Iestyn Lewis

Railroads and wealth distribution

2010-01-06T11:23:00.003-05:00

The girls and I are working on an N-scale model train layout in my office, using some of my old stuff from my high-school and college layouts, and some new bits. I'll have some posts about that soon. I likes the little trains, we have a G scale train at Christmas time too.

Just like any hobby, you can quickly spend a lot of money on locomotives, cars, track, buildings, etc..

Take this guy, who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars building a garden railroad with 4000 real (not scale!) feet of track:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HoCTo1SLHI

I thought that was impressive. But if you really want to be an old guy playing with trains....

Warren Buffett bought Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF). All of it. The second largest railroad in the country, for $34 billion dollars. Now THAT'S a train set!! I would totally make them let me drive at least one train from LA to JAX if I were him.

New Telescope

2010-01-05T09:26:00.005-05:00

On the Carousel of Hobbies, the astronomy horsie has apparently come around again. I was big into it a few years ago, I built an 8" reflector that packed down into a suitcase, which I brought to Moab, Utah with us. Unfortunately it was much cooler in its transformer-like aspects than in actual optical performance. Then I owned a series of cheap commercial scopes. I enjoyed the 4" refractor the most.

Refractors are the ones that most people picture when they picture a telescope - glass at the front, eyepiece in the back, long tube in the middle. They have mostly been supplanted by reflectors, which use mirrors instead of glass, and can be built much larger. But there's some holdouts for the refractor, mostly because they can be sharper on planets and the moon.

I bought a small refractor (3 inches) from Craigslist and was hooked again, so I started looking for bigger ones, but they are either expensive or poor quality. I went over to SurplusShed.com and found that they had a 127mm mounted objective (the glass in the front) for about $150! Since 5 inch refractors from commercial sources start at $400, this was quite a deal, so I got the objective and a cheap focuser.

Since Mars is approaching us in January I wanted to be sure I had something to look at it with. The small refractor I have is too small to give much magnification, and I didn't want to go find the right diameter aluminium tube for the big lens, plus buying all the stuff to do it "right" would end up costing as much as buying the commercial one in the first place.

So.... here's what I have so far. A lens and a focuser on a plank, supported by plumbing fittings and a big ugly tripod. As simple as you can get. I am planning to enclose the tube with some lightweight paneling and add blackout paper to the inside, but this works! I'm really pleased with the performance of the lens, I was able to see the polar and equatorial belts on Jupiter just fine last night (before my butt froze off).

I took the focuser apart and re-greased it and shimmed it so it doesn't move around all over the place. Next step will be to check the collimation (alignment) of the lens and eyepiece, close in the tube, and paint it.

I heart grooveshark

2009-11-27T10:52:00.002-05:00

They revamped the interface and added a new Radio feature, which to me works much better than Pandora. Pandora was always trying to shove indie band crap down my throat when I wanted Zep, and Zep when I wanted indie band crap. Just adding AC/DC to Grooveshark seems to bring me everything from all-girl white stripes knockoffs to John Mayall to Zep. Killah. And no ads or listening limitations. Here's to the good times until they try to make money and some other young band of wells-meaning idealists makes something else for free.

vinyl love

2009-04-23T19:51:00.003-04:00

I've been expanding my small collection of records with lots of trips to the 3 local thrift stores. It's good cheap fun. You have to get a certain amount of buying horrible records out of your system ("just because it's so cheesy!"). After buying a Judy Garland double LP set with 20 page career retrospective booklet, I now officially only buy decent stuff.

Records are a great format for combating ADD - I don't feel compelled to skip songs, and they're just more fun to listen to than CDs. In addition to the LPs, my wife has a bunch of 45s from her 80s childhood - hell yeah, You Belong To The City. We alsoo inherited a ton of song and story 45s from my brother in law, so I just had to go get the kids their own record player.

Here A prepares to drop the needle on a phat Sesame Street cut. I'm oddly proud that they have no idea what a Wii is, but A knows to handle records only on their edges and the difference between 45 and 33 rpm.

Back to the Projects: Wireless Speakers

2009-04-10T19:59:00.002-04:00

Alright, that was a long break. Let's get back into it. I had a pair of Home Depot wireless speakers that worked pretty well, but had weak drivers. I used the FE126e drivers that have been through 2 other cabinets. This time around I just made a basic, 10 liter bass reflex cabinet, very traditional. To cut down on the high-frequency "shout" that these drivers have, I treated the cones with 3 light coats of Mod Podge, and added a baffle-step correction circuit to the speaker.

I attached the electronic guts of the old wireless speakers to the backs of the new cabinets. This way I can either use the wireless input, or plug them in as regular speakers.

They sound far better than any of the other cabinets I've tried them in, leading me to be a strong believer in baffle-step correction. Here are some YouTube videos:

Walkaround

Playing music

this = teh hawtness

2009-02-05T12:38:00.004-05:00

If, like me, you enjoy trolling craigslist for items you have no intention of purchasing, then check this out:

http://atlanta.clpic.com/

Once you go there, change your location and search. You can change the size of the images with a slider at the top, and then click on one to bring up the listing right there.

Just stay out of the personals section. Trust me.

open mic night - w00t!

2009-01-28T11:32:00.003-05:00

Finally got back to open mic night at the coffeehouse last night. This time my neighbor Benn and I played together - we only got to do 3 songs (out of the 5 we had ready), which is actually a good thing, because there were probably 12 groups wanting to play, so they were moving everyone along. It's really thriving. I think we did well, and there were some great people playing. Half the people from our street showed up, which was pretty great, next time we'll have to hire a bus.

Always amazing, after a string of middle-aged guys, to have 2 high school girls get up there and just kill. Your mind gets used to what "singing" sounds like, and then someone gets up there with an actual set of pipes and blows your hair back - it's cool.

We played Desire by Ryan Adams, Woman Across the River by the Allman Brothers, and Dance, Dance, Dance by Steve Miller.

Runnin' To The Lounge

2009-01-20T13:07:00.005-05:00

Microsoft just introduced Songsmith, which is software that automatically generates an accompaniment to any melody.

David Lee Roth's vocal track from Runnin' With the Devil is available with no accompaniment.

The results are breathtaking.

why was this not made

2008-10-23T13:25:00.003-04:00

I know the answer to that question, but damn.... I want this. "Quickly children - Bor-El's minions have found us! Into the RV-2, quickly! RV-2, retract camper and prepare for escape!!"

Toyota RV

wrenchin'

2008-09-28T17:56:00.003-04:00

I've never really had a car to work on before. Our 2 Hondas are serviced by the Honda guy, I never touched my Ranger or Chrysler, not even an oil change. With the Z car, I decided that I was not going to take it to anyone unless it was an emergency, and get as much practical knowledge as possible.

I have the brake pads to do a brake job, but I decided to get a little more work time in before I tackled that. I bought the Haynes manual, which tells you how to do everything up to and including rebuilding the transmission.

So far I've -

- put a vacuum-molded dash cap on the dash, which covers up the cracks quite nicely and looks just like the original dash

- added black leather seat covers and steering wheel cover.

- removed the spare tire, non-functioning a/c system, cruise control, and weird injector cooling fan. This amounted to over 100 pounds of weight, which isn't really noticeable performance wise, but the engine is a lot more accessible without all that crap glommed on to it. I also took out the perfectly serviceable air filter and put a ricer boy cone filter on, just for kicks.

The spare tire was a brilliant design which was stored flat, and came with the (original!) can of compressed air. You were supposed to inflate the flat spare tire, and then deflate it when you were done and put it back (and buy a new can of compressed air). I replaced it with a can of fix-a-flat.

Then I changed the oil, for the first time ever, and the fuel filter. Lessons - the oil doesn't land where you put the oil pan on the ground, and change the fuel filter outside, because the garage smells like gas a lot now.

So now it's all set up - next, changing the transmission and differential oil, then that brake job...

Midlife crisis, 6 years early

2008-08-30T15:07:00.004-04:00

I've been hankering for an impractical, temperamental, gas-swilling weekend conveyance for a while now. Dad and I went and looked at a pristine El Camino last weekend - well, it turns out that my cherished memories of the El Camino are best left as that. Completely out of the blue, because they fell into my narrow craigslist price range search, I became interested in old Datsun Z cars.

And today, I bought one. I think it frikkin' rules. It rattles, squeaks and only ventilates you when it feels like it. But just LOOK at it. T-tops, 6 spoke wheels and Ferrari red. And the interior is even decent. And it's got a great inline-6 tractor sound.

Plus, you owe it to yourself to check out the youtube ads. The 280ZX had one of the finest ad campaigns I've ever seen. Steve Wozniak and BLACK GOLD.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9RX0mBZ0HA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWF-hH1nloo

Yet More Speakers!

2008-08-18T08:18:00.002-04:00

I finally bought a router and built some nicer looking speakers. I don't know what took me so long to learn how to use a router, they add a nice finishing touch. These are made out of solid oak project boards from Home Depot, rounded the edges over and flush-mounted the drivers (Jordan JX92S full-range). They are the MLTL 48 transmission line design, although the cross-sectional area is a little too small.

Sound great, though, much more bass than the previous set of speakers, and they can be driven at more realistic volume levels.

Crates make good houses

2008-07-17T11:47:00.003-04:00

We got a new instrument for the lab a few weeks ago. (a Corning high-throughput label-free screening platform based on optical biosensor technology).

It came in 3 huge crates, and another crate that contained a small forklift for use in assembly. I'm not kidding, it shipped with its own forklift. Curiously, the guys that assembled the thing never even uncrated the forklift. Which is too bad, because me and the delivery guy (who looked, dressed and sounded exactly like Larry the Cable Guy), took a huge amount of time and sweat to git-r-done and move that sucker off the truck, on to the elevator, and into position.

But I digress. After uncrating the instrument, the crates were left behind. And they were pretty neat. Made of OSB (oriented strand board) and disassemblable into their component parts via a clip mechanism, they were a production in themselves. Apparently they have a whole warehouse full of the empties (I guess $250,000 scientific instruments are hot these days), so they asked if we could use them.

I just can't resist the call of free crap, so I said sure. I spent 2 hours one Sunday taking the things apart, removing the extraneous packaging (one of them had a complete sled with shockmounts, made of 7/8 inch 9 ply plywood), humping them down the hall to the elevator, moving them out to the illegally parked minivan, and getting them home.

Yesterday I finally got the chance to take them out from under the tarp and prepare them for their new role as a playhouse. I'm going to stain them grey and add some mid-century modern overhangs, but they're a success already, although of course the big kid prefers playing on the top to actually playing inside...

