top-quark.blog
Tasty treat
Tue, 12/27/2005, 18:42
If you so much as grin, you're going to hell.
Blog spammers will be the first against the wall.
Mon, 12/26/2005, 02:42Not that there's really anyone to notice, on this desolate expanse of unread blog, but comment spam is really fracking annoying, from an administration standpoint. Like anywhere else, it's mostly ads for prescription pills and online casinos, but every now and then, there's more "interesting" fare. One might consider my situation lucky, too. For the most part, I've been shielded from the brunt of the phenomenon by the purely serendipitous use of semi-obscure blogging software, but bits and pieces seep their way through every so often, not unlike drippings from my incontinent bunkmate "Phil", from summer camp. In the course of investigating solutions to this problem (spam - not urine), I found that there's actually a dedicated term used to describe the distorted text recognition problems that many sites have you solve to register/post/comment. What I would like to do, if I were a motivated, bright, and inspired individual, is to implement my very own obscure CAPTCHA as part of this blog. It wouldn't be too hard to create a scripting language-based function to create an image from a random text string parameter, then run it through some matrix transformations. This motivated, bright, and inspired individual, though, is not me. At least, not today, nor any foreseeable time in the next several weeks, as I struggle to overcome a bout of chronic stupid. So I might just wind up shuffling around the comment field order to trip the bots up, combined with .htaccess modding, since most spammers come from certain kinds of TLDs. It's not actually a fix; it's rather a bit like trying to improve test scores at a school by painting "EXIT" over all the entrances, and burning the short buses. The persistent (or oblivious) idiots still get through. Oh, and another two-day email outage is coming up, to kill the email spam to my nospam@ account. As if this were ever actually a real problem, when a cursory glance at my inbox reveals a dearth of any human-generated content. Like I was saying not that long ago (in fact, four scrollwheel clicks down), I hate web work.
Alternative Firearms Lube
Mon, 10/31/2005, 20:57I've been experimenting for a while now, and think I can now definitively give my recommendation. I've found Mobil1 Synthetic ATF to be an excellent replacement for Breakfree CLP (Cleaner-Lubricant-Protectant; the standard US military arms care product). -It's persistent, unlike Breakfree CLP, which tends to evaporate quickly.
-It's very aggressive on buildup, a quality that manifests itself in much longer runtimes with dirty ammo (i.e. Wolf and its ilk), and in residue cleanup on exterior surfaces (cosmetic, I know, but it shows you the cleaning power)
-It's homogeneous; unlike CLP, where the PTFE tends to precipitate out of solution (or fall out of suspension), the Mobil1 doesn't leave lubricant clumps that get pushed out of the way, rendering them useless.
-It's very slick. Applying it to the carrier rails, I can feel a difference compared to Breakfree CLP. (related to the above point) The use of transmission fluid is relatively well-documented as a good general-purpose cleaner product (e.g. the Armalite Tech Note, but I feel that Mobil1's synthetic variety is also excellent on the lubrication and protection aspects. Its use as a firearms lube was discussed a bit on a thread over at 10-8 forums. At $6/quart, I don't feel there's a better product on the market in terms of effectiveness or value. As always, though, YMMV.
Canon dies, news at 9.
Wed, 10/19/2005, 00:04I'm going to bloody shoot somebody. Yesterday afternoon, my brand spankin' new Canon Powershot A510 arrived at my doorstep, heralding a new era in my photography semi-hobby; my ceremonious ascent from the dungeons of 1.3 MP to the slightly less dank dungeons of 3.2 MP. Yet here I am now, a scant 24 hours later, with a tremendously worthless and expensive brick. Mind you, in all of its compact plastic splendor, it's not going to do the brick job that well, either.
What really shocks me about this whole bit, though, is that I didn't do anything wrong!! There I was, taking pictures, when all of a sudden, it craps the bed. No death throes of any kind; no beeps, earth-shaking motor vibrations, distorted display, or magic smoke. I really am quite disappointed, given the scale and drama of my other machinery failures. All you can tell here is that the lens is still extended/locked, and it is 150% dead.
