New Raid Box

So, in the continuing saga that is music at YPS Manor, I have a new piece of hardware. Let me take a moment to explain the backstory.

In the beginning was a WD NetCenter 320 GB network hard drive. I determined that 320 gigs was not going to be sufficient over the long haul. The WD now hides in the server closet and handles mundane things like recipe backups and archived downloads.

In attempt to get in front of the storage problem, I requested and received a Fantom G-Force NAS. As a proper child of the era, I grew up watching Battle of The Planets, so the opportunity to own a G-Force was fairly irresistible.

I should have resisted. A few weeks after I bought it, the fan went out. Not getting any response from tech support, I kludged up a new fan. Then the power supply went out. Twice. Then a hard drive failed. In short, it hasn't been the most reliable piece of equipment I've ever owned.

Well, right about the time the hard drive failed, I got an Amazon gift card. It nearly covered the purchase price of a ZyXEL NSA221 enclosure. I still had very little data on either of my last hard drive purchases. So, after a bit of drive swapping between machines, I have a 1.5 TB RAID-1 stack.

One of the main reasons I purchased the Zyxel is because of the native support for Squeezecenter. I wouldn't have to spend my limited free time kludging together a solution. Ultimately, that was a failure for one simple reason: the Zyxel is slow. I expect slightly snappier response from my media server than I was getting. So on that front, it was a disappointment. I'm still using my little Zotac board with AMD Sempron for the media server, and keeping a backup of all the music on the Zyxel.

Other than that, the Zyxel has been fine. I had to RMA the first one for a bad power switch, but it's been flawless since then. It's a little slow on huge data dumps, like the initial copying of the music files. Setup was easy and painless, everything in the house recognizes it, it holds a ton of data. Woo and hoo. If you already have drives, or even if you don't, it's hard to go wrong with the Zyxel. A little work on your part gets a lot more storage space for the buck.

Lightning Returns

So, in a bizarre coincidence, lightning hit the tree in front of our neighbor's house, jumped to his house, and from there the magic of telecommunications took over with a vengeance. Loyal readers will recall we faced a similar situation two years ago.

We fared much better this time. Two computers, the X-Box 360 NIC, a NAS power supply, and various and sundry pieces of AT&T hardware went out. Unfortunately, the two computers that fried were my primary desktop and the music server. So instead of thinking up deathless prose to post on the Internet, I've been shopping PC parts.

I'm making some possibly unfounded assumptions about which parts of the two boxes are bad. I have, arguendo, assumed death on the part of the motherboard and processor. The music server is a cheap box running a old AMD chip and mobo combo. I've had no problems with it, so I went with a cheap combo deal from Newegg. A mini ITX board and single core Sempron should do what I need that box to do. Sadly, the initial board had problems with the onboard video, so I RMA'd it and am eagerly awaiting the new board as we speak. If it works well, I may get a small ITX case and stick it downstairs to run a media client on, but that may be asking a bit too much out of it. I'll just have to see.

My primary desktop was more difficult. I don't mind using old stuff for the music server, because it's not doing a lot of processor intensive grunt. I'm enough of a geek that I need a bit more for my primary computer. So I had one simple requirement: go up in specifications. I figured that shouldn't be too difficult with a 2 year old box.

Of course, what I learned is that Intel has gotten awfully proud of their chips. I've been using Intel in my main boxes forever, since when I started doing this AMD wasn't an option. Replacing my old Intel processor with a comparable low-end quad-core Intel ended up being more than I was prepared to spend right now. Hmm. Let's see what AMD has to offer.

Long story short, for about what I would pay for a comparable Intel chip, I can get a faster AMD and a mobo. Of course, this requires a memory upgrade, but other than that, I should be golden. I'm assuming my hard and optical drives aren't fried, which is usually a pretty safe bet. They're more robust pieces of kit, I've found. In any event, I should be up and running as soon as parts get here. Yay me. Boo lightning.

Now all I need is a wireless NIC for the X-Box. I'm just not sufficiently motivated to go digging in the hardware guts of that particular equipment, since all my sources tell me the NIC is part of the board and requires board replacement.

Not Your TV, Monkey

Okay, so I’m a big fan of Make magazine. I’m a charter subscriber, I have all the issues, etc., etc. In general, I find it a pretty neat operation with lots of things to interest me.