Speakers, more or less finished.

2008-06-27T11:33:00.003-04:00

Here they are. Lots o' changes. I cut the line length down to match the measured (as opposed to published) driver specs, added a wing to counter baffle step loss, and tweaked them no end with various damping materials. But it worked out, they sound wicked awesome now.

speaker of the house

2008-05-19T21:24:00.006-04:00

Every couple of years I get the urge to build a set of speakers. In California I attempted to build a copy of the famed Gallo Nucleus speaker. I did get the same bass drivers, but I used 2 plastic bowls instead of the recommended stainless steel spheres, and used some ribbon tweeters from Electron Hut instead of the handmade cylindrical driver. Needless to say, no one was worried about copyright infringement.

Then 2 years ago I built a couple of garage speakers based on plans from Parts Express. They work just great out in the garage, but I was getting itchy to build something better for the living room. This time around I thought I would head into the world of full-range drivers. Full range is kind of a step backwards - instead of having a separate woofer, midrange and tweeter to handle the audio spectrum, full range attempts to get all 3 out of a single driver. The idea is that by avoiding a crossover point between drivers, you get a more natural sound.

Needless to say, this poses problems. A big cone can't really move fast enough to reproduce high frequencies accurately, so you either have to stick to drivers 4" and under, or put a "whizzer" cone onto a larger driver, which kind of makes the highs shouty and directional. But, how much bass can you get out of a 4 inch driver, a stiff 4 inch driver at that? As it turns out, a surprising amount.

The driver I'm using is the Fostex FE126E. As with all things obscure and inscrutable, it hails from Japan. It's a 4 inch diameter driver with a cone made of banana pulp fiber. Its Xmax (how much the cone can move back and forth) is an amazingly small 0.3 mm. Picture a boom-boom subwoofer pumping air, and this is the exact opposite. It has a magnet nearly as large as the cone itself, which means it's a very tightly controlled driver - when it's time to move, the cone is going to move, with almost no slop.

So where does the bass come from? There are a few options, all of which revolve around horns or resonators. When you put your hands up to your mouth and shout, you are forming a horn. Your voice becomes louder in the direction you point your hands - you are sacrificing coverage for intensity in a specific area. When you put your mouth at the end of a paper towel tube and speak into it, that's more of a resonance effect - the tube is amplifying certain frequencies due to its resonating like an organ pipe.

So, by having the back of the speaker fire into an appropriately shaped chamber, we can exploit the resonance and horn effects to effectively amplify and direct the tiny bass output of the driver into usable bass that should mesh with the mid and high frequencies coming from the front of the driver.

After looking at several options, I chose the BIB design, or "bigger is better". This design is brilliantly simple, involving a box with no top and a single internal piece. This forms a folded horn/resonator. The driver is mounted in the skinny end pointed forward, and the horn ends up firing up. The speaker is placed against a wall to further reinforce the bass frequencies.

I've already prototyped a pair in cheap plywood, and now am building the real thing. A side effect of the horn pointing up is that it disperses the bass and midbass vertically, giving a very open, natural sound. The bass is ample, to the point where you're looking for a hidden subwoofer.

Wow, can I go on about speakers or what...

do I feel lucky?

2008-04-22T12:53:00.003-04:00

This thread of Shakespearized movie lines is great overall, but as I have the original firmly memorized, this classic Clint Eastwood quote is my favorite:

Sirrah, I can but guess your present thoughts
Did he have time his musket to reload?
Forsooth, I have myself forgot if so.
But as this weapon has the strength to split
Your very head loose from its earthly frame
Then ponder, cur, your place in fortune's favor.

The Speed of Sound

2008-04-18T12:22:00.003-04:00

Most instrumental guitar albums from the 80s are pretty much unlistenable now. Most of them were pretty unlistenable then, even if you were high on testosterone and Stridex acne pads.

I'd make the case for Ronnie Montrose's Speed of Sound as one of the few exceptions to that rule. I loved this album then, and it holds up today. Who the hell is this guy? Well, apparently he played with the Edgar Winter group (don't know if he did Free Ride or not), and had his own band (fronted by... echh... Sammy Hagar), but he is primarily known as an instrumental guitarist.

The album is from 1988 and features drum programming from the era where "the drum samples are good, but the dynamics aren't there", and mostly electronic, sparse accompaniment. The guitar sound is Heavily Processed, from an age where guitarists had eschewed the pedals-into-amp approach in favor of the rackmount Guitar Processor, lending the tone copious amounts of reverb and distortion that actually did not model any kind of amplifier or pedal, but was its own entity. It's a warm, fuzzy sound that in this case, doesn't sound "loud". You can put this album on and not want to put blankets over the speakers.

The playing is restrained and tasteful (as it gets for the genre). Very few wheedlie-whees, mostly simple melody lines and embellishments, with a good bit of emotion. I remember reading an interview with him in Guitar Player where he said his hand was healing from slicing it open with a knife, so recording the leads involved a significant amount of pain, which might explain the lack of pyrotechnics and the emotion-charged bends.

All of the songs have spacey names like "Outer Marker Inbound", "VTOL", and "Zero G". There's even a cover of the Ventures' "Telstar". Here's a sample from Amazon.

As with any album that was part of the soundtrack to your youth, I've lost all ability to judge it objectively. The songs put me back, waiting in front of the hardware store in the winter for my dad to pick me up from work. I'm listening to it on my new Toshiba walkman with auto-reverse and built in 3-band EQ. It's dark and snowing a little, and the guitar sounds perfect.

Computer Dashboard, part 8 - All Done

2008-04-17T12:42:00.003-04:00

Back to part 7

Well, here it is in its final form. I used Visio to print out a faceplate for it, and created some scales for the meters. Originally I was going to make a weather module that would scrape wunderground.com and return weather information to be displayed, but never got around to it.

I've had it hooked up to any number of computers since building it in 2005. It's currently working right now on my work computer. Only problem is that it doesn't move that much because I have such a beast of a machine that it's hard to tax it enough to push the CPU, Memory or Disk readings up. The Memory and Disk meters read pages/second, so they're not just measuring how much memory is being used in total, but the accesses.

It does impress people, though. You can send yourself an email and watch the email light glow, then read the email and watch the light go off. It was a fun project, and I sort of had plans to build quite simplified versions (say, a bobble head that starts going when you get new email or something equally insipid), but the cost of the USB I/O boards is somewhat prohibitive. And then I got interested in something else.

Computer Dashboard, part 7 - Software

2008-04-16T08:53:00.003-04:00

Back to Part 6

The journey is almost complete. Just one last link in the chain. We've covered everything that happens after the signal leaves the computer via the USB cable, but how do we send the appropriate information to the USB board?

The USB board comes with a software component that lets you set the values of the pins via any number of programming languages. I chose C# because I had Visual Studio and the component was compatible. Comprende? I wrote a little C# program that queries the Microsoft system software many times a second as to the status of the CPU, the memory usage, disk usage, and network usage, and also whether there are any new emails. Here's a code snippet:

// setup of adapters and monitors
currAdapter = "CPUPercentageAdapter";
currMonitor = "CPUMonitor";
((Adapter)adapters[currAdapter]).Device = meters[0];
((Monitor)monitors[currMonitor]).AddSubscriber((Adapter)adapters[currAdapter]);
currAdapter = "CPUYellowAdapter";
((BinaryAdapter)adapters[currAdapter]).OnAt = 50;
((BinaryAdapter)adapters[currAdapter]).OffAt = 85;
((Adapter)adapters[currAdapter]).Device = yellowlights[0];
((Monitor)monitors[currMonitor]).AddSubscriber((Adapter)adapters[currAdapter]);
currAdapter = "CPURedAdapter";
((BinaryAdapter)adapters[currAdapter]).OnAt = 75;
((BinaryAdapter)adapters[currAdapter]).OffAt = 110;
((Adapter)adapters[currAdapter]).Device = redlights[0];
((Monitor)monitors[currMonitor]).AddSubscriber((Adapter)adapters[currAdapter]);

I structured the software around an Adapter and Subscriber model - an Adapter talks to one of the devices on the dashboard, and it can Subscribe to a Monitor. So if the CPU meter Adapter subscribes to the CPU Monitor, it will show the current CPU status. You can see in that code that I'm also setting some threshold values, so the CPU yellow light comes on at 50% usage, and the red light comes on at 75% usage.

All the gucky bits where you actually play with bits and do math and stuff are tucked away in the Adapter and USBDevice classes, so at the top level, you just hook up an Adapter to a Device, and Subscribe to a Monitor, and it magically shows up on the dashboard. The picture shows all the components in the chain.

Computer Dashboard, part 6 - Multiplexing

2008-04-15T10:54:00.005-04:00

back to Part 5

I bought 4 meters and 4 LEDs and a box and came up with a layout. I figured that would be a good number of things to measure. Problem was, I didn't have enough pins on the I/O board. Each meter would need 5 pins dedicated to it, and each LED would need one, for a total of 24 pins. I only had 16 pins.

I thought about this for a while with no good ideas, and then, as is it so often does, a model railroading site came to the rescue. It seems to be dead now, but here's a cached copy. They had the same problem of wanting to control a bunch of stuff from a parallel port, with not enough pins, so they designed a parallel port expander using a gizmo called an octal latch.

An octal latch is kind of like a very small memory chip. It's called octal because it can store up to 8 bits of data. The way it works is, you signal the chip and say, "hey, I've got some data for you - here's 8 bits." The latch takes those 8 bits and outputs those 8 bits until you come back with some more data for it, at which point it forgets the previous 8 bits and starts outputting the new 8 bits.

So how does this help? Well, if we give each meter one of these latches, then we can run from latch to latch, setting values for each meter. In effect, we can use the same 5 pins on the I/O board to set each meter - we just activate one of the latches, send our 5 bits, the 5 bits get converted to a current, the meter displays that current. The 5 bits are held for that meter until we come back around to that meter and give it a new value.

Because we can cycle around many times a second, all of the meters appear to be moving simultaneously and independently, when in fact they are being set separately, one right after another. So now we can use 13 pins to set all of our meters and LEDs:

1 - activate latch 1
2 - activate latch 2
3 - activate latch 3
4 - activate latch 4
5 - 9 - 5 bits of meter output
10 - 13 - 4 LED outputs

Whew. Well, that covers all the "hardware" stuff. The latches, R/C networks and resistor networks were all placed on one breadboard, with a LOT of soldering. Because I hated to waste 3 bits on each latch, I decided to add a red and a yellow LED inside each meter to indicate some condition (medium value or high value), and piggybacked those onto each latch - so I actually ended up using 7 bits for each meter, 5 for the value and 2 for the LEDs. I put the LEDs inside the meter cases, and they glow from behind the meter scale.