Canon tech support's going to get a call in the morning, but I'm not expecting much. Who wants to bet they ask if the batteries are new? At least I can count on Dell (who I bought it from) to be swift with the RMA process.
My trusty 1.3 MP Olympus has a new (temporary) lease on life, and my (already) low impression of Canon is reaffirmed.
I hate web work.
Thu, 10/06/2005, 13:26Not that it should be at all surprising, but fussing with HTML, Perl, CGI, and blogging software isn't how I get my jollies. From time to time, though, it's completely necessary. In this case, this site's growing content (gasp) made it a bloody pain to maintain. Also, various pages had remnants of about 5 previous incarnations of this website. A structural and visual nightmare. So now, I've entirely designed the website to be path-independant, which helps resolve some long-standing issues people have had accessing data, and will (hopefully) help me make more content faster. Also, I finally figured out stylesheets, which is such an improvement. The layout is much cleaner now, especially with the blog. Comments are appreciated!
Yummy..
Thu, 08/18/2005, 01:57A lot of people don't realize just how quickly aquatic and hydroponic plants grow, compared to the houseplants in one's daily experience.
One week in my biofilter yields... Two pounds of duckweed, strained and squeezed of water, with the scale tared. This is from waste water off my aquariums, in a 2x3 foot sump, illuminated with a 15 watt fluorescent tube. By no means ideal, and really without any effort. No surprise the stuff's called duckweed. I wish only that there was a market for the stuff. Maybe it could be bagged and sold as salad. With enough marketing spin, I'm sure the public could be convinced that the little snails in it are a protein/calcium bonus. A bit like crunchy croutons. Mmmmmm..
Actually, I don't have any idea of duckweed's nutritional worth. I assume that it's like lettuce, in that it's pretty decent in Beta carotene/Vitamin A and Potassium, but otherwise mostly worthless. Even if it were devoid of nutrition, though, I think that duckweed would be an ideal candidate for genetic manipulation to enhance the nutrition. It thrives in junk water, and its biomass amplifies frighteningly fast. You could get a kiddy pool filled with wastewater, put it under lamps or the sun, and you'd have the duckweed covering the surface in no time flat.
Naturally, nobody would pick this over prime rib. But, as they say, beggars can't be choosers. Besides the obvious application of feeding the crap parts of the world, it'd be a decent enough key crop in something like a fallout bunker, or extended space flights. The buoyancy of the plants is just a shade higher than neutral; if you kept the water volume agitated, you could conceivably produce MUCH higher yields under artificial cultivation.
Along the same lines as duckweed, though, I've read before that there's research being done with blue-green "algae" (cyanobacteria) for food production. People with more money than sense already pop spirulina pills, but the proposals I've seen involve large plots of land with shallow water. It just bothers me, though, given my experience with the stuff in my freshwater aquariums.
FWIW, this image was titled "greatsatan.jpg" It usually forms a massive gooey sheet that no fish or snail touches, and it smells like something awful. I think I just threw up a bit in my mouth just now. (Well, not really...) I don't claim to have extensive knowledge of the variations between BGA species, but generally speaking, I'd starve ten times before putting BGA in my mouth. Duckweed, at least, has texture and form, instead of being shapeless slime. Duckweed kinda looks like pesto, too...
Battery Pack Rebuild
Tue, 07/05/2005, 01:25This article's not complete yet, but I thought I'd post the beginning part to satiate all n of my readers (where n<7). Also, since this is informal, I'm looking for feedback on how I should implement a "nerdiness" meter. I know a lot of my readers aren't dyed-in-blue tech folks, so it'd probably be better to sort out the hardcore tech from the more generally appreciable articles. Let me know *somehow*.
My old POS laptop (dubbed "meow") has a really dead battery. When it was new, it was great; 4 hours a charge easily. But for the longest time now, it's been relagated to desknote status. Really, it's just good enough for switching outlets when you put it into hibernation mode. It's been (repeatedly) suggested that I get rid of it (the computer), but slow and tortuous as it is to work with, it does still have its uses.
