January 08, 2010
July 30, 2009
Boo!
Yet again, it's been far too long since I've posted here. Oh well. Blame Twitter and/or Facebook if you must. Quick hit-and-run run-down:
A) Em's great. I love that little girl. Words and photos fall miles short of describing her awesomeness.
B) I ran a marathon in April and I'm supposedly training for the Chicago Marathon in October, but I haven't run in almost 2 full weeks due to a creeping illness which has taken away all of my energy. Need to shake it off soon.
C) I never wrote a proper Illinois Marathon wrap-up. I thought I had one well underway, but all I can find now is my 'notes' file. Here it is:
<Quote>
What went wrong:
Inconsistency in first 10 (and throughout). a) Should have had 1-mile paces. b) park route was slow and passing was impossible c) 2nd half was hillier than expected.
Calf cramp - pre-race stretching? Water/nutrition?
Hip fatigue - stride?
Wind/uphills = mental. 9MPH headwinds on the uphill stretch around Mile 18-19.
Tingling in last 2-3 miles.
What went right:
Tim, Chris, Dennis.
Had gas left to sprint the end.
Weather (other than wind).
CROWD/VOLUNTEER SUPPORT!!!
Other points:
The Champaign Country Club mile SUCKED! My slowest mile.
Garmin was good, but it disagrees with reality. It gave me about 0.01 mile extra per course mile. At the end of the race, that added up to over a quarter mile of difference. It's minor, but noteworthy. Also, for whatever reason, my watch time differs from the official chip time but nearly a minute. I'm not sure how to resolve that.
<EndQuote>
My photos from the event.
Tim Borbely's photos from the event.
Oh and here, listen to this PODCAST about the Illinois Marathon: 061_2009IllinoisMarathonPodcast.mp3
D) Motorcycling:
i) Not ONLY motorcycling related, but everyone who drives should visit The Black Nail Brigade web site and in particular, read The Black Nail Brigade Manifesto. This is no joke. This is not a fashion statement. This is about life and death and the preservation and prevention thereof. Go. Read. Now. I'll wait for you.
ii) Been doing a bit of riding. Not much on the dual sport, but some here and there.
iii) Got waylaid by a minor accident in May when an ignorant woman pulled in front of me. You can search out details in my Flickr photo stream. I am well or at least really close to it, the bike is well, damage insurance has been settled, injusry insurance is still outstanding.
iv) Just bought tickets to the Moto GP races in Indianapolis at the end of August. This will be my first race experience ever, believe it or not - car, motorcycle, whatever. Should be a blast.
E) Computers - I've been burned out on technology lately in part because a seriese of hardware failures have just beaten the crap out of me both at home and at work. But I've lately heard about some interesting projects which have rekindled a bit of a spark. I no particular order of usefulness to my life, examples are: Xen, eyeOS, Evernote (used it before, using it more now), a cheap analog to digital video capture device from Woot!, some stuff with MythTV, and a few other things I've forgotten already. OLPC or something like it for Emily? Anyway, yeah, tech = cool.
F) Pets: Harrison died back in November. Not sure if I ever posted that. Also, a few months back we got fish. Now we have a TON of them. And a snail. I love watching them.
G) Flying. Have done NONE in a long, LONG time. Doesn't even look like I'll make it to Oshkosh this year. A bummer, but oh well. *sigh*
Ok, I'm running out of steam on this latest hit-and-run. As I always say, I'll try not to be such a stranger. Yeah, right.
Later.
October 07, 2007
M-Audio Keystation Pro 88 MIDI Repair
I recently had to take apart my new-to-me M-Audio Keystation Pro 88 keyboard controller. The MIDI Out port had flaked out. I bought it as a floor display and I think the MIDI cords got yanked out of the back more than once which resulted in broken solder joints. I've used it for a while as is, but the plug always felt loose and I wasn't surprised when it went totally Tango Uniform on me. So I busted out my screw driver, multimeter, and soldering iron to effect a repair of the MIDI jack.
When it came to dismantling the board, it looked fairly straightforward to me, but I searched online to see if there was any guidance to be had. I didn't find any, so I decided to take some photos along the way and post this little write-up in case any one wanted to follow in my footsteps. WARNING: I am not an electronics expert by any stretch. I'm just a guy who likes to take broken things apart and fix them if he can. I get lucky and occasionally things work the same or better after I put them back together, but follow this guidance at your own risk. If you have any doubts, take your board to some one with experience and/or insurance.
1) To work on the keyboard, I took it off its stand and placed it on the floor. I tipped it to that the back of the board (with the ports and power switch) was facing upwards. On my carpeting, it would rest like this on its own, apparently with no pressure on the keys, but I didn't trust it to stand on its own and kept a hand on it while it was propped up thusly.