Computer Dashboard, part 5 - Dampers

2008-04-14T09:21:00.003-04:00

Back to Part 4

In the previous chapters we've seen how output from the pins of the I/O board can either switch an LED on or off, or move a meter. After doing some tests, I noticed that while it worked just fine, the output was rather "harsh". The LED was ON or it was OFF - immediately. The meter snapped with precision and speed to each position on the scale. Now, this might have been cool in the early 80s, when digital was new. But nowadays it's hip to soften the edges a bit and "fake" analog.

Witness the hypnotic sleep indicator on a MacBook - it fades in and out, as an incandescent lightbulb might do. So what I wanted to do was add some smoothing to my output devices - something to make the meter gradually move from one position to another, and fade the LEDs in and out.

This is very simple to do with a simple R/C network in between the output pins and the device. An R/C network is simply a single resistor and capacitor. A capacitor is like a very fast charging battery. (well, not really, but think of it that way). A resistor will affect how fast the capacitor charges. What this means is, when an output pin turns on, you can wire the resistor and capacitor in such a way that initially, most of the current goes into charging the capacitor, rather than into the LED. As the capacitor charges to full, more and more of the current goes into the LED. This results in a slow-on effect. When the pin turns off, the full capacitor discharges through the LED, resulting in a slow-off effect. Same for the meter - the capacitor will soak up current and release it during any change, resulting in a damping or slowing of any movement. The picture shows this - the input signal is the square spiky thing, the output is the gentle rampy thing.

I had to fool around with the resistor and capacitor values to arrive at the final configuration, but it's quite effective. Nowadays they're showing kids how to arrive at the same effect by programming microcontrollers. Sigh.

Computer Dashboard, part 4 - D/A Conversion 2

2008-04-11T09:32:00.003-04:00

Back to Part 3

Gee, this is getting a little epic. Keath, I'm glad you're enjoying it. Or at least reading it. So. We have a meter to swing, and a number of pins, each of which can output a set voltage. What we need to do is some binary math. For my purposes, I decided that my meters were small enough that setting them to one of 32 values was going to be enough precision. That meant I needed 5 pins to dedicate to a meter, because 2 to the 5th is 32. Got it?

No? Well, binary numbers represent numbers with just 2 values, 0 and 1. Just like in decimal numbers we have the "ones place" and the "tens place" and the "hundreds place", ie, 124 has 1 in the hundreds, 2 in the tens and 4 in the ones, binary numbers have the 1's place, the 2's place, the 4's place, the 8's place, and the 16's place, etc. So, if you are using 5 pins, you can count from 0 to 31, because 16 + 8 + 4 + 2 + 1 = 31. That gives me 32 values, so for instance, the number 10011 is 16 + 2 + 1 = 19. (n-n-n-nineteen).

Got it? Well, go google it or something. The point, is we need some way of making pin 5 "count" more than pin 1. When pin 1 changes, we only want the meter to move by 1 unit. When pin 5 changes, we want the meter to move by 16 units. The way to do this is with a resistor ladder. As shown in the picture, each of the 5 pins will connect to the network from the bottom, and there is one output, to the meter. Pin 1 will be connected furthest from the output (marked LSB on the diagram), so as the voltage from that pin makes its way across all of those resistors, it will be dropped until it contributes very little to the total at the end. Pin 5 will be connected nearest to the output (marked MSB on the diagram), so the voltage from Pin 5 only has 1 resistor in its path to the output, and will thus influence the voltage, or current, at the end, much more. (Resistors drop voltage, by the way).

That's it - that's how simple a digital-analog converter can be - a bunch of resistors. Going the other way - not so easy.

Pollen Nation

2008-04-10T07:50:00.003-04:00

It's pollen season here in the south, and here in the south, pollen is not just an abstract thing that floats around and makes allergy sufferers complain. Oh no, it's a fine yellow dust that coats, I say coats, everything. These pictures really don't show you the full scope of the coverage.

On the doorstep one you can kind of see footprints, and get an idea of what color the doorstep is supposed to be.

I'll have to upload another picture when it rains, when the streams and rivulets run bright yellow with plant spooge.

Shrovis-Bishopthorpe

2008-04-09T09:18:00.004-04:00

I am a huge Anglophile, so this storyline in Achewood is making me larf und larf. Keep clicking next, it's ongoing, and is still in progress.

The Shrovis-Bishopthorpe Envaliant III

Computer Dashboard, part 3 - D/A Conversion 1

2008-04-08T12:09:00.006-04:00

back to Part 2

Meters work by swinging a needle in response to an electrical current. No matter what the scale on the meter says, "Degrees C", "Fuel Level", "Houseguests Offended", the meter only cares about one thing- when you feed it no current, the meter goes to (usually) the left, or Empty, or 0, and when you feed it the maximum amount of current, the meter goes to Full, or 100, or "That's a paddlin'", or whatever. So the meter needs to be fed a variable amount of current, in response to whatever you're measuring.

Now the ActiveWire USB board doesn't have the ability to output a variable amount of current. It has 16 pins, each of which can either output a voltage (5V, I think), or no voltage. So somehow, we need to take a number of those pins, and change various digital combinations of "off" or "on" into analog values, varying between 0 (no current) and 1 (the maximum amount of current).

Such a thing is called a digital-to-analog converter, and it's amazingly simple. This is the same way your CD player or mp3 player works (more or less). What happens is that you assign a number of pins to represent a voltage (which is then converted to current). The more pins you assign, the more precisely you can specify the voltage. Let's say you assign 1 pin:

1 pin
On or Off
Analog Values:
0 or 1

2 pins
Pin1 ON, Pin2 ON
Pin1 ON, Pin2 OFF
Pin1 OFF, Pin2 ON
Pin1 OFF, Pin2 OFF
Analog Values:
0, 0.33, 0.66, 1

The more pins you assign, the more precision you get in the analog signal. CDs use 16 "pins", or bits, and all they do is read 16-bit sequences from the disk, many times a second, and simply send that voltage level, or current, to the speakers, which results in a waveform, which is converted to sound.

All paneled in

2008-04-06T12:12:00.004-04:00

The ice fishing hut is all paneled in. Here are some pics from the outside looking in and the inside looking out. Still needs some backwoods pimpin', but it's nice to have a dust-free space to solder and do endless metronome exercises in. I also had to put my shop back in order as a side effect, so now I have no excuse to not get to all that stuff I said I'd be getting to...

Computer Dashboard, part 2 - USB

2008-04-03T09:05:00.002-04:00

back to Part 1

So, now that I had the meters and blinkenlights which would form the display, it was time to think about how the information was going to get from the computer to the display. I decided to start with the simplest case - how would I turn an LED on and off? To turn an LED on, you need a source of voltage.

The parallel or printer port used to be the tool of choice for doing this. You get multiple pins, each of which can be assigned to be either on (voltage) or off (no voltage), and there are multiple drivers which can help you set these pins from your software. However, the parallel port and its cousin, the serial port, are rapidly disappearing, replaced by the USB port.

As I found out, USB communication is not accomplished with a chip or two from Radio Shack. You actually need a license, which you must buy, in order to talk to the port, and talking to the port more or less requires a microcontroller on the other end. So it didn't look as though I was going to build one from scratch.

Fortunately, several companies sell boards that will plug into a USB port, and offer that same, tinkerer-friendly set of pins which can be assigned to on or off. The one I chose was from ActiveWire.

Once I got the board, I plugged it in, wired up an LED to one of the pins, and used the sample application that came with the board to turn the LED on and off. Success! Now I would have to figure out how to control multiple LEDs, and some way of controlling the meters.

Computer Dashboard, part 1

2008-04-02T14:56:00.006-04:00

This is a project I built some time ago, but I thought I'd give it a write-up, since it's kind of interesting and maybe someone else will get some ideas.

The idea is to create an "ambient device", which is something that either connects to your computer, or to a network, and displays some kind of information in a way that doesn't involve your computer screen. For instance, Ambient Devices sells plastic orbs that light up blue or red, depending on weather forecasts or the stock market. Kind of a way to see information from the internets that isn't as useful or dynamic as having a computer, but looks cooler. Or different.

I wanted to build a device with panel meters (the things with needles that swing back and forth) to display information either from the internet or about my computer (like a car dashboard for your system - CPU utilization, disk utilization, network traffic).

I started, as I usually do, with the fun cosmetic junk - what kind of old meters could I find to go on the front. I went to my favorite store, Austin Electronics, to peruse their surplus meters, and found some edge meters that met my main criteria of "cheap". The big ones were surprisingly expensive. I also found some huge LEDs which I thought would make good binary status indicators ("do I have any new email?")

Cue up Fanfare for the Common Man...

2008-03-17T13:38:00.004-04:00

... and feast your eyes on this. Late 2009. I will have one. That's no empty threat. I don't care what kind of gas mileage it gets, how bad the interior is, or if I need to grow a mullet. This is Neo, the One, the second coming. The car that thinks it's a truck. The truck that thinks it's a car. Listen! Its name is whispered on the wind.... el camino....

Dobbertin Surface Orbiter

2008-02-25T12:25:00.003-05:00

This is possibly the most perfect vehicle ever created. An amphibious RV constructed from an old milk tanker trailer. I just... want to park this in my driveway. And stare at it.

Link

From Here I Shall Compose My Manifesto

2008-02-23T18:15:00.003-05:00

There comes a time in every man's life when he realizes that the house he provides for his family has, in fact, no room in it where he may keep jars of paint and X-acto knives lying around. Since this house doesn't have a basement, and the garage is just a little chilly/hot in the winter/summer, I used the existing shelves and hanging storage shelves in the garage and attached some studs to them. I bought some fine fake cherry paneling for the inside, and will insulate the walls.

This will give me a 9x9x7 cubish space in which to work on fiddly things, woodshed my guitar, and hang my fishing trophies. Since it's so small, I expect that a small heater and window a/c unit should keep it comfy all year round. I call it my ice fishing shack.

I'm not dead

2008-02-13T10:23:00.002-05:00

I know it's been a hella long time since my last post. And I know that all of my faithful readership is wondering just what is going on. Well, it's winter, and that's usually when I do some kind of smaller crafty project, but this winter I've mostly been focusing on improving my guitar skills. But I did just start construction on a studio in the garage, and I have some ideas for gas-powered miniature carnival rides, so something more substantial should be coming soon. In the meantime, please enjoy this picture of Mia as "Last Child on Earth".

