Make: Electronics

Okay, Lisa has already found the stash of images at Flickr, but I've been meaning to mention this for awhile. I've been working my way (glacially) through Make: Electronics by Charles Platt. On any given weekend, I may or may not have the time to run one of the experiments from the book, but when I do, I haul everything from the den into the dining room and wire up another experiment from the book.

It's pretty cool, and I've been snapping photos of some of the experiments and inlining comments on Flickr. I'll probably regret that, as Flickr will die an ignominious death one day, and all my careful comments will go down the memory hole with it. In any case, browse if you care.

Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum

Back in February, Jean, Renee and I went to an all-day Robotics Tournament at the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum. I took my P&S camera, and took scads of photos. I finally got around to uploading the better images (mostly in focus), and the banner is a sample.

Mini

Almost since the day we bought Jean's four-door sedan, a Honda Civic, she has had trouble with it. For the most part it's been electrical, what with alarms and check lights and the like. They never really could fix all that. Most recently, she took it in for a check engine light and they made some minor repairs and told her that the light was most likely spurious.

The day after we retrieved it from the dealer, it began a mysterious whining, which would come and go, but was clearly engine-related. Well, having had troubles with it almost from the start, we started saving for its replacement, and have been putting money away regularly, almost ten years now. So I told Jean to just go ahead and find a replacement. She did a lot of looking and decided to get the Minicooper. We ordered it and about two days before it was to arrive, her Honda simply crapped out on the road to work.

Fortunately she was still close to home, and was able to limp back in fits and starts. Happy ending, we took delivery of her new car, and got rid of her old albatross.

As an after-note, I still have my Honda Civic Hatchback that is over ten years old, and use it every day to commute to work. We also used it for the trip to Cannon Beach. So this is not a diatribe against Honda, just a particular Honda.

Solar Odyssey

Today's banner is one of the handful of shots I took of Oregon State University's Solar Odyssey solar-powered car. They brought it to my workplace over lunch, so I strolled over and snapped a few. Enough of them turned out okay that I decided to make a photoset out of them.

The photos I took at Alan and Pia's wedding were not nearly as crisp, so I'm hesitant to put any up, but I'll look 'em over this weekend and see if any are passable. My only excuse is that I've been lazy about practicing with my new camera, and flubbed the settings. Sorry!

<em>Real</em> Black

Renee was trying to print some homework that she had entered into Quark Express, one of Jean's tools left over from her days as an editor. The printouts kept coming out sepia-toned. We've had that problem in the past when the printer drivers go wonky, so I was prepared to reinstall printer drivers if necessary.

But first, Jean took a stab at adjusting the palette of the document in Quark (she's a wizard in that layout tool). When she was done, the doc printed in nice, crisp black. She told us, "I just created a fake color called real black." I had to repeat that back to her so she could appreciate the contradiction.

Phone Eater

Just a quick note. I have my phone back after several days without it. I had given it to Renee since I don't want her without one, and she had managed to destroy hers. So now she has her replacement, and I have mine back.

There was a risk I might have to replace mine as well, since she is on her third phone since we signed with Verizon, while Jean and I are both still using our original ones. This time, she somehow contrived to completely break off the antenna (one of those ones that is molded into the damn body of the phone, fer chrissakes). The new one has no external antenna, so here's hoping...

Lovely New Faucet(s)

We finally had the plumber over to do a handful of "fix this annoying leak/squeak/rattle" and had already gone out and purchased new taps for the hallway and basement bathrooms. The banner shows the new hallway faucet, and you can see before and after pictures in this Flickr set.

An unforeseen (by me) consequence of nice new taps is that Jean is now set on redoing the entire bathroom! Fear for me!

Domain Live for Another Five Years

Probably...

pairNIC has an absolutely clunky payment interface, which among other things warns you to not click finish multiple times, as your credit card may be billed over again, but then rejects your submission several times on trivial nitpicks, such as not listing the name of the bank issuing your card! Who does that, really? And I have my card from Discover.com, the issuer. They are not a bank. Are you going to reject my payment after you see that I listed Discover.com as the bank to get your stupid form to accept my input? Really? Or are you just going to try charging my card multiple times, once for each FAIL you created?

This is not the first computer failure I've experienced today (it is the third, after trying to do some online stock option manipulation and failing [they wanted my employee id number, fer crissakes], and then trying to import bank history into Moneydance and seeing all accounts duplicated and intermingled). So yeah, figured I'd gripe.

But if the basics go well, I get to hang onto terebi2.org for five more years.

Twitter

For any friends who are on Twitter, I've opened an account, @dpwakefield (since I can't get the account ThePhin, which was taken). I don't plan on 'tweeting' much, if at all, as my main reason for starting one was to get a discount on a money management package that I'm thinking of switching over to from Quicken...

Have You Tried Turning It Off And On Again?