One reoccurring theme does bug me, however: the continuing fascination with the TV-B-Gone. In case you’re unfamiliar, I'll give you the condensed backstory. Some nit with no self-control apparently cannot be in a public space with a television on and ignore it. He is compelled by the evil mid control rays emitted by the demon box to sit and stare blankly at the moving pictures and pretty lights. So he invented a device that turns TVs off. Before you ask, I’m not joking. This is his own account, slightly paraphrased, of why he invented the thing in the first place.

Leaving aside the issues the account displays about the inventor, I have no problem with the device. A small remote control cycles through eleventy billion power codes for TVs when you push the button. Neat. There’s some slickness I can admire in the design and execution.

What grates on me is the absolute sense of entitlement the whole episode displays. I don’t like TVs being on in public spaces, so I’ll turn them off. Fuck everybody who might have been watching the TV, it annoys me, so off it goes! The idea that your wants and desires are more important than those of everybody else in the facility makes you a pretentious douchebag with an overdeveloped sense of self-importance.

Here’s a way to deal with it: don’t hang in places that have TVs on all the time. Real hard, right? Alternatively, you can always sit facing away from the TV, ask somebody to turn the volume down, or just ignore the idiot box. Seriously, they’re not magic. You can ignore them.

Honestly, this would be a petty annoyance and all would be well and good except Make keeps beating this horse. Buy a TV-B-Gone! Oh, wait, people notice when you point your remote at the TV and it goes off. They then throw you out of their establishment. Problem solved! Build it into a hat! Or a sweatshirt! So you can turn TVs off and not get caught at it! Because sometimes, that has bad consequences.

Okay, TVs annoy you. I get it. I didn’t own a TV until I got married. TVs are primarily useful to me as display devices for my electronics. If I wasn’t married, I wouldn’t even have cable. I have no problem if you don’t like them either. But guess what? If it’s not your TV in your house, you have as much business turning it off as I do dumping a bottle of water on smokers. Somewhere in your whole solipsistic narrative about how TVs are teh debbil, you missed the point where other people like them. Just because people like or do something you don’t like doesn’t give you the right to interfere with them. Your right to tell people what to do is limited to your property. To turn one of Make’s dicta on ownership upside down, if you don’t own it, don’t open it. How hard is that as a concept?

I’ve read a bunch of bullshit justifications from guerrilla activist culture-jammers about why this is somehow noble and is an attempt to take back public spaces and yadda yadda yadda, blah blah blah. If you've written one of these justifications, be honest with yourself. Your high-minded nonsense scribblings are rationalizations to dress up your own prejudices. Bottom line is TVs annoy you and you feel like you should be able to turn them off anytime, anywhere, despite what anybody else thinks. Make spends a lot of time pushing things that are empowering, creative, and return control of technology to the individual. The TV-B-Gone is none of these. The TV-B-Gone in practice runs against everything else Make claims to uphold. Frankly, the continued championing of a device which exists to let you be a controlling asshat is disappointing.

Glowing Couture

One of the nice things about the geek inheriting the earth is the wide variety of clothing now available. The downside? Most of the items are t-shirts. There's an amazing variety of themes, motifs, catchphrases and icons you can get on a t-shirt. Speaking as someone with both a BSG-75 and a Stormtrooper Skull & Crossbones in the closet, I have no issue with the proliferation of t-shirts.

However, some of us have to go to work everyday in corporate America. At this point, your clothing choices dwindle dramatically. So it's always nice to see an item that works both as social signifier and tasteful clothing, like this scarf. I'm thinking about one for either iridium or silver to wear in those rare moments here in Houston when it's cold.

A Morning Down the Rabbit Hole, Ballistics Edition

So, I’m going through my morning links as I drink coffee. Uncle posts a link up to an article sort of explaining ballistic coefficient. Being afflicted with a technical education, the explanation raised more questions than it answered. So I went looking for answers. That might have been a mistake. Several links and a fair amount of time later, I found all kinds of answers. In turn, I have way more questions. Isn’t that just always the way?

I’ll give you the short answer: Ballistic coefficient is an agreed upon lie. It fudges the real world into a single number that we’ve all agreed to use because it’s usually good enough for what we’re doing. Strangely, I’m reminded of API pressure calcs.