For example... Since figuring out how to get my wireless card going in Netstumbler, I've been doing limited wardriving runs. It hasn't been all that great, though, since my inverter for my car's too noisy, and the computer gets random crashes. The solution is to go to battery power. Well, there's no way in hell I'm going to shell out $80+ on a new battery, when the computer's worth maybe 2x that (on a good day). The solution, then, like many times before, is to rebuild the battery pack. This time, though, I'll document the process.
The battery itself.. belongs to my old Compaq Presario 1244 system. Technical bits, for you search engine types...
Compaq Series 2941B P/N 330986 - B21 also 330935 - 001
It's NiMH (Ni-MH, Nickel Metal Hydride) chemistry, with a voltage of 9.6V and capacity of 3.8 Ah. Typically, a pack of this size and chemistry is filled with a number of cylindrical AA-esque batteries, attached with tabs; unsurprisingly, this one is completely typical, as we'll soon see.
Disassembly wasn't as... elegant as I like. Strong adhesive and soft plastic really made it a bear to get in. What I figured out on the ends was that a heatgun or hair dryer will soften up the adhesive to the point that you can hand-part the halves. Wear gloves, though.
Liberating the bottom half, we find that the cells are uncharacteristically umarked. That's bad, since you usually use the markings to find replacements. No matter, though. With a trusty set of calipers and this site, referencing dimensions of common battery pack cell dimensions, I was able to determine that the cells are of the 4/3A variety.
It's also good to note the thermistor that's thermally coupled to some cells with thermal compound. The temperature of the cells is a vital parameter in the charging "algorithm". On rebuild, I'll be reattaching it with some thermal compound of my own.
As with anything electronic, don't get too enthusiastic in disassembly. There's a rather fragile and semi-flexy power circuit stuck to the top of the battery casing. You don't want to damage this.
I haven't done any extensive sourcing yet, but it looks like the best deal in cells is going to be at The Battery Station (famed for their CR-123As, also). The particular item of interest is the tabbed "HR-4/3AU" sale items. At $4 each, that's $36 to rebuild my pack, or half price off the $80 new packs. Incidentally, the tabbed part is very important when constructing battery packs. Soldering can potentially damage the cells, so just leave it to the manufacturer to spot weld the tabs on; once those're attached, you can solder the tabs to your heart's content, sorta.
Fedora Core 4 Fun & Problems
Thu, 06/16/2005, 11:20I've tried out pretty much every linux distribution on the market, and have always had a handful of complaints. Installation is unclear, with few explanations, the default choices aren't indicated, or aren't sensible, my relatively common hardware isn't autodetected, and package installation is always a Byzantine affair.
Well, I downloaded Fedora Core 4 a couple days ago, and it seems to have addressed most of my gripes above. For an OS, I'm reasonably happy; for linux, I'm ecstatic. It's the best linux distro I've used yet. Except for three issues, for which I've recorded the solutions.
1) Installation would engimatically freeze when it was time to change disks. Click the "Next" button, and the graphic depresses, then everything stops. After about the fifth or tenth time installing, I decided to reburn the CDs at 8x. The very next time was *perfect*. Besides the CDs issue, though, installation was easy and straightforward. I just wish they'd program the installer such that a CD failure would be indicated by an error message.
2) Every other distro on the planet includes mp3 support, and somehow they haven't been sued yet. Drop the ideological crap, and include the decoders, goddamnit. Also, have xmms available on installation; it's the most popular player, by far. Solution? In console, "yum install xmms". Then go to freshrpms and download the XMMS MP3 plugin.
Linux will *NEVER* be ready for the desktop, so long as users have to go on an easter egg hunt to establish basic functionality.
