For almost 3 years now I have dealt with a horrible buzzing noise emanating from the external speakers connected to my PowerBook when it was plugged in to things on my desk. At some point I discovered it was linked to having my 17″ Apple Studio Display plugged in, but leaving it disconnected kind of defeats the purpose, so I didn’t track the problem any further. So the magic is this; turn the brightness slider all the way up in the Displays control panel, and no more buzzing! It turns out that it is only the dimming of the backlight that introduces this noise over the ground plane. I couldn’t believe I didn’t figure this out earlier! Finally I may begin enjoying my Fostex PM 0.5’s again. Sweet.

I can’t say I love DirecTV, but TiVo just made it a lot more bearable. I still blame DirecTV for the slow performance of the grid guide on our HR10-250 recorder, but other than that, it’s a solid product, especially with the dual tuners.

DirecTV is also at fault for the silly old software version running on the thing, presumably to make their other boxes not look so lame compared to TiVo. The new version is so fast and convenient with folders.. and our 4XX hours of recording capability gest slightly out of hand… but I expect no upgrades. I like the HR10-250 over prospective future products because it tunes HD over the air, allowing us to avoid paying DirecTV for a LOWER QUALITY version of the same broadcast I pick up with our 20 yr old aerial. All this still ends up being cheaper than cable, which I guess is something.

I upgraded it with a second 300GB drive for expanded storage, and am looking forward to adding network capabilities to the TiVo, because the Home Media Option is also disabled by DirecTV, thus forcing me to hack it back in. Sigh. Other fun things involved in setting up this new box included running a second coax cable from the dish, and replacing the old circular dish with a 3LNB Phase III oval dish. I can’t wait to turn the old dish in to a parabolic microphone– but i need to find a way to finish the (currently textured) surface of the old dish with a glass smooth coating. I’m thinking a thick polyurethane? Or that stuff I’ve seen on tables that is a quarter inch or so of plastic.

What an awesome mothers day gift…

On a completely unrelated note, check out an ad for this website @ Filter a couple of weeks ago:

I’ve started another great summer of working on the reporting system for Bcfg2, and have been putting in my 8 hours each day. It is excellent fun at the lab as always, but keeps me extremely busy and makes me tired.

The Brother and Sister concert this weekend would have been really exciting to go to, but it turns out that I won’t be able to go, so if anybody else does and finds this, please let me know. Maybe the Blues Fest with my mom will be fun instead.

Narayan recommended the IT Crowd to me, a funny british television show about IT people. Its funny. Check it out on You Tube.
Look for the ones that are around 23 minutes, starting with “Yesterday’s Jam.” You Tube would be so great if it weren’t for the horrible performance and quality of flash video…

I hope very soon to move to a new server to make the site faster, but I’m going to need a free weekend for that, and I just don’t see one of those coming anytime soon. But alas, summer feeling good; there are many projects coming down the pipe.

So I enabled Akismet to try to curtail comment spam with very little intrusion. Please let me know on the contact page if you are having trouble getting through with a comment. There is one more option I’ve got with this stuff, but hopefully this will take care of it all.

Also tonight I a friend posted this URL on a NTWRKtruth plasma screen at Filter via text message. Their “Hacks” section on their website is totally a sham; they’re not hacks if you advertise them. Welcome to anyone who happens upon the site from said advertisement. Please leave a comment or something.

I enjoyed the plant sale at Allerton, but did not buy any plants.

I did however meet a Chinese Musician and managed to take his portrait.

He had many friends, which you might go to Allerton and meet. I did not take their photos because it was starting to rain.

While of course there is a paper to rewrite, and a couple of last homework assignments to tu:n in, I instead hope to draw attention to more interesting things going on this week.

I’ve been listening to TwiT, with Leo Laporte & Friends — a fine podcast indeed, covering the week’s tech issues. They talked a little bit this week about Maker Faire an event which I’d love to visit given the opportunity. Maybe they’ll do it again next year?

So in the spirit of making things, last night I went to the ACM office and worked on an interesting project. Details to follow later this week.

This weekend Allerton is hosting their the annual plant sale. It should be really exciting– I plan on bringing my digital SLR to get some good pictures while I’m there. Anyone else up for a trip this weekend?