Of course, the caveat here is usually. The longer the range gets, the less useful BC becomes. And once you hit the transonic boundary, it becomes even less useful. What’s the most useful answer? Surprising absolutely no one, actual real world test data is the gold standard. Got a Doppler radar to measure bullet velocities in flight? No? Hmm. Neither do I. No wonder everybody uses BC, especially for cross-platform comparisons.

Anyhow, more on ballistic coefficient can be found on Wikipedia. You can also find a Marksmanship book on Wikibooks.

Breakfast Food Geekery

Apparently, one can slice a bagel into two interlinked congruent halves. You may be wondering what the hell that means, so go here and gaze in wonder at mathematics applied to bagels.

Cheap Sous Vide, Part 2

So, I’ve been contemplating this fine piece of gadgetry know as a thermal circulator. All the popular chefs are using them for sous vide. They, are, as I mentioned earlier, ludicrously expensive for an apparatus which may not be useful to me. The obvious answer is to see if one is available cheaper used. The cheapest used one I could find was about $600, which is still prohibitively expensive.

So, let’s use some of this high-powered engineering education and experience I’ve spent all these years acquiring. Our desired device has one singular function in life: maintain a water bath at a precise temperature. So, we need some way to heat the water and some way to control the heat. If we control the heat, we control the temperature.

So, how do the bright boys who make these things do it? A quick look at an existing model reveals an immersion heating element, some kind of control system, and a pump to smooth out any gradients. All right, that looks pretty straightforward.

Hmm. Let’s cruise some odd back corners of the Internet. A 2500 watt immersion heater element for $2.95! That just might work. If I do some back of the envelope calculations*, I figure I need about 200W to maintain a temperature of 140°F compensating for convective and radiative heat loss. I’m ignoring conduction since we shouldn’t be touching much with our pot. Hmm what do I get from a 277V element if I run it at 120V? Damn, now I have to remember my sparky equations, or at least look them up. So, scribbling furiously on the same envelope after consulting references, I get about 470 watts from my chosen element.** A little bit more math and the heater should get 10 liters of water hot enough in about 50 minutes. Screw that, I’m impatient. We’ll run two in parallel and heat the water up twice as fast. Oh, wait, how much current is that gonna draw, anyway? 8 amps? Fine, we can easily pull 8A on a household circuit.

Right. That’s the heating. Let’s see what is available for a control system. Now, those of you unacquainted with industrial process controls may be unaware of a device known as a temperature controller. It’s a pretty little pre-engineered box that requires a power source and a temperature sensor to work. You hook everything up and enter a desired temperature in your controller. The controller then checks the temperature sensor against your desired temperature and based on the result either switches something on, or switches something off. In our case, we want the switch to come on when the sensor temp reads low, and go off when the temperature sensor reads high. This is the default configuration for most controllers. So, where do we find a temperature controller? I started off at Omega, since they make everything under the sun for temperature measurement and control. But, as befits many industrial suppliers, they are expensive. So, screw it. We’re off to eBay. Look at that! Temperature controllers out the wazoo! Hmm. We are trying to do this cheaply, but with some assurances it’ll actually work. Let’s skip used equipment and focus on new parts. I can get a temperature controller with included thermocouple for $31.95 plus shipping. Hell, yeah.

Okay, here’s a snag. The max current we can pull with the relay circuit in the controller is 3A. As we know from doing our quick and dubious math, we need about 8 amps. So the included relay ain’t gonna work. Shit. However, our controller also has a DC trigger out. The controller puts out some voltage for the on state and drops to nothing for the off state. Let’s see, 8V out. That will drive a solid state relay quite nicely, won’t it? Well, hell, we’re already at eBay in another window. How much for an SSR? $8.99 for a 25A relay that triggers off 3-32 VDC. The price even includes shipping from some Chinese factory town. Sweet!

Now, we need a box to hold our controller, relay, and associated wiring in. I found yet another score on eBay: a PVC enclosure with aluminum back plate already installed for $25. Slightly used, but since it’s just a box to hold parts, I can live with that. Since we’ve got the back plate in the enclosure, we can dispense with a separate heat sink for the SSR.

