A Curiously Chocolate Radio

I've been saving Altoids tins for years. They're full of project possibilities: how much electronics could you cram into one? What neat things will people see when they peek inside?

From the outside this looks like an ordinary Altoids tin. But what's under the cover?

Why, it's a shiny pocket radio!

I got the circuit board out of a cheap FM radio, but I added the batteries and speaker. (The original radio only had head phones.) It turned out to be very difficult to get the antenna to work right. The original radio used the head phones to double as a loop antenna, but the speaker I replaced them with doesn't have long enough wires and wouldn't get any reception with the metal tin surrounding it. I solved it by running one leg of the audio out the back as an antenna wire, and I grounded the other side of the audio to the metal case.

Now the radio gets better reception than it did even before I hacked it!

The chocolate brown theme of the tin reminded me of old wooden cabinet phonographs, so I thought it would be neat to make the radio so that you prop the lid open to use it, as if it were from that era.

The speaker is held to the lid with foam tape, which keeps it from buzzing. The circuit board is held on one side with foam tape and screws on the other side, and the batteries are in a Radio Shack AAA battery holder, also secured with foam tape. I used 190 proof Everclear to pre-clean the inside of the tin, so the foam tape would stick tight.

I'm pleased with how this project turned out. It's one of the few projects I've actually seen through to completion in years - a testament to the wisdom of choosing a simple project. And it's something I will actually use!

What Am I Doing Here?

It's been another crazy semester, and I've no doubt lost my readers (all five of you) by not posting in so long. I've been suffering an existential crisis as to just what my blog is really all about.

I started blogging with the intention of writing about the business of software - and I will do so still from time to time - but it has been so long since my employment has dealt directly with coding that I feel I can no longer speak of it as an expert. When you're away from the front lines of software development, your memory of it becomes stale too quickly.

So I have to ask myself, who am I writing for and what would those people want to read? I will admit that I actually am writing for myself, but I do so with the suspicion that what I want to write, someone else may want to read.

For one thing, I think I will move most of my project pages off Google Pages, and turn them into blog posts from now on. Since Google has decided not to continue working on the Google Pages software, I don't know what will become of my website. Blogspot, on the other hand, has continued to improve, and I've learned how to add images to my posts.

I found that the most anecdotal narrative I've written yet, "Looting CompUSA", is also the one that rates highest on a Google search (indicating popularity). Clearly the personal touch does better than an intellectual essay.

One area that I've long neglected on this blog is my personal life. No more! My fiancee has asked why I don't talk about her on my blog, so let me start the new direction of my blog by announcing that I'm super excited because we just got our honeymoon trip booked!

Wifi Combat

I suspect someone has been jamming my wireless network today.

I noticed that web pages were taking a long time to load, which is strange since my cable internet is normally very fast. Then my laptop's wireless connection to my router
started dropping out within seconds every time it reconnected.

I opened my site monitor and found that new non-broadcasting wireless networks were suddenly popping up on channels 1 and 11, and the strongest one was on the same channel as my router. Though my connection kept dropping out, I managed to connect to the admin page on my router long enough to move it to channel 6. It's not a good idea to use the wireless network to do router configuration, but I wasn't too worried about someone spying on my router password out of my packets because I run WPA-2 encryption.

After I moved to 6, someone opened a new nonbroadcasting network on channel 8! Usually, 1-6-11 are the three channels used. These are chosen because they are as far apart as you can get; the intermediate channels interfere slightly with each other. It is possible that someone might choose 8 knowing that it would interfere with my 6. I thought, "they're trying to squeeze me out."

Haha, they don't know who they're messing with. I went into my router again and this time I sliced my broadcast power down as low as it would go: 3 percent.

You might think, that if you are in a wifi jamming war, you would want to make your signal as strong as possible. That's brute force thinking. The Zen way to beat them is to make it so they don't know your signal is there at all. A signal that is too strong is a common security risk for wifi networks; if you instead use only the minimum signal you can get by with, you reduce the chances of someone eavesdropping on your signal from far away. By setting my broadcast signal so low, hardly any of it spills outside the walls of my house.

Once I had the signal turned down so that my jammer couldn't see my network, I switched channels one last time - from 6 down to 5, so that it would both be farter from 8, and odd instead of even (if that matters -?). Though my 3% signal only gets two bars on my meter, it still runs at the full 54 MBps, and I haven't been knocked offline since.

I Didn't Clear the CMOS - D'Oh!

At work this week a computer was hit by a power surge and it wouldn't come on, though the lights would light up. "Aha," I said, "I know just what to do!" I suspected that the power surge might have corrupted the CMOS memory. Back when I used to be in electronics class at Vo-Tech, I often ran into computers that appeared totally dead because of something as minor as a corrupt CMOS setting. They often had nothing major wrong with them once the CMOS was cleared.

I wasted no time in opening up the work computer that had been scrambled by the power surge, and I set the jumper to clear the CMOS. When the procedure was finished, the computer magically came back to life.

Later that day I got to thinking... Isn't it strange, I told myself, that the computer at work which I fixed by clearing the CMOS had exactly the same symptoms as my dead motherboard at home. For some reason, though I instantly knew to clear the CMOS on the work computer, when my home computer had had the same problem, it had not even occurred to me to check that!