12:00:09, Morse M2 Metric Tap

This week I really enjoyed the first smells of spring as my cold subsided and I got outside. The weather has been beautiful, following some great storms. Today was so nice in fact, I went Geocaching after work. I rode my bike down to the big park on Windsor and had a really enjoyable time. For those interested in Geocaching, I highly recommend using the Google Earth KML file to visualize local cache locations and find convenient targets.

The Laser Galvo project is still going on. As you can see above, I got a special very fine tap in which I will use to thread the holes in the milled aluminum, once that work is done.

One special note about the photographs above; I took them with a Kodak Professional DCS 330 Digital camera, then proceeded to crop them to 2×3. It’s lots of fun to be able to use depth-of-field in a meaningful way again. And the colors are Fantastic. I forgot how great pictures through this old camera could be.

Now on to a beautiful evening of Coding.

There seems to be some progress on every front these days. I am making significant progress working on a yet-unreleased-project using Ruby On Rails. Its really quite fun to program with Ruby on Rails– I wish I would have learned about such web frameworks a long time ago.

I’m also thinking a bunch about LaserLine 2.0. MacWarriors is on board with working on a real 2.0 version and we are going to do some planning Saturday at the meeting. I hope to have the hardware finished this summer so we can work all next semester to create a beautiful piece of software to drive the thing. I expect features and plans will be detailed on the WikiTrac Project Site.

Laser Galvo Update

Speaking of the projector, the final CAD versions of the base and side are ready. I am now prepared to go in to production with the pieces. It might take some time to get them produced, but it is very much going to be worth it. The M2 metric screws for it arrived; here are some pictures of the finished coilform and screws:

I tried to contact Robin Adams at Linux-Laser about the bILDA2 interface but got no response. Hopefully Linux-laser.org will update soon with plans for this amazing piece of hardware. I am really excited about building one and writing an IOKitUSB driver for it. (This is only half-sarcastic–it would be very interesting to write my first hardware driver–but also scary. Hopefully IOKit will make this not so painful???)

KAP Update

A week ago, on the startlingly windy Friday, I flew my kite. While at first I had problems I thought I was ready for some good KAPing when the wind diminished and steadied at the Arboretum. When I tried earlier in the day to fly the kite on the Engineering Quad the extreme wind was strong enough to break a swivel and release my kite. It was the closest I’ve been to flying away. There was also some sort of down-draft-vortex business making flying in the quad near impossible. So back to the Arboretum–I had the kite up and steady, so I attached my camera. When I got home I found my pictures were 100% failure. I realized that there is no way I’m going to get quality pictures with this camera setup. It just can’t handle the movement of the kite string. I also need a better suspension– but really I’m starting to look for a broken Digital Elph that I can hack in to a camera for KAPing only. I’m still too scared to send up a really nice camera– and I want one that I won’t feel too bad hacking up for an external electronic shutter release.

I also need a broken DLP projector– but that’s another story. Please let me know if you have one you’re considering disposing of. In fact, there is a large amount of specialty equipment I am looking to purchase. All sorts of strange things, mostly used, broken, or otherwise unavailable. Maybe I should put up a “Wanted” web page with product info on it.

Random

This week I found this company, Pomona Electronics, that makes the greatest little metal project boxes. I bought one from ECE Stores, and now only search for a great project to build in to it. I’m sure I’ll come up with something. They have this great blue enamel finish, and just exude quality. Made in the USA. I think they’ve been around for…ever.

I was thinking about applying for the ADC Student WWDC Scholarship– but that means I’ll have to join ADC as a student member first. I should really act on that quickly if I’d like to go.

Non-Electronic, Non-Technical Update

I was introduced to this great website Threadless this week. They have a bunch of great t-shirts (though I don’t really need to buy any of those right now…) My favourite is the Visible Light one.

Geek-out Addendum

So instead of actually posting this 2 hours ago, I spent a huge amount of time trying to install mmCache or eAccelerator. on Mac OS X 10.4.5. Unfortuantely I was not able to get it to work. It looked like phpize was configuring the package for the wrong API version, but it seems somehow worse than that… Anyway, does anybody have either of these modules in binary form for OS X 10.4.5? If not– any other suggestions for a phpAccelerator?