June 26th, 2010
Yesterday, I decided to pull out my old scanner — that I had not used for 10 years or so probably – to scan a few pages that I had printed out log ago. I found those pages inside my desk drawer when I cleaned it out recently. The goal was to get rid of as much paper as possible and have only digital documents instead, especially if they were originally text files to begin with that I had printed.
But it didn’t go so smoothly. When I plugged in the scanner, I noticed that it wasn’t working. The scanning head would light up, but it wasn’t moving at all. Thinking that it was locked, I checked the bottom lock, but it was open, so I figured that it must have been jammed on the inside. I thought opening it would be simple enough, maybe I could unscrew a few screws at the bottom, but there were none at all. 
This is an old Canon LIDE scanner, that uses LEDs instead of a regular light bulb to make its scans, and it wasn’t made to be easily opened… I ended up having to pry off the frame that covers the glass, then slide the glass out, and that wasn’t easy because it was glued onto the glass. I checked the lock, and it was fine. So I found my way to the motor, after hearing the “boing!” sounds of the springs that press the scanning head up to the glass and unexpectedly popped out, causing the head to fall off the tray that holds it. I removed the gears that turn the drive belt and found that the motor was completely seized up. I managed to open it, and with some work, it started to turn again. Then I had to reassemble it all, and I wasn’t sure it would even work, but it did. It seems to work pretty well now, so I better not let it sit for 10 years again.
Posted in Lair, Technology
June 22nd, 2010
I bought some more wall hangers for my guitars the other day, to add two more guitars to my “Wall of Guitars”. It seems that 6 guitars is all I’ll be able to fit on this wall, so I put one up next to my amplifiers on the opposite wall. I still have one guitar that has nowhere to go, maybe I can hang it in the other room…
I have enough guitars.
Posted in Guitar, Lair
June 14th, 2010
I worked in the yard again. One of the bigger projects was that I cut down an old Juniper which was half-dead. It wasn’t as easy as it should have been because the wood was really difficult to cut, especially when getting the stump out. I used a few different hand saws, an axe (actually 2, I broke the first on it!), and even a drill, but it took a couple of weeks in all to get rid of it. That’s documented in my Flickr gallery. I had cut down the other Juniper we had about 10 years ago, and it wasn’t so difficult, maybe because it was still alive.
After that was done, I worked on my model train layout. I had never really wired it properly, so I decided to finally do that and give the trains adequate power. I used 14 gauge stranded copper for that. It seems like overkill, but the run gets pretty long and I calculated that 14 gauge wire would be needed to prevent power sag. These then connect to smaller feeders to the rails with terminal blocks. Lots of cutting, stripping, and crimping had to be done, but this also allows me to separate the tables if necessary. After I got rid of many empty boxes that I kept there, it made accessing the underside of the tables much easier.
I replaced some of the lights in the kitchen. The old under-cabinet halogen lights were not working too well. When I removed them, it became pretty obvious as to why that was, they were not wired very well by the installer, which probably ended up damaging them in the end. It was almost surprising that they even worked at all. I replaced them with new LED lights, which were more expensive, but they are almost as bright as the halogen lights were, just not as warm in color… and they don’t get hot while lit, unlike the halogens.
I’ve also been thinking about replacing the fluorescent light fixtures in the basement with some new ones. The new ones have a built-in door that opens up to change the tubes, as opposed to the old style — a sheet of clear plastic crammed between the ceiling tile rails — which always seemed to crack the plastic before it was in place. Also, with a digital ballast, they save more energy than the old ones… about 40% from what I read. So I could have more light for the same cost; 4 tubes instead of 2 for example.
Posted in Lair
April 6th, 2010
My new monitor finally arrived today. After waiting for a month, I decided that I had to contact Dell about it, so I used the form on their website. The next day, I got an email apologizing for the delay, and they arranged to have it shipped by Friday. It took a little longer to arrive because of the Easter holiday, but it’s here now. So I’m happy.
Now about the monitor. It’s an ST2410, the screen is 24″ widescreen, and “true HD”, but the funny thing about it is that it’s no higher than my old 19″ was. But that’s why I got this one. I wanted the same height as before, because a higher screen is better for writing, and with widescreen monitors, it takes a bigger monitor to achieve this. I kept the second monitor I had, an 18″ LCD, for my notebooks, since my desk had enough room to keep it even with the new monitor beside it. That way, I can watch a movie or something and still see what my notebooks are up to with their lids closed.
Posted in Lair, Loot, Technology
March 25th, 2010
I received some new cooling fans for Meteor. All of the original case fans are dead now, same as those in Colossus. I spent some time installing those yesterday. Three fans in total. Not really fun. But I did finally solve the problem with the fan in the bottom of the case next to the drive cage. The Antec P180 case should have come with a fan grill there, but it didn’t. With 4 hard drives in there, the cables are sure to interfere with the fan. Since I had to remove the fan holder to change the dead fan, I installed a grill on it at the same time. I had originally just placed a grill just leaning against the compartment to keep the wires out of the fan blades. It had worked okay, but it was loose in there. Now it’s attached securely to the fan.