Sonic Temple

2007-12-06T14:07:00.000-05:00

I finally dug the ol' pipe organ out of storage and mounted it on the wall of the garage. I decided against the MIDI card this time, as I don't feel like putting a computer out in the garage. I went old school and hooked up each valve to one of the keys from one of the keyboards from the dead tube organ. Anyway, it adds that homey touch to the garage, and with the speakers and amps, makes quite an imposing site.

More about the pipe organ, since there's no other information online about it - it's very small, 32 hand-built wooden pipes. I built it in 2002 or 2003, it used to have a nice case and it was hooked up to a computer so you could play tunes on it automatically. The blower is a salvage thing I got for $20, the valves are electromechanical, and the piping is PVC. It sounds more like a calliope than a proper pipe organ, and I guessed at a lot of the pipe widths, so it's somewhat uneven in sound. But it does make sound and you can play recognizable music on it, so I did what I set out to do. Impressively, there's only one jammed pipe after 2 years of the pipes sitting on the floor of the garage.

Tubes! Boobs.

2007-11-23T08:27:00.003-05:00

There are no boobs in this post. The title is from a lyric by the immortal Surf Punks. I was going to go into a digression on the formative effects of the Surf Punks on my musical tastes, but there is an entire wikipedia article on the subject. If you're looking for insightful commentary on early 80s California surfing culture, including the tense local-valley dynamic (My Beach. My Wave. Go Home!), property rights (Somebody Ripped My Stick) and sexual relations (Too Big for Her Top), you could do worse than to check them out. Not a lot worse, but somewhat.

Ok, moving on - the amp that I built out of tube organ parts is done, and it sounds wizard. Atfer I pulled the power amp section out, I kind of tried to figure out what the minimum connections I would need to make it work - input, volume, output and power. It had a helhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifl of a lot more connections to the rest of the organ to accept input from all the stops, apply vibrato, and who knows what else. But, I got lucky and found the 4 wires I needed to make it work.

The power amp is a tried-and-true design from the early 60s - a pair of 6L6s in a "push-pull" configuration, which means each tube amplifies half the signal. It's efficient and clean, and is the basic circuit of venerable guitar amps like the Fender Bassman and Super Reverb, as well as plenty of hi-fi amps from the era. It has a preamp and phase splitter tube in front of the power tubes, and is good from anywhere from 25 to 40 watts, depending on configuration.

An amp built for guitar will have 2 or more gain stages in front of the power amp section to boost the weak signal from a guitar and put it through some tone controls before it hits the power amp section. Since this amp doesn't have that, you need to feed it a line-level signal, and do whatever processing you want before it hits the amp. Right now I have it running through my Roland Micro Cube, and out the headphone jack into the tube amp. I actually think this is a great combination. The Micro Cube has all kinds of digitally modeled amps, and by feeding that out into a real tube power stage and into vintage speakers, it really gives the amp modeling some life and lets it breathe. (I have a Behringer v-amp2 on the way to replace the micro cube).

So the cabinet is made from the original organ case, cut up and reassembled into a much smaller box. The speakers are the organ speakers, and are that early type that look incredibly fragile (paper cone, those weird rectangular magnets, thin stamped metal), but they are really rich sounding. I have an input jack, a volume knob, and a power switch (wired backwards). It sounds authentic. You can really hear the difference when you get it up loud enough to let the power tubes start breathing. I think I'm onto something with the digital front-end into the tube back-end. (And I think this is what Fender does with their CyberTwin series).

That last picture is of a smaller amp that I built from parts a few years ago. It's a single-EL84 practice amp that puts out 5 watts. That one is a lot of fun because it's so low-powered that you can make it distort nicely at volumes that won't split your head open. Interestingly, you can now buy that amp in 5 different guises at your local Guitar Center - (amp designs tend to be ripped off/copied across all the major manufacturers - there's only so many ways you can design a reasonable amplifier). When I built it, not so much - tubes have really enjoyed a comeback. The beautiful thing about them is the simplicity - look at the underside of a tube amp chassis and you really don't see that many parts - you can almost trace the schematic by hand if you want to.

Plus, the small one heats up and something shorts out inside. I have to set this small bottle of liqueur on top of it to clear the short and keep playing. You just don't get that kind of rock and roll character out of solid state.

My apologies to the fine people of Corinth, Mississippi

2007-11-20T07:44:00.002-05:00

Well, it was bound to happen. After buying that Wurlitzer tube organ, I cleaned it up, played with it for a couple of months, and then... it sat, disused and lonely. Lonely and heavy, like a convenience store clerk in rural Georgia at 3 am.

Uh... anyway. Since I've been playing a lot more guitar lately, I thought I might see if I could get a guitar amp out of it. It has a pretty sizeable tube power amp and speakers, and I thought I'd build a case out of all the nicely veneered wood. This of course entailed taking it all apart. As I did so I discovered just how much work had gone into the electronics of this thing. There is one printed circuit board. The rest is hand-wired, point-to-point. The tone generator (the huge rack of tubes on that original picture) wiring is a marvel. I can't imagine how long it must have taken.

There are numerous places where there are rollers or switches that contact dozens of finely sprung wires all at once. It's a bizarre combination of mechanical and electrical functionality that held up for 50 years until a doofus with a screwdriver showed up. (Actually, two doofi - Abby was quite helpful with her own little screwdriver and wrench). So, sorry if anyone who was at the Corinth factory in 1959 is reading. At least it makes the rest of them more valuable!

The organ had some kind of intrinsic heaviness to it - no matter how many parts I removed and carried away, it didn't seem to get any lighter. The last chunk I carried outside was still heavy.

So anyway, I guess I'll make a wall hanging out of the guts (unless someone wants a crapload of vintage caps and resistors, desoldering not included), and the amp and speakers are well on their way to becoming a bitchin' guitar amp. Now that I have my garage back, there should be more project goodness coming your way, including the Resurrection of the Pipe Organ.

I live by a river

2007-11-20T07:33:00.001-05:00

Oh yeah... In response to my previous nonsense about dewcatchers, I realized that I live very near to a major river (which is flowing 3.2 billion gallons daily to feed sturgeons and mussels, and a power plant). So surely with a garden hose, an electric pump, pickup water tank and water purifier, I could form my own water utility. I wonder how many pickups with the same idea you'll find at Jones Bridge Park if this really does go as badly as it could. Or maybe we'll all just go down to the river to wash our clothes and bathe.

Or maybe Perdue will send the GA National Guard to secure Lake Lanier against the US Army Corps of Engineers. That's a graphic demonstration of state vs. federal rights for ya. (yes, I know the lake is a federally built reservoir, etc., etc.).

Water.... must have.... water

2007-10-15T08:24:00.000-04:00

Due to massive population growth, unprecedented lack of rainfall and stunning lack of management foresight, Atlanta will run out of water in 3 months if nothing changes.

Read more about it.

Hmm.. Well, I'd been looking for a new project. What better project than the continued survival of one's own family! Now, it's a little strange, because bottled water will (presumably) continue to be available, so dying of thirst isn't really the problem. But we will start to smell pretty bad, and cooking would get to be a chore. So how can you get (not necessarily potable) water, assuming you don't want to dig a well (I don't)?

Here's what I've come up with so far:

* Dehumidifier. You can get 3-6 gallons a day if you run it continuously. Of course, you're burning coal to do so, but seeing as how we're partly in this fix because of a sturgeon and 2 endangered mussels... bugger the atmosphere.

* Solar still. Dig a shallow trench, cover it with plastic at an angle, sun hits the earth, water evaporates onto plastic, drains into basin. Output depends on the size of the still, but are modest - maybe a gallon or 2 a day, with a BIG trench.

* Dew collection. This involves simply constructing an inverted pyramid of a fabric with a large surface area. Yields are said to be more than a solar still. And I have a lot of PVC pipe with which to experiment.

* Conservation. Apparently 40 gallons/person/day is a good target to shoot for, which seemed high to me. We already don't wash the children as much as we should, so we can stop filling the bath as much when we do, switch to more sponge baths, and stop flushing the toilet so much. All things I recall from my own childhood.

The next few months should be interesting.

desktop tag

2007-09-25T08:09:00.001-04:00

Okay, time to get back into the posting here. I've been tagged twice. First, the show-me-your-desktop tag, courtesy of Cate. I do have a Mac, but it's pretty boring. My dock is on the left, oooohhhh..... However, let me share with you the 3840x1200 goodness that is my dual-widescreen windows work environment:

Ba ha ha ha. It rules. The thing on the left is ObjectDock, which is a Mac dock emulator. It works pretty good, except that the icons aren't very pretty a lot of the time, but that's not the app's fault.

I'll tag Stan, because he has new desktops and operating systems every month.

Parade of Guitars

2007-08-19T13:02:00.001-04:00

Inspired by Stan's research on his (really sweet) Epiphone, here is a parade of the electric guitars I've owned over the years. I haven't quite had the luck that Stan has had holding onto one guitar. I tend to buy guitars that are either a) crap or b) weird or c) both. What I really want is a Gibson SG, or at least that's what I think I want. I could go buy one or at least a decent Epiphone copy. But I'm afraid it wouldn't live up to my expectations. I hardly even take them down in guitar stores.

Let the show begin...

The first one is (I think) a Mattel Synsonic black Explorer. I could be totally making this up, but I swear I have a memory of this guitar. It had a 9 volt battery to power the built-in speaker. It took me 30 minutes to tune. I have no idea what happened to it, or even if I had the Explorer or the Strat copy.

NO PICTURE OF THE APPLAUSE - PICTURE AN 80s GUITARIST. CLOSE ENOUGH.

Next up was the Applause "power-strat" copy. It was 200 bucks literally from an ad in the back of Guitar World. No pickguard, 2 single coil, 1 hb, bad floyd-rose knockoff tremolo, impossible action. This guitar got heavily modded - I cut the lower horn off and glued it back on backwards (I don't know...), put LEDs in the middle single-coil position, dumped tempera paint on it, and most importantly, drilled a hole by the back strap holder to accept a model rocket engine and fitted an igniter switch to it. Did not actually set it off during battle of the bands, but did rock it outside in the parking lot. Probably destroyed in some fashion or another, but I don't remember.

