Broken Xbox

This is the warning on the bottom of my Xbox game console, to be a true disclosure they need to add "Taking apart your Xbox may result in you fixing it better than Microsoft was going to"



I bought a "working" xbox this weekend and it was broken. Admittedly I got a decent deal on it regardless.

Basically it would shut off at random after turning the unit on. I decided to take a look inside to see if anything was obviously amiss. First go I didn't see any problems but I suspected the power supply board.

I did a google search on the premise that since it was a microsoft product, a huge number of people have had this specific problem already without any satisfactory resolution, except for solving it themselves. (I don't consider sending it to be repaired for a exorbitant fee by microsoft to be a satisfactory resolution, considering it is really a flaw on their part.)

(I fully admit my bias against Microsoft. Yes I still use their products, that is why I am biased against them. Years of poor customer satisfaction will do that.)

I got a hit on the search "xbox shuts off" and find out this problem was responsible for a recall of power cords, a replacement being supplied that had a built in circuit breaker. Not really a good "fix" for the problem. Of course I am jumping to the conclusion that microsoft would supply a fix that doesn't really fix the true issue, the solder connection going bad from heat and lack of robustness.

I resoldered the connection and it is working fine so far.

Lightning vs. Tree

Went on a good hike this morning. Started at about 4:45am and made it back home at 7:30am. I was hoping to sneak up on some deer and turkey but didn't see anything but tracks. Did see a very neat lightning struck hemlock. Actually the best I have seen. Pieces were strewn in a 60 foot circle and individual "splinter" looked to be about 6-8ft long, 5"deep and maybee 1.5"wide. One of the neatest things was that in addition to the splinters being blown off, the bark was also, there was a piece where the small twigs coming out of the trunk were completely stripped of bark, these were probably about 1/8" diameter twigs over 1' long, free of bark still connected to a piece of the trunk that had been blasted away.

Digging up roots

I spent hours hacking away with a double bladed axe and tugging up roots in the walkway. It was a big annoyance, and possibly a last act of revenge (hopefully last) of a big tree we had to cut down right next to our house. I felt kinda bad about abusing the axe but I never used it as an axe and it works great as a root cutter.

Spoof Reel Mower Info

Old reel mower, add 3 cans of spray paint, and it is like new again. Yeah, it is dumb, I know already!

Peter's Reel Mower

I've been working on a Reel Mower for Pete. Believe it or not he actually wanted one of these things! Even though I collect stuff like this, I cannot help but give a once over look at someone that says they want something like that. I think he might be a treehugger or something. Probably harmless.

Reel mowers are pretty cool and being human powered are a must have as far as I am concerned. I have several, mostly broken. The thing is, they really were not all that popular for a long, long time, so they are usually a cheap buy, or free if you can find one. Of course they usually are screwed up. If you find one, lubrication can do alot, but wont cure all ills. Spray paint will fix maybee 25% of the problems that remain.

Some of the reel mowers I have used work really good, especially one really old Toro I had, and probably still have somewhere. I was using it and boom! the tire falls off. Actually the hard rubber part, this one was a really old wood handled one and the tires were pretty big, which gave it extra oomph, and it ran very smooth. No doubt a top of the line model in it's time. The old rubber tire had cracked and become weakened afer only 50 or 60 years, and when I got around to using it, it couldn't take it. I may have been pushing it too hard also, now that I think of it I may have been doing a race to see how fast I could cut with it. Anyways, Toro probably doesn't stock replacement tires. I didn't actually check but I think it is a safe bet to say that they don't.

Getting back to the story, I was looking for something else and got to where I had a couple reel mowers stored. One was definitely out, missing rubber on the wheel (no not the Toro), but the second was, well, complete, and all metal(Pete has specifically mentioned that he did not want a wood reel mower). Albeit rusted like a, well, you know. Nothing a really quick job of sanding and spraypainting couldn't fix. I had the perfect paint, I found them in a pile of Free stuff by the road! First a "Professionals" primer coat, and then, a silver Metallic coat for the handle, and rims. I considered flourescent orange for the body, but I like Pete and I don't want Lisa to leave him. So I settled for the next best. Green (John Deer Green), Actually I wanted to use Red, but the nozzle was clogged.

