10/10/10

I didn’t realize it had been so long since I had blogged…hazards of the information age. You haven’t been missing out on much. Here’s the latest fun project, a home aquarium:

Home with a bag of fish.

Such excitement.

Max is the fish obsessed one but Henry likes them as well.

Four fish. Poor doomed little fish.

Besides normal life I’ve been working on some 3D modeling work for TDC and their website will someday be updated with the new designs. It’s nice to have a third part time job, I think I was slacking with just the Taig sales and jewelry.

In hobby news I finally found a few new airguns to play with and blog about, although I’m a bit heavy on bb guns right now. It had been a whole two months without getting a new airgun and I was going through a bit of withdrawal.

I finally gave up on getting Photoshop Elements 1.0 to play nicely with Windows 7. I’m trying out Paint.net although I find It’s easier to do file saving and renaming as a batch job in Irfanview after editing and color correcting the pictures in Paint.net. I find it hilarious that Paint.net’s homepage has google ads that tout other photo editing programs. In any case it’s a good piece of software and free.

As part of the above mentioned modeling job I often have to illustrate steps taken in Rhino so we can keep on top of the process. Turns out Windows 7 has a neat program called Problem Steps Recorder (just type PSR in the search bar). It captures everything in a .mht archive file that’s .zipped. Unpacking the .mht into html and separate pictures was giving me fits, I finally decided to just save everything out from IE separately as the unpacking programs I found didn’t work. Wake up! You fell asleep from the boredom.

Felice and I both transitioned to using a dual monitor setup on our PCs. I can’t believe I used to suffer with only one monitor. One thing that will drive you crazy is trying to get the displays to have the same color and brightness, etc. I found that by opening this picture in separate windows on both monitors was a good reference for tweaking the settings.

I know, I’m not being nerdy enough. Last month I also installed Virtualbox on my PC then installed Ubuntu linux on the virtual machine (yes nerdburger, I did just upgrade to Maverick Meerkat). Virtualbox is pretty slick not that I have any real use for it.

Oh yeah, I checked a bunch of rechargeable batteries with my multi-tester. Some days I have to pinch myself to make sure I’m not dreaming.

If you grew up in the Boston area in the 70’s you definitely remember this from almost every movie you saw.

George is working on rebuilding a Whizzer bicycle engine:

And I found this at a yard sale for free:

but I donated it to Goodwill. I didn’t have a Colecovision which was needed to get it working and it took up a ton of space I don’t have.

So that’s the last month and a half or so.

Latest Things

August has been a bit busy, so you get a dump of pictures and links…

Here’s some pics from DaVinci Days

Max Likes Bugs


Off to save the galaxy.

And some from the Steam Up:

Evey year we take a pic in front of the biggest Cat.

Kindly fireman.

Spotted a time traveller…

And his wife.

Walker Bulldog.

Yes it is.

Neat home made rail bike/cart.

Spud took Max and me fishing down the Long Tom.

Small fry.

Going back into the river.

So that’s the last month in pics, at least the high points.

Besides that I’ve been messing with computers a bit (I’ve bought a bunch at yard sales dirt cheap). So here are some computer links:

I bought this IOGear Keyboard for use in the bedroom, works well although the trackball doesn’t work well beyond about 40 degrees tilt.

How to boot from a USB or CD even if your BIOS won’t let you. Very handy, allowed me to restore a $3.00 laptop purchased at a yard sale.

CPU-Z tells you everything you need to know about a PC. Great for dealing with unknown hardware and figuring out what’s what.

Guimark is a great way of benchtesting a machine’s flash performance (I use the “Flex 3” test). Amazing the differences a little ram or CPU speed make when rendering Flash streaming video.

I installed a Netgear WG111 wireless PCI card (no Amazon link because I wouldn’t recommend it…) on one of the Barn PCs. It disabled “Fast User Switching” – AKA the normal XP login screen. Here’s an article on how to get it back. It’s 2010, Netgear, get your act together!

Online “Crap, I left my Caps Key on while typing that 10 paragraph blog comment” converter.

And some other non computer links:

Telegraph Instruments of Europe

The Making of a 15th Century Cannon

Harry Epstein Closeout Tools

Kolbasti Dancing.

Old Telephone

Picked up this old telephone at the thrift store today.

Interestingly enough there’s a twin of this phone in the Benton County museum. I’m guessing they came out of the same place, but that’s just a guess.

Not really ergonomic.

“Property of American Tel & Tel Co 323 Pat USA Jan 14 191?”

“Western Electric”

They really want you to know who owns it.

MIssing the bell, if it had one.

Old wire bundles.

The bottom…

If anyone knows about this model I’d love to hear about it. Googling hasn’t turned up much beyond the museum link above.

