Here are some Notable Quoteables from yours truly:
Malignant Engineering
A design paradigm, where the product eventually takes over all resources, eventually killng the host, yet living on indefinitely.
If we try to force delivery now, of these premature ideas, the final product like most certainly suffer from serious developmental disabilities.
And of course my classic:
Laziness is the Father of Invention.
The collection of flying rockets continues to expand.
This is a semi-custom design. Based on an Estes Baby Bertha rocket kit. Extended nose cone and scale V2 fins make this look similar to the world changing V2 Ballistic Missile of WWII. Rocket was still awaiting final finish paint at time of photo. [ Full Project Writeup ]
Design is more of a repair and subsequent enhancement of an existing rocket (Estes Taser). Following water damage at the base of the body tube, I sectioned about 2″ from it, and re-affixed the poly engine and fin assembly. The top red payload section is from parts ordered online. The L.E.D. payload (for night flights) comes from Halloween skull decorations (like the white plastic skull far right). A pair of night flights proved the rocket to be a good flyer and the lights made night recovery very easy. Night rocket launches are fun!
Constructed completely from spare parts attached to a large Estes BT-55 body tube that I ordered online. The fins and nose cone came the Baby Bertha kit. Launch lug and payload section came from an Estes Payloader rocket (which was parted out for another project DD08). Engine mount was constructed from scratch based on patterns from other kits and a home-made mild steel engine retainer clip.
While watching some Anime that the kids enjoy watching on Saturday mornings, a character appeared that was so similar to this great video game villan, I just HAD to find these videos. The first, being the original, the second being a rather amusing techo-mashup.
After all, what technologist would be raising his kids properly, without them knowing such uber-geeky things.
Enjoy these classics!
AT&T promised us MMS by the end of summer. Well, they clearly missed that date because it’s already fall!
BUT.. they did get it released to us, TODAY.
Some people have been reporting very slow downloads of the Carrier Updates (the iPhone itself has supported the feature since iPhone 3.1, just not for us in America stuck with AT&T). But once the update downloads and installs, you will need to reboot your iPhone to get the feature working.
What does it look like when you have iPhone MMS? Well, a new camera icon appears on your MMS page.
Click the icon, and you have the option of taking a photo or using one from your iPhone photo library. Attach to the message, type your text and viloa… welcome to 2006! It’s been so long it’s almost novel again.
Now if only AT&T would quit screwing us the really great feature they plan to block forever, ‘Tethering’. Might as well just jailbreak the phone.
More news hitting the wire about the SLS!
This time from Road and Track:
Finally, the disguise has been peeled off of Mercedes‘ all-new supercar, the SLS AMG. And what can we see? Exactly what we expected: a modern successor to the legendary 300SL Gullwing, with a remarkably upright windshield. The front is pure modern Mercedes, a bit on the blocky side with large headlamp clusters, a long hood and a giant 3-pointed star. Of course there are the gullwing doors along with retro strakes on the front fenders. The short rear deck, though, is a bit more squared-off than we expected, reminding a bit (dare we say) of the old Acura CL coupe. A flush-mounted rear wing rises at speed. The driver-focused interior appears nicely done, if slightly understyled, in typical German fashion…..
Here are some specifications:
Mercedes Benz SLS |
|
|---|---|
| Displacement: |
6200 cc |
| Horsepower |
563 bhp @ 6800 RPM |
| Torque |
480 ft./lb. @ 4750 RPM |
| Transmission |
7-speed twin-clutch transaxle |
| Curb Weight: |
3600 lb. |
A gorgeous car. A true homage to the great 300 SL Gullwings. More amazing work coming from Stuttgart. I’d love to put one on my mansion.
