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May 9th, 2008
 | 02:06 pm - Eee?
Do any of you have any experience with the Asus Eee PC? My old Thinkpad T22 keeled over recently, and I'm thinking of getting an Eee as my new personal laptop. The small form factor appeals to me, as does the price (cheaper than a lot of used full-size laptops) but I'm curious what people think of it who have actually used one.
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May 6th, 2008
 | 02:18 pm - More audio marketing stupidity: Twisted pair interconnects
Here's the latest bit of pointless audio gimmickry -- "twisted pair" interconnects:
http://www.streetwires.com/products/Default.aspx?grp=9
Basically, instead of one piece of coaxial cable, they're using two pieces of mini coax twisted together, connected to the same points at both ends.
This is utterly pointless.
It's true that twisted pairs offer interference rejection -- but this only works for balanced systems that are designed for them. (For example, XLR microphone connections.) Unbalanced systems, like standard line level connections, don't benefit at all. In fact, that mini coax is probably lossier than a normal, thicker coax cable.
EDIT: Actually, on closer examination, I don't think they're using coax at all; I think they're just using twisted pairs. This is likely to pick up a lot more noise than a normal interconnect.
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 | 10:26 am - Writer's Block: My First Car
The first one I actually owned was a 1994 Honda Civic Si. (Shown here with a Yakima Rack installed.)
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May 3rd, 2008
| 04:02 pm - Car stuff
Two lighting-related chores today.
First, I replaced the instrument cluster lights on the Crown Vic. Enough of them had burned out to make this a necessary chore. The instrument cluster on this car has a backlit look that suggests a general illumination source of some kind, like a luminescent panel. Unfortunately, that's not how it works. Instead, it uses about ten miniature incandescent bulbs, which require disassembling a large portion of the dashboard to change. Because this is such a pain I decided to just replace all the bulbs, including the warning lights and the lights behind the HVAC controls. This ended up taking 20 bulbs, but at least I won't have to do it again for a while.
After that, I wheeled the Cabriolet into the maintenance garage to adjust its headlights. I'd been complaining about them every time I drove it in the dark. They were aimed too low and too far to the left, such that the low beams were pointed at the ground straight ahead and the high beams went off to the left. I did this same job on the Crown Vic a while back and it was difficult, because the Crown Vic's "aero-style" headlights have a lousy, mushy beam pattern and you can't tell what you're doing when you try to aim them visually. The Cabriolet uses old-style sealed beams, which have a sharper pattern and are much easier to aim. I also touched up the aim on the auxiliary high beams mounted in the grille. I'm used to factory driving lights being mostly for show, but these have a nice, well-defined driving beam pattern and can actually be adjusted. (They're made by Hella, so I guess that shouldn't surprise me too much.)
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April 30th, 2008
 | 09:51 am - The Onion -- trend leader
Real life sometimes imitates The Onion. (Best example: Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over' from January 2001.) But now we have real news organizations imitating The Onion, too; CNN has started to sell headline tee shirts on their website, according to Consumerist.
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April 28th, 2008
| 05:51 pm - Bendix 55P3
The restored Bendix Aviation Corp. 55P3, ready to use:
It could probably use realignment, as the AGC action isn't very good, but I don't have a signal generator and it's good enough for listening to local stations. All American Five designs aren't exactly good broadcast DX radios, anyway, because they lack an RF amp stage. The audio response on this set is quite nice for listening to talk radio. The audio output stage and case design are such that there's fairly good bass response (for a set this size) and treble is sharply rolled off, giving a warm sound and attenuating static.
I earlier described this as a Bakelite radio, but I actually suspect it's some other form of plastic. It doesn't have the distinctive smell I associate with Bakelite, and the color isn't a typical one -- Bakelite is almost always black, unless it's been painted.
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April 22nd, 2008
| 12:05 pm - Rally photos
Here's a Flickr photo set from the 2008 Olympus Rally:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/22426639@N06/sets/72157604676550918/
If you're looking for action photos you'll be disappointed -- I wasn't in a good location to take any, and besides, there are plenty of great ones on the Rally America website. I thought it'd be nice to post some photos to give a feel for the terrain, though, since that's hard to get from action close-ups.
