November 13, 2006
Canon Pixma MP150 Printer
A while back my brother Andy came to visit. While he was here he bought a new laptop computer, which came with a free Canon printer. He didn't need the printer, so he left it with me. Very fancy printer, photo quality ink-jet with built in scanner. We hooked it up a couple of months ago and used it to print a few items.
This weekend it started acting up. Paper would not feed. Push the buttons, cycle power, load and reload paper, read the manual, follow the troubleshooting guide, waste a couple of hours fooling around. Finally decide it's junk, not worth taking the time to pack it up and send it back to the factory for repair (replacement). Get junior's toolkit and take it apart. What a pain. Try to take the control panel out of the scanner/lid. Decide it's too much effort. Put it back together, without the side covers. It prints! What the #$%&? And what is this little plastic piece that's left over? White plastic, about a half inch long, with two pins.
Thursday, November 23, 2006
Dr. Strangelove
November 13, 2006
Dr. Strangelove
My boss (Mike Fleming) and our chief engineer here at Stevens just got back from a big meeting about GOES satellites in South Carolina. Not much new on the GOES front, more of the same bureaucratic nonsense, but he did bring back another story. Seems the Navy is putting up a constellation of LEO (low earth orbit) satellites to provide broadband communications. They do not expect to fully utilize the capacity of these satellites anytime soon, so are thinking about leasing bandwidth to the commercial sector. The Navy has put up eight of these radiation hardened satellites so far. Designing radiation hardened DSP's is my boss's specialty, so he is especially interested in this. (DSP: Digital Signal Processor. Most all radio communications uses DSP these days.)
You may have heard how the space shuttle has five computers that all do the same job, and the results they produce are a result of a vote amongst these processors. They do this because of radiation. Radiation in space is higher than it is on earth, and can cause errors in computers. Radiation hardening is anything you do to a piece of equipment so that it can continue to operate when exposed to nuclear radiation. The simplest way to do it is to shield the equipment with lead or concrete or something similar. Another way is to make each component large enough that destruction of a few molecules will not impact it's performance. Both these methods mean the device is going to larger and heavier, and heavy is the enemy of space travel.
Redundant devices is another way to deal with this problem. The space shuttle uses multiple computers. Mike's method is similar to the space shuttle method, but instead of duplicating the computers, he uses multiple transistors in the processing chip at the core of the computer itself.
For the military, radiation hardening does not mean just being able to survive the normal incident radiation of outerspace, but also to survive the EMP (Electro-Magnetic Pulse) produced by a nearby nuclear explosion, such as one caused by a North Korean Missle armed with a nuclear warhead that detonates prematurely.
Anyway, with the amount of bandwidth available from these Navy satellites, we could have Sat-phones (Satellite telephone) the size of cell-phones, and we wouldn't need all these cell phone towers. The power required to reach a LEO satellite is about the same that a cell phone produces. So now we are looking at the Sat-phone business.
Since these are military satellites, privacy would be nil, on the other hand, there would be thousands of channels, and how many channels can they actually listen to? And since they are military satellites, the military could shut down the service any time they wanted, similar to their control of the GPS satellites.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/muos.htm
Dr. Strangelove
My boss (Mike Fleming) and our chief engineer here at Stevens just got back from a big meeting about GOES satellites in South Carolina. Not much new on the GOES front, more of the same bureaucratic nonsense, but he did bring back another story. Seems the Navy is putting up a constellation of LEO (low earth orbit) satellites to provide broadband communications. They do not expect to fully utilize the capacity of these satellites anytime soon, so are thinking about leasing bandwidth to the commercial sector. The Navy has put up eight of these radiation hardened satellites so far. Designing radiation hardened DSP's is my boss's specialty, so he is especially interested in this. (DSP: Digital Signal Processor. Most all radio communications uses DSP these days.)
You may have heard how the space shuttle has five computers that all do the same job, and the results they produce are a result of a vote amongst these processors. They do this because of radiation. Radiation in space is higher than it is on earth, and can cause errors in computers. Radiation hardening is anything you do to a piece of equipment so that it can continue to operate when exposed to nuclear radiation. The simplest way to do it is to shield the equipment with lead or concrete or something similar. Another way is to make each component large enough that destruction of a few molecules will not impact it's performance. Both these methods mean the device is going to larger and heavier, and heavy is the enemy of space travel.
Redundant devices is another way to deal with this problem. The space shuttle uses multiple computers. Mike's method is similar to the space shuttle method, but instead of duplicating the computers, he uses multiple transistors in the processing chip at the core of the computer itself.
For the military, radiation hardening does not mean just being able to survive the normal incident radiation of outerspace, but also to survive the EMP (Electro-Magnetic Pulse) produced by a nearby nuclear explosion, such as one caused by a North Korean Missle armed with a nuclear warhead that detonates prematurely.