Now I got serious, so Stan, Dylan and I went to Daddy's Junky Music in Manchester, and out of all the guitars there, I decided that the best one would be a black Peavey Vandenberg. Reverse headstock, "dinky strat" styling, real floyd rose - what a shred machine. Except that I was not, am not, and will never be a shredder. So I played my usual pentatonic noodlings and "25 or 6 to 4" with the jazz band. It was possibly the most inappropriate guitar imaginable for these purposes. This picture from eBay captures it exactly as I remember it - for all I know this could be the exact guitar. I can even smell the synthetic fur in the case. Must have sold it before going to college at some point.

NO PICTURE OF THE TERRIBLE FLYING V. LUCKY YOU.

At this point I got more into bass, but who the hell wants to look at basses. So we'll just move on to my first pawn shop purchase in Houston - a godawful flying v copy. It met its end by being tossed repeatedly into the air and left to fall on the concrete at one of our house parties. I don't think I played a single gig or anything else with it.

A little later I got involved with The Freshmakers, and we actually played some outside gigs for (no) money, so I needed a real guitar and real amp. I bought a Yamaha Weddington Special, which is a really obscure guitar. I actually went to the financial aid office and got a small loan out for it. The only picture I could find of it is in this ad, beside an equally obscure guitarist. It was pretty nice, really - a Les Paul Special rip with a slightly different shape. I thought I would have it for good, but I needed to pay the rent one day... If you ever come across one, it's probably worth a look.

After leaving college I really had no other electric guitars for quite a while. It was only in California when I accepted a black Squier Strat instead of rent from my roommate that I got back into them. I'm not even going to put a picture up of this. I think if you've ever played guitar, you've played or owned a Squier Strat. They are depressingly mediocre guitars.

Fast forward again to Atlanta, just a couple of years ago, I got a yen to own a decent electric. So I went to Guitar Center, and was really thinking I was going to buy that Epiphone SG. But, I saw this thing called a Blueshawk in the used section and couldn't resist the allure of the weird. Real Gibson, made in the USA, semi-hollow, tiny body, sort-of-P90 pickups, and most bizarrely, 25 inch scale length (Gibsons are usually 24, fenders are 25). I bought it and took it home, but even though you had 15 separate tone options available with the weird switches on it, eventually I deduced that none of them sounded very good. And the fit and finish was pretty awful. And I think I just like maple fretboards better. So I took it back. But, I did write the last song that I have written on it. So there is that.

And now, I am the proud owner of a heavily modified Reverend Hitman guitar. I was lusting after one of these - they're (weird), semi-hollow bodies with like a Formica top and really nice, meaty baseball bat necks. There was a 6 month waiting list for a new one, so I bought one off of eBay, with a "Fat Tele" pickup config. I can't stand Teles, so I made a new pickguard and put in a crapload of pickups so I could select the minihumbucker for jazz, single front coil for Hendrix, single and middle out of phase for Mark Knopfler, and rear hb for ZZ Top. It also has a piezo bridge for nasty, 70s sounding acoustic guitar. That was a mistake. The rest is pretty ok - I don't like the color. I think I'm going to take all the pickups out except the front hb and refinish it or something. Or just buy a new body from Warmoth and have the frets redressed - the neck is the best thing about it.

There you have it - my life in guitars.

2 Blue Beans

2007-07-29T18:13:00.001-04:00

My vunderful vife Trisha is sewing little girls' clothes for sale on Etsy. If your plans call for the purchase of such items, check it out:

http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=5210435

ACE SIM CTC

2007-07-29T18:07:00.000-04:00

If you've read my earlier diatribe (too lazy to link it for you! ha!) you know of my history with radio controlled aircraft. I'm happy to say that I've built one that I think will survive me. It's a kit I got last Christmas from my folks, completely carbon fiber and ripstop nylon. I finally finished it up last night and flew it today. Very floaty, kind of like flying a powered leaf. Lots 'o fun. When it hits the dirt the tubing joints pop, and you just press it back togeteher. Brilliant!

46 MPG

2007-07-28T17:14:00.000-04:00

Ok, that is the last post I will make about gas mileage, because it is an incredibly wanky-ass subject to be writing about. You want to see some people in need of a real hobby, go to cleanmpg.com and read a forum or two.

BUT 46 MPG!!!! The EPA for the car is only 32. In real terms, that means I can go 140 more miles per tank, or almost 4 round trips to work.

Yes, I do eat meat, fly on jet planes, and my gas savings could be wiped out merely by having lunch somewhere decent. So it ultimately means nothing in terms of environment and finance.

46 MPG!!!!

Hypermiling!

2007-07-24T08:31:00.001-04:00

Because "driving like a granny" just doesn't sound as cool. So after a few months of commuting, I've found that no matter how fast you book it on the highway, it's going to take about 35 minutes each way if you're lucky. Since my wonderful wife got me an iPod for my birthday, I now have a reliable source of This American Lives and cell biology lectures from Berkeley.

So, why not take it to the other extreme and try to get the best gas mileage you can? The prerequisites are:
1) A stick shift.
2) A willingness to let it all go

I have the first, it took a while to attain the second, but last week I managed 38 MPG in my 2000 Civic with 106,000 miles. Not too shabby, I thought, especially since my drive is 7 miles of highway bookended by 6 miles of surface street on each end.

Like everything else, there are nutcases out there who give my newfound extreme sport a bad name - people who hit the offramp doing 50, shut the engine off, and don't touch the brakes until they hit the curb with their front tires at their destination. And people who refuse to accelerate at any more than a snail's pace - those lights don't last forever, and more than 3 cars would like to get through.

But, even being relatively courteous and relatively safe, you can do a lot. The biggest thing is the most boring - get on the highway, set the cruise control for 55 (if you're feeling mellow) or 60 (if you're in a frisky mood), and sit in the right hand lane. It's incredibly relaxing. In Atlanta, with 5 lanes of traffic to your left, it's like you're not even moving. I almost never have to touch anything from the time I get on the highway to the time I get off. For most cars, fuel economy tops out in 5th gear at 45 or so, remains pretty steady until about 60, then tails off badly - 20% lower at 70, 30% lower at 80, etc. And over 7 miles, the difference between 60 and 80 is nothing - especially since you end up braking and weaving trying to do 80.

Second - don't use your brakes. This just means, brake with the engine as much as possible, which forces you to drive with plenty of space in between you and the car in front of you. The ideal is that you never stop, you're always creeping up to lights until they change. In practice, this only works for me sometimes - like I said, the volume of traffic is usually such that if you creep too much, you're pissing people off who are trying to get through the same light you are. But, this morning, I made it through 4 lights without touching the brakes. This one leads to dangerous behavior - like cornering too fast to keep up your momentum. But hey - giving up speeding has to have some benefits...

Third - gentle on the accelerator. Duh. It takes real, Newton's-law kind of energy to accelerate a body at rest. In ideal world, it takes no energy to maintain the same velocity - in our world, you have to overcome friction and air resistance - but that's a lot less than accelerating. I try to shift at 2000 rpm now, and get into 5th gear as soon as possible (but without depressing the accelerator any more than necessary).

Fourth - maintain the car. I'm trying to do more of this on the Civic. (The van is big and scary, and I happily leave that to my Honda Dude). I look forward to changing or cleaning the plugs, air filter, and putting in lightweight oil.

Side benefits are, the car should last a lot longer, the drive is a lot more relaxing, and when you actually do have to accelerate, brake or maneuver, it's much more thrilling.

Guitaraoke

2007-07-18T22:06:00.000-04:00

Thought I'd post a short bit on the software I'm working on. Basically, it's a glorified Notepad with big fonts! Sounds exciting, doesn't it? It's to support my incredibly weak memory. I enjoy playing the guitar and singing. Except that I can't remember chords. Or lyrics. So, unless I have something in front of me, my hot jams usually go something like, "ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWER! Princess, somethin, something, outside in the cold, umm... GUITAR SOLO!!!!"

Guitaraoke is a simple program to display chords and lyrics. There's a list of artists, a list of songs, and a big text area so the laptop can be across the room. I have a foot control that I'm building from an old USB keyboard so I can switch songs and scroll through the lyrics without stopping the rock. Zac and I tried it out the other week, and it works great - we got through a lot more songs, a lot more easily, than with printing everything out.

I'm working on polishing it up a little bit and then I'll post it on the web for all to enjoy. I had some spare time in my meetings this week so I added the ability to play an mp3 for each song, and a little bit of an easier way to load songs in (they're just text files in folders, usually copy/pasted off the stellar www.guntheranderson.com
website.

Indoor project

2007-07-02T07:35:00.002-04:00

When a 1959 all-tube Wurlitzer organ presents itself on the List of Craig for merely $100, one must respond. One must throw out one's own back, and two of thine friends backs in the process.

Actually, I had no idea that it was all tube, or 1959. We picked it up, and it is a HEAVY sumbitch, let me tell you. Got it back home, doodled around with it (it actually sounds pretty dang nice), then I googled the model number - 1959! Hey, cool.

That night, I opened up the back to reveal the glory you see here. You see, I have a fetish for vacuum tubes. I thought my 3-tube guitar amp was pretty cool. I just about soiled my pants when I took the cover off. The label proclaiming "28 12FQ8 Tubes". The fact that those are all individual tube oscillators to produce the tones. The rows of ganged capacitors. The 6L6 power amp tubes. The fact that the stop switches just have a few tubes thrown in for good measure.

And in a global economy that provides us with so much for so little, the isolationist protectionist in me wept a little bit inside, to read, on each and every tube, "Made in the USA for Wurlitzer by General Electric".

...What so proudly we hailed, in the twilight's last gleaming...

Video!

2007-06-30T19:09:00.000-04:00

Downhill:

Uphill:

th-th-th-that's all folks!

2007-06-25T08:31:00.000-04:00

Thanks to everyone who's been following the story. Here she is, in more-or-less final form. Couldn't resist the call of green. I have to find the right place to add the mandatory touch of red. It's even got a cupholder.

Just in case anyone's searching for this in the future: quadricycle, velomobile, homebuilt, diy, recumbent. That ought to cover it. I'll try to get some videos uploaded soon.

It holds children!

2007-06-18T12:11:00.000-04:00

When I said feature complete, I didn't mean it. After a rousing game of minigolf in the morning, I got a whole afternoon in the sweltering heat of the garage to complete the rumble seat.

Here are the results. I had to move the seat up to the higher rails to get enough room for the children's feet.

OK, that's going to be it for pictures until I get it all rebuilt and shiny. My neighbors are threatening to enter it in a 4th of July parade if I don't first.

Feature complete.

