 512 megabits. Funny thing is it looks like I have four of them. That would be 256MB of VRAM, but I have 128MB. O RLY? I must delve deeper but not now.
I looked at the spot where my motherboard would have had the 3G MiniPCI-E slot and there was no card slot installed there, but the pads were present. That means I have another USB port available to me.
Interesting, another little discovery. I could replace the button panel to the left of my keyboard with the one from the Satellite R20 and have three more buttons if I were willing to tap directly into the wires. They'd normally control a CD, but I have no use for that. I'd like to have a button to activate a custom ThinkLight type device and one to activate the receiver for an Xbox controller installed inside the system. As for the third extra button, I don't know.
Now running Prime95 to seat the coolers and tune for undervolting. It is beyond gay that Intel decided to be dicks about undervolting. While I was able to take my Pentium M systems down far below the P-state 0 default voltage, the .95VDC of P-State 0 on my Core 2 Duo is the lowest selectable voltage. Dammit! What harm is there in a CPU lasting longer? I can understand not wanting people to overclock, but to artificially limit undervolting and the battery savings that comes with it? Stupid as hell, especially when I'm cranking away with no problems at 2GHz with .975V input.
I was glad to find out that the Tecra M7 really is built upside-down. While the motherboard is usually fastened to the bottom of the case, it's fastened to the top in this one. This is a good think because it means the crack in my case bottom can be remedied very easily. And I did check the composition of the case piece to find that it's AZ91D Magnesium alloy after all.
Friday, May 15, 2009
Obsession
I spent most of what little sleep time I had mentally working on the logic board for the sweet LCD monitor I picked up before my surgery. I'm convinced I can get it working again, but I'm unable to attempt it just yet because there's no way I can drive and there's no way I should be at the plant breathing fumes for any amount of time while remounting the chip I need to remount. I sure want to, though.
It all just sounds really appealing to me, fixing that panel and using it as my gaming monitor. I need a plan B just in case I can't get the logic board going, though. I don't have one yet.
It all just sounds really appealing to me, fixing that panel and using it as my gaming monitor. I need a plan B just in case I can't get the logic board going, though. I don't have one yet.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Micronaps
I remember when I used to carry a polyphasic sleep schedule out of necessity. It's definitely different when the drugs you are taking leave you dozing off while sitting up. I don't like falling asleep when I have a computer in my lap. It's even more startling when I find myself waking up from a seamless dream where I've been typing away only to wake up to a screen full of "d"s. Anyone who would dare drive while taking Roxicet is a damn fool and should be jailed.
This almost feels like Benadryl. I remember when that stuff was the only antihistamine that would work for me and having to trade the use of my mind for not feeling like I was going to die. Thank God for Zyrtec and then generic as Cetirizine and then Sam's Club for selling 500 pills of the stuff for under $30. Since then, I've never fallen asleep with a soldering iron in my hand.
My 10AM Roxicet dose hit pretty quickly despite my having eaten over a cup of the leftover alfredo bowties.
I've started taking my Glutamine capsules again. While it isn't doctor-ordered, I figure that the help I get from such a supplement when I work out is about the same as the help I need for regrowing pretty much any body tissue, expecially when I am almost entirely unable to eat meat right now. I take five grams of that twice a day, but only the capsules. They have a better chance of reaching my intestines before being broken open.
In other news, I've been experimenting with machine virtualization. I knew that having a dual-core machine would allow me to run programs like DOS Box, but what I didn't expect was Virtual PC 2007. All I had to do was turn on Virtualization in the Tecra M7's BIOS, download and install the free app and I was able to get DOS 7.10 (I think that's what WinME runs on top of) to install with Rise of the Triad and Blood running okay with the music turned off.
I'm stoked that I'll be able to run old programs like Autodesk Animator if I feel like it. This project has made the Dell laptop I wished to retain for just such things obsolete. Now I can sell that off without even missing it. What would be really amazing is to have Windows 3.11 or Linux running under Virtual PC.
I'm upgrading this machine to the full 4GB RAM it will take. I don't care if most of that fourth gigabyte will be lost to the 32-bit quirk, at today's prices it just doesn't matter. Looks like I'll be able to see almost 3.5GB anyway and that's fine.
I've learned a lot so far and I've had about half a dozen micronaps while writing this post.
This almost feels like Benadryl. I remember when that stuff was the only antihistamine that would work for me and having to trade the use of my mind for not feeling like I was going to die. Thank God for Zyrtec and then generic as Cetirizine and then Sam's Club for selling 500 pills of the stuff for under $30. Since then, I've never fallen asleep with a soldering iron in my hand.
My 10AM Roxicet dose hit pretty quickly despite my having eaten over a cup of the leftover alfredo bowties.
I've started taking my Glutamine capsules again. While it isn't doctor-ordered, I figure that the help I get from such a supplement when I work out is about the same as the help I need for regrowing pretty much any body tissue, expecially when I am almost entirely unable to eat meat right now. I take five grams of that twice a day, but only the capsules. They have a better chance of reaching my intestines before being broken open.
In other news, I've been experimenting with machine virtualization. I knew that having a dual-core machine would allow me to run programs like DOS Box, but what I didn't expect was Virtual PC 2007. All I had to do was turn on Virtualization in the Tecra M7's BIOS, download and install the free app and I was able to get DOS 7.10 (I think that's what WinME runs on top of) to install with Rise of the Triad and Blood running okay with the music turned off.
I'm stoked that I'll be able to run old programs like Autodesk Animator if I feel like it. This project has made the Dell laptop I wished to retain for just such things obsolete. Now I can sell that off without even missing it. What would be really amazing is to have Windows 3.11 or Linux running under Virtual PC.
I'm upgrading this machine to the full 4GB RAM it will take. I don't care if most of that fourth gigabyte will be lost to the 32-bit quirk, at today's prices it just doesn't matter. Looks like I'll be able to see almost 3.5GB anyway and that's fine.
I've learned a lot so far and I've had about half a dozen micronaps while writing this post.
Two Days Later
I now know how important it is to stay ahead of the pain. I woke up half an hour after I should have taken another dose of Roxicet and was nearly whimpering I hurt so badly. My nose was clogged with blood so I had been breathing out of my mouth. It's a grand thing we had the humidifier because that's the only thing that kept me from having a tongue of cotton.
I don't know whether my scabs are starting to come off early or not, but I'm hoping it's just transient pain. I can deal with that. I don't want to end up bleeding from an artery.
I branched out a bit with my food intake, eating some bowtie pasta with Alfredo sauce my wife made for dinner. I ate that around 2AM when the noodles had softened a bit more. I ate it with some sea salt. I'm really big on sea salt for the reason that the salt has some anti-infective properties that cheap table salt doesn't have. Something about the ions. I don't remember what.
I don't know whether my scabs are starting to come off early or not, but I'm hoping it's just transient pain. I can deal with that. I don't want to end up bleeding from an artery.
I branched out a bit with my food intake, eating some bowtie pasta with Alfredo sauce my wife made for dinner. I ate that around 2AM when the noodles had softened a bit more. I ate it with some sea salt. I'm really big on sea salt for the reason that the salt has some anti-infective properties that cheap table salt doesn't have. Something about the ions. I don't remember what.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
I'm Doing Science And I'm Still Alive
The moment I woke up, I was shaking uncontrollably. It had been explained to me that waking up from a hernia operation or orthopedic surgery was way different from what I was about to face. They used Diprivan to knock me out so I've had that stuff three times now. In addition, I was given Fentanyl. That made me loopy as hell and I was chatty in the OR before I got my Diprivan and was out like a light.
