| Saturday, February 11, 2006 |
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Dinner is served...
by brian @ 19:31:01 - [perma-link]Connie and I aren't having a valentines day dinner with our friends. No... We ARE having a not valentines day dinner with out friends.
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| Sunday, February 5, 2006 |
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Bad parking @ burgerville
by brian @ 17:17:23 - [perma-link]My guess is a drunk in a truck. Smashed the hizzell out of the fence.
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210 Horses
by brian @ 22:