2007-06-11T22:26:00.000-04:00

Which means, it may not be pretty, it may have bugs, but it does everything it was designed to do. I rode it all around the neighborhood in the dusk, scaring the dogs. No mishaps, no scary surprises. Note the children, simulated here by a bundle of shingles. Next steps will be some solo shakedown runs to Simpsonwood, then, just like American Chopper, it'll be off to paint and chrome.

Back in the Saddle

2007-06-10T21:25:00.001-04:00

Hey all -

Thanks for your comments! I had the jackshaft idea too, but thought it was a little too complex for this round. Let me put it this way - I might turn out to be a passable fabricator at some point, but a mechanic I ain't. Even the oil on brand new bike chain kinda makes it not my favorite part of the whole process.

My personal wuss issues aside, I went through and rewelded all the joints on the crank. I was able to fill in the 3 or 4 holes that I made the first time around, and basically extended and completed the rest of them.

With the crank brace, rewelded crank, and electric assist, it works like a charm. I took it up and down the street, down the cul-del-sac, and back. I haven't decided yet on the gears or not - for a vehicle with no long distance requirements, it seems like too much. So far, the best strategy seems to be to keep it in the second-lowest gear and use just enough electric assist to keep light pressure on the pedals. Uphill, that's almost full throttle. On the flats, you can stop pedaling and the motor will propel you much faster, but then it starts to feel illegal.

1 brake was enough to get me safely down the hill, so 2 ought to be just fine - I really have a single destination in mind (Simpsonwood), so as long as I take the long, flat way, should be no problem.

Grr. Arrgh.

2007-06-09T22:25:00.001-04:00

The bike part of the bike car is turning out to be significantly harder than anticipated. After the electric runs, I got the crank installed and the chain on, and took it up the driveway. Chain falls off. Tried again. Chain falls off. It was really hard to pedal (turns out I bought a too big big chainring for the front). Oh, and don't weld 6 dollar chainrings. They fold up like a taco.

So I got a smaller chainring off one of the junk bikes and bolted it on. Easier to pedal, chain falls off. By this time I notice that the shaft outside of the bike is really bent. Ok, it's going to need some support outside of the chainring. Order another bearing, wait a few days.

Got that bearing on tonight, take the back derailleur off (it so does not need any gears other than "low"). Take it up the driveway. Chain does not fall off! Crank breaks at a weld. Arrgh. Now I need to go through and solidify the crank. And probably get a yet-smaller chainring.

Yes, yes, hell yes

2007-06-02T23:17:00.000-04:00

Mad progress. Crank is all welded up and pretty straight. It's mounted in the bearings and on the bike. Seat position is pretty set, it's nice and low in the frame, but I did weld on 2 more rails in case I want it higher in the future.

The steering works great, which is just awesome. It involves a 90 degree transfer of motion via an angle bracket, which is an idea I got from tracker organs (although I'm sure it's used anywhere you need to transfer motion from one direction to another). A rare example of an old hobby coming in handy in a new one. It's via a lever - forward for right, back for left.

And, as soon as I had the steering set up, I couldn't help but take it out into the night for a test drive with just the electric wheel. It. is. the. bomb. The wheel pushes it along just great, and even up a little incline. It stops on hills, but that's what the pedals are for. It's a blast already. I can't wait to get the chain and brakes on it.

Jiggety-jig

2007-05-29T22:40:00.000-04:00

Since I have no tubing bender with which to make the crank, and since budgetary constraints prohibit the purchase of one at this time, I had to go ahead and make up a jig to weld the crank together. Here it is with the parts attached. The microphone stand gave its life for this crank. Tomorrow I should be able to weld it up and mount it on the bike. That'll clear the bottleneck to fit the seat and steering, and then, it will roll.

Measure twice, order once

2007-05-29T08:45:00.000-04:00

It turns out that 3/4" electrical conduit does not in fact have a 7/8 " outside diameter. I know this because it completely does not fit in the nice new 7/8" bearings that I received yesterday. Fortunately I scoured the house and found a mic stand that has 7/8" outside diameter tubing as its base, so I am now down one mic stand but up one set of crank raw materials. At the end of this week I hope to have a crank welded together.

Progress!

2007-05-20T17:32:00.000-04:00

It stands on all 4 wheels now, and I've started on the steering linkage. The electric wheel pushes it along just fine, and I'm deciding on a place for the seat. Here we see Abby holding aloft the traditional Steel Branch symbolizing the completion of major frame construction. 2 of my neighbors have come in to see what all the arcing is about. Interestingly, both of them said they had done some welding earlier in their lives. Must be a rite of passage.

The garage is getting to the point where I really should do a major cleanup before continuing construction, but I doubt I'll follow through with that.

Chinese Electric Wheel

2007-05-20T09:34:00.000-04:00

So I found the cheapest electric hub wheel I could possibly find. It came yesterday, with 1 photocopied sheet of English instructions and plenty of Chinese. It uses 2 12 V batteries, which weigh as much as the whole frame, so I hope it works well.

Dragula

2007-05-19T21:36:00.000-04:00

I went to the Norcross Open Car Show today. They had everything there you could want, from 30s hot rods to a completely original 1970 Dodge Challenger. What I was looking at were the T-buckets, though, because the bikecar is heading in that direction. I liked one in particular, with the leather couch interior and coach taillights (they look like little lanterns). As I went passed I hummed Dragula by Rob Zombie and have been humming it ever since. So the bikecar will have a gothic T bucket theme going for it.

By the way, the car in the Rob Zombie Dragula video is actually the Munster Koach. The Dragula was Grandpa Munsters, and was in fact a coffin with a V8. Sweeeeeet..

Quadbike Wheel

2007-05-16T21:53:00.000-04:00

More progress on the quadbike - one of the back wheels is attached. I'm loosely following the plans found at www.americanspeedster.com, except mine's made of metal instead of PVC pipe. Same basic idea - chain outside the body, one electric rear wheel. Welding's getting to be no big thing, I think I've got the hang of it. Always a shame that you can't go back and fix all the things you did when you were learning. Oh well, next one.

Gas looks set to go above 4 dollars a gallon. Time to start a moped/golf cart/bicycle shop.

BIKE. CAR!

2007-05-14T21:39:00.000-04:00

Well, it's been a while. I've always wanted to weld. It seemed like such a useful skill, but somehow I never got around to it, probably because it's also an inconvenient skill, what with the fire, sparks and melting metal.

A couple of months ago Dad was down fixing my porch roof with me, and he convinced me to go to the Harbor Freight store and pick up a flux welder. I was not aware of the advancements in welding technology. This welder plugs into a 120 volt house line, doesn't use gas, and doesn't use sticks. You just hold the pointy end close to the pieces you want to join and pull the trigger.

Actually there's more to it than that - I still only get a nice-looking weld about 1 out of 5 times, but the rest seem to hold too. It's a strange feeling, since you can't see what's going on too well from behind the mask, and you have to go on feel and trying to watch the puddle of molten metal behind the arc.

Which brings me to the best thing about welding; you're MELTING METAL. With ELECTRICITY. Yes, please.

So anyway, my first project is a 4 wheeled pedal and electric powered vehicle. So far the frame is done and all the parts are on order. It's heavy, but so far not as bad as I thought it would be. I'll try to stay more up to date on my progress here.

Amazing waste of time and money

2006-12-19T12:23:00.000-05:00

I just destroyed my latest model plane. Let's take stock of just how much money and time this hobby has taken over the last couple of years. I'll upload pictures and specific dates as I get a chance.

First came the helicopters:

E-flite Blade CP -

Money spent - (airframe + parts) $400
Tinkering time - 10 hours
Flying time - 1 hour
Ultimate fate - smashed in fit of rage
Duration - 1 week

I sold my last telescope to buy this, for $250. I bought that scope for $250. Note the incredible value represented by the hobby of astronomy. Contrast this with what's to come. This helicopter lasted a week.

Lite Machines Corona -

Money spent - (airframe + parts) $1500
Tinkering time - 40 hours
Flying time - 5 hours
Ultimate fate - sold for $300 total
Duration - 9 months

Can't say enough good stuff about this machine. Survived me, had fun flying it. But, it certainly ate a big chunk of change.

Ikarus Eco 8

Money spent - (airframe + parts) $900
Tinkering time - 10 hours
Flying time - 30 minutes
Ultimate fate - sold, damaged, for $100 total
Duration - 1 month

Huge, huge, huge waste of money

Then I got into planes.

ParkZone Mustang P-51

Money spent - (airframe + parts) $250
Tinkering time - 4 hours
Flying time - 20 minutes
Ultimate fate - scrapped, servo + receiver used for boat
Duration - 1 week

Too fast for the field I fly at, also after sustaining some damage, never recovered.

T-Hawk

Money spent - (airframe only) $170
Tinkering time - 10 minutes
Flying time - 3 hours so far
Ultimate fate - still have!
Duration - months

Clearly the right option for me.

Animal (3D foam plane, bought mostly for parts)

Money spent - $250
Tinkering time - none, built already
Flying time - <1 minute (prop fell off, plane crashed)
Duration - 2 days
Ultimate fate - scrapped for parts

Ikarus Wizard Flying Boat

Money spent - $70
Tinkering time - 10 hours to build
Flying time - 10 minutes
Duration - 3 days
Ultimate fate - crashed, scrapped for parts

Mini iFO

Money spent - $70
Tinkering time - 8 hours to build
Flying time - 10 minutes so far
Duration - still around
Ultimate fate - damaged, needs a redesigned servo tray

And I've also built some free flight planes

Guillow's Cessna

Money spent - $10
Building time - 10 hours
Flying time - 10 minutes (crashed too often)
Ultimate fate - wrecked in the garage

Guillow's Javelin duration model

Money spent - $15
Building time -10 hours
Flying time - 30 minutes (lost in tree)
Ultimate fate - recovered from forest, discarded

Dumas Tiger Moth

Money spent - $25
Building time - >20 hours
Flying time - 5 minutes (damaged)
Ultimate fate - destroyed in a fit of rage

The Totals:

Money spent - money recovered: $3190
Time spent building and repairing: 114 hours, or almost 3 workweeks
Time spent flying: 7.8 hours, or about 1 workday

What's left?

I have my T-Hawk, transmitter, and the mini-IFO which basically just needs service. I have 2 incredibly frustrating experiences where I saw red and destroyed the plane or helicopter. I have a ratio of 1 part flying to 40 parts building/repairing. I have some enjoyable evenings spent building balsa planes, and some spent repairing helicopters (the first time is fun). I am down more than $3000 in a year and a half. (most of that in helicopters, which is why I got rid of them).