And oh holy hell did I hurt. Swallowing was terror and I was bleeding from my nose as they said I would. I remember having Strep real bad ten years back and that's what the pain where my tonsils used to be feels like. There was no way Lortab would be enough for this. I was relieved when I found out I was given Roxicet (liquid Oxycontin) for this. Even though that stuff did little more than knock me flat when I had my hernia surgery, it's been a blessing this trip.
While I did have my Vasectomy when I was under, there's no pain at all there so far. It's all in my throat.
My tonsils were sneaky. They were a lot bigger than they seemed and the surgeon commented on how full of infection the left one was. I have pictures, but I'll spare my readers the gory details.
I'm now seven hours post-op, I had to go easy on my water intake to prevent so many bathroom trips and the stress that goes with it. I've eaten applesauce and popsicles so far. I think I'll branch out a little bit later to something like mashed potatoes with sea salt.
Extra: It turns out the disc they gave me has videos on it, not just photos. Wow.
And oh holy hell did I hurt. Swallowing was terror and I was bleeding from my nose as they said I would. I remember having Strep real bad ten years back and that's what the pain where my tonsils used to be feels like. There was no way Lortab would be enough for this. I was relieved when I found out I was given Roxicet (liquid Oxycontin) for this. Even though that stuff did little more than knock me flat when I had my hernia surgery, it's been a blessing this trip.
While I did have my Vasectomy when I was under, there's no pain at all there so far. It's all in my throat.
My tonsils were sneaky. They were a lot bigger than they seemed and the surgeon commented on how full of infection the left one was. I have pictures, but I'll spare my readers the gory details.
I'm now seven hours post-op, I had to go easy on my water intake to prevent so many bathroom trips and the stress that goes with it. I've eaten applesauce and popsicles so far. I think I'll branch out a little bit later to something like mashed potatoes with sea salt.
Extra: It turns out the disc they gave me has videos on it, not just photos. Wow.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Going Under The Knife
It's time to play Human Pincushion with your host, Monkeyboy!
I get knocked out tomorrow morning for a total of four surgeries all in one shot. It's a QVC deal here, folks. It's not just a tonsillectomy! It's also a septoplasty! But wait there's more. Act now and receive sinus surgery and a vasectomy absolutely free*
*not really!
To follow: Two weeks of hell.
I get knocked out tomorrow morning for a total of four surgeries all in one shot. It's a QVC deal here, folks. It's not just a tonsillectomy! It's also a septoplasty! But wait there's more. Act now and receive sinus surgery and a vasectomy absolutely free*
*not really!
To follow: Two weeks of hell.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Good Enough Computing
There was a discussion on Slashdot a while back about something some writer called "Good Enough Computing". I just found it today. Skimming through the comments, I couldn't help but think about my own predictions of the same nature about a decade ago.
I've never seen a need to run on the bleeding edge of technology. I don't even know what it's like to own a brand new computer of the current generation because the last time I experienced the current generation as it was happening, it didn't stay fresh for long and this was in 1995.
Maybe I'm an elitist of sorts? That's entirely possible. It was only a year ago that Doom was still my favorite game and that was made in 1993 or something. As of last week, my new favorite is Half Life 2, which is a decade newer. Doom is a distant memory as it should be.
Back to hardware, it was in 1997 when I received my first taste of Windows 95 that I realized multimedia was going to be a big thing for computers. Videos under Windows 3.1 were just plain ridiculous, even on my family's Pentium 60 PC. When I ran the Goodtimes demo video under Windows 95 for the first time, I was absolutely floored to see it running at better than VHS quality with stereo sound--on a 486 SX 33.
Two years later, I found out about MP3 and started ripping and encoding my own tracks. My 2 gig hard drive was no longer enough. I wouldn't reach the point of "enough space" until 2005 when I built a 750GB RAID5 array. It never filled up and the disks are due for replacement.
As for CPU power, I happened upon a wonderful gem back in 2001. This was my first taste of Dual CPUs. Granted, I had built the system a year before, but I was running a single CPU OS on it so half the power of the rig was going to waste. While each CPU was only running at 550MHz, I could still multitask like crazy, using an entire CPU to decode video while another was used for PhotoShop or whatever.
I've always tended more toward portable computing than deskbound computing so most desktop technology is of little interest to me. It was the advent of multicore CPUs in mobile systems that caught my attention. When they became mainstream, I set my countdown. I figured it would be three years before I could get ahold of an off-lease system that matched what I wanted. I had one in two.
So yeah, the system I have now is my personal Good Enough.
I've had it almost two weeks and haven't talked about it here yet so here goes.
Toshiba Tecra M7
While I could run down the spec sheet list and call it a day, I'm not going to do that. I'd rather talk about why each spec is important for me.
Core 2 Duo T7200 - The part number means shit to most people. This requires a bit more explanation than the later stuff so I'll just dive right in. The Tecra M7 was originally released with Core Duo CPUs. These were good, but finding one with the Core 2 Duo meant it was about a year newer as I was getting the refreshed edition of the Tecra M7 so it was like getting something for nothing, but that was only the start of it.
Compared to the Core Duo, the Core 2 Duo is 20% faster at the same clock speed and includes 64-bit support. While I may never use the 64-bit stuff, it's nice to have around. That 20% thing is important, though, beyond another case of getting something for nothing.
Getting into the numbers, the T7200 is a 2.0GHz chip. That's as far as most people go in checking the numbers. The Core Duo of the same speed is the T2500. Other than the differences I discussed above, there's another trick--twice as much L2 cache memory. While the Core Duo carried 2MB of L2, the T7200 carries 4MB. More L2 cache is never a bad thing, especially when it's being shared between two cores. Something for nothing again.
Another something for nothing came along in unexpected form when I found that the CPU would undervolt very well, maintaining perfect operation down to 1.0V at full speed, down .16V from stock. While it doesn't help my battery that much, it keeps heat down and that's always good.
That's basically it for the CPU side of things. Now for the other stuff.
When I started looking for an upgrade, I knew I wanted a convertible notebook/tablet with a good 3D accelerator. That narrowed the field a lot since most tablets use integrated graphics. I had looked at the Tecra M4 model, but there were two vastly different GPUs found in those and getting the sellers to differentiate was like pulling teeth. Even the high-performance one was a sneaky bastard, claiming to be a 6600 while it was clocked so far down from stock as to necessitate a dedicated TE (Toshiba Edition) trim level.
The Tecra M7 was the most recent tablet available from Toshiba so I looked into it. It had two different video options as well, but they were real easy to spot since one was integrated while the other was a dedicated Nvidia 128MB Quadro solution based on the GeForce 7300. I hoped it would overclock and it did, by 50% on the core and 25% on the memory. While it wasn't enough to push it to mid-range performance, it was a decent boost, allowing me 2024 3DMarks in 3DMark 2005 and 10310 3DMarks in 3DMark2001SE.