Anyway, with the amount of bandwidth available from these Navy satellites, we could have Sat-phones (Satellite telephone) the size of cell-phones, and we wouldn't need all these cell phone towers. The power required to reach a LEO satellite is about the same that a cell phone produces. So now we are looking at the Sat-phone business.
Since these are military satellites, privacy would be nil, on the other hand, there would be thousands of channels, and how many channels can they actually listen to? And since they are military satellites, the military could shut down the service any time they wanted, similar to their control of the GPS satellites.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/muos.htm
Cat's Eye
November 10 , 2006
Cat's Eye
I noticed that one of our cats appeared to have a hair lying across the lens of one eye. Did not seem to bother him.
Talked to someone about this and they said that it does not bother cats or dogs to have a hair in their eye, and that they just wipe it out with their finger.
!?!?!?!?!
Cat's Eye
I noticed that one of our cats appeared to have a hair lying across the lens of one eye. Did not seem to bother him.
Talked to someone about this and they said that it does not bother cats or dogs to have a hair in their eye, and that they just wipe it out with their finger.
!?!?!?!?!
Africa
November 13, 2006
Africa
There was a big article about Africa in the Travel section yesterday and I tried to locate the country that Asante (the new guy at work) is from. I look on the map figuring I will be able to easily pick it out, but whoa! There are a whole bunch of countries whose name starts with G. Is is Ghana? Guinea? Guzortek? Turns out it is Gambia, 11,000 square kilometers (tiny), surrounded by Senegal, former British Crown Colony, gained independence in 1964, still part of the British Commonwealth. There are a bunch of old forts there from when it was part of the British Empire. It is a narrow strip of land on either side of the Gambia river. The country is as wide as British warships could fire shells from the river.
Ghana is also a former British Colony, became independent in 1960.
Africa
There was a big article about Africa in the Travel section yesterday and I tried to locate the country that Asante (the new guy at work) is from. I look on the map figuring I will be able to easily pick it out, but whoa! There are a whole bunch of countries whose name starts with G. Is is Ghana? Guinea? Guzortek? Turns out it is Gambia, 11,000 square kilometers (tiny), surrounded by Senegal, former British Crown Colony, gained independence in 1964, still part of the British Commonwealth. There are a bunch of old forts there from when it was part of the British Empire. It is a narrow strip of land on either side of the Gambia river. The country is as wide as British warships could fire shells from the river.
Ghana is also a former British Colony, became independent in 1960.
Custer
November 22, 2006
Custer
One of the speakers at my Toastmasters meeting today gave a speech entitled "Custer had it coming". Bob Fineburg, the speaker, got this title from a bumper sticker he saw when he was in college. One of his professors sent him out to interview an old Indian (Native American) chief, who claimed to have been in the battle at Little Big Horn, where Custer was killed. The battle was in 1876, the interview was in 1976. In 1976, you could still get to the site of the battle. Now it is closed to everyone, including Native Americans, because of looting: people digging up bones and bullets and taking them away.
The grass at the site is called greasy-grassy because it looks like it is coated with grease.
After the battle the Indians scalped the dead soldiers, except for Custer. For Custer, they drove sticks in his ears, so that when he got to heaven, or the "happy hunting grounds" or wherever his spririt was going, they would know that he did not listen, which evidently was the Indians biggest complaint against him.
Custer
One of the speakers at my Toastmasters meeting today gave a speech entitled "Custer had it coming". Bob Fineburg, the speaker, got this title from a bumper sticker he saw when he was in college. One of his professors sent him out to interview an old Indian (Native American) chief, who claimed to have been in the battle at Little Big Horn, where Custer was killed. The battle was in 1876, the interview was in 1976. In 1976, you could still get to the site of the battle. Now it is closed to everyone, including Native Americans, because of looting: people digging up bones and bullets and taking them away.
The grass at the site is called greasy-grassy because it looks like it is coated with grease.
After the battle the Indians scalped the dead soldiers, except for Custer. For Custer, they drove sticks in his ears, so that when he got to heaven, or the "happy hunting grounds" or wherever his spririt was going, they would know that he did not listen, which evidently was the Indians biggest complaint against him.
Monday, November 20, 2006
Johnny builds another computer
Johnny put together a computer this weekend using some parts from his previous gaming system and some parts from some old systems I drug home from work. It wasn't enough to just bolt it together: it had to be modified, for improved cooling, you know. The case had two places, one in front and one in back, for mounting auxiliary cooling fans. The rack for the three and a half inch disk drives was a separate piece that could be removed. Johnny wanted extra cooling for the disk drives, so we bent some tabs and drilled some holes and mounted this disk drive rack to the floor of the case. This positioned it right in back of the fan mounted to the front panel.