My computer has been dead for a month while I struggled to find the time to set up a new motherboard and hard drive with it. I pulled my old motherboard out of the trash and set the jumper to clear the CMOS. I had already parted out all the pieces of the computer that the motherboard went in; I would feel like a fool if a 2 minute procedure could have saved that computer. "If this works, I'm won't know whether to be happy or pissed at myself."

I cleared the CMOS. The motherboard, which I had thrown away, the loss of which had thrown me off work and gaming for a month - the motherboard worked.

D'oh!

In Hindsight, my Foresight was 20-20

When I bought my portable harddrive, I went to no small amount of trouble to install Ubuntu Linux on it, wasting valuable storage space to make a sort of "Ubuntu rescue partition." Most of the people I asked told me running an operating system from a USB drive was pointless, and probably impossible. Impossible it was not, though it required tedious study of arcane documents and a bit of black magic. For a while it was fun to see Linux booting off a USB drive, but eventually I grew tired of the trick and just installed Ubuntu onto the internal hard drives in my machines.

I came to regret having wasted the space on my external drive, so a few weeks ago I prepared to clear off the drive and repartition it. But before I could start, the motherboard in my desktop was killed by a runaway power supply.

Between my junk box and donations from friends, I was able to gather a booty of no less than eight replacement motherboards, each of dubious origin and doubtful reliability.

Three motherboards evidenced fire damage; they had been toasted before I ever got them.

One motherboard worked, but only with a goofy old style of RAM and not with my fastest processor.

One went into nuclear meltdown in my lap.

Two more simply did nothing at all.

I saved the best one for last. With its beautiful silver coating and more features than even I will use, this motherboard was obviously targetted at gamers and custom system builders. The only caveat was that it dated from a couple years earlier than my old motherboard, so it would run my processor, but not as fast as the recently deceased board had. But it was the best candidate, and it was new in the box. Could it be, could this one actually work? My heart was in my throat as I connected the cables.

Nothing.

Anticlimax. Pack up and go home.

I don't think so. This motherboard, I mean you could just look at it, and you'd just know, it was too damn pretty to not work. Like seeing a shiny Corvette on the showroom floor and being told it doesn't run. Doesn't add up, does it?

When I get stuck, I try to put my problem in the larger context of the situation as a whole. So... This motherboard had to come from somewhere. I didn't know its history but I do know that someone had taken this expensive new motherboard and thrown it away. Now what would cause someone to do that? Maybe they bought it and it didn't work. I refuse to accept that it doesn't work. Then - what could cause someone to think their motherboard doesn't work?

User error.

And the antidote to user error? RTFM. It stands for "Read the F--king Manual," and it's good advice.

In the manual for the motherboard I found that a jumper was incorrectly stuck on where the power switch belongs. That's like holding the button in all the time; it won't turn on until you let go. Furthermore the presence of the jumper had led me to put the real power switch onto the wrong place. Someone had stuck a jumper where it didn't belong and the motherboard was just wired permanently off. I removed the jumper, and the system booted; it seems the original owner threw out something worth $200 rather than open a book and read about it.

Now we come to the foresight I alluded to in my title. Obviously I could not really have known ahead of time, but I might as well have. It turned out that my little Linux partition on my external storage drive was worthwhile anyhow. The hard drive I'd been using with my old motherboard was SATA, but my replacement motherboard doesn't have SATA. It meant that I couldn't boot the hard drive that had my operating system on it. Instead, I had to gut my external storage drive to get a P-ATA drive that would work with the replacement motherboard. And on the drive, there was the preinstalled Ubuntu partition, working just as well now that it is inside my computer as it did when it was outside in the USB enclosure. So I have an operating system for my computer after all.

Project Pages - Powerwheels Robots

I'm stoked because I just finished the first of the Project Pages on my website! I made a complete write-up about Hagrid, my powerwheels robot. Expect to see more projects up soon too.

The Dearly Departed: My Poor Bicycle

This morning I awoke (at noon) to find my bicycle stolen. Ack! That's what I get for using a cheap Walmart chain to secure a valuable item. The thieves didn't even have to cut it; they just pulled and the traitorous links separated without protest. They left the chain, broken, on the ground.

That's my brother riding it in this picture. It was a 1962 Huffy; an English bicycle with a 3-speed hub. Completely irreplaceable - a collector's item these days. I liked it because I hate dérailleurs; with a 3-speed hub there's no chain derailing and you can change gears at any time, even at a dead stop. Despite half a century of age and neglect, the bicycle was in perfect working order. It had brand-new tires and I'd just installed all new cables.

I actually noticed the chain out of place a second before I put two and two together: "Hmmm... If I'm holding the chain... and the chain is broken... and it was on my bicycle last night... and today it was on the ground... Holy Crap! WHERE'S ME BICYCLE?"

It's a strange feeling one gets at this moment of realization. It reminded me of when I was three and let go of my balloon on accident. As I watched it disappear into the sky, I somehow understood that there was nothing that could be done to retrieve it. Something ought to be done - yet nothing could be done.

You let go of your balloon - it goes up and away. Simple physics. You leave your bicycle chained outside in a neighborhood of juvenile delinquents - it gets vandalized. Cause and effect.