So why dedicated 3D graphics? Because I'm never giving up my dream of making a video game, that's why. I need a 3D chip with enough power to allow me to design stuff. While I may not play many games, I design stuff.
The display was important. The panel in my Tecra M2 was of the variety I can barely stand. When a black screen doesn't look black and starts to go light grey at the bottom, that's a bad sign. The Dell C840 I tricked out does not suffer from this, but IPS panels are hard to come by in a laptop. The happy medium? A panel like the one in my Alienware M9700. I don't know what it is about that thing, but it looks good. Fortunately, the panel in the M7 looks the same other than having the pen surface in front of it. It's more than good enough for my needs.
CardBus versus ExpressCard - The M7 has a CardBus slot while other systems based on PCI Express use the ExpressCard interface. This is fortunate because I have use for CardBus still while I don't really have use for ExpressCard. I need to be able to read CompactFlash cards, for one.
Speaking of card readers, the one on the M7 is great. Where my M2 had an SD slot, the M7 will accept SD, XD and Memory Stick. The MS feature is important since that's what my digital camera takes.
What else? The system has a metal case, which I absolutely must have, a great keyboard and a SATA hard disk. SATA is important since the PATA drives are dwindling in number and won't be available soon (I'm talking about five years from now).
I was looking for a system I could work to death like I did my old T1850 that was made in 1992, bought by me in 1997 and only put out to pasture when the greyscale display became too big of a handicap. Well, that and the lack of a sound chip... and networking... and expansion card slots. This one has no such limitations and it's a lot faster than the T1850. How much faster? Well, the T1850 was tested with Norton Sysinfo under DOS back in the day and scored 16.6. I seem to recall a score of 1 was the speed of an 8086 machine or something like that. After the CPU upgrade to a 486slc25, the system scored something like a 42.
How do we compare that to a modern system? You run the freaking program. A little bit of abandonware searching yielded a copy of Norton Utilities 8 for DOS. While I do have a legal copy somewhere, this was faster for me. A bit of USB floppy disk magic later, this was the result:
Yes, that says 5039. The Tecra M7 is 5039 times as fast as the base system. Notice at the bottom how the frequency isn't even showing up correctly. Even with this CPU throttled all the way back, it's still off that scale at 1GHz. Even more remarkable, this is all on one core. The second core isn't even visible under DOS. If it were, that's a score over 10,000.
I swear I heard guffaws of mechanical laughter when the system finished booting from that floppy, which took as long as it takes the system to start Vista from the hard disk if that tells you anything.
This is most definitely my "Good Enough" point and I'm sure I'll stick with it until the hinge on the M7 breaks and I can't find a replacement. That's the only weak point I can see.
Using machines way beyond two or even three lifetimes (lifetime for a laptop = lease term, which is standardized to three years) requires a bit more attention to detail than the usual approach of buying new. I've already discussed some of that within my search for the ideal system, but it's time to lay it all bare here.
Q: What kind of system has the best chance of lasting ten years?
A: I'll tell you with a hyphen list of stuff to look for.
- Metal case
Plastic, whether glass-reinforced or otherwise, just sucks for longevity. I've done extensive epoxy work on a Compaq LTE/286, Toshiba T1800/T1850, Toshiba 300CT/320CT and a few others. Plastic is fine for a couple of years until the brass inserts your case screws grab onto start pulling out of the holes. The only exception I've seen for the plastic casing rule involves Lenovo and the Roll Cage used for the Thinkpads. Those have metal in all the right places.
- Strong Hinges
Nothing defeats the purpose of a laptop faster than a display that won't stay where you put it. If you open your display, start typing and the display rotates further back with each keystroke, you've got a problem. From another angle, there are also those systems which have the strong hinges, but lack the casing to back them up. One such system was the Toshiba Portege 300 series, which required the hinge screws be tightened on a regular basis to avoid starting a crack in the mounts that would quickly lead to the hinge on the left side completely breaking away. You can't have strong hinges without a strong case. You need metal. Granted, some systems with plastic casing still use a cast Magnesium alloy piece for the hinge mounts.
- Sturdy motherboard mounting
Here's another one the goes hand-in-hand with a metal case. If you've got a metal case, you don't have to worry about your motherboard flexing. Nobody picks their laptop up the perfect way every time. If you can't hold it by one corner without damaging it over time, it's not designed for human beings. I'm talking to Fujitsu, for one. I ended up with a pair of S7010D systems with the same problem, which a search showed was caused by picking the system up with one hand at the left corner. There's no way in hell this should matter for a sub-4lb system so why did it? Plastic case. The case screws were even the kind you see in a kid's toy. What? They didn't have money for the brass inserts?
- Aftermarket batteries
Unless the battery pack in your machine is being used in a lot of other machines, you're not likely to find a replacement when you need it. Even the manufacturer is unlikely to be making batteries for your system five years after it was introduced. Lithium Ion batteries start dying the moment they're born, whether you use them or not. After three years, your battery pack is unlikely to be working at all. I see this with my Alienware from 2006. The battery pack in that will give a charge life of twenty minutes. It was never really meant for unplugged use, made perfectly clear by the flashing orange power switch LED when unplugged. This is to be expected for a system that was designed for a purpose that drains the entire pack in less than an hour when used at full potential.
You can't get an aftermarket pack for the Alienware system. Why? Because it's really an Arima W830 that was customized and sold by a few boutique vendors like Alienware for $4000 each in numbers that probably total 100,000 or so, far short of the millions that would cause a third-party battery maker take notice.
If you want to see a good example of a battery pack that just wouldn't die, look at the PA2487U from Toshiba. The 1996 vintage 430CDT I bought back in 1999 for $500 used this model of pack and when I bought a 2805-S603 at the ass-end of 2001, it used the same pack in updated form. I don't think that was the last system to use it, either.
- Drive interface that won't go obsolete for a long time
My T1850 used a 120MB 2.5" IDE hard disk that was something like 19mm thick. While IDE lasted for a long time (even the 2005 Tecra M2 used it), the T1850 was crippled by the fact it couldn't take a drive other than that 120MB drive.
While we have no such limitations today unless you count the 128GB/137BB limitation thing, the IDE interface itself is marked for extinction. SATA is the new standard and it's mainstream. If you want to find hard disk storage in the future, go for a SATA system or be prepared to invest in solid-state storage to limp along. SATA is going to be around for a very long time. IDE went through seven generations after being standardized in 1994. SATA 3.0 is only just starting to show up.
- Spare part stockpile
When you have a system you really like, you want to keep it useful. Start collecting parts when they show up cheap. Buy a couple of new keyboards to keep on-hand. You never know when you may face a spill, lost keycap or just worn out keys. Buy a couple of hinge assemblies and display cables if you can. Maybe buy an extra display to keep around for when your backlight tube starts to wear out. Keep a few compatible power supplies around. Don't bother with the aftermarket ones. Chances are your manufacturer uses the same power supply for a lot of different models so you should be able to get the real deal for only a few dollars more than the aftermarket junk.
- Do it right the second time
Mass-production of anything requires the cutting of corners in the name of efficiency. This is made painfully obvious in the assembly of cooling systems. If you've got a CPU that's designed to take a top temperature of 200F and the cheap, foamy, uneven thermal pad between it and the heatsink will keep it under this limit, the manufacturer won't care as long as it will outlast the warranty. Same with the GPU, too. What's the solution? Better thermal compound. Get some high-grade compound and use that between your CPU and heatsink. Since mobile CPUs generally have the bare silicon die exposed, good thermal compound is even more important due to the smaller surface area.