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April 17th, 2008
| 11:31 am
I'm heading out tomorrow to spend the weekend helping with the Olympus Rally. This is a Rally America stage rally event that's being held out by Pomeroy, WA. (Normally it's held near Olympia, but they couldn't get permission to use the logging roads there this year, probably due to all the wind damage the timber areas have seen this spring.)
For those who aren't familiar with the sport, stage rallies are automotive racing events that are run on normal roads that have been temporarily closed to traffic. The cars must all be street legal, and race against the clock, with the shortest total time winning the event. It's a very popular sport in Europe, but less so here, where we prefer to have our race cars go around in circles for hours at a time.
Current Music: Dave Matthews Band, "Tripping Billies"
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April 15th, 2008
| 05:35 pm - Arts and crafts
Had some fun building an EZ-10 for my USB WiFi dongle. This is a cardboard-and-tinfoil corner reflector that gives, in theory, about 10 dBi gain; it's comparable to, but easier to pack than, a Chinese cookware antenna.
Here it is in its "deployed" form:
And here it is "flat-packed" to be tucked into my laptop bag:
I don't have any calibrated equipment on 2.4 GHz, so I can't say how close it's coming to the theoretical 10 dBi figure. Signal level does peak and null noticeably as it's rotated, though, and there's about a 15% boost in signal level over the dongle by itself.
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April 12th, 2008
| 09:15 pm
I was able to revive the Airline 25GSL-1814A, today. Some of you may remember the terminal strip on this set's audio output transformer came apart while I was working on replacing capacitors. Since then I've picked up a non-working Airline GSL-1614A. This is a rather uninteresting set -- a fairly ugly plastic radio from the mid-1950s with an almost laughably cheap four-tube design. However, it had the same audio amplifier tube as the set I was trying to fix, which meant the output transformer would be suitable as a replacement. Output transformers match the high impedance of the audio amplifier tube to the low impedance of the speaker, so it's important that the tube and transformer go together.
The 1614A turned out to use an output transformer with a two-wire primary, so I made a modification similar to what was done to my Bendix set by some unnamed repairman -- I added an extra filter choke to the power supply circuit to compensate for the inability of the output transformer to do that job. I haven't heard any hum in the audio in my initial tests, so it looks like adding an extra filter capacitor, as was done with the Bendix, won't be necessary.
I'm pretty pleased I was able to get this one going again, because I think it's a really handsome tabletop radio. Still left to do: Replacing the power cord with a polarized one and rewiring the power switch, for safety; and cleaning up the case with some furniture polish.
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April 9th, 2008
| 10:14 pm - Another old radio
Picked up a Bendix 55P3 tabletop radio on eBay. This is a Bakelite plastic radio from roughly 1949. Normally I prefer wood radios, but this one is pretty handsome. I'll post some pictures when I'm finished working on it. Bendix originally manufactured brake parts for cars and trucks, but during WWII they began making aircraft radios. After the war they branched out into consumer electronics -- radios and phonographs. Their aviation division lives on to this day as Bendix/King.
Internally this is an utterly conventional All American Five, and as usual the chassis is connected to one side of the line cord. Appallingly, the entire bottom of the radio is metal -- someone could have gotten a serious shock just by picking this set up from the bottom while it was plugged in. (Perhaps this is why they put a handle on the top.) A polarized line cord and a slight rewiring of the on/off switch will correct this safety hazard.
The radio works as-is, and has a nice tone. The power supply filter capacitors were already replaced some time fairly recently, but the paper capacitors still need to be changed. One of them in particular, used as a power line bypass, has gone "leaky" enough that it's heated up and much of the wax has melted out.
Interestingly, there's a previous, much older repair -- probably done some time in the late 1950s or 1960s, judging from the parts involved. The audio output transformer apparently failed or was damaged somehow, and was replaced with a more generic unit. The original transformer had an extra tap that allowed it to double as a power supply filter choke, a cost-saving measure. The new transformer lacked this. Whoever did the repair added a choke coil and an extra filter capacitor to correct for this. The modifications make sense and are neatly done, so I'll leave them in place and document them on my copy of the schematic.
