The sugar crystals are just enough larger that they don’t dissolve fully into the batter, and then they melt and run out and caramelize when cooked. This might not matter for anything else.

It’s a bit of a shame, because, if you believe the package blurbs, this is harvested at kindler, gentler sugar plantations.

AKA “ThinkGeek – Ticket #BPT-31853-141″
So far, no good. Instructions are 3 years old, do not describe current Macintoshes. Standard minor amounts of fiddling and Googling has failed to yield a silver configuration bullet. I told the guys at ThinkGeek I would document my results, and I meant it. If I ever get this to work, you will read it here, and I will document what worked.

Thinkgeek has at least got polite-and-rapid-response on a Saturday figured out, let’s see if they can get something useful out of the manufacturer, which is where I think the problem originates.

Leopard installer patch?

“The installer could not be patched. Patching will be canceled.”

D’OH! Turn up the volume on the guitar!

It’s very quiet, even all the way up.

I need to tinker with the settings some, perhaps, but in fairness to ThinkGeek and Behringer, I need to retract my rant. The only thing I can fault them, is that the guitar is really quiet into the USB Codec, and they mentioned none of this in the documentation.

I still need to post the for-Snow-Leopard version of the pictures.

I fix my (car) brakes, and I fix my (car) stereo. The rest, oh well.
The new speaker did not fit in the old speaker mount, despite being the same “size”. Marine plywood to the rescue. This is the second one I’ve made like this, and it went unexpectedly well. A dremel is wonderful — and I just set the saber saw at 45 degrees, and free-handed a marked circle, and it came out nice. But, again, marine plywood wins big — strong, no cutting, no splitting. I don’t think I could have cut low-grade plywood or regular wood that close without cracking it in the process.

When you give a pumpkin field a year off, what do you think grows in it?

Free Pumpkins!

Saw this just the other day driving home in traffic, three cheers for telephoto and anti-shake.

But what does it mean?

There’s a learning curve. I think I’m past it.
I repaired the busted board. It looks like this:

The so-called second-second-system, using an Atmel168 chip, intended to use Arduino software (minor mods required for lower clock rate), with the option of controlling the LED power profile in software, and also of controlling external electronics.

The pins in a fence around the microprocessor are intended to allow a piggy-back board with additional electronics to be loaded on top. For example, the lights might be controlled independently, or perhaps some rechargeable batteries could be used to provide a standlight, or maybe a USB charger for cellphones and cameras.
Here’s little board to allow a 20+ volt battery pack to be connected or disconnected, under the control of pin B0. Do note, the ability to do battery management is pretty limited — NiMH batteries are finicky, it’s hard to get a good handle on the current going in or out of the battery (10-bit DAC ranging to 5 volts, at best is measuring current through a 1 ohm resistor, with a 5mA resolution. Typical currents will be in the 200mA range, or less, so one part in 40.

I thought about the costs a bit, and had some ideas about simplifying the first board, and arrived at this smaller, simpler board. The shunt comes on a little earlier, but it uses the same ramp-up trick to direct power to the LEDs as the system voltage increases.

Today’s lesson: Hub generators are current sources.The sidewall generator was starting to tick me off. Fiddly, the mount cracked once, a little noisy, and too slippy in the winter. So, I took my Christmas money, and bought a custom wheel from a local bike shop, with a Shimano 3D71 in the middle.

Hooking this up to the regulator for the sidewall dynamo worked great, till it failed. Simulation of the circuit revealed two unexpected things; the two small capacitors were probably swinging well past their voltage limits, and they were also getting reverse-biased in the process. However, the part that actually failed, was the power transistor in the voltage clamp; it had gotten so hot that the epoxy on it was cooked to a dark brown. Replacing that transistor restored the clamp to its former function, but this time I added an indicator LED (a power indicator LED) to let me know whether the clamp was running part time, or often. Turns out, the light went on solid at about 10mph, and got plenty bright at 15mph.

Given that the clamp is supposed to only turn on at 23.5 volts, and sinks 350mA, that the hub was delivering somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 watts of power (it’s rated for 3).

It seems a shame to convert all that useful power into heat and transistor flambé. Plan B, is to string all the power LEDs I’ve got kicking around into one big load, and either switch that on with the clamp, or maybe just use that for the clamp. Eight LEDs would be a little pricey, but wow, think of the light.

Or maybe I could run a stereo.

Iz can do lolcatz, 2.

Nothing says Christmas (or April Fools’) like….

Every Christmas, we make many, many tie-dye shirts, because we have many, many nieces and nephews, plus a few friends in town that know that we do this.

And one year, for April Fools’, I was a “subcontractor” on a joke at Sun. Someone needed a whole sheet, tie-dyed, on short notice.

I had never dyed anything quite this large before, and I only had one chance to get it right.
Later, I prepared a “half-baked” presentation on how I did it, which (with minor enhancements) I exported to the web. If you decide to take this up as a hobby, almost everything you need can be had from Dharma Trading.

• Powdered Procion dyes (Lemon Yellow, Fuchsia, and Turquoise)
• Soda Ash fixer
• Urea
• Shirts
• Bottles
• Synthrapol but this might be better

Rubber bands you can get from the office supply, plastic bags (which can be reused) and salt from the grocery store.