Tree Monorail

2006-06-13T13:51:00.000-04:00

I like garden railways. I even have a G-scale 3 car train that goes under the christmas tree. The problem is that they are EXPENSIVE. Disregarding the cars and locomotives, the track itself is quite pricey. And yet I envision a mass transit system for all the gnomes and elves that live in the backyard. What to do?

MONORAIL! MONORAIL!

First, go check out this guy's backyard monorail:
http://www.monorails.org/tMspages/NMT01.html

A model monorail would be great. It could be suspended from the trees where available, and require only a few supporting posts where trees are not available. Plus, with only one track, you eliminate the problem of trying to build double-track that maintains a set distance between the rails.

The plan is to use flexible copper tubing for trackage, which should be fairly aesthetically OK, especially after it oxidizes. The monorail itself will be a suspended type (under the rail), unlike the Disney top-of-the rail type. Track costs should be minimal. Control will be radio control and onboard batteries, so nothing will have to be electrified. I can see a station on the deck, a station in the woods.... I can see all kinds of things.

Writing

2006-06-06T09:53:00.000-04:00

I see it's been a week since my last post. Must be time for the "writing about writing" post. I have written in the following formats:

Songs. I'm not particularly good at songwriting. Something pretty much has to happen to me in order for me to write about it, so there's a limiting factor right there. Not a whole lot really songworthy happens to me. (Especially as you get older - man, no one wants to hear songs about the middle of life). And, I stink at metaphor. Thus, my songs are more or less a direct recital of some event.
Marketing pieces. Well, these are just sort of painful.

I've been reading Analog, which is one of the last remaining pulp-science-fiction magazines, and while the writing is somewhat wince-inducing, it perfectly matches my remaining attention span. I might have to give that a try, although my ear for dialog is awful. But the format and content seem like something that would be amenable to giving it a try.

SpanofLife Interface

2006-05-24T09:16:00.000-04:00

While lying in bed this morning I thought of the spanoflife interface. Since we only have 3 dimensions to work in, I'll have to go 3d. But, what I realized is that people live their lives in 2D space. Yes, we climb mountains, go into Death Valley, etc., but for the most part we don't gain or lose much elevation, compared to the horizontal distance we cover. So I can use that dimension, height, to represent the passage of time. Each person will have a life line that stretches from the top to the bottom of the screen, and their postiion on the earth will be represented in the X,Y plane.

This is basically the same as some railroad timetables.

This will not be applicable for astronauts.

This post doesn't make much sense.

Money

2006-05-23T17:11:00.000-04:00

I've been more interested in economics lately. Although my understanding of it is shaky at best, I recently read a few things which are scary to say the least.

First - the impending baby boomer retirement. Now, everyone already knows about the trillions in healthcare costs that this means, and that the younger generations will be shouldering that without enough people in the workforce. But - what about all the 401(k)s? I just read an article in the Economist that goes like this: When everyone retires over the next 10-15 years, everyone is going to be cashing in their 401(k)s. In other words, everyone of retirement age is going to be converting those stocks and bonds into cash to live on. How? By selling them on the market. But....who is going to buy them??

There are not enough younger people in the workforce, in the US, to buy up all of those stocks and bonds. What does this mean? It means that the stock market is headed for a deep dive, because of simple supply and demand. Without sufficient demand, the prices are going to dive, because of the glut of stocks and bonds on the market. This means that, for instance, my 401(k) is going to tank, unless I convert it into some other asset (cash, usually), which of course exacerbates the problem.

The authors of the article basically propose that the only real solution for this is going to be to make it as easy for Chinese and Indian workers to buy these assets as it is for Americans, thereby increasing demand. Alternatively, grow our own workforce by leaps and bounds, by.... oh, I don't know.... granting amnesty to tens of millions of Latinos, who would now be eligible to buy stocks and bonds?

It's fascinating, because it's so basic, and yet such an unexpected result.

So, speaking of cash. Some years ago, the US went off of the gold standard. Up to that time, the US government guaranteed that you could (in theory), go and give them a dollar, and they would give you a little bit of gold (not really, but bear with me). In other words, money was only printed as a substitute for gold, which they maintained in large vaults. This was the gold standard, and it ensured that the government printed no more money than they could back up with gold.

Why gold? While it is pretty, gold is basically in limited supply. What causes a thing to have value? Well, it could be useful, or it could be in limited supply. When you buy stocks, you are betting that the company is going to produce something that people want, thus your stocks are valuable because they allow someone to produce something useful. Gold is easier to understand - it's valuable because there's not much of it. If it was easy to produce gold from, say, dirt, then gold would be as valuable as dirt. Having a gold standard meant that the risk of inflation was low, because the government couldn't just print more money unless they could obtain more gold.

Well, the US went off of that standard. Now we have what is basically paper - it is a currency with no inherent value. It is not backed by anything except the government's assurance that it will pay for things (this note legal tender). So what does that mean? Well, the dollar has been falling in value against other currencies. This means that other nations are starting to not quite believe that the US government will back that currency. (Which is reasonable, since we are running a deficit in the trillions of dollars - $24,000 in debt for every man, woman and child).

And the price of gold has gone through the roof. It was about 200 dollars an ounce a few years ago. It is now $653 an ounce. A lot of that is speculation. But some of it reflects real concern that the world's major currency, the dollar, is heading for the same fate as the peso and the ruble - worthlessness. So people are buying metal dug up out of the ground, only because there's not that much of it, so it is inherently valuable. Scary stuff.

shiny new toys

2006-05-22T10:19:00.000-04:00

Well, I'm taking a break from writing about my own attempts to be creative so that I may tell you about several new consumer goods I bought over the weekend.

First - wireless speakers from Home Depot. I plugged the transmitter into my computer, and tuned it to my internet jazz radio station. Then I put one speaker in the sunroom, and one in the kitchen. Now there's instant muzak on demand. They actually sound pretty good to me, since I had really low expectations from what is basically baby-monitor technology.

Second - a Roland Micro Cube guitar amp. I've always been skeptical of digital guitar effects and amps, since what I've heard has sounded like crap. But - this has changed my mind. I went into Guitar Center looking for a distortion pedal. For $125, this is a complete amp that can sound like a jazz amp, a little british combo, a Marshall, or a high-gain Mesa-Boogie. I'm not kidding about the last 2, either - it really does. They've done a freakishly amazing job. It has a 5 inch speaker and runs off of 6 AA batteries, and it gives your head problems. Your eyes just can't believe that the sounds are coming from this little thing that you can pick up and swing around your head.

Plus the interface is great - 2 knobs for all the effects. They realized that hey, this is a practice amp. People don't want to sit there and diddle with 16 knobs just to get a bit of a swooshy sound, so they put 4 effects on one knob.

And the amp modeling. Yes, ok, digital technology really is amazing. It doesn't quite respond to touch in the same way that my little tube amp does, but it's close, and it has a much fuller sound when played clean. I believe the way it works is this:

an electric guitar is hooked up to an amp. (say, a Marshall stack).
the signal right out of the guitar is recorded (before it hits the amp)
the signal out of the amp is recorded
the signals are compared, and a mathematical model is constructed of how they differ, ie, here's what you have to do to the raw signal to get it to sound like the output from the amp.
That model is encoded onto a hardware chip, and placed into the amp.

So now, instead of your distortion effect coming from a diode clipping, a chip is taking your signal and transforming it in the same way that the Marshall would have transformed it (compressing it, distorting it, speaker cone interacting with air), and it comes out of the amp sounding like a Marshall.

Third - the best of all. The Nelson RainTrain sprinkler. 20 pounds of cast iron, shaped like a tractor with a sprinkler head on top of it. Every time you have to water your lawn, you get to lay out the hose like a little train track, then put the shut-off ramp at one end and the sprinkler on the other. Then you turn the water on, water spins the sprinkler arms, arms turn the worm gear, worm gear turns the (2-speed!) transmission, sprinkler crawls across the lawn, following the hose track that you set out for it, and stops when it hits the ramp.

Great sprinkler to play in, too - you don't have to choose between dry and drenched. Abby loves it, I love it (possibly too much). I mean, it combines trains, tractors, and hydro-power, and mostly incidentally, does something that you're supposed to be doing.

Parsing Wikipedia

2006-05-18T10:08:00.000-04:00

On spanoflife, I set up a MySQL database, and started to set it up according to the ERD I built, then realized I should really prototype some interface ideas. So I went looking for sample data and discovered that it is really hard to find any data in a machine-readable format. Most biographies and timelines are in the format of paragraph text. The richest source of this data seems to be wikipedia. So. The real next step is to build a parser which can take a page on, say, Galileo, and read out the events in his life into database entries. I guess I'll use python just because I have it on hand. I found a parsing library, so I can turn things like:

In 1611, he went to Rome, where he joined the Accademia dei Lincei and observed sunspots. In 1612, opposition arose to the Copernican theories, which Galileo supported. In 1614, from the pulpit of Santa Maria Novella, Father Tommaso Caccini (1574-1648) denounced Galileo's opinions on the motion of the Earth, judging them dangerous and close to heresy.

Into:

EVENT_START_TIME EVENT_NAME
1611 He went to Rome, where he joined the Accademia dei Lincei and observed sunspots.

And so on and so forth.

Player Dulcimer

2006-05-17T09:20:00.000-04:00

I have this hammered dulcimer sitting in the corner that I've been meaning to play more. It's a beautiful instrument, and it makes a beautiful tone, but I go through these periods of musical drought where I don't play anything, and then it just gathers dust. Plus, I have noticed that playing it exacerbates my wrist problems, so I can't play it for very long. So.... what to do?

As I was cruising AllElectronics.com, one of my favorite surplus electronics websites (yes, I have more than one), I came across this page:

http://www.allelectronics.com/cgi-bin/item/SOL-89/search/MINI_SPRING-RETURN_SOLENOID_.html

Isn't that just the cutest little spring-return solenoid you ever saw?

So I thought, hey, I could put little hammers on the ends of these things, suspend them above the dulcimer in a frame, connect a MIDI-to-parallel interface, plug in a computer filled with Christmas carols and reels, and voila, instanct Celtic charm. This is quite similar to my player pipe organ that I built earlier - the only difference is that these are little bangy things instead of little openy things. I already have the MIDI-to-parallel board, since I have no room for the organ in the new house. All I need are the solenoids (on order), and the computer (well, we have a bunch of those...) , and the frame, which shouldn't be too difficult.

space/time

2006-05-15T10:18:00.000-04:00

Another thing I'm struggling with is how to integrate the display of time (basically a linear string with events on it) with space (messy, 3-d). I would like a zoom feature here too, so that you could, for instance, view a line representing all events on the European continent, then be able to zoom in and separate by country, then maybe by city, etc.