- Get your hands dirty
When your warranty is gone, there's nothing stopping you from opening your system and taking care of business. Clean the dust out once a year or so, tighten all the internal screws and re-seat all of the connectors.
- Body Doubles
If your machine supports docking and you can stand using it that way, got for it. Using external gear will save wear on your keyboard, backlight and optical drive, which will also reduce stress on your power conversion circuitry by not having to run so many components.
I've never seen a need to run on the bleeding edge of technology. I don't even know what it's like to own a brand new computer of the current generation because the last time I experienced the current generation as it was happening, it didn't stay fresh for long and this was in 1995.
Maybe I'm an elitist of sorts? That's entirely possible. It was only a year ago that Doom was still my favorite game and that was made in 1993 or something. As of last week, my new favorite is Half Life 2, which is a decade newer. Doom is a distant memory as it should be.
Back to hardware, it was in 1997 when I received my first taste of Windows 95 that I realized multimedia was going to be a big thing for computers. Videos under Windows 3.1 were just plain ridiculous, even on my family's Pentium 60 PC. When I ran the Goodtimes demo video under Windows 95 for the first time, I was absolutely floored to see it running at better than VHS quality with stereo sound--on a 486 SX 33.
Two years later, I found out about MP3 and started ripping and encoding my own tracks. My 2 gig hard drive was no longer enough. I wouldn't reach the point of "enough space" until 2005 when I built a 750GB RAID5 array. It never filled up and the disks are due for replacement.
As for CPU power, I happened upon a wonderful gem back in 2001. This was my first taste of Dual CPUs. Granted, I had built the system a year before, but I was running a single CPU OS on it so half the power of the rig was going to waste. While each CPU was only running at 550MHz, I could still multitask like crazy, using an entire CPU to decode video while another was used for PhotoShop or whatever.
I've always tended more toward portable computing than deskbound computing so most desktop technology is of little interest to me. It was the advent of multicore CPUs in mobile systems that caught my attention. When they became mainstream, I set my countdown. I figured it would be three years before I could get ahold of an off-lease system that matched what I wanted. I had one in two.
So yeah, the system I have now is my personal Good Enough.
I've had it almost two weeks and haven't talked about it here yet so here goes.
Toshiba Tecra M7
While I could run down the spec sheet list and call it a day, I'm not going to do that. I'd rather talk about why each spec is important for me.
Core 2 Duo T7200 - The part number means shit to most people. This requires a bit more explanation than the later stuff so I'll just dive right in. The Tecra M7 was originally released with Core Duo CPUs. These were good, but finding one with the Core 2 Duo meant it was about a year newer as I was getting the refreshed edition of the Tecra M7 so it was like getting something for nothing, but that was only the start of it.
Compared to the Core Duo, the Core 2 Duo is 20% faster at the same clock speed and includes 64-bit support. While I may never use the 64-bit stuff, it's nice to have around. That 20% thing is important, though, beyond another case of getting something for nothing.
Getting into the numbers, the T7200 is a 2.0GHz chip. That's as far as most people go in checking the numbers. The Core Duo of the same speed is the T2500. Other than the differences I discussed above, there's another trick--twice as much L2 cache memory. While the Core Duo carried 2MB of L2, the T7200 carries 4MB. More L2 cache is never a bad thing, especially when it's being shared between two cores. Something for nothing again.
Another something for nothing came along in unexpected form when I found that the CPU would undervolt very well, maintaining perfect operation down to 1.0V at full speed, down .16V from stock. While it doesn't help my battery that much, it keeps heat down and that's always good.
That's basically it for the CPU side of things. Now for the other stuff.
When I started looking for an upgrade, I knew I wanted a convertible notebook/tablet with a good 3D accelerator. That narrowed the field a lot since most tablets use integrated graphics. I had looked at the Tecra M4 model, but there were two vastly different GPUs found in those and getting the sellers to differentiate was like pulling teeth. Even the high-performance one was a sneaky bastard, claiming to be a 6600 while it was clocked so far down from stock as to necessitate a dedicated TE (Toshiba Edition) trim level.
The Tecra M7 was the most recent tablet available from Toshiba so I looked into it. It had two different video options as well, but they were real easy to spot since one was integrated while the other was a dedicated Nvidia 128MB Quadro solution based on the GeForce 7300. I hoped it would overclock and it did, by 50% on the core and 25% on the memory. While it wasn't enough to push it to mid-range performance, it was a decent boost, allowing me 2024 3DMarks in 3DMark 2005 and 10310 3DMarks in 3DMark2001SE.
So why dedicated 3D graphics? Because I'm never giving up my dream of making a video game, that's why. I need a 3D chip with enough power to allow me to design stuff. While I may not play many games, I design stuff.
The display was important. The panel in my Tecra M2 was of the variety I can barely stand. When a black screen doesn't look black and starts to go light grey at the bottom, that's a bad sign. The Dell C840 I tricked out does not suffer from this, but IPS panels are hard to come by in a laptop. The happy medium? A panel like the one in my Alienware M9700. I don't know what it is about that thing, but it looks good. Fortunately, the panel in the M7 looks the same other than having the pen surface in front of it. It's more than good enough for my needs.
CardBus versus ExpressCard - The M7 has a CardBus slot while other systems based on PCI Express use the ExpressCard interface. This is fortunate because I have use for CardBus still while I don't really have use for ExpressCard. I need to be able to read CompactFlash cards, for one.
Speaking of card readers, the one on the M7 is great. Where my M2 had an SD slot, the M7 will accept SD, XD and Memory Stick. The MS feature is important since that's what my digital camera takes.
What else? The system has a metal case, which I absolutely must have, a great keyboard and a SATA hard disk. SATA is important since the PATA drives are dwindling in number and won't be available soon (I'm talking about five years from now).
I was looking for a system I could work to death like I did my old T1850 that was made in 1992, bought by me in 1997 and only put out to pasture when the greyscale display became too big of a handicap. Well, that and the lack of a sound chip... and networking... and expansion card slots. This one has no such limitations and it's a lot faster than the T1850. How much faster? Well, the T1850 was tested with Norton Sysinfo under DOS back in the day and scored 16.6. I seem to recall a score of 1 was the speed of an 8086 machine or something like that. After the CPU upgrade to a 486slc25, the system scored something like a 42.
How do we compare that to a modern system? You run the freaking program. A little bit of abandonware searching yielded a copy of Norton Utilities 8 for DOS. While I do have a legal copy somewhere, this was faster for me. A bit of USB floppy disk magic later, this was the result:
Yes, that says 5039. The Tecra M7 is 5039 times as fast as the base system. Notice at the bottom how the frequency isn't even showing up correctly. Even with this CPU throttled all the way back, it's still off that scale at 1GHz. Even more remarkable, this is all on one core. The second core isn't even visible under DOS. If it were, that's a score over 10,000.
I swear I heard guffaws of mechanical laughter when the system finished booting from that floppy, which took as long as it takes the system to start Vista from the hard disk if that tells you anything.
This is most definitely my "Good Enough" point and I'm sure I'll stick with it until the hinge on the M7 breaks and I can't find a replacement. That's the only weak point I can see.