Our household has been plagued by printer problems for months. So much so that Jean and I have even considered purchasing a new printer, though without any assurance that this would help, so I've procrastinated on that approach.

Anyway, in case anyone is Googling for help with printer problems which are similar to ours, I'll describe the problems and the solution which worked for us. Your mileage may vary, local laws may apply, etc. etc...

The Problem(s)

Our setup consists of two Mac OS X computers, one a rather old PPC in the dining area with an Epson Stylus Photo R260 inkjet printer attached via USB (printer sharing enabled), the other a newer but still 'mature' Intel version in the den.

The first problem was that the den computer could not always see the printer, even when the dining area computer was awake with the printer turned on. Over the months, attempts to get the den computer to 'see' the printer had resulted in multiple listings of the same printer in various print dialogs. Selecting any one of these printers was a coin toss, and the job could either get printed, or disappear into the ether, never to be heard from again. The print queue tool might indicate that the job was printing, the printer unavailable, or busy.

The second problem was that even when the printer was visible, available and printing jobs from the den, they would invariably print out in a muddy sepia tone, i.e. a monochrome shade of brown. I should also mention that Jean says that even the dining computer, attached directly to the printer, had problems printing photos with any sort of faithful color.

The Solution (So Far)

This weekend I resolved to solve the problem or prove that we needed outside help (paging Apple Store Genius...). After a bit of Internet browsing and multiple forays into the Apple Help menus, I resolved to do the following:

1. Delete all printers, print queues and configurations from both computers


2. Download and install the latest drivers from Epson for this printer onto both computers


3. Reestablish printer sharing from the dining room computer


4. Re-add the printer to both computers' printer lists


5. Test printing several color documents from both printers

After this full system teardown and rebuild (hence the title of this article), I found that indeed, for now, the printer is visible, active and available to the den computer. Any given document printed from both computers appears to be identical in color and layout.

So for now, problem solved. I'll be watching for degradation in performance over the next few weeks/months.

iPods 'Shuffle'

I usually try to wait longer than two years to recycle a gadget, and with rumors that the iPod Touch would eventually get a camera, I thought about waiting at least until next summer, but truth to tell, I've built up such a large music library between twenty-five years of CDs and however long I've been on eMusic, and there's not enough room on my original iPod Touch. So I broke down and got a 64GB one today.

Renee inherited the first one, which was a 16GB G1. She surrendered her nano (also inherited from me), so that I could get the 10% discount. That was my price for giving her my old unit.

One observation I'll make is that while the iPod Touch still doesn't do some of the things I used to use my PalmPilot for, it has come along far enough that I don't use the Palm at all any more. It sits in a drawer in the den.

The other observation I'll make is that I've always had a habit of naming my computers, including PDAs, after anime characters, usually female. I haven't watched an anime show regularly for several months now, so I'm out of options. Instead, I decided to name this one after my penpal Nami. Hi, Nami! We got the shirts you sent, and Renee is going to wear one of them. Surprise, even a Japanese XL is too small for me.

Verizon Sucks

I'm posting this from work because I can't post it from home. For the third morning in a row, I fired up the computer and no Internet access! If they follow the pattern, when I get home tonight, everything will be fine.

So what I'm observing is that when I get up at 6am, there is no Internet access, and no amount of rebooting or resetting of computers and/or routers makes any damned difference. Since I have maybe an hour on the mornings when I drive Renee to school, and I try to get in early on mornings when I don't, that eliminates the idea of calling tech support, which is usually at least an hour of frustration. Besides, what would be the point? There's nothing wrong on my end. The damn connection is back up all by itself in the evening.

I suppose it could be something weird like a temperature drop causing a cable short, which is corrected as the day warms up, but I'm reaaaaaally skeptical. Maybe, if I have no Internet on Saturday morning, I'll postpone my crowded day to deal with some drone forcing me to walk the same old tired diagnostic menu and try to find out what's really going on. But for now, I just want to go on record: Verizon Sucks!

P.S.-If there were REAL competition, I'd have a choice other than Comcast, whom I am assured by all my friends sucks even more.

P.P.S.-In the end, it was Jean who donated an hour out of her hectic day to walk the telephone tree, and then the drone's diagnostic menu ("have you tried turning it of and on again?"). The final verdict: "there seems to be a bit of a problem with our server. I've reset it". So still magic, still sucktastic.

QOTD

Matroska is an open standard [...] primarily used by Free Software-loving hippies [...]

Mark Pilgrim

Cut down to the essential part, since I find MKV files annoying as hell...

Test Post

Just for its amusement value, I thought I'd type a short entry on my new iPod Touch. Don't expect that to happen every day. This one little message has taken a few minutes to hunt and peck on the software keyboard. But we do what we can. Like the time I used my laptop computer and Skype over PDX's wireless network to call home when I had a perfectly good cellphone. Well, this has gone on long enough. Forgive the typoes, and the run-on paragraph. This experiment is over. Goodnight!