I don't really want to get all complex with geographical views, since that would involve getting into 3d rendering. For a first pass, it would probably suffice to separate out the timelines side-by-side. Although... it may be neat to have a 2d map at the bottom with the timelines growing out of it. As you zoom, the map zooms too - but now you really are talking about another API, and lining stuff up on the screen. But it would be a very graphical way to show the geographical proximity of various events and timelines.

outlook

2006-05-15T09:43:00.000-04:00

I was playing around with outlook to see if i could use it as a testbed for spanoflife stuff (since it already has a nice built in data model and API for dealing with dates, events, and tasks), and I entered an appointment for Feb 2, 1874 just to see if it could handle dates far in the past. It accepted it and promptly put up a message telling me my appointment was 6714 weeks overdue.

In fact, through exhaustive study, the earliest date you can enter is 4/1/1601. An odd starting point, maybe someone has a sense of humor.

As always, Wikipedia astounds, with a page dedicated to 1601:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1601

I think I will have to scrape or link to Wikipedia for this kind of event content.

This does bring up a point about date handling. I want to be able to represent the entire lifespan of the earth on a timeline, which of course is only fuzzily known. I have entries in the tables for start and stop times, but those are going to have to be supplanted by "approximate" dates of some kind. I want to use the modern calendar, obviously, but it has to be able to zoom out to things like "10,000 years ago".

The zen of drywall finishing

2006-05-12T10:28:00.000-04:00

The first mudding tools I bought were from the paint aisle, and were not well-suited - the knives too narrow, the mud too thick. I went and got a proper mud pan, wide knives and lightweight compound, and it was actually kind of enjoyable. I'm sure I'd feel different if I was doing a whole room, but at least now I see how you could get pretty efficient at finishing drywall.

SpanofLife

2006-05-11T11:49:00.000-04:00

I don't know if I will get around to working on this for a while, especially since it involves computer work. The idea is to provide a web-based "timeline" interface for interesting spans of time. This could be your life or other lives, or it could be spans of history. You would be able to see key events on each span laid out, along with images, etc. Bringing two or more spans together would let you compare your own life with, say, Alexander the Great's. Or see the timelines of the Founding Fathers all together, so you could see that in fact, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams were of two different generations. Or overlay what's happened in the past 100 years with what happened in 1700-1800. Or layout your kids's pictures in a linear format.

The idea I want to get across is that everybody's span is pretty short, so you need to get the stuff done that you want to get done before the Reaper comes. But in a positive way. From a practical standpoint, there's a lot of work to be done. I think I realized this when I just laid out the years from 1974 to 2054 in Excel, and put my age next to each year, and filled in some things up to my current year. I saw that
a) my life is about 3/8 over
b) stuff takes time to accomplish, but not as much time as you think, if you ever get started
c) it was pretty neat to see that all laid out.

Motion on projects

2006-05-09T13:30:00.000-04:00

I have obtained 3 craptacular women's bikes from some dude in Lawrenceville to serve as the basis for Frankencumbent, the recumbent, front-wheel drive, probably unridable bike. I can't wait to attack them with my new $10 angle-grinder.

I've also registered spanoflife.com for another project. Things sure are different from the last time I signed up. Domain name plus 6 months of PHP hosting for $28.

Exercise Go-Kart - Google Search

2006-05-08T08:41:00.000-04:00

Here are the results from my google searching on the exercise bike:

Searched for:
rowing bicycle

First result:
http://rowingbike.free.fr/

Which has ALL manner of wacky bikes that use your upper body. Neat animation half-way down the page. I don't see any that combine standard bike pedaling and upper-body, though. But a lot of rowing bikes.

And the gold mine:
http://webpages.charter.net/rcgilmore/Illustrations.htm

People have been doing this for a LONG time, it seems. I still haven't seen anything exactly like my vision, but plenty of things that come close- mostly 2-wheel, interestingly. And some really entertaining stuff.

Last but not least, here is the exact thing I was thinking of (in a bike format, but the same idea) - there are also other patents from the page above that are trikes, with more or less the same thing - double handles that serve as extra propulsion and steering:

http://www.delphion.com/fcgi-bin/any2html?FILENAME=dlcache%2F47%2F16%2FUS04541647__.tif&PAGE=1&USER_HTML=%253CA%2BHREF%253D%2Forder%253Fpn%3DUS04541647__+TARGET%3D_top%253EOrderPatent%253C%2FA%253E&OUT_FORMAT=gif&SCALE=0.52

Exercise Go-Kart

2006-05-08T08:30:00.000-04:00

Ok - this is recumbent bicycle part II. I thought, since recumbents are so bad at climbing hills because you don't have the weight of your body to assist, why not get the rest of your body into the act? I've been doing weights at the gym to work on my upper body, what if I could do the same thing outside while moving somewhere?

The basic idea is that you harness your upper body to drive the bike, in addition to your legs. I think this calls for 2 things:

Recumbent sitting position, so your upper body is upright as it would be at a gym.
3 or 4 wheels so balance is no longer an issue. If you're going to be flailing all your limbs, I don't think balance is going to happen.

I envision either a tadpole trike (2 wheels at front, 1 at rear), or a 4-wheeler, with the rider seated in the middle. Standard bike pedals in front. 2 handles extend upwards from the bike to the rider's hands, at about chest height. (Think ski poles). By moving these handles back and forth, the rider adds power to their pedaling. The actual motion could be varied - one possible motion would be a ski-pole like motion such as you see on an elliptiglider at the gym. Another would be more of a rowing motion, whereby the handles are both forward or both backward at the same time.

The handles are hooked into the drive train via a standard crank mechanism. For the rowing motion, I would think you'd want to gear the handles down, so the row motion is about half the speed of the pedaling motion, otherwise you'll look like a silent movie of a gandy dancer railroad car.

The main challenge is going to be the steering. Since you're not on 2 wheels, you can't have lean steering. Perhaps the handles could move side-to-side as well for steering - I'm not sure how well that would work - could you provide power from your hands and steer at the same time?

Google sucks my ambition

2006-05-08T08:28:00.000-04:00

One of the problems with a completely connected world is that in a few keystrokes, you can discover how none of your ideas are new. Google has given everyone the ability to enter their idea into a box and see if it's been implemented. I know this should be a good thing, letting us all build on the knowledge of others. But sometimes you just want to go off on a tangent without knowing that there's an entire club devoted to the idea you just came up with. So I'm going to pursue my ideas here in a 2-part format- first I'll post the idea and explanation, then in a second part I'll post my google search results for it.

Drywall sucks

2006-05-08T08:17:00.000-04:00

I put up a little bit of drywall over the weekend, and it's a messy thing. Just like anything, by the time I got reasonably good at it, the project was over. It is a weird thing, though- you are surrounded by thousands of pounds of talcum powder in a modern house. Our other house had plaster walls, which are so much more refined (but even more messy and require a lot more skill to implement). So what does drywall have going for it?

Cheap - it's made of powdered rock, which we have plenty of, and it's not being used for anything else.
Flat - or at least, the paper covering is. So really the flat, finishable surface is simply paper.
Dense / non-resonant - it provides some measure of sound deadening - contrast to walls surfaced with a thin wood - the whole room acts like a drum.
Relatively workable - it can be cut with a utility knife. Once it's up, though, it's toast. If you want it down, it pretty much has to be destroyed.

What sucks about it?

Messy. Any cuts to it result in dust everywhere
Fragile. It cannot tolerate flexing at all, and has to be protected at all edges by corner bead. Even light bumps from furniture can result in breakage.
Heavy.

About the only substitute I could think of would be some kind of board manufactured out of recycled paper. Basically, the exterior would remain a sheet of paper, just like drywall, but the inside would be made of little pressed paper fibers. That would seem to fulfill the cheap, dense and workable aspects, while cutting down on the messy and fragile aspect. Don't know about the heavy part, though. Probably even worse than standard drywall in moisture situations, too.

Recumbent Bicycles

2006-05-05T15:31:00.000-04:00

What with $3 gas and everything, I have a renewed interest in biking. I got our bikes out of storage, but it's just so normal. And it makes my hands hurt after a while. My dad and I built a recumbent bike out of electrical conduit back in high school, and I rode that thing everywhere ,even though it had to have weighed more than 50 lbs. (Going uphill fast really not an option). I've been looking at various homebuilt options, and am especially intrigued by some that allow you to hook 2 of them together to build a little bike-car that can also tote kids and groceries. I suppose my vision of the whole family pedaling to the grocery store or out to eat probably looks better in my head than it would work out in real life, but here are the contenders:

The $18 Recumbent. 2 thriftstore bikes, 1 hacksaw, front wheel drive. Probably not going to get Trisha on one of these. (or any of the front-wheel drives). But I do like the fact that it's got a short chain.

Like the above, only with more welding involved.

And then the bike car options. There are also other "quadracycle" things available, but they seem to be more suitable for a beach boardwalk - fun, but you're not going to get anywhere very quickly.

http://www.ultimate-quadracycle.com/showroom/sportster.html
http://www.blackbirdbikes.com/ez1sxquadribent.htm

Both of those can also have electric motors attached, which would cut down on the pain of hills.

Text Based 3D Modeling

2006-05-05T15:02:00.000-04:00

I've been playing around with the Google free SketchUp program, and it's pretty nifty, although it takes some practice, and only really seems suited to architecture. Like all other 3D programs, it starts killing my wrists after a while, and I wonder if it might not be sensible to build some sort of text interface to a 3D modeling program. Sort of like POVRay (in which I built a really bitchin', animated version of a steam engine, long ago). But of course POVRay is not realtime. I want something like:

rectangle(10,10) upperJoist;
upperJoist.extend(z, 20);

which would create a block 10x10x20. As far as positioning and putting things together, I think you could take a cue from SketchUp and do intelligent things with endpoints, faces, etc. Hmmm... maybe I just want to download POVRay again.

Update: Such a thing kind of exists - Visual for Python lets you do almost what I say in the post above:

floor = box (pos=(0,0,0), length=4, height=0.5, width=4, color=color.blue)

ball = sphere (pos=(0,4,0), radius=1, color=color.red)

ball.velocity = vector(0,-1,0)

Neat!