Using machines way beyond two or even three lifetimes (lifetime for a laptop = lease term, which is standardized to three years) requires a bit more attention to detail than the usual approach of buying new. I've already discussed some of that within my search for the ideal system, but it's time to lay it all bare here.
Q: What kind of system has the best chance of lasting ten years?
A: I'll tell you with a hyphen list of stuff to look for.
- Metal case
Plastic, whether glass-reinforced or otherwise, just sucks for longevity. I've done extensive epoxy work on a Compaq LTE/286, Toshiba T1800/T1850, Toshiba 300CT/320CT and a few others. Plastic is fine for a couple of years until the brass inserts your case screws grab onto start pulling out of the holes. The only exception I've seen for the plastic casing rule involves Lenovo and the Roll Cage used for the Thinkpads. Those have metal in all the right places.
- Strong Hinges
Nothing defeats the purpose of a laptop faster than a display that won't stay where you put it. If you open your display, start typing and the display rotates further back with each keystroke, you've got a problem. From another angle, there are also those systems which have the strong hinges, but lack the casing to back them up. One such system was the Toshiba Portege 300 series, which required the hinge screws be tightened on a regular basis to avoid starting a crack in the mounts that would quickly lead to the hinge on the left side completely breaking away. You can't have strong hinges without a strong case. You need metal. Granted, some systems with plastic casing still use a cast Magnesium alloy piece for the hinge mounts.
- Sturdy motherboard mounting
Here's another one the goes hand-in-hand with a metal case. If you've got a metal case, you don't have to worry about your motherboard flexing. Nobody picks their laptop up the perfect way every time. If you can't hold it by one corner without damaging it over time, it's not designed for human beings. I'm talking to Fujitsu, for one. I ended up with a pair of S7010D systems with the same problem, which a search showed was caused by picking the system up with one hand at the left corner. There's no way in hell this should matter for a sub-4lb system so why did it? Plastic case. The case screws were even the kind you see in a kid's toy. What? They didn't have money for the brass inserts?
- Aftermarket batteries
Unless the battery pack in your machine is being used in a lot of other machines, you're not likely to find a replacement when you need it. Even the manufacturer is unlikely to be making batteries for your system five years after it was introduced. Lithium Ion batteries start dying the moment they're born, whether you use them or not. After three years, your battery pack is unlikely to be working at all. I see this with my Alienware from 2006. The battery pack in that will give a charge life of twenty minutes. It was never really meant for unplugged use, made perfectly clear by the flashing orange power switch LED when unplugged. This is to be expected for a system that was designed for a purpose that drains the entire pack in less than an hour when used at full potential.
You can't get an aftermarket pack for the Alienware system. Why? Because it's really an Arima W830 that was customized and sold by a few boutique vendors like Alienware for $4000 each in numbers that probably total 100,000 or so, far short of the millions that would cause a third-party battery maker take notice.
If you want to see a good example of a battery pack that just wouldn't die, look at the PA2487U from Toshiba. The 1996 vintage 430CDT I bought back in 1999 for $500 used this model of pack and when I bought a 2805-S603 at the ass-end of 2001, it used the same pack in updated form. I don't think that was the last system to use it, either.
- Drive interface that won't go obsolete for a long time
My T1850 used a 120MB 2.5" IDE hard disk that was something like 19mm thick. While IDE lasted for a long time (even the 2005 Tecra M2 used it), the T1850 was crippled by the fact it couldn't take a drive other than that 120MB drive.
While we have no such limitations today unless you count the 128GB/137BB limitation thing, the IDE interface itself is marked for extinction. SATA is the new standard and it's mainstream. If you want to find hard disk storage in the future, go for a SATA system or be prepared to invest in solid-state storage to limp along. SATA is going to be around for a very long time. IDE went through seven generations after being standardized in 1994. SATA 3.0 is only just starting to show up.
- Spare part stockpile
When you have a system you really like, you want to keep it useful. Start collecting parts when they show up cheap. Buy a couple of new keyboards to keep on-hand. You never know when you may face a spill, lost keycap or just worn out keys. Buy a couple of hinge assemblies and display cables if you can. Maybe buy an extra display to keep around for when your backlight tube starts to wear out. Keep a few compatible power supplies around. Don't bother with the aftermarket ones. Chances are your manufacturer uses the same power supply for a lot of different models so you should be able to get the real deal for only a few dollars more than the aftermarket junk.
- Do it right the second time
Mass-production of anything requires the cutting of corners in the name of efficiency. This is made painfully obvious in the assembly of cooling systems. If you've got a CPU that's designed to take a top temperature of 200F and the cheap, foamy, uneven thermal pad between it and the heatsink will keep it under this limit, the manufacturer won't care as long as it will outlast the warranty. Same with the GPU, too. What's the solution? Better thermal compound. Get some high-grade compound and use that between your CPU and heatsink. Since mobile CPUs generally have the bare silicon die exposed, good thermal compound is even more important due to the smaller surface area.
- Get your hands dirty
When your warranty is gone, there's nothing stopping you from opening your system and taking care of business. Clean the dust out once a year or so, tighten all the internal screws and re-seat all of the connectors.
- Body Doubles
If your machine supports docking and you can stand using it that way, got for it. Using external gear will save wear on your keyboard, backlight and optical drive, which will also reduce stress on your power conversion circuitry by not having to run so many components.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Please Execute My Dumb-Ass Sister
Enough family friendly shit. Plasma Lamp is going natural even if my family does read it.
I suck at math. Well, that's not entirely true; I'm good with it, but only to the extent that intuition provides enough accuracy. Everything is a fraction, even if it's x/1. My weakness is that my brand of mathematical skills just doesn't work when I'm often down to three digits to the right of the decimal point.
I believe high school did some semi-permanent damage in my case. While I was burning through Trigonometry in my Electronics courses in my Freshman year (without knowing what it was), my all-out math courses ended with Geometry. While I could get into the repetitive dartboard approach of the curriculum (80 show-your-work problems a day and pundits still ponder motives behind school shootings) or the fact that my Geometry teacher (yes, I mean you, wet-nurse Douchebag Randy) made the subject about as engaging as explosive diarrhea, suffice it to say I never did retain what little I learned in that class and was thoroughly and truly lost when the second half of the class was taught by a far better teacher (Yes, I mean you, Keith).
What I did remember was the title of this post. Granted, you're not going to find that form of the mnemonic in any textbook I haven't written (x=0), but I needed something less lame than "Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally" and came up with that one ten years before I learned I did, in fact, have a sister. Sorry, Sasha.
While I could do just fine in my field of work without taking my math skills to the next level, I'm not happy with that. I need to be dead-certain about the method to any kind of organized mayhem I'm exposed to on a regular basis or it eats away at me and I was recently burned by that exact thing last week so screw it, it's time.
Have I mentioned it irritates the shitjuice out of me that Douchebag Randy and my very awesome father-in-law share the same first name? No? Well it does.
I'm sure I'm being a little bit harsh, but half my thus-far lifetime later I've yet to meet a douchebag of similar calibre.