Music and More

Two brief items.

One, I used my Christmas money and some allowance to buy myself an iPod Touch. It's pretty neat.

Two, I found out that Dance Raja Dance is available on Amazon's MP3 store, and bought it. I've had "Aatavu Chanda (Dancing Is Beautiful)" for years, and to finally find the rest of this album available is pretty neat. Funny thing, when I searched for it on eMusic, I couldn't find it, but Googling just now, one of the last links on the first page was to the eMusic offering of same. Guess I'll have to look more carefully in future.

Update

The album is good, though I have to admit that the first song, the one I've had forever and which is available for free from Last.FM, is still the best.

And I forgot to mention the name of my new iPod Touch: Toa

Win Some, Lose Some

On the flip side of gadget recovery, Renee's cellphone borked out Friday night. It would seem to turn itself off, but when you held down the power button to try turning it on again, it just buzzed angrily for as long as the button was held down.

I called Verizon Wireless (after hunting all over my bill for the number), and the guy I eventually got through to was very helpful. We have a new phone in the mail, supposedly scheduled to arrive on Wednesday or Thursday. With my employee discount, it comes to ... free.

So if the phone arrives in a timely fashion, and works, and neither of our other phones goes toes up in the next month or two, I'm satisfied with the resolution of this one.

Minimal Geek Repair

I've on my third hard drive for my ReplayTV, and my second remote control. The first one became unusable when the Select button refused to work. Think of it as the Enter key on your keyboard. I gussied up to the Internet and found a replacement, forget how much. And now the replacement has been getting wonkier and wonkier on the Select key. I could just pony up the dough for a third remote, but with the recent sale (second time around) by DM Holdings to DirecTV, I wasn't sure how much more money I want to put into this rig.

So instead, I fired up Google, which got me to this page. Two possible solutions: open the sucker up and clean the contacts, or reprogram the keys.

I grabbed my older, clearly broken remote, and busted it apart, cleaning the contacts thoroughly. Put together again, I found that the Select key now responded, if somewhat fussily. It would still be a little too annoying to use. However, now that I could get any response out of the key, I could reprogram the remote to use the Enter key instead of the Select key (can't do the reprogramming if you can't tell the remote which keys to switch around). And now I can use my old remote, albeit by reprogramming my fingers to press a new button now and then. I'm putting the newer remote in a drawer, sans batteries, against the eventual need for another rejuvenation ballet.

New TV

I seem to have neglected to mention that our living-room television, that we've had nigh on ten years, finally gave up the ghost. This was a few weeks ago. On Burr's suggestion, we put it up on craigslist, clearly marked defunct. Within the day, someone claimed it, and hauled it away. I should try that more often.

So as a stopgap, I took a 20" television that I had in storage and moved it into the living room. Downscaling from 32" to 20" didn't bother me as I watch most of my programs in the family room downstairs. But Renee watches most of her programming upstairs, and she complained that the 20" made her "eyes hurt".

Jean and I have been budgeting money for a new television for awhile now, as we knew that the 32" was on a downward spiral. So this weekend, we made the tour of Costco and Fry's, and settled on a flat-panel that was in our price range. It's a Samsung, and I put it in the family room today. Then I moved the 27" from the family room upstairs to the living room. My buttocks still ache.

After getting the hookups correct on both televisions, I noticed that even though we'd downgraded to 'limited basic' cable, the new television downstairs was picking up several digital channels that were not listed in the package. This includes a handful (NBC, CBS, PBS) of HDTV channels. Renee watched a football game between San Diego (?) and somebody else in HD as a result. She roots for the San Diego team because her best friend is from there.

I mostly won't benefit from this arrangement, as I do all my viewing using the ReplayTV, which only records standard definition television. But Jean and Renee both do live television viewing, so they may in fact become HD fans. Time will tell...

The Robot Monk

This just about made my weekend, it's so cool, in an absurd way. Be sure to check out the Flickr photoset of the robot in action.

Recliner

Jean is around five feet tall, and often dissatisfied with the scale of the furniture around her. This summer, she and Renee went to Michigan to visit Jean's parents, and while there, she saw a chair that her parents had bought that she liked. As for the Papa Bear, Mama Bear and Baby Bear, there are three sizes of this chair available, and yesterday we went and tried all three out, at Elegant Interiors, in Lake Oswego.

The chair Jean eventually settled on was this one, appropriately enough, the Mama Bear size. Jean is indulging her penchant for light colors by getting the Pearl Grey leather upholstery, and humoring my need for some darker tones by getting the Teak Stained base.

We'll take delivery in a few weeks, as the color combo was not in stock, and needs to be sent to Norway. This gives us plenty of time to plan out the placement in our family room. I'll post a picture once we have it.