2) The back of the board is made up of one continuous plate of metal. To remove it, I removed all of the screws on both the back and bottom of the board that attach the metal plate to the frame. Note that on my board, the screws on back had little clear plastic washers presumably to protect the finish of the board. I kept an eye on those so I wouldn't lose them. Also note, NO OTHER SCREWS NEEDED TO BE REMOVED! Just the ones holding the metal plate down from the outside.
3) Once all of the screws were removed, I took a while to figure out how the plate came off because it was still held in fairly tightly. I was trying to open the back panel up by lifting up from the bottom of it, but this didn't get me any where. The trick was to use a broad putty knife and pry up at the back plate from one end of the board. The plate has 90 degree bends at both the top and bottom that fit tightly into the frame of the board, so it has to be lifted straight out of those tracks.
4) I found that once the panel was loose, tipping it 'bottom forward' while looking at the bottom of the board was the best way to get at the ribbon cable connectors. There wasn't a lot of room on these ribbon cables, so I was careful not to over stress them and kept the back plate as close to the board as I could. I believe all of the connectors are unique, but it's always a good idea to label or at least photograph them before removal.
5) Once I removed all of the connecting wires, I removed the 8 screws holding the the circuit board to the back plate.
6) After using my multimeter to confirm that the jack itself was still good - the solder joints were just broken, I resoldered the jack to the board, tested the connections with a MIDI cable and my multimeter and put everything back together.
Note: The one tricky bit I found when reassembling everything was that the power and USB jacks did not want to fit nicely through their cutouts on the back plate. I cranked down the screws before I realized this and risked screwing up those jacks while repairing the MIDI. I removed the board one more time, made sure everything was seated properly, and THEN screwed the back plate back down.
That's it! As easy as 1-2-6, I fixed my MIDI controller. If not for my recent Brain Machine project and my first experience soldering on a Printed Circuit Board, I don't know if I'd have had the guts to attempt this repair, but it was really not a big deal when all was said and done. The toughest part is that the board weighs nearly 50#. I could have hurt my back getting it off and back on the stand :)
I hope this helps some one out there who needs to crack the case on his/her board. If you have any questions, let me know: oblivion at ratula dot net.
September 02, 2007
From Linux to Flickr
So I have a minor ass-ton of photos on my olde web server from before I put everything on Flickr. Most of them are sitting in an old OLD version of Gallery that's been getting pounded by spam comments. I finally decided to pull the plug on Gallery, but I want to migrate the photos to flickr.
The problem, however, is that there is not an official uploader for linux. I could zip up the files and move them to a windows box (or put them on a Samba share my laptop could get to), but I decided to be a bit mroe direct and remembered that flickr accepts uploads via e-mail.
I noodled out this little script to do the deed for me:
for i in `find -name '*.jpg' |grep -v '\.sized\.' |grep -v '\.thumb\.' |grep -v '\.highlight\.' |cut -f2 -d'/' `
do echo $i
uuencode $i $i | mail -s "$i tags: tag tags more.tags from.gallery" {my_upload_address}@photos.flickr.com
done
Sweet.
The only problem is that after getting to the albums of my shots from my Canon Digital Rebel, I've realized that I need a 'sleep' statement in there to let the mail servers/interweb tubes cool off a bit :)
Hack hack hack.
August 30, 2007
Hacking, the Legal Kind
First off, let me acknowledge - long time, no blog/podcast. You know the excuses. Topic closed.
Re: the subject of this post, it's not so much hacking (yet) as kit-building, but I just bought a MiniPOV 3 kit in order to make Mitch Altman's Brain Machine. I remember seeing "Brain Wave Machines" or "Hypnosis Machines" at Sharper Image stores in the malls back in the 80s, and I've always been into altering my mind without drugs (I once stayed up so late looking at the fractal demo that came with my Cyrix 387 floating-point math coprocessor that I seriously mind-tripped and STILL remember the dream I had that nigh circa 1992) so this really caught my interest. I, of course, first heard about this project from the 2600 Off the Hook podcast (08/08/2007) from Chaos Communication Camp in Germany.
I've done some light soldering before, though never on a Printed Circuit Board (PCB). This should be fun. I nearly dropped $60 on a new soldering iron and other tools, but decided to hold off on that until I see if my current iron is up to the task (perhaps with a new/hacked tip) and see if this phase lasts more than a few days.
If the brain machine project goes well, I just might step up to building a cool MIDI interface from the MIDIsense kit. That would be where the true hacking would begin. We'll see.
Wish me luck!
BTW, a little bird told me you can expect a new podcast soon. Really. I swear. Unless the recording didn't take this morning. . . .
P.S. Comments are still CLOSED. If you'd like to comment, please call my comment line, mail eblotheweblog at gmail, or catch me on IM/GTalk, etc. Thanks.