If I ever have to do a proof by hand, it'll be because there's a gun to my head. I've got computers to do that shit for me. While I can full understand long-division, being able to do a proof by hand is like being that flamboyant and dead-by-a-25-cent-bullet sword guy in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
I suck at math. Well, that's not entirely true; I'm good with it, but only to the extent that intuition provides enough accuracy. Everything is a fraction, even if it's x/1. My weakness is that my brand of mathematical skills just doesn't work when I'm often down to three digits to the right of the decimal point.
I believe high school did some semi-permanent damage in my case. While I was burning through Trigonometry in my Electronics courses in my Freshman year (without knowing what it was), my all-out math courses ended with Geometry. While I could get into the repetitive dartboard approach of the curriculum (80 show-your-work problems a day and pundits still ponder motives behind school shootings) or the fact that my Geometry teacher (yes, I mean you, wet-nurse Douchebag Randy) made the subject about as engaging as explosive diarrhea, suffice it to say I never did retain what little I learned in that class and was thoroughly and truly lost when the second half of the class was taught by a far better teacher (Yes, I mean you, Keith).
What I did remember was the title of this post. Granted, you're not going to find that form of the mnemonic in any textbook I haven't written (x=0), but I needed something less lame than "Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally" and came up with that one ten years before I learned I did, in fact, have a sister. Sorry, Sasha.
I'm still keeping it.
While I could do just fine in my field of work without taking my math skills to the next level, I'm not happy with that. I need to be dead-certain about the method to any kind of organized mayhem I'm exposed to on a regular basis or it eats away at me and I was recently burned by that exact thing last week so screw it, it's time.
Have I mentioned it irritates the shitjuice out of me that Douchebag Randy and my very awesome father-in-law share the same first name? No? Well it does.
I'm sure I'm being a little bit harsh, but half my thus-far lifetime later I've yet to meet a douchebag of similar calibre.
If I ever have to do a proof by hand, it'll be because there's a gun to my head. I've got computers to do that shit for me. While I can full understand long-division, being able to do a proof by hand is like being that flamboyant and dead-by-a-25-cent-bullet sword guy in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Friday, February 20, 2009
FARK.com - A Fine Howdy For ADHD
I've been a Fark.com participant since 2002 as user Camaroash. Today, when a Photoshop thread about Toys for ADHD kids evolved from pictures of one-piece Lego sets and sedatives (some were great, like the jet-powered go-kart with the machine gun mounted on front) to a mature discussion about the condition, I was 24hr silenced for threadjacking/off-topic posting.
This would be understandable if it weren't for the fact that ADHD was the topic and that's what several members and I were discussing (hyperfocus mode, specifically). I figured it would be fine as I've never read every post in a FARK Photoshop thread, personally. I scroll to the pictures. I figured anyones else not wanting to read what we were talking about would do the same.
Not good enough, apparently. And with that, the thread was trimmed from 92 posts to 43. Well... fuck.
I think some random moderator felt threatened that we were talking about the low grades-high IQ/test scores anomaly. I understand that. Nobody wants to be told that existing isn't enough to make them special by any measure. Sometimes the hand you were dealt becomes an advantage after being a huge disadvantage for a very long time. Some people sing, others build stuff.
FARK is for man-bites-dog news, flamewars and being at the gym in 26 minutes, not deep discussions. My neglect of that seemingly universal fact is my greatest folly so far in my adult life. I feel fortunate that my greatest folly is not only so benign, but so reversible.
If there's one thing FARK was good for, it was variety--perfect for the ever-changing interests of ADD-folk and the like-minded individuals who became participants as a result. Talk about alienating your target audience. I won't be back.
Maybe FARKers like beehphy, posicat, karatekitten13, rynthetyn, ptelg, PhoenixInFlames, Hat Madder and vcoalition would like to form an alliance with the Plasma Lamp to find or start a board where we can discuss such things without being grounded? Maybe not? I'd rather spend my time working on the iMac G4 display to DVI monitor conversion than starting a message board, actually.
This would be understandable if it weren't for the fact that ADHD was the topic and that's what several members and I were discussing (hyperfocus mode, specifically). I figured it would be fine as I've never read every post in a FARK Photoshop thread, personally. I scroll to the pictures. I figured anyones else not wanting to read what we were talking about would do the same.
Not good enough, apparently. And with that, the thread was trimmed from 92 posts to 43. Well... fuck.
I think some random moderator felt threatened that we were talking about the low grades-high IQ/test scores anomaly. I understand that. Nobody wants to be told that existing isn't enough to make them special by any measure. Sometimes the hand you were dealt becomes an advantage after being a huge disadvantage for a very long time. Some people sing, others build stuff.
FARK is for man-bites-dog news, flamewars and being at the gym in 26 minutes, not deep discussions. My neglect of that seemingly universal fact is my greatest folly so far in my adult life. I feel fortunate that my greatest folly is not only so benign, but so reversible.
If there's one thing FARK was good for, it was variety--perfect for the ever-changing interests of ADD-folk and the like-minded individuals who became participants as a result. Talk about alienating your target audience. I won't be back.
Maybe FARKers like beehphy, posicat, karatekitten13, rynthetyn, ptelg, PhoenixInFlames, Hat Madder and vcoalition would like to form an alliance with the Plasma Lamp to find or start a board where we can discuss such things without being grounded? Maybe not? I'd rather spend my time working on the iMac G4 display to DVI monitor conversion than starting a message board, actually.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Okay I lied. I do have something going.
I can't just put my mind on pause while working on fixing my body. I have to learn something new and do something cool. So what am I doing?
I'm turning a gutted iMac G4 into a setup reminiscent of an old IBM Aptiva 2159 system. For those who are unfamiliar with such old technology, the Aptiva 2159 was unique in that it had an external console inside which the floppy disk drive and optical drive were installed. This box sat underneath the display and was on a long cable to the tower. You could have the tower stored out of sight, much more quiet because of it, and still use your drives.
I'm sure some Apple purists out there are going to be pissed, but there will be little to bitch about since the same method can be applied to shoehorning a Mac Mini inside the iMac G4. At least that's the case when the panels use TMDS as opposed to LVDS. I don't know if all iMacs are TMDS.
My iMac G4 is a 20" model with a bad logic board. Bad because the G4 CPU die has a chipped corner, but it would seem I was hasty taking it out as it has the signs of a PMU crash. Regardless, I want to put it to use and I have no use for a Mac outside of my Powerbook G4.
The display is why I want to use it. It's a S-IPS panel from IDTech and it looks awesome. I have a 20" LCD at home, but 20" in widescreen is actually a lot more useful to me than 20" in 4:3 aspect despite being less real-estate.
20.1" widescreen: 17.06" wide by 10.67" high - area: 182.03" sq
20.1" Standard 4:3: 16.08" wide by 12.06" high - area: 192"sq
The slightly larger pixels are helpful, too. But there's a lot more to it than that.
The best feature of the iMac G4, to me, is the fact that the display is on its own swing-arm. Unlike the 20" panel I have at home, which is fixed to the stand, I can easily bring it closer without interfering with my desk arrangement and I can move it out of the way when I'm not using it without picking the whole thing up and having to worry about cable flex and cable slack requirements.
With the drive cage inside the system, adding USB peripherals will be dead simple. I can have a USB optical drive and a fairly large hard disk mounted and well-cooled in the case. I need to have something in there since the bottom isn't heavy enough without it. Also, while the optical drive will need an eject button and it's hard to add one without screwing up the look of the system, there sure isn't much holding that Apple logo on the front of the system above the drive slot.