EDIT: My friend Kent says: "With no dial it came out of the Julian, Corvallis, or Benton Hotel, if local. That way it was hooked to a switch board. When the reciever was lifted a light came on at the switch board, the operator then plugged a 1/4 phone plug into that hole and asked what number they wanted. The switch board operator had a dial, and dialed the number wanted, then plugged the lines together. If they were real nice they unplugged their line or else they didn't and listened to the conversation. Either way when the phone was hung up the light went out and they unplugged the line."

Henry Assists

Henry Volunteers…

Being dressed.

A look he loves.

Parallel Port Card for the Dimension 5100

This is more for my future reference than for you, my dear readers. Henry is now using my old desktop. This presented a problem as the old Deskjet 722C was hooked to his old computer that had a parallel port. My Dimension 5100 lacked such a port. So I ordered a Startech parallel port PCI cardfrom Amazon. The instructions on the manufacturer’s site worked perfectly and the printer is hooked up again.

Leaky Hose Nozzle

Our old Italian hose nozzle was leaking and was clogged.

The nozzle. I like writing “nozzle”. It’s a funny word.

The barrel unscrews from the nut that retains it.

Full of rust and the two rubber seals/o-rings were hard.

The 2/3 steel clip was malleable and easily removed. The metal (not sure what alloy, didn’t look at it closely) washer is important. I wire brushed the corrosion and minerals off of the stem.

I scavenged in my o-ring collection for suitable replacements.

Everything back in place, lubed with petroleum jelly. The barrel was screwed back on and it works 99% as good as new. The tension on the nut is important, too tight and you can’t easily adjust the flow by hand. You can tighten it up to the point where it binds then back it off just to the point where it adjusts easily.

Printing from Windows 7 (64 bit) to a 722C Networked Printer.

I know, all this computer stuff is boring, but it’s my blog. I’m mostly writing this entry so I have the info collected for future use.

We have an old workhorse HP 722C printer hooked up to Henry’s PC. While I usually print to the printer on my desk, for larger runs, such as a PDF manual, I print to the 722C which is more economical. Unfortunately Windows 7 64 bit has some issues setting up to do this. Windows 7 32 bit does not have this problem, apparently.

Here’s what I had to do.

From this thread on the HP forums (2nd post on the page):

“Install the printer as if it were connected to LPT1:, then  go to the Devices and Printers folder, right click on the Deskjet 722, Printer Settings, Ports, Add Port, Local Port, \\XPname\Printershare name (with the proper XP computer and printer share names), Next.   Do not print the test page.  Before printing to the shared printer from the Win 7 machine apply the patch.”

722C did not appear on the menu of printers so I selected 720C instead.Once installed I downloaded, unzipped and copied the patched DLL files as noted in this thread and referenced in the above thread:

“The attached file contains a patch for this issue.  Apply the patch as follows: First make sure the driver for the printer is installed.   Log into the computer with an administrative account.  Download the patch by clicking on this link or on the paper clip at the end of this post.  Save the patch file to your computer, then unzip it.  Next copy the three DLL files to the following directory:  
%windir%\system32\spool\drivers\x64\3   
This can be done from a DOS prompt if DOS is opened with the "run as administrator" command, or from explorer with a copy and paste.  Depending on your UAC settings you may need to provide confirmation.  Also allow the current files to be overwritten if prompted. This patch is not required and should not applied to a 32 bit version of Vista or Windows 7.”

The printer share name was not “\\Henry\DeskJet 722C Printer” as appeared on my other machines, instead it was “\\Henry\Printer”.

Anyway, it works fine now.

Trackball Museum

Found while cleaning out the shed.

New Computer

Well I finally gave in and bought a new PC. The old Dell 8100 still works fine but was definitely old technology, with a 3Ghz Pentium 4 and only 2 Gb of RAM.

So I spent several weeks looking at various models online from a variety of manufacturers. I had many decisions to make and there were a variety of unknowns. Would all my old programs work on a 64 bit machine? Would I hate Windows 7? What type of system would last the 5 to 7 years before an upgrade without driving me nuts?

In the end I settled on a Dell Studio XPS 8100.  Then I started looking at the various options and each time I added them up I got well North of $1000…sigh.

So I looked at the Dell Outlet. They offer “scratch and dent” and refurbished models at a not insignificant discount. I found a system that was pretty much what I wanted. It has a Core i5 750 processor, 8 Gb of RAM and a 512Mb GeForce 310 graphics card, running Windows 7, 64 bit. Not the most powerful system, but plenty for the sort of stuff I do. I also ordered a 23” monitor from the Outlet at the same time.

The delivery date was the next Friday. So I waited, and checked the status daily. I noticed that the monitor had shipped but that the computer was still “In Production”. That seemed odd as the systems are sold as-is, off the shelf. So I went to their Facebook page and asked what that meant.

The extremely helpful woman who manages their Facebook presence got right back to me and said that it means they lost the system and were finding a comparable system to send out. Not a problem, these things happen. That Friday I received the monitor and shoved the box in the corner. Then on Sunday I decided to open up the Monitor and hook it up to my old computer to see how it looked. When I opened the box I found that it was not a monitor but was the computer that they had lost!