Leverkusen, 04 September 2009. The legendary Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca in California can now be viewed from your PC on Google Street View. Racing fans can travel the entire circuit – starting at Andretti’s Hairpin to the infamous Corkscrew Curve – from the perspective of a race car participating in the final leg of the 2008 American Le Mans Series. The tour was filmed using a spherical, multi-lens camera mounted to a vehicle, and combined with additional photographic imagery, GPS and other geo-spatial data to produce a true image of the race track at eye level.
Finally, one amazing looking car from Mercedes-Benz. An homage to the old SL300, including gull wing doors! If only it were not 177,000 Euros.
Due to be revealed at next week’s Frankfurt Motor Show, the 300SL-inspired “Gullwing” is packing a front/mid-mounted version of the venerable 6.3-liter V8 fitted to the majority of AMG’s offerings, mated to a seven-speed dual-clutch gearbox channeling 563 hp and 480 lb-ft of torque to the rear wheels. Weight is pegged at around 3,500 pounds, allowing the SLS to run from a rest to 60 in 3.7 seconds. Top speed is 197 mph and optional carbon ceramic discs should bring the party to a halt with supreme authority.
Well, a good fix, but not a long term one, the firs time around.
XBOX 360 – Red Ring of Death — Round 1
So, this time I’m going to implement the X-Clamp fix, a more advanced repair of the box. Here is a video that basically covers what I am doing (this is not my video, I’m a much more exciting person than this dude).
Another relevant video. Between the two, there information is there on executing the ‘fix’ I’m attempting today:
Parts list for implementing the repair:
8 5mm .80pitch 12mm long socket head screws.
36 M5 washers
16 #10 nylon washers
1 vial of Arctic Silver CPU head sink paste
After following instructions from several sites, I used the above parts to try the X-clamp repair. After implementing the repair and hooking the XBOX back up to the TV, the 3 rings of death remain.
Looking over this ‘helpful’ Microsoft support page. Based on it’s diagnostic trouble shooting tree, it *might* be the power supply this time. Great. I guess I’ll have to go to one of those used gaming stores and see if I can get a power brick or at least plug mine into another XBOX and figure out if it’s the brick. Pathetic, overly complex, under-engineered device. Makes me wish I’d bought the PS3 or Wii instead.
I did notice that my XBOX seems to have upgraded cooling components. You’ll notice that the CPU (large block) and the GPU (two piece sink) are quite a bit larger than the ones pictured in the online guides and videos above.
Never the less, it has GPU cooling issues that resulted in the RROD (Red Ring of Death) .
After discussing this with my pal Steve in Reno, he prompted me to do a little more research on exactly which MB I have in this machine. It turns out I have the ‘latest and greatest’ MS fixes for the heat issues (well, except the ‘glue’ used on the Elite systems) implemented in my ‘Falcon’ Motherboard, as noted by Wiki page, here:
Falcon
IBM 65 nm CPU
ATI 90 nm GPU and smaller embedded DRAM chip
All Xbox 360 Premium machines and Arcade machines manufactured August 2007 introduced the new 65 nm CPU accompanied with a new cooler and still 90 nm GPU with the Zephyr cooler. The motherboard is based on Zephyr and requires fewer components (some capacitors and coils removed) for the new 65 nm CPU, resulting in lower costs.
Somehow the conversation at work devolved into us finding this little gem:
Hemp for Victory. 1943 Film by the US Government. It’s 10 min. long, and seems to have been sped up a bit during digitizing. According to the websie where I found this, the film was VERY difficult to locate, and a usable copy was not located until 1976!.
Here it is, hosted on YouTube… at least until someone in the US Government puts a stop to it:
So.. looks like I have some reading to do. I have a basic understand of WHY one would use a TOR network. Now I need to educate myself on how it all works. 20 years away from CIS classes makes one a little rusty.
Some links I’ll be checking out:
onion routing definition – computer
A method for anonymous communications over a wide area network such as the Internet. It hides the names of the parties that are communicating as well as the data by encrypting the payload in layers, with a different encryption layer for each hop in the route. Using cooperating proxy routers throughout the network, the initiating onion router, called a “….