As I said, the panel in my G4 uses TMDS signalling. The TI TFP403 TMDS receiver inside the panel module is DVI-compliant to the 1.0 standard. I just need to hook it up and make sure I'm sending it the right signals to run the panel. For extra credit, I can run wires from the panel's EDID pins to give the panel plug and play capability.
But I still need a backlight and that's where it gets a bit difficult.
I don't have a datasheet for the brain of the inverter and there are three pins that haven't been completely identified. While I could buy a generic inverter and use that, I'd much rather use the stock one so that's what I'm going for. I just need to figure out what those remaining pins are for and what signals belong on them. I have the tools to do it, including an X-ray machine.
The iMac G4 will become a fixed-resolution DVI monitor with drives and who knows what else inside. The heart of the system will sit out of sight and will be many times more powerful than the iMac ever was.
This weekend, I start the sniffing of traces.
I'm turning a gutted iMac G4 into a setup reminiscent of an old IBM Aptiva 2159 system. For those who are unfamiliar with such old technology, the Aptiva 2159 was unique in that it had an external console inside which the floppy disk drive and optical drive were installed. This box sat underneath the display and was on a long cable to the tower. You could have the tower stored out of sight, much more quiet because of it, and still use your drives.
I'm sure some Apple purists out there are going to be pissed, but there will be little to bitch about since the same method can be applied to shoehorning a Mac Mini inside the iMac G4. At least that's the case when the panels use TMDS as opposed to LVDS. I don't know if all iMacs are TMDS.
My iMac G4 is a 20" model with a bad logic board. Bad because the G4 CPU die has a chipped corner, but it would seem I was hasty taking it out as it has the signs of a PMU crash. Regardless, I want to put it to use and I have no use for a Mac outside of my Powerbook G4.
The display is why I want to use it. It's a S-IPS panel from IDTech and it looks awesome. I have a 20" LCD at home, but 20" in widescreen is actually a lot more useful to me than 20" in 4:3 aspect despite being less real-estate.
20.1" widescreen: 17.06" wide by 10.67" high - area: 182.03" sq
20.1" Standard 4:3: 16.08" wide by 12.06" high - area: 192"sq
The slightly larger pixels are helpful, too. But there's a lot more to it than that.
The best feature of the iMac G4, to me, is the fact that the display is on its own swing-arm. Unlike the 20" panel I have at home, which is fixed to the stand, I can easily bring it closer without interfering with my desk arrangement and I can move it out of the way when I'm not using it without picking the whole thing up and having to worry about cable flex and cable slack requirements.
With the drive cage inside the system, adding USB peripherals will be dead simple. I can have a USB optical drive and a fairly large hard disk mounted and well-cooled in the case. I need to have something in there since the bottom isn't heavy enough without it. Also, while the optical drive will need an eject button and it's hard to add one without screwing up the look of the system, there sure isn't much holding that Apple logo on the front of the system above the drive slot.
As I said, the panel in my G4 uses TMDS signalling. The TI TFP403 TMDS receiver inside the panel module is DVI-compliant to the 1.0 standard. I just need to hook it up and make sure I'm sending it the right signals to run the panel. For extra credit, I can run wires from the panel's EDID pins to give the panel plug and play capability.
But I still need a backlight and that's where it gets a bit difficult.
I don't have a datasheet for the brain of the inverter and there are three pins that haven't been completely identified. While I could buy a generic inverter and use that, I'd much rather use the stock one so that's what I'm going for. I just need to figure out what those remaining pins are for and what signals belong on them. I have the tools to do it, including an X-ray machine.
The iMac G4 will become a fixed-resolution DVI monitor with drives and who knows what else inside. The heart of the system will sit out of sight and will be many times more powerful than the iMac ever was.
This weekend, I start the sniffing of traces.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Repair Yourself
I've been silent here for over a month. My goals changed. I'm dedicated to repairing my body and doing some important preventative maintenance in order to stave off some nasty genetic problems I may or may not be at risk for.
The most pressing of these is Diabetes. I was cautioned by my doctor that I came up Prediabetic. When you have blood work done, one of the things the people in lab coats check is your fasting blood glucose. Anything over 100 is a warning sign. I scored 101. For the record, anything over 125 means you're Diabetic. In my case, it's temporary. I'm just too fat. If I lose weight and get in shape and still fail the blood test, that's when it's set in stone.
Since it was caught early, I haven't had any damage done to my insides and can reverse it. In the process, I also make my heart stronger so I won't die at 55 like my Grandpa did (before he was brought back to life for another 20 years before dying for good from the same thing out of nowhere).
Truth is, I won't be doing much work that I can post about here for the next few months. I'm going to waive my fix debt while I'm doing this because each time I complete a workout, I live one fix longer and sharpen my mind that much more.
Plasma Fit - By The Powers of Fragwell
At this point, I've completed 164 miles on my trainer bike in two weeks. While there are a lot of cyclists who cover that in a week or even one day, they've been at this a lot longer. I will get to that point, but, for the rest of the year, I'm going to work on ruthlessly trashing and resurrecting my recumbent trainer and my 1988 Cannondale SM500.
With any luck, I'll flog them both as heavily as the Huffy Swamp Water I nuked the hell out of back in 1995. The Cannondale can take it. I'm not so sure about the trainer.
The most pressing of these is Diabetes. I was cautioned by my doctor that I came up Prediabetic. When you have blood work done, one of the things the people in lab coats check is your fasting blood glucose. Anything over 100 is a warning sign. I scored 101. For the record, anything over 125 means you're Diabetic. In my case, it's temporary. I'm just too fat. If I lose weight and get in shape and still fail the blood test, that's when it's set in stone.
Since it was caught early, I haven't had any damage done to my insides and can reverse it. In the process, I also make my heart stronger so I won't die at 55 like my Grandpa did (before he was brought back to life for another 20 years before dying for good from the same thing out of nowhere).
Truth is, I won't be doing much work that I can post about here for the next few months. I'm going to waive my fix debt while I'm doing this because each time I complete a workout, I live one fix longer and sharpen my mind that much more.
Plasma Fit - By The Powers of Fragwell
At this point, I've completed 164 miles on my trainer bike in two weeks. While there are a lot of cyclists who cover that in a week or even one day, they've been at this a lot longer. I will get to that point, but, for the rest of the year, I'm going to work on ruthlessly trashing and resurrecting my recumbent trainer and my 1988 Cannondale SM500.
With any luck, I'll flog them both as heavily as the Huffy Swamp Water I nuked the hell out of back in 1995. The Cannondale can take it. I'm not so sure about the trainer.
Friday, January 2, 2009
It's A Start....
My New Year's resolution other than the usual "get fit" is to be a lot more persistent with my repairs. I always learn a lot even when a repair takes days on something that isn't even worth the time. Since I'm now working outside in the well-insulated and well-heated Fragwell Lab, I have the room for all kinds of things
Last night, I repaired an NEC MT1050 projector I had had sitting around for over two years. First day of the year and first repair of the year.