After reassembling I did the following video and did a test mow of the front yard. I t worked pretty good. Fairly light to push, and no problems cutting. Very nice noise wise compared to a gas mower. Just the "shicking" of blades. Width of cut is narrow compared to a gas mower, but the overall feeling I had was that it cut the total area fast. If you account for the time to fuel and go to the gas station to get gas I bet there is a break even point where it is faster, even with a smaller cut.

The youtube link wasn't working for some reason, but you can view it here on google videos

Linux on Laptops

Started researching linux on laptops again. I don't have a time slot to do anything really in depth though.

I am trying live cd distros on a Toshiba Sattelite Pro 435CDS, I put in a hd that has windows 95 installed and it ran mostly ok, it had a problem that if left alone for a while would got into sleep to die mode, which required a restart.

Score Card for Distros on the Toshiba
DSL - Runs but really flakey
Ubuntu 6.06 - Does not make it to running




Win 95 ran pretty fast on it. Too bad it it is such a poor operating system.


Some useful links (hopefully)

Guide for music on old laptops


Making a boot disk for old computers that wont boot from the cd rom because of bios limitations.

Smart Disk Manager on sourceforge, I downloaded sbminst.exe

I had to run it from the command prompt and it copied to floppy is seconds.

It booted cdrom fine. Ubuntu 6.06 ran wierd though and died with strange blocky large character, Tried DSL (Damn Small Linux)It made it to the main screen, but was flakey.

Fujitsu B142 Laptop and Windows NSG

Had to restore the windows 98 again on my antique Laptop. The Fujitsu B142 is a small touchscreen 300 mhz pentium computer. It is adequite for web browsing and average stuff but obviously will not run bloatware.

You have to take it apart to get to the hd.

The last straw was that I had trouble getting onto the internet and I am pretty sure it is a Windows 98 problem plus the sound does not work anymore, and the touchscreen needs recalibration every time I turn it on.

I have a fujitsu restore disk, and it is a big convienience, since you probably had to restore quite a bit back in the day. The hard drive I am using has been used many times for various projects from being reformatted to work with a neuros osd, to having win xp installed for a itx computer. As it worked out that was not to the satisfaction of the fujitsu restore, and it died with a compaint about disk being full. I used Darkik's Boot and Nuke to wipe the hd.

As of 9:33pm it is working with the new hd, fresh install and same D-Link Airplus pcmcia card.

I did find some references to putting linux on the B142 and some people were nice enough to work out drivers for linux for the touchscreen. If I have more trouble with Win 98 I will try the linux install which is just about certain.

The Orange Thing

Saturday I saw this for sale on the side of the road in town. I took the number and noted that the price was affordable for such a interesting thing. And it might actually be usefull around the house and garden. For sale next to it were a couple lawn mowers, which I actually needed, having had a recent spat of mower failures. Usually I can fiddle something up to work without too much effort but these were really messed up, one siezed up, and another seemed to be having some sort of major carburator issue. Anyway, the next day I called the number on the thing and the guy selling it said he was leaving town until Tuesday, in like 15 minutes. I was not going to see it that day.

Tuesday morning comes up and I meet up with him. He is retired and has a sideline of repairing mowers and such. I decide to buy a old toro mower he has and ask him if he can cut me a combo deal on the mower and orange thing, he does and home it goes.

Electric Vehicles

Nathan was asking me if we could make an electric quad for him. It is kind of a long story as to why he was asking but basically revolved around me telling him that I would not let him ride a gas engine quad because it was to big, etc. So I went to look online for a electric kids tractor someone had made that I had seen a while back. There are even more things the guy has done and cool stuff too unfortunately he has had to charge for plans. Though from the looks of it they are probably a deal at whatever he is charging. Plans are not my style, they are too restrictive because I work in Junk. Still he has free plans and very good ones too from the looks of it though I had trouble opening the one I wanted to see. Anyway I just wanted to look at it to see what size motor he use and what motor controller. Anyway the point is moot because I will be using whatever I have on hand, maybee a electric golf bag cart, or a powerwheels, or a electric scooter motor and controller I have. And all the work he has done could hardly be made up for on what he must make on plans really. He has some decent stuff on making evs, motor, controller , battery info etc.