This radio still has all its original Bendix tubes. This isn't quite as unusual as you'd think -- while tubes have a finite lifespan, that lifespan is often a long one.
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| 04:18 pm
Heads up: There's a security hole in older Adobe Flash Player versions. You can check your current version by visiting this page; versions 9.0.115.0 and 8.0.39.0 and earlier are vulnerable. If you have one of the vulnerable versions you should download the newest one and install it..
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April 8th, 2008
 | 05:32 pm
I noticed today that Amazon.com's online music service now supports Linux. (Previously it was Windows/Mac only.) This is worth checking out if you want an alternative to iTunes's DRM-protected, iPod-only tracks; when you buy music online from Amazon's service, you get 256 kbps MP3 files with no DRM. They do make you use their download utility, but once the files are on your disk you can use them like any other MP3 files.
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April 7th, 2008
 | 10:03 am
Well, Skybus Airlines closed up shop on Friday. Maybe "cheap tickets as long as you're going to Columbus, OH" wasn't a particularly good business model; who knew?
This follows the recent closures of Aloha and ATA. With high fuel prices, businesses cutting back on travel, and stiff fare competition for leisure travelers, I think we're likely to see more airlines go under before this is all over.
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April 4th, 2008
 | 04:19 pm
Jay Leno revealed in his column recently that he was asked if he'd host an American version of Top Gear. He turned it down, essentially because he thinks American TV will ruin the show. He makes a lot of good points. I've watched a fair amount of automotive TV (yeah, I know, no big shock, right?) and the reason Top Gear is so refreshing is it's not relentlessly upbeat. Even in their "serious" review pieces they often criticize the cars; sometimes they trash them savagely. You simply don't see that on American TV. I've never seen Motorweek review a car negatively. Even Car and Driver Television was pretty gentle, a sharp contrast to the magazine's occasional skewering of a new model they don't like. This makes for boring TV because it reduces the show to an infomercial. BBC shows are able to mock the products of large corporations without biting the hand that feeds them, a situation that even Public Television is not in here in the U.S.
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April 1st, 2008
 | 11:20 am
Does anyone else find April Fools' Day slightly frustrating, in the Internet age? It's so hard to tell what's serious and what's not online, especially given how bizarre the real world has gotten.
Current Music: Pepe Deluxé - Ms Wilhelmina And Her Hat
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March 31st, 2008
| 10:27 am
Consumerist has a story today about someone being scammed by FreeCreditReport.com. To get a credit report, they make you sign up for their $15/month credit monitoring service; then they make it hard to cancel.
I find them particularly slimy because I think they're trying to create deliberate confusion with AnnualCreditReport.com, which really is a free site, one that the government mandates that credit reporting agencies run.
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March 28th, 2008
 | 10:24 am - Automotive weirdness
Someone chopped a 1989 Geo Metro Xfi down into a tandem two-seater, reducing the frontal area, and claims 75 mpg:
The body work looks above average for this kind of project. The car strikes me as sort of ugly-cute...reminds me a little of a BV-141. Of course, when you start with a Geo Metro, almost anything you do to the styling is likely to be an improvement.
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March 22nd, 2008
| 08:13 pm
Well, the work on the Airline receiver didn't turn out so well. The radio was dead after I replaced the capacitors -- the filaments lit but there was no audio. Close inspection shows that the terminal strip on the output transformer -- held in place mostly by 55-year-old glue -- shifted, breaking one of the connections to the primary side of the transformer. The wire end is too deeply embedded in the coil winding to retrieve and resolder. That means it's a parts radio, now -- output transformers for these sets aren't easy to come by.
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March 18th, 2008
| 01:08 pm - For those of you who like to peek at your Christmas presents...
The IRS has released the schedule on which stimulus checks will be issued, and now has an online calculator you can use to find out how much you'll get. You'll need a copy of your 2007 tax return to fill in the blanks. (If you haven't done your 2007 return yet, obviously you'll need to do that first. But you've got less than a month left, so you really ought to be doing it anyway. ;) )
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