Go Online without Getting Snooped: Tor (The Onion Router)
step 1 — How Tor Works
An “onion router” is an Internet site that takes requests for web-pages and passes them onto other onion routers, and on to other onion routers, until one of them finally decides to fetch the page and pass it back through the layers of the onion until it reaches you. The t….
Tor: Overview
Tor is a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. It also enables software developers to create new communication tools with built-in privacy features. Tor provides the foundation for a range of applications that allow organ…
Arg… just a matter of time before my XBOX died, it would seem. While I was out having a fun vacation, the XBOX 360 was left on by the kids. At some point it overheated and started to display the Red Ring of Death:
I tried most of the common external efforts to reset a faulted piece of hardware. Power cycled, removed power, performed a series of power cycles, left it unplugged for days, everything I could think of that would help with a typical computer failure.
DID NOT WORK.
Interwebs to the rescue! After a short Google for articles on the problem, I found a number of YouTube videos showing various ways to fix this annoying problem. Watching them, they seem to fall into three categories:
– Over heat with towels method
Following reviews of various methods above (and I’m sure there are others) I decided I would first try a variation of the ‘Penny method‘ mentioned above.
Others have already documented this process, so I’m not going do it here. What I will say is that my hybrid penny fix worked, at least for now. The only change I made to the described Penny Process was that I used 2-penny stacks instead of three. Another video I watched showed a successful fix with only 2-pennys, and that also allowed easy re-assembly of the C-clamp screws with the shorter penny stack.
There was a trick that I had to watch 4 videos to find. That is how the proper sequence for removing the outter plastic shell. I made the mistake of starting on the front (after removing the front panel, which you need to do first, BTW). After removal of the little grey side panels (snap-crackly-pop, they will come out with careful prying) I tried to go for the ‘easy’ snaps on the front of the enclosure.
It tuns out you should unsnap the REAR of the enclosure first. The little ‘slots’ across the back are access to a series of snapping clasts across the rear. Use a small flat-blade screwdriver that will fit IN the slots to push in on them, until you hear a good snap. Sounds like something breaking, but.. nothing did. It’s just the way it work. Once the 8 or so snaps are released, pull the rear apart. It’s sort of tight, but it does come apart. Once the rear is seperated, the front is of course very easy to unclasp. Watch the little DVD/CD drive door button, you’ll need to futz with that a bit.
Once 1/2 of the plastic over is removed, you’ll next need to remove the long silver (6 of those) T-10 (that’s torx size 10, very small, for those playing at home). Once those six are out the other side of the cover comes off, and you have something that looks like this:
Now, one last photo. I can’t say this with any certainty, but it was posted by others that the main issue is those crappy ‘band-aid’ heat transfer spounges on tops of the RAM chips. There are 4 of those things. The various penny fixes involved shoving tape wrapped pennies between the metal case and the chips to provide a more conductive material interface. I used stacks of 2 pennys on each chip, tape wrapped then, reusing the bandades by peeling off the other side of the double-stick ‘band-aids’ fastened the penny stacks to the chips, re-assembled the case and tested.
Following the ‘post-fix-overheat-to-reset-and-re-melt-heat-transfer-grease’ method, I fired up the box with the fans unplugged until I saw the TWO flashing red ring segments. This indicates a full-overheating of the chips. I let the machine cool down, plugged back in the fans, re-installed the fan duct (not seen in any of my photos) and…. VOILA:
Sure beats having to sign up for Windoze Live to start an ‘authorized’ repair request. Microsoft can just ………………. (you fill in the blank).
So, for litteraly 9 cents (8 pennys and less than 1 cent of electrical tape) I was able to fix the machine. Of course they could have just put a proper heat sink on those chips for.. hm.. I’m sure less than 8 cents, but no.. just like Microsoft software, they only do an 85% job, and end-user repairs are generally required.