Some other neat stuff I came across were a electric motor cycle done in a show called Gomi Style which I had never heard of before. Honestly I am not sure anyone has heard of this before. It is worth a watch. It's free too, well except for your time. He did have some cool ideas like making a "FREE Take it" sign to put on dumpters when he goes dumpster diving. Not origional but still cool.

Time To Take Some Time

I'm on vacation from work, the paying job that is. I have a bunch of stuff I should take care of around here. An accumulation of years of neglect. I will try a hack at a couple things like that but mostly I hope to restructure some habits and make some physical changes to the space I have. Also work on some fun projects I have been wanting to do. Mostly make some things, and finish some things. Part of that is trying to itemize my stuff. I will be looking to sell or otherwise move some things out. Two weeks to work on this is not enough but it is nice.

Sherline Mill First Cuts

This is the first thing that I have made on my CNC mill.

Got a Little Done

Cleaned out the area of the garage where I am putting the next 2 shelf units. Also got 3 more outlets in. Didn't put the shelves up, but that should be the easy part.

Bought the quad. It is fun. Have to get a hitch to do some work with it.

Cutting wood on the cnc mill. Aceconverter is pretty funny, it made gcode from a dxf but it will cut a line here go the the next line of text and randomly cut another line and go back. It is very inefficient and slow.

Sunday Goals

I have to write this down.

I want to move along on a bunch of things.
1. Cut chips on the mill using ace converter.
2. Put up another shelf unit in the garage. Or 2.
3. Program the spot welder display and power settings. Make the fixturing part
that clamps the electrodes.

That's it for now.

Cleanout

Got another 30x42 shelf unit in. That makes 2 plus one 12X36 unit. So far it doesn't seem to be really making a dent in the garage. It must be since I can get through it a bit. Unforturnately there isn't enough floor space to set up all the tools I have. I will have to mull that over.

Found my GE welder. What a beast. Now that I have the lincoln arc welder I am not sure if I need it. Now I have a arc welder, a 110v mig, and oxy acetylene. I'm thinking of setting up a covered separate space to do all the flammable things. Forging , welding, eventually set up a foundry.

I am pretty pleased with the Weller WESD51. Actually I never used anything but the crummy radio shack type soldering irons. This is temp controlled, has a nice digital temp display, and is very quick to heat up, I can pretty much turn it on and be soldering what I need in the time it takes me to fiddle with what I need to get ready to solder.

I mention it because I just soldered the new batteries into my IBM thinkpad battery pack. It is charging right now. The fujitsu lifebook B142 battery pack I did works okay. I got them from batteryspace.com but mistakenly ordered 18500 batteries instead of the 18650, they were cheaper and I didn't notice the item number difference, as it turns out they are the same diameter but shorter. I am using them anyway. Their rating is less at 1400mah per cell.
Not a big deal I hope.

Another thing, the total order was for 12 li-ion cells, I get them and before I make the pack I check the voltage, well 4 are under 2 volts. I do some research and it confirms what I already knew that under voltage li-ion batteries are no good. That is a bad thing. Anyway I call the company and they end up sending me 4 new cells. It works of for me even, but now I am wondering if the batteries are new old stock. Turns out li-ion are time sensitive, regardless of usage. Plus I wonder how many people make packs without checking the batteries.

LCD Display Driven by PIC

A Hitachi 44780 LCD driven by a PIC 16F628 using Pic Basic Pro. This is for Peter who way overuses the "All your base" thing. FYI it is from a old japanese video game where they are awful at making the english dialog.

LCD Display

Hooked up the parallel LCD display to the 16F628 for the first time ever, it works good. Pretty simple.

 

May 13, 2007?