Johnny also had some chrome wire fan grills that he wanted to use. The case had grills that were integral to the case made by punching a bunch of holes in the sheet metal. We cut these grills out by using an electric drill to cut the strips-of-metal-between-adjacent-holes (there is a term for this but I do not remember what it is). Then we used a small diameter (one inch) grindstone mounted in a high speed (three or four thousand RPM) electric drill to grind away jagged edges and then to remove the remaining metal to make the hole full size. We should have taken some pictures. It would make this easier to explain. A video with accurate sound would give a realistic idea of what all was involved. Grinding was very noisy. We wore the grindstone down to nothing.
Before we started all this drilling and cutting, Johnny removed all the electronic components from the computer case, including the power supply and the front panel switches. Little bits of steel can ruin sensitive electronics. After we were done with all the metal work, we used the air compressor to clean the case. We covered the floor of our work area (in the garage) with metal bits. I swept them up, it was quite a pile.
Johnny also spent considerable time sorting out the electronic components. We had three motherboards and three disk drives, all apparently good, but not all combinations would work together. Some motherboards would run the BIOS, but would not boot from any disk. Some disks would format and test fine, but no motherboard could boot from them. We finally ended up using the newest, and most powerful motherboard with one of two 80GB disk drives we had. We could not get our second 80GB disk to boot. It tests fine otherwise, so it is providing extra storage.
I was talking to Jack at lunch today about the mods we made to the computer case this weekend and I realized we probably should have wiped out the case with a damp cloth when were done, to pick up any grit that was left over from the grinding. Blowing it out with air was probably adequate, but the next time we do this, we should try wiping it off and see if we get any more grit.
Johnny also had some chrome wire fan grills that he wanted to use. The case had grills that were integral to the case made by punching a bunch of holes in the sheet metal. We cut these grills out by using an electric drill to cut the strips-of-metal-between-adjacent-holes (there is a term for this but I do not remember what it is). Then we used a small diameter (one inch) grindstone mounted in a high speed (three or four thousand RPM) electric drill to grind away jagged edges and then to remove the remaining metal to make the hole full size. We should have taken some pictures. It would make this easier to explain. A video with accurate sound would give a realistic idea of what all was involved. Grinding was very noisy. We wore the grindstone down to nothing.
Before we started all this drilling and cutting, Johnny removed all the electronic components from the computer case, including the power supply and the front panel switches. Little bits of steel can ruin sensitive electronics. After we were done with all the metal work, we used the air compressor to clean the case. We covered the floor of our work area (in the garage) with metal bits. I swept them up, it was quite a pile.
Johnny also spent considerable time sorting out the electronic components. We had three motherboards and three disk drives, all apparently good, but not all combinations would work together. Some motherboards would run the BIOS, but would not boot from any disk. Some disks would format and test fine, but no motherboard could boot from them. We finally ended up using the newest, and most powerful motherboard with one of two 80GB disk drives we had. We could not get our second 80GB disk to boot. It tests fine otherwise, so it is providing extra storage.
I was talking to Jack at lunch today about the mods we made to the computer case this weekend and I realized we probably should have wiped out the case with a damp cloth when were done, to pick up any grit that was left over from the grinding. Blowing it out with air was probably adequate, but the next time we do this, we should try wiping it off and see if we get any more grit.
Monday, November 6, 2006
Driving
Drove the car-car to work today, as it needed service and the Chrysler dealer is a short walk from where I work.
I almost lost control of the car on the corner coming off Highway 26 onto 217. Same place where I came upon a Honda facing the wrong direction a month or so ago. He had spun out, but was undamaged. Everybody stopped to let him turn around and proceed. I blamed it on poor driving ability.
This morning's incident made me rethink that. I was a little irritated with all the doofi around me, and I was trying to pass one goober brain who had pulled in front of me, but I didn't think I was going that fast. But about halfway through the corner, the rear end started sliding and for a second there I thought I was going to lose it completely, but I got it under control, but just for a second, and then it started sliding again. Not as bad the second time, but it was still a little unnerving. I am thinking there must be something wrong with that corner. I tried the brakes when I got off the freeway and I was able to really jam them on without sliding. So be careful out there.
I almost lost control of the car on the corner coming off Highway 26 onto 217. Same place where I came upon a Honda facing the wrong direction a month or so ago. He had spun out, but was undamaged. Everybody stopped to let him turn around and proceed. I blamed it on poor driving ability.
This morning's incident made me rethink that. I was a little irritated with all the doofi around me, and I was trying to pass one goober brain who had pulled in front of me, but I didn't think I was going that fast. But about halfway through the corner, the rear end started sliding and for a second there I thought I was going to lose it completely, but I got it under control, but just for a second, and then it started sliding again. Not as bad the second time, but it was still a little unnerving. I am thinking there must be something wrong with that corner. I tried the brakes when I got off the freeway and I was able to really jam them on without sliding. So be careful out there.
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