While I'm still working on repairing a Planar 42" plasma monitor (which, when fixed, will be the biggest thing I've ever repaired) with a bad power supply board, there are other games afoot. Last night, one of the two-lead parts I replaced in my projector proved an interesting conundrum. While I have a very good (for ten minutes at a time due to a thermal defect) Hakko soldering iron I salvaged from the trash at work, it only heats one side of a component at a time. What to do?
Simple: Use the Tenma soldering iron I've had since 1997 on the other side of the component and get it out of there without trouble or pulled pads. That part worked, but not without difficulty.
Tenma gear is a lot better than anything Radio Shack could ever hope to cough up, but they're not Hakko (let alone OKI/Metcal, for that matter). About a year after I got the iron, the power supply fell off my desk for some reason and landed on the plug for the pencil. It's been flakey on temperature feedback ever since, causing the power supply to think the iron has heated up to full temp before it has even started to heat. I couldn't repair it before due to the obvious catch-22. Now, with the Hakko on-hand that's no longer the case.
I opened the case of the Tenma iron to see Chinese Class 1 work and goddam phenolic paper circuit boards. The connector for the pencil (pencil compared to a Radio Shack iron, hulking compared to the Hakko) was on its own goddamn phenolic paper circuit board so I pulled that and unsoldered the ground lead for inspection. Results: Broken traces for what can only be the thermal feedback, judging by the lack of charring from arcs that one would find if it were the heating coil circuit. So what to do?
When I was younger and just wanted something to work, I'd use my scratch and solder technique where I scratch the masking away from the trace and solder across the gap. These days, I know better. While I lack new masking material here at home, I'm not about to merely scratch and solder the failed board. I save clipped lead remains from through-hole components I replace during repairs for situations like this. Next to me, I have a 24AWG solid copper lead from a capacitor that I will use for this.
Since the construction isn't RoHS compliant in the least, I won't have to worry about tin whiskers growing from the exposed work, not that it would make a difference anyway on something like this.
Repair finished, it works again.
It's worth noting that I was impressed with how quickly the Tenma station reached working temperature compared to a Radio Shack iron. Turning both the Hakko and Tenma on at the same time, however, the Hakko is the clear winner by like a minute.
I think my next repair will involve cleaning the controls on my Philips 7851 receiver and retrofitting it with white LEDs for panel lighting. And while I have the cleaner out, I'll see what I can do about the old Hitachi oscilloscope I picked up at the DI for $5. The controls on that are so dirty it's unusable in current form. I don't have a probe, either, and don't think I'll ever manage to scavenge one so that will be a purchase, for sure.
I'll have to see what kind of repairs I can do today to fill my quota in advance. I was thinking one fixit project a day was a good goal, but I'd run out of things to fix. More likely, one a week is a good baseline with three a week being a very good goal. Bottom line: I don't want broken stuff hanging around here for two years like the projector I could have fixed long ago did.
An additional goal I have is to learn something new each month. Even things I've had limited exposure to are fair game for this. For example, I have an SGI Octane workstation I'd really like to use and have used before. I did an IRIX install on it back when it still had the EMXI display adapter in it, but the current install won't start up since MardiGras and Odyssey display adapters aren't plug and play to the OS. I need to reinstall to get it all working again and I found my IRIX disc set last night. I've used the step-by-step IRIX install instructions in the past, but what I'd really like is to be able to do it from memory.
In addition to the SGI Octane, I still have other SGI rigs and I have two IBM RS/6000 systems I'd really like to get running. Since I'm running into UNIX systems more often now and working on Linux systems in my career, more experience is a very good thing. And this blog is a good portfolio.
I resolve to start adding photos to my entries... as soon as I can get a stupid card reader.
Last night, I repaired an NEC MT1050 projector I had had sitting around for over two years. First day of the year and first repair of the year.
While I'm still working on repairing a Planar 42" plasma monitor (which, when fixed, will be the biggest thing I've ever repaired) with a bad power supply board, there are other games afoot. Last night, one of the two-lead parts I replaced in my projector proved an interesting conundrum. While I have a very good (for ten minutes at a time due to a thermal defect) Hakko soldering iron I salvaged from the trash at work, it only heats one side of a component at a time. What to do?
Simple: Use the Tenma soldering iron I've had since 1997 on the other side of the component and get it out of there without trouble or pulled pads. That part worked, but not without difficulty.
Tenma gear is a lot better than anything Radio Shack could ever hope to cough up, but they're not Hakko (let alone OKI/Metcal, for that matter). About a year after I got the iron, the power supply fell off my desk for some reason and landed on the plug for the pencil. It's been flakey on temperature feedback ever since, causing the power supply to think the iron has heated up to full temp before it has even started to heat. I couldn't repair it before due to the obvious catch-22. Now, with the Hakko on-hand that's no longer the case.
I opened the case of the Tenma iron to see Chinese Class 1 work and goddam phenolic paper circuit boards. The connector for the pencil (pencil compared to a Radio Shack iron, hulking compared to the Hakko) was on its own goddamn phenolic paper circuit board so I pulled that and unsoldered the ground lead for inspection. Results: Broken traces for what can only be the thermal feedback, judging by the lack of charring from arcs that one would find if it were the heating coil circuit. So what to do?
When I was younger and just wanted something to work, I'd use my scratch and solder technique where I scratch the masking away from the trace and solder across the gap. These days, I know better. While I lack new masking material here at home, I'm not about to merely scratch and solder the failed board. I save clipped lead remains from through-hole components I replace during repairs for situations like this. Next to me, I have a 24AWG solid copper lead from a capacitor that I will use for this.
Since the construction isn't RoHS compliant in the least, I won't have to worry about tin whiskers growing from the exposed work, not that it would make a difference anyway on something like this.
Repair finished, it works again.
It's worth noting that I was impressed with how quickly the Tenma station reached working temperature compared to a Radio Shack iron. Turning both the Hakko and Tenma on at the same time, however, the Hakko is the clear winner by like a minute.
I think my next repair will involve cleaning the controls on my Philips 7851 receiver and retrofitting it with white LEDs for panel lighting. And while I have the cleaner out, I'll see what I can do about the old Hitachi oscilloscope I picked up at the DI for $5. The controls on that are so dirty it's unusable in current form. I don't have a probe, either, and don't think I'll ever manage to scavenge one so that will be a purchase, for sure.
I'll have to see what kind of repairs I can do today to fill my quota in advance. I was thinking one fixit project a day was a good goal, but I'd run out of things to fix. More likely, one a week is a good baseline with three a week being a very good goal. Bottom line: I don't want broken stuff hanging around here for two years like the projector I could have fixed long ago did.
An additional goal I have is to learn something new each month. Even things I've had limited exposure to are fair game for this. For example, I have an SGI Octane workstation I'd really like to use and have used before. I did an IRIX install on it back when it still had the EMXI display adapter in it, but the current install won't start up since MardiGras and Odyssey display adapters aren't plug and play to the OS. I need to reinstall to get it all working again and I found my IRIX disc set last night. I've used the step-by-step IRIX install instructions in the past, but what I'd really like is to be able to do it from memory.
In addition to the SGI Octane, I still have other SGI rigs and I have two IBM RS/6000 systems I'd really like to get running. Since I'm running into UNIX systems more often now and working on Linux systems in my career, more experience is a very good thing. And this blog is a good portfolio.
I resolve to start adding photos to my entries... as soon as I can get a stupid card reader.
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