Trying to do everything. Trying to reclaim my garage, make a cnc mill, make PICs work, make a mini spot welder, etc etc. Hmm, that doesn't include what other people want me to do and what I am putting off!


Got 4 outlets installed in the garage. Now I can put shelving up over them. The shelving is 30"deep and 42" wide. I should be able to use some as bench space, sort of. I got the fixture plate installed on the mill and went further in putting the vice on. Also soldered a connector to use a lcd display I want to use on my PIC projects.


 
 
 
 

Spot Welder

Made some progress on the welder this weekend. Am programming a PIC Microcontroller to run the time cycle and took a old sewing machine foot pedal and converted it to a on/off switch, the guts were toast anyway. A prize from the free box on some long ago Tag Sale. The Transformer is from a dead microwave I cut the secondary coil away with a chisel and wound about 4 turns of heavy wire to get 4volts to do the welding. Will see how it comes out. It does heat up a thin piece of SS enough to burn the wood block I had under it, a nice 1/4" diameter black mark. And that with only 1 sec of duration.


I finally am making progress with programming the PIC 16F628, It was very frustrating trying to figure out the settings in the programmer. I finally found something that worked and am sticking with it for now. I think I can actually do some useful stuff and have it be a time saver and make it possible to make some cool stuff.



 
 

Musical Instrument Maker in Towns Closes but hasTag Sale

There was a major folk instrument maker in town that sold out. It was really cool having them around and we had one of their instruments, so it was a surprise last fall when I had decided to buy another dulcimer for M that when we went down, the new owners were just about finished packing up the business to move it to Indiana! M ended up buying the dulcimer she wanted online that was made in town but I was very bummed to have them leave.

This weekend, just as I was getting in the car to leave for the first real tag sale day for me and S this year, M comes out and tells me that they are having a TS at the workshop where they used to make musical instruments. Of course we went there first. If I had more money I would have spent more. They had alot. Including alot of things that I could not afford, like rough board exotic wood and tons of instruments. Mostly stuff that had been hanging around for years and broken, but that is right up my alley. I can't afford the spiffy new stuff but I think I enjoy a beater fixer upper instrument more at times.

Cool things I got,
Incomplete 3 string dulcimer, old uke, with free crack on back and real old timey wood pegs, courting dulcimer, weird one string sliding "fret" instrument. A harp kit, a pallet of dulcimer parts, with a couple/3 dulcimers in partical assembly, antother almost complete dulcimer, a bowed psaltry, and 27 3'x1' deep heavy duty shelving, and 12 40" x24" deep shelving.

I might have missed a thing or two.

PIC Programming 16F628A

I am getting frustrated. The documentation on the web for programming has not been so great. I finally got the blinkin program to work on the Pic Programmer. I am using the free IC-PROG, which seems to do the job though I had a bunch of errors, mostly associated with some address that did not verify correctly. Running it multiple times seemed to make it finally work. By work, I mean loaded the hex file onto the PIC. As for blinking, no luck. I finally figured it was using the incorrect oscillator callout. Even though the tutorial said that IC-Prog would select if for me. After a frustrating search for what the various oscillator callouts meant, I decided that IntRC CLKOUT might be worth a try, and the leds are blinking at as 6 sec on, 6 sec off cycle. It is supposed to blink at a 1 sec on, 1 sec off cycle.

Mousetraps

Marie mentioned that some friends of ours had a problem with mice, but were not familiar with the use of mouse traps. Having had mice cause countless headaches in the past, getting into things in the garage, into cars etc. etc. I was more than happy to put this rapid video out to help get a little more mouse trap lore out there. My idea of "rapid video" is to get a informational video created with the least time and effort, but attempt to get the important information into it. The videos do end up being a bit rough but I like that style especially compared to the over produced non informative video that conventional media outlets create. The videos are unrehearsed and improvisational. We might (but probably not, because we are too busy) go back and do a remake that tries to make a point clearer or expand the topic in an interesting/funny way, or reduce to a more focussed piece.