I also got a new D-Link gigabit switch; a DGS-105D. That’s a 5 port version of the switches I have now (DGS-1008D). I got it for Terminator, since it was hooked up to an older 100 megabit switch. Funny that Dell shipped it to me in less than 24 hours, but they can’t get me a monitor, which they make.
The transition to Terminator has gone pretty well. I had to edit a few scripts to make them connect to the MySQL database on Electrocuter2, and create some new PHP script images that actually pull an image from Electrocuter2 and then recreate it so that it’s available to the outside world. The Now Playing section, for example, had to be modified this way. It’s not as fast, but it works pretty well.
Once I was done with all of this, I brought the boxes to the basement… it’s starting too look like a warehouse. So I decided to clean it up and get rid of some of those boxes. That will take some time, but I need to do it.
Posted in Lair, Railwolf.com, Technology
November 12th, 2009
I went downtown yesterday afternoon. It was a surprisingly nice day; sunny without any clouds at all. That’s quite nice, especially since it has been either cloudy or raining almost every day for the past several months.
So, I went to the music shop, and I ended up getting a bass amplifier. I was thinking about the Roland Cube, but it seemed to not be the right choice, since its knobs are all at the back, and I was thinking about possibly putting all my amps on a shelving unit, or just stacking them all on top of each other. The bass amp would be at the bottom in either case, so the knobs would have become impossible to reach. So, I got a Traynor DynaBass 100. This amp is 100 watts, it has a 15″ speaker, and it only cost a bit more than the Roland Cube. I seem to have made the right choice, I really like this amp. 
Traynor DynaBass 100.
I also got a couple of BOSS pedals; a Blues Driver and a Chorus Ensemble. This brings me to a total of 13 pedals. And I ordered something that should arrive in a few days… 
Posted in Guitar, Lair, Life, Loot
October 20th, 2009
I decided to replace the hard drive in the web server. It went okay at first, but the drive disappeared after I cloned the old drive to it. Oddly enough, the BIOS wasn’t able to handle the size of the drive. I was pretty sure that I had updated it for 48-bit LBA, but that was many years ago. I found a newer Beta BIOS from 2002 — which is the last one made for that motherboard. I wonder why they didn’t make the final version of it in 7 years… After that was done, the drive wouldn’t let the machine boot. Blue screens every time. It seemed to be working better before the update.
I managed to get the machine to boot after removing the drive, booting without it, then reinstalling it. It booted after that. Now I’m not sure if I can trust that drive, it seems unstable.
So, the solution was to set up Apache, MySQL, etc. on Meteor, and now it’s the web server. Everything transferred smoothly, almost as if nothing happened, even after a major upgrade to the MySQL server. It took some reconfiguring, but it was worth it. The speed difference is amazing. 
Posted in Lair, Railwolf.com, Technology
September 22nd, 2009
Yesterday, I had some more problems with my internet connection. It seems that Bell had some trouble with some routers, and some of the traffic was being sent to Quebec, when it shouldn’t have been going through there at all, and then bouncing back and forth between routers there until it pretty much timed out. That made ICQ disconnect frequently yesterday afternoon, but it still worked for the most part. It didn’t last too long, thankfully.