After converting some video to iPod format, and discovering how much time it took, I decided I might be willing to actually pay a little bit of money to get it done right, especially for DVDs, which look like they would take hours.

I couldn’t find what I wanted on iTunes (any and all Hayao Miyazaki), but I did see the Princess Bride ($9.99) and Wild Hogs ($14.99). I saw Wild Hogs on the airplane, and it was about as lame and horrible as a “comedy” could hope to be. The Princess Bride, on the other hand, is a fabulous movie that everyone should watch. “Inconceivable!”, “As you wish”, R. O. U. S., The Dread Pirate Roberts, iocaine powder, the man with six fingers, true love, “My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die”. There’s not even one memorable thing about Wild Hogs, yet it costs 50% more. Any market that prices Wild Hogs above Princess Bride, is busted.

What I really don’t understand, is why these movies cost as much as they do. DVDs (which have higher resolution, can be copied, ripped, played with VLC, etc) cost only a bit more.

The price looked good, I thought I would give them a try. They’re a clear win; for this kind of lighting, LEDs are the choice.

I bought these from LED Supply. They are one-foot by half-inch strips, each emitting 200 lumens of LED light, running on 12-24 volts DC. The price is pretty good; if you price out 200 lumens, add regulators, etc, from discrete parts, it’s easy to exceed their price ($25 per foot). My goal is to get something that is energy-saving, non-hot (not a fire hazard) that I won’t need to mess with for a long time. We have some crappy halogen under-cabinet lights already; they’re a pain to change, hot, and the heat melted the fixtures. LEDs ought to beat all that, at fraction of the power (or, if we want to be light gluttons, we can get a ton of lot for half the power).

The light is pretty good; better than fluorescents, definitely, and there’s choices (I actually think that bright white is a little too blue). I put six (a mixture of cool white and bright white) in a string, and wired it experimentally to a cheap power supply (available from the same site, looks like they got a truckload from Kodak on surplus) and checked it with a power meter, and the whole rig (including the power supply) pulled 22 watts, with a power factor of around .6 (this, of course, is an artifact of the power supply). The lights come with a dimming input, but I’m not using it.

You could easily run this on a car battery, or off the grid, if you had DC.

And yes, the price looks a little high, but they’re only going to get cheaper and brighter in the future, and they’re good for 10 years of use, 24/7, with no penalty for turning them on and off.

This shows one-and-a-half strips, with the power supplied at the left. You’ll notice that they are tacked in place with white electrical tape; they weigh next to nothing, and are somewhat flexible.

This shows a joint between two strips (with the electrical tape removed). The yellowish dots inside the squares are the LEDs. Notice the exposed wiring — this is not for a splashy location, unless you waterproof with a little silicone, or a slim casing (I can imagine routing a channel in a thin piece of wood with holes drilled in it for the lights).

I did not take the trouble of using a constant exposure for these three photos, I just let the camera do its autoexposure thing. This gives you an idea of how bright they are.

Notice how much the camera had to boost the exposure to compensate for the missing light.

18 watts of LED light (net 22 at the wall socket). You can see where one of the strips is drooping.

It would be a little pricey and delicate, but you could make a heck of a string of Christmas tree lights out of some of these.

Comcast has a usage limit, but it’s a secret.

I’d like to run Azureus (BitTorrent) to download (legal) things like the South-by-Southwest Featured Artists. However, recently Comcast has started throttling BitTorrent traffic, and there’s talk on the net of people getting their internet yanked for exceeding usage limits.

Being a prudent person, I figured I should ask first (there’s plenty of discussion elsewhere about how futile this is, but what the heck), and the regular customer service person referred me to the “Comcast Customer Security Assurance”. But when you call them, you are presented with two voice mail options — if your service has been disconnected, and if you are returning a call, neither of which addresses my case. I relayed this information to the regular customer service person, along with a suggestion that they fix their voicemail, or perhaps they could contact the other arm of Comcast to get the information for me.

Haven’t heard back from them since. If DSL worked here, I would get it. FIOS is just down the road, but not here yet. I should find out who in this town is reponsible for choosing cable providers; maybe we can change.

And IF you insist on running Azureus on Comcast, at least in the Boston area, you need to make encryption mandatory, not optional.

So how do these guys do file uploads? And what’s with all the parts?

This, is “extended”.

So far, this is not exactly knocking my socks off.
The image upload options seem a little bogus — it might be nice to be able to rescale it before upload, in case it is a full-size image (I’ve written that code myself in Java, it falls well short of rocket surgery).

Oh, that was tacky, I left the trailing slash off the Path, and it just glued it to the file name. Bleah.

I was a relatively happy iBlog user, and the upgrade to 2.0 looked pretty, but it is full of bugs. So now I am trying WordPress. I am particularly interested in learning if the file upload works ok — or screw that, maybe I will just take care of my own files.

Let’s try a Big Picture of the southbound end of a northbound bike:

And the videos — looks like I post my own link. Here’s goes nothing:

Little Puffer Fishies, at the beach

Or maybe I don’t — is it possible that links to unappproved sites are diagnosed with silent failure? Hard to tell, since there’s no feedback.

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