So let’s see, we’ve got the heating elements, a way to control them, and a box to hold stuff. Are we missing anything? Oh, yeah, a pump. Well, I’ve got to go by the pet store and pick up some turtle supplies. I’ll see what’s available in the way of a pump and get back to you guys when the parts get here.

* Actually done in MathCad. If anybody wants to see the math, let me know.

**I did all the electrical calcs as straight DC, since an immersion heater is as close to a purely resistive load as uou're going to find in an AC circuit. Sloppy, yes, but I'm not an EE.

Cheap Sous Vide, Part 1

So, I mentioned I got Under Pressure recently. I have been reading it, and I will freely admit I'm both intrigued and intimidated. The intimidation comes from two somewhat related issues. This is a book for foodies and professional chefs. The recipes are technically demanding, have absurd ingredient lists, almost requires a brigade de cuisine, and some specialized equipment. I'm fine with the first two. I can either do it, or I'll take a swing at it and fail spectacularly. Ingredients are readily available in a town with 4 million people. The last two are more an issue.

This is what I refer to as sous-chef cooking at it's finest. WTF does Keller care that it takes 200 steps and 7 people to do it? He's got staff. Me? I have J and a dog, only one of whom actually wants to be in the kitchen when I'm doing serious cooking. The dog has figured out I'm clumsy and drop things that are occasionally tasty. J has figured out out other people get in my way and make even more peevish and irascible than normal. Needless to say, this cuts down on the amount of prep work that can be done for any single recipe if it's all going to be eaten at the same time. I have learned to accept this limitation and work around it. I do a fair amount of mise en place and bastardize recipes to get where I need to go.

The specialized equipment, however, would appear to be a deal breaker. Sous vide needs a vacuum packer and an immersion circulator. I'm thinking my cheap FoodSaver will work for the vacuum packing aspect, even though Keller insists they aren't adequate. Maybe not for what he's doing, but I figure it'll work for me. The immersion circulator, though? That's kind of a bitch. A cheap one runs about $900 new, and you don't get much of a discount for buying used. That strikes me as a little much for experimentation. What to do, what to do?

Hey, wait a minute. I'm an engineer. I can figure this out...

Cheap and Obvious

Going for the easy joke, I note scientists have discovered Ry'leh. Artists and sensitive wussy boys the world over are having horrible dreams as we speak.

Slap up a few posters and maybe you'll be eaten last.

Pie!

It's Pie Day! Everybody loves pie, right? J is partial to cherry, while I am a fan of almost anything involving raspberries and chocolate. So go out and... oh, wait. That's PI Day. Who the hell sets aside a day to honor a universal mathematical constant? Oh, yeah, nerds and geeks everywhere, that's who. In other words, my people.

Anyhow, there's plenty of Pi themed merchandise here. Pick up something nice in celebration of everyones favorite irrational ratio.

RIP E.G.G.

Well, the geekier portion of the internet no doubt already knows this. Gary Gygax died yesterday while I was out dealing with idiots. If you don’t know who he is, move along, this post ain’t for you. It’s hard to adequately explain the impact he had on several generations of nerds, but it was incalculable. I’d say more, but really, what is there to be said? I’m sure if you look, others will have written reams about the grand significance of it all by now. Me? I’ll pass. Smartass and snark we do around here. Seriousness and significance? Not so much.

He and his works helped, in no small part, make me the person I am today. He will be missed, although some tributes are probably more tasteful than others.

Ka-Boom

Did I say competent? That might have been too strong of a word.

The Geek Is Strong

Yeah, lame Star Wars reference, I know. Anyhow, via Gizmodo I found the build page from Polecat Aerospace. The Star Wars reference is because they built a 21 foot long replica of an X-Wing and are gonna try to fly it with 4 M class rocket motors.

I am interested in seeing the video from launch, if it becomes available on the net. In any case, I salute these folks for being crazy enough to try it and dedicated and competent enough to pull it off.

Calculator Advice

A little piece of advice for you non-technical types. If you are desperately wandering around looking for a calculator, don't bother to ask the engineers for one. If you do forget my advice, and you get a device with Hewlett Packard emblazoned on it, politely decline and keep going. Unless you've spent the time to learn RPN, the HP calculators engineers use will do you no good.

This only applies to older engineers with HP calculators, though. The newer generations of engineers seem to use TI and Casio calculators, which may prove more helpful.