3) The Turtle Beach Santa Cruz card is a relatively common sound card. But it doesn't quite work out of the box with FC4 (or previous editions, apparently). When the system autodetects your card as a CS46xx and plays the test sound the first time, lie and say you heard it. I mean, it really is a cs4630, but the settings aren't right. When you boot in, open a terminal and start alsamixer, then enable the external amp and boost DAC to max. You could also use the kde/gnome sound mixer. I struggled quite a bit with making the soundcard work, until I figured the secret out.
International Intrigue with Google Earth
Tue, 06/14/2005, 12:02Google Earth, formerly called Keyhole, is probably one of the most fun and useful pieces of software I've ever used. How fun? Besides Half-life, it's the only software I've ever bought.
Anyhow, I was flying around various points in Taiwan today, and found Ching Chuan Kang (CCK) Air Base, home to a bunch of Taiwan's IDFs. Really neat facility to look at on keyhole, with a lot of planes on the tarmac. Well, in the GlobalSecurity article I linked to just now, it mentions that, "In May 1999 it was reported that China had built a replica of Ching Chuan Kang AB at a site near Dingxin airport".
Whaaa? Well, since I have the capability now, I had to see it for myself. Looking online on google, I couldn't really find coordinates for the mentioned Dingxin Airport, but this page mentions that the airport is 80km southwest of the Jiuquan satellite launch site (41.21 N, 100.21 E). Well, sure enough, the airport is roughly where it should be... and slightly east of the airport...
Taiwan's Air Base on the left, Chinese attack mockup on right.
Looks like it's been scratched out in the desert with earthmovers or something, but it's a full-scale replica of the Taiwanese airbase, complete with aircraft bunkers! A nickle says that if resolution was better, you could see bomb craters.
Open Chinese belligerence, at its best.
Try it out yourself:
CCK Original: 24.264353 N, 120.624340 E
Clone Facility: 40.376895 N, 99.886154 E
AK Build Log, Part 1
Mon, 06/13/2005, 01:37About a year ago, a friend and I bought a couple AMD-65 rifle kits from TAPCO. Price was decent, at around $60 each, which was (and is) a decently good price.
For the uninitiated, AMD-65s are a variety of AK47, endemic to Hungarian tanks. As tanker rifles, they're short, have folding wire stocks, and have both rear and forward pistol grips. Overall, they’re a very compact and effective platform.
The civilian shooter finds they are somewhat more expensive to build than other AK rifles, though. The barrels don't meet the 16" legal requirement normally, and need to be permanently extended. Additionally, since the parts are imported, domestically-manufactured parts need to be purchased to meet 922(r) compliance. Both these issues can be negated, though, if building a pistol (where barrel length doesn't matter, and 922(r) doesn't apply).
Myself.. I’m still unsure of whether I'll build my kit as a pistol or a rifle... Rifle is the authentic configuration, but pistol will make it a much quicker and cheaper build. If I elect to go the pistol route, I'll probably mount a single-point sling on back, Euro SMG style.
Either way, though, the parts still have to be prepped, and progress has been slow on that front. Mostly because I don't have all the proper tools. One of the major sticking points was the old rivets in the rear trunion. I kept bending my cheapie punch set, so I decided to drill the rivets out..
I don't have a drill press, so I used a handheld drill to get as far through the rivets as I could. One rivet went OK, but I broke off a drill bit inside the other. I was thinking I'd need to take it to a machine shop to get it removed with an electronic tap remover. Well, it sat in my garage for a few months, until today, when I decided to try punching them out.
It worked! Huge relief, since the tap/drill removal services are obscenely expensive.
Today's minor miracle brought to you by Craftsman... and the letter "Q". Their punch set is orders and orders better than the junk punches I used to have.
My next step is for my friend and I to order some AK receivers. I think I’ll order my receiver as a pistol, then convert it later to a rifle, if I find my needs have changed. Right now, the best candidate receiver I'm looking at is the Ohio Ordnance Works, though I'm also investigating other possibilities.
Switched Power Supply in the 400 Watt Range
Fri, 06/10/2005, 20:26Skydiving. Running with bulls. Playing inside high voltage power supplies. Except for the first two, I've done 'em all now.
