September 1st, 2010
Today, I received some stuff for my model train layout. The most important part of that to me were the HO scale trucks, which I will try to do something very interesting with in the future. I also got some street lights, grade crossing, crossing signals, a gazebo, and a locomotive engine block. I was very surprised that the engine block actually was not a one piece casting as I had expected, but a 40 piece kit. Well, I won’t use it for a while, then. 
As for my PHP scripts, I continued working on them a little more these past few days, when my nose was not so runny as to flood my keyboard. My immune system takes bribes from viruses to let them attack me.
I made a graph to keep track of the UPS line voltage, and I noticed an interesting trend; the voltage drops a bit during the day and then increases above 120V late at night, as you can see in my pretty graph. 
I will maybe set up a section of the site for these and other graphs and stuff that would be similar to the old “Railwolf Labs” site I had before.
I also set up a PHP script to monitor my router’s status and represent it graphically, like the router’s front panel, using the actual front panel icons, plus the addition of the current IP address. The script actually logs into the router’s page and grabs the information from it. It wasn’t easy to do, but I figured out how. This is how it looks:
Posted in Hobbies, Life, Railwolf.com, Technology
August 26th, 2010
I had a cold again this week, so I didn’t get to work on my model train layout. Since I feel better now, I decided to play with some PHP scripts tonight and see what I could come up with. This is my latest project:
The result was quite good, I managed to convert the old hard drive status script into an APC UPS status script. It will now be much easier to keep track of all of them during a power outage, conserve battery power, and arrange any necessary shutdowns. I can only keep track of three of them at the moment, since Apcupsd doesn’t allow monitoring more than one UPS at a time for now, and it doesn’t work with 64bit versions of Windows, either. But it’s okay, those two units that it doesn’t work with only power my network switches anyway.
Posted in Health, Life, Railwolf.com, Technology
August 13th, 2010
I was looking at an “old” Linksys 8 port Gigabit network switch that I had in a box of dead computer parts in the basement. I decided to either get rid of it, or salvage some parts for something useful. I thought that maybe I could use the LEDs inside it for my model train layout, for example.
First, I plugged it in to make sure it wasn’t working. Sure enough, it didn’t work any better than the last time — it was dead. So I opened it up, looking for any obvious traces that would explain its failure; burned out chips, leaking capacitors, loose parts, etc. but it all looked normal. Then it was time to test the LEDs to see if they still worked. I took a piece of wire I had lying around and shorted out some pins on the chip closest to the LEDs, and they lit up like magic. Actually, not just the LEDs – and this is the funny part, the short made all of the switch work again, too! Just like it never died. What happened is still a mystery to me. Maybe it was “stuck” and the short reset it, I don’t know. The switch got one last chance to save itself from destruction.
Posted in Technology
August 1st, 2010
I got a new power supply on sale a few days ago, and coincidentally, the power supply in Electrocuter2 failed last night. It was very convenient timing for sure. I replaced the power supply quickly enough despite being tired, and it works fine. I’m glad I got it. I also got an Apevia power supply tester, which is pretty good. It has a nice blue backlit LCD screen with all the voltage readings as well as every type of connector. Surely enough, it detected that the old power supply had a bad 12V rail.
I finished all the track on my model train layout tonight. Now I just need to do some wiring to power those tracks, which shouldn’t take very long. I did the soldering of terminal rail joiners tonight. I even repaired a pair that I had broken some years ago by soldering it.
As for scenery, I have one building assembled now, an auto dealership, but that will probably be the only one I’ll do. I added some lights to it, using a cheap LED light my mother gave me because it kept falling apart. It turned out to look quite good inside the building after I gutted the unit and taped the circuit board with the LEDs to the ceiling of the building with electrical tape. I run the lights using the original battery compartment. I placed it away from the building by connecting new wires to it with alligator clips. I also added a SPST switch to turn it off when I’m not using it, because the original switch is mounted on the circuit board, and it’s not convenient to reach inside the building to press it.
I will need to hide the wires that can be seen along the back wall inside the building, but it’s fine for now.
This car dealership will be just outside the town I plan to build. I have a great vision of what I would like the town to be like, but it will take a lot of time to make it come to life. It won’t be very big, but it will have a street with some shops on it, and a bank, which will be in the process of being robbed.
Posted in Hobbies, Life, Technology
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 17th, 2010
I just upgraded the site to WordPress to 3.0. This normally would have gone smoothly, but the automatic updater had an error which rendered WordPress completely unusable. So I had to upload all the files manually to get it working again. It seems that I’m not the only one who had this problem, so keep this in mind if you’re going to upgrade.
Posted in Railwolf.com, Technology
May 27th, 2010
On Tuesday, I received a package from Amazon.ca. It contained a 320GB WD Elements portable external hard drive. Amazon.ca has been selling electronics for a little while now, but I had not really thought about getting anything like that from them, because I feared shipping damage. Sometimes my DVDs arrived with cracked cases, and once with damage to the disc itself. The CDs and DVDs that I bought from Amazon.com were always packaged better. I don’t know why Amazon.ca don’t package things as well as they do in the USA, but in this case, it was acceptable for a retail boxed drive. For an OEM drive, on the other hand… the little bags of air would not help it so much.
Anyway, the drive itself is nice. It’s small, light, quiet, and stays cool. It probably has a notebook drive inside its case, so it allows it to be powered by the USB cable that connects it to the computer. That’s convenient. What is not convenient is that the cable that comes with it works fine for plugging it into a notebook, but it’s a bit short for a desktop. Using a longer cable will work, but you need to use a USB cable that has an adequate wire gauge or else there will be power sag and the drive won’t spin up. Other than that, the drive performs quite well. It’s not quite as fast as a desktop hard drive, but it beats my NAS by about 3x when copying files over a network. So in all, I’m pretty happy with it. I would buy it again.
WD Elements
Posted in Loot, Technology
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
March 18th, 2010
There was some server downtime since last night when I shut down Colossus. I’m really thinking about scrapping that machine now, I’m fed up with all the problems it’s been having. It’s not only the monitor problems, but Nvidia chipset drivers that cause blue screens, etc.. I tried many different versions, but they all cause some sort of trouble on occasion. Not to mention the shorted out network chip on that motherboard, and unstable USB… it’s time to retire it. I can keep it as a spare machine for just surfing the web or whatever, but that’s about it. Never again will I buy a motherboard with an Nvidia chipset, nor a video card. Too many problems… 
So now I moved the web server job for Railwolf.com to Terminator… yes… and my internal lab stuff has all been moved back to Electrocuter2, which works fine now that I have removed those failed drives. I’ll be moving some of the drives from Colossus to Meteor soon, too.
The idea is to cut down on the heat produced in my room, especially since it seems that this summer will be hot. It’s only March and it’s already getting pretty warm. Nice weather, though, like spring. It was 16°C / 60°F yesterday.
I still haven’t gotten my monitor. I don’t know why, but it’s taking much longer than reasonable for a monitor. I ordered it from Dell.ca on the 2nd of March. So it’s been more than two weeks already, and they don’t even know when it will ship now. It’s just a monitor, do they have to make it especially for me or what? I can probably get something shipped from Taiwan myself faster than that.
Posted in Railwolf.com, Technology