Here’s the traceroute to the ICQ server:
tracert login.icq.com
Tracing route to login.messaging.aol.com [64.12.202.116]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 11 ms 9 ms 13 ms 64.230.197.114
2 9 ms 8 ms 12 ms dis15-ottawa23_Vlan103.net.bell.ca [64.230.228.49]
3 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms core1-ottawa23_GE11-1.net.bell.ca [64.230.241.217]
4 11 ms 11 ms 10 ms Ncore3-montrealak_POS0-4-0-0.net.bell.ca [64.230.147.141]
5 12 ms 15 ms 12 ms newcore4-montrealak_POS0-3-0-0_core.net.bell.ca [64.230.171.86]
6 16 ms 15 ms 15 ms core4-quebec14_POS5-0-0.net.bell.ca [64.230.147.146]
7 71 ms 71 ms 68 ms dis5-quebec14_GE1-2.net.bell.ca [64.230.243.126]
8 70 ms 70 ms 69 ms core3-quebec14_GE4-0.net.bell.ca [64.230.243.117]
9 127 ms 125 ms 125 ms dis5-quebec14_GE7-15.net.bell.ca [64.230.170.10]
10 127 ms * 124 ms core3-quebec14_GE4-0.net.bell.ca [64.230.243.117]
11 187 ms 184 ms 184 ms dis5-quebec14_GE7-15.net.bell.ca [64.230.170.10]
12 182 ms 182 ms 181 ms core3-quebec14_GE4-0.net.bell.ca [64.230.243.117]
13 237 ms 232 ms * dis5-quebec14_GE7-15.net.bell.ca [64.230.170.10]
14 231 ms 228 ms 231 ms core3-quebec14_GE4-0.net.bell.ca [64.230.243.117]
15 286 ms 283 ms 285 ms dis5-quebec14_GE7-15.net.bell.ca [64.230.170.10]
16 * 281 ms 280 ms core3-quebec14_GE4-0.net.bell.ca [64.230.243.117]
17 * 502 ms 359 ms dis5-quebec14_GE7-15.net.bell.ca [64.230.170.10]
18 314 ms 309 ms 314 ms core3-quebec14_GE4-0.net.bell.ca [64.230.243.117]
19 * 622 ms 548 ms dis5-quebec14_GE7-15.net.bell.ca [64.230.170.10]
20 366 ms 363 ms 360 ms core3-quebec14_GE4-0.net.bell.ca [64.230.243.117]
21 1021 ms 1269 ms * dis5-quebec14_GE7-15.net.bell.ca [64.230.170.10]
22 406 ms 403 ms 405 ms core3-quebec14_GE4-0.net.bell.ca [64.230.243.117]
23 1326 ms * * dis5-quebec14_GE7-15.net.bell.ca [64.230.170.10]
24 488 ms 490 ms 489 ms core3-quebec14_GE4-0.net.bell.ca [64.230.243.117]
25 538 ms 540 ms * dis5-quebec14_GE7-15.net.bell.ca [64.230.170.10]
26 * 535 ms * core3-quebec14_GE4-0.net.bell.ca [64.230.243.117]
27 * 27 ms 31 ms bucp-m1-vip.blue.aol.com [64.12.202.116]
Trace complete.
Not good.
I noticed that the web server has been running a bit slowly since the drive swap. I’m not sure why, because the drive is identical to the one it replaced, and seems to be running fine. It might be the drive that the web stuff is on that is causing the slowdowns, though. It’s getting pretty old. I might replace that one sometime this week to see if that will help. I should probably update all the server software, too, but that will require a lot of reconfiguring.
Also, the email server stopped sending me WordPress comment notification emails for some reason, but I got it working again by changing the email address that it sends to. Strange.
Posted in Lair, Railwolf.com, Technology
September 8th, 2009
Wow, today was interesting. I got up quite early, because I had fallen asleep last night during a nap — which turned out to last nearly five hours. So I was quite well rested today, and ready for it all.
It’s quite a bit of a coincidence that everything arrived today, even though it was in part due to the Labor Day long weekend. I received about five packages in total in three separate deliveries. My father was not really impressed by that.
From Amazon:
- CD: Pay Attention – The Mighty Mighty Bosstones (out of print!)
- DVDs:
- Casino
- Carlito’s Way: Crime Saga Collection
- Pulp Fiction
- Showtime
- Seinfeld: The Complete Series
So that’s the first of three out of print CDs I ordered. Two more to go. I got them from the Amazon.ca Marketplace, which I only did once before. It can be hard to get a new item at a reasonable price when it’s out of print, but I managed to get one of each of the CDs I wanted. So far so good…
From Dell:
- IOGEAR MiniView 2-port KVM
- APC RBC-32 replacement battery
I was waiting the stuff from Dell since about the time I ordered the hard drives. There was a delay, but it wasn’t too bad. I got the KVM on sale, probably the reason for the delay. It’s not bad for the price. I don’t use those machines much from down there anyway, but it seems to be doing its job nicely.
There was no rush for the UPS battery, since the old one was still okay. I will put the old battery in an older UPS that will power Electrocuter1 and the Gigabit switch in the basement, since those are not essential and the battery still has a bit of life left. I actually have a few models of UPS that use the same battery type, so that’s convenient.
Posted in Lair, Loot, Movies, Music, Technology
August 24th, 2009
Today, I received a package from FedEx. This contains some of the computer stuff I mentioned that I ordered last week. I got a couple of Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB hard drives, a D-Link DGS-1008D Gigabit network switch, and a D-Link DNS-321 Network Storage Enclosure.
The new drives replaced the 250GB drives in Colossus, while the old drives went into the DNS-321. Everything went smoothly, and it didn’t take as long to set up as I thought it would. The DNS-321 is very nicely done, easy to set up, and it has a pretty good transfer speed considering that I set up the drives in RAID1 (mirror). I’m impressed by this little box.
The D-Link DGS-1008D switch is almost the same as the one I already had, except it’s now a “green” Gigabit switch, updated to save power, which also makes it run cooler than the old one — which is going to be relocated to the basement.
Posted in Lair, Loot, Technology