Reptile Show Pictures 3

 
 
 
  

Reptile Show Pictures 2

 
 
 
  

Reptile Show Pictures 1

 
 
 
  

Big Green Truck Pics 1

Blogger did it to me again, I typed this really interesting and funny text to go with the pictures and it somehow deletes it without a trace while uploading. Now I have to be brief.

We went to a party this weekend thrown by Marilyn for Family and Friends. Saw people I have not seen in years, and honestly, talked to some acquaintences more than I had sum total in all the time I knew them! Talked to some less than I would have liked, but it was bustling. Mike told me stories about games he would play as a kid in Brooklyn, mostly they revolved around some sort of punishment for the looser, very entertaining. I think we started talking about that because there was a water ballon toss that somehow became a water balloon fight. I don't think Mark started it though a little bird asked me "Why did Mark Start throwing water balloons at people?" I wasn't really paying attention to it but when I did look, I did see Mark peg a little kid, maybee age 3. Mark won I think. Party was good. The weather was great, company to, and the food was just right.

Being brief, the pics will show the catering truck. It was very cool, wood fired pizza oven, espresso machine, and ice cream served off the back. The tables tops become the side covers for the truck. Great looking and efficient.


 
 
 
  


 
 
 
  

Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9.0

This is a post using Dragon NaturallySpeaking. It is okay. It is not perfect, but what what do you expect for only $179.:-) I think it will take some getting used to have to speak in kind of a funny way. Hopefully it won't carry over to my normal speaking with human beings. You have two speak, and enunciate and a rather clear way. it is kind of weird talking and looking at the screen waiting for the words to appear. Right now, I don't have the hang of it and apparently the way I speak makes it have a lot of errors. You don't see that because I am using the commands to select the words and correcting them. It seems to be a little lag, he but I guess there is a lot of processing that goes on. I am running a sempon 2200 and it is not the fastest computer around. Even with all the corrections I had to do and I think it's faster than typing.

Road Warrior Mower, Free!

This is the coolest free thing I have gotten in at least a week! Sure it don't run but it will!

Specs:
Engine Briggs and Stratton
Model 190707
Type 0883-01
Code 75092211


 
 
 
  

Upgrade Harddrive

I ordered a 60 gig hd from newegg.com. I have to say that company does an excellent job. They ship super fast, and I have ordered hundreds of dollars of stuff, if not thousands and they have always come through quick.

I ordered the hard drive Friday and received it Monday. The pics are of the lifebook taken apart, and yes you have to take it apart to repace the hard drive. Thankfully there was this site on disassembly. It made the job less intimidating at least.

I got the new HD installed and put the b142 back together. I had forgotten what a pain win 98 was. I had to do the whole fdisk, and format etc, etc. Did the recovery with the floppy and fujitsu cd. Went pretty well actually.

I did try to install win 98se over the 98 install. Almost every pc card for sale has a minimum req listed as win 98se and it would be nice to use them. To make a long story short, it did not work out for me. I decided to live with it when I found I had a pcmcia wireless card that worked with the lifebook. I will settle for that.

Another cool thing happened this weekend. Some background first, I had wanted to upgrade the memory to 160mb from the 96mb it had. That meant I needed a 128 mb pc100 laptop memory card. I shopped around and for $25 - $30 I could get one. I just didn't want to do that on a $100 computer (yeah I spent $60 on a 60gig hd, but that is different, I can use that for something else:-) So moving on, Saturday I am out tagsaling and I go to this sale and they have a linksys wireless router forasale, I am chatting with the seller about it and notice a broken laptop in the garbage. I go through the "Are you throwing that out?" routine, well he gives me the laptop which is a t20 thinkpad, stripped but he says "hey, wait around and I will see if I have stuff for it". He comes back up and gives me the origional memory for the t20, a 128mb memory stick. Well it works perfect in the lifebook. I am happy now:-)

I am waiting for the lilliput monitor I bought off ebay (link is not the auction I won) to come. I am kinda disapointed in the seller, I paid paypal after doing the Buy It Now on July 30. No email notice for shipping or anything. Hopefully it will come in tomorrow.