I needed a power supply. Problem is that commercial supplies are a specialty item, and are overbuilt for what I need. The wonderful world of consumer electronics offers a fine solution, ripe for hacking. A casual stroll down the cutthroat world of pricewatch shows about a bajillion cheap PC power supplies. PC supplies offer a buncha different useful voltages; 3.3, 5, 12, -5, -12, etc... The problem, though, is that they need a load to function correctly. I never knew how to handle this.
Then...
I came across an interesting website recently. It's not terrifically detailed, though the author does disclaim that it's not a HOWTO (ten bucks says he's just covering his ass). I also found this website, which is useful in conjunction.
Disclaimer: Don't do this. I'm a junior Electrical & Computer engineering major, and I still wake up at night, in a cold sweat. Chances are that you'll shock the shit out of yourself, and I really, really don't like court. I'm not even going to tell you to be careful; just don't do it.
I went to pricewatch and bought a 400 watt power supply for $10 shipped. Since my PC supply's too loud, and I think the bearings are going to die, I was gonna hack that. Well, as it turns out, the $10 supply was louder, with even dodgier bearings, so I just kept my PC supply where it was.
So, battle plan:
-Keep one drive cable, for computer accessory testing/dev.
-Four terminals: Ground, 3.3, 5, and 12. (black, orange, red, yellow wires)
-Two wires each, for MAXIMUM POWER (well, to preclude any melting)
-Rewire power switch
-Wire and attach load resistor
*giggle*
In the lower-right, you can sorta see some of the dire warnings of fire, brimstone, and firestone tires.
The innards. I want to make some sort of "diversity" joke here, but it'll probably reflect poorly on me in the future.
Note the BigAss(TM) capacitors.
After a little pruning, it's starting to look a little more civilized. Here I've isolated the wires I'll be using into operational clusters.
The power switch (bottom black box on the rear panel) needed a bit of research.
Power control on an ATX supply is actually two-tiered. Not only is there (sometimes) the master switch, controlling the 120v connection, but the motherboard additionally controls the supply though the green wire on the ATX connector. What I did here was bypass the switch's 120V control, to instead use the switch to short the (thin) green wire to ground.
I could have just put in another SPST switch to short the green wire to ground, but I felt this was a cleaner setup.
The 10 ohm, 10 watt sandbar load resistor, across 5V and ground wires. It does a great job, and I'm proud of it. Note the zip ties, as recommended by the pseudo-HOWTO. It's ghetto, but effective. A note for posterity: Thermal compound's messy stuff.
The cover. Spent a little time in CAD, made a drilling template. Center punch with a nail, then drill 1/4" holes for the binding posts. Note that 12-5=7; a fact that's handy for making your computer case fans quieter.
Maybe I'm stupid or something, but I couldn't figure out how fiber washers were supposed to isolate the screw portion of the binding posts from contacting the metal chassis. So I epoxied them in place. Here I baked them under my desklamp, because I'm gangster like that.
The finished product. I'll probably put in an LED power indicator lamp in the future, but as noted on my reference website, the fan is a good indication.
Results? Pretty nice, actually. Positive across the board.
- Voltages on 3.3, 5, and 12 volt lines are 3.39, 5.12, and 12.26 volts, respectively. That's 2.7, 2.4, and 2.2 percent deviation, for the mathematically impaired. I'm not doing anything analytical, so that's more than fine.
- Power dissipated by the load resistor is, I think, about 2.5 Watts. It doesn't get hot at all.
- Cost: $10 for the power supply. $8.30 for the other parts at Ratshack: Silicone thermal compound, at $1.99, a 2-pack of resistors for $1.79, and $3.99 for a 4-pack of posts. The last item makes me feel victimized, but that's what you get for patronizing your local consumerized techie-sellout chain. So, in total, about $18 for a 400 watt power supply, with some supplies that can be reused for another project.
- I didn't die.