So I contacted them again to let them know what had happened as I didn’t want them to ship two computers. What happened next was quite unexpected. They told me to keep that system for the price of the monitor, $159! They cancelled the rest of the order. So I zipped over to Staples and bought a 24” Acer monitor.

I just want to say thanks to the Dell Outlet for providing customer service that was personal, timely and above and beyond what I expected.

As for the system…well it took me a couple of days to set the new PC up with all my old programs, passwords, etc. Windows 7 was pretty easy to tweak although many features such as the Quick Launch bar are hidden. I found out how to enable it here.

The dreaded UAC doesn’t annoy me at all but I have to say that I hate the Library file system. I can see how it’s great for people with large amounts of homogenous media types, but most of my folders consist of mixed file types. It’s easy enough to ignore the libraries and directly use the old file system. I’d love to hear how wrong I am about the libraries.

I though the Aero Snap was gimmicky when I saw it touted in ads, but it’s quite handy for my workflow.

So overall I’m just having tons of fun with the new, exceedingly fast by comparison, machine. Now to get back to work and do all the things I put off while learning the new system.

One last note, I’m composing this on Windows Live Writer. Seems like a much easier way of posting to my blogs than the tiny little interface that Blogger uses. Microsoft isn’t allowed to include the Windows Live software with PCs for some complex reason but it’s a free download.

Here’s a picture that I’ll use to test that functionality:

Well that worked.

Ubuntu Fun

With the new (used) PC installed in the kitchen running XP, I decided it would be a good test bed to see how I liked running Ubuntu Linux for all sorts of common browsing tasks.

Since I wanted to do it with a minimum of fuss and the ability to revert back to just XP on the system I used the Wubi installer. It installs (and uninstalls) Ubuntu and other varieties of Linux as though it were a Windows program. Worked well and I now have a dual boot system.

While I haven't decided whether I like it enough to use in place of Windows (not going to happen on my main work PC) on most of our PCs, and I haven't used it enough to see if it's as good as XP for web browsing/media enjoyment, it seems just as good. Here's a great guide on How-To Geek.

So I also installed the Ubuntu Netbook Remix on the Toshiba Netbook we have. Used Wubi as before. It was very slow (10+ minutes) on bootup however. Luckily the internet is full of information and a few minutes of googling produced this forum thread that had me change a setting in the BIOS. Now it boots quickly. There's another page on How-To Geek about doing this install.

Now I just need to get Felice to learn how to use it. She managed to get hit by a virus (fake antivirus/trojan/etc) on the netbook a few days ago and I'd like to avoid that in the future.

If you're wondering how I cleaned the virus up? Well that's how I first found the How-To Geek site as they have a good lesson on doing just that. Avast failed miserably in preventing the infection, so I now run MSE (Microsoft Security Essentials) instead. I'm doing a scan a day with MSE and Malwarebytes just to make sure it's all gone. Here's hoping. Having Linux on the netbook will at least assist me in fixing future problems should they arise.

On the other blog...

I put up a post about Inkscape and the David Scanner...you may find it interesting.

EZ UP, Easier

Felice has been having a hard time putting our EZ UP, up. The instructions helpfully show two people deploying it. Unfortunately she usually sets it up on her own.

Turning some acetal plastic...

Pressed into the end of a piece of conduit.

And the other end.

By pushing up on the middle of the EZ Up, the shelter deploys. Certainly not optimal but hey.

With the pole holding up the center it's a simple matter for Felice to snap each corner into place. A piece of broom stick probably would work just as well.

Separation Anxiety

Been a bit busy lately as Felice had to fly out to Albuquerque earlier this week to help her folks out for a few days. She's back now. But I much prefer this type of separator:

Picked it up at a yard sale for Kent as he likes blacksmithing ephemera. I'd love to know the story behind it. I also found a variable speed Delta scroll saw, which I've been wanting for a while.

Since I couldn't get into the shop much while watching the kids 24/7 (or more accurately, 24/4) I spent a good deal of time continuing work on my first (in a long while) computer program. It's developing nicely but I had to ressurect all the dormant trig in my brain. I'm still using "Just Basic" which is simple enough that I can code without looking stuff up every two minutes. Most Basic commands are etched in my brain. But the whole GUI thing took a bit of effort to get right. The program is a simple conversion of a linear g-code axis to a rotary axis, but I'm adding in a bunch of functionality. A nice hobby activity.
This trig. page was quite helpful. As was Machinery's handbook.

At the last open shop night a fellow named John Heinz showed up. He makes some interesting tools! He came over later in the week to borrow the use of my surface grinder but we couldn't get the chuck to hold the M4 steel with enough force to surface some tiny plane blades.

Speaking of blades, my airgun co-blogger Derrick sent me a link to his uncle's knife blog. Great writing and stories.

Bending Brackets

I had to bend up some brackets. Nothing fancy.

Vee block in the arbor press.

It was a little hard to line up the square bar.

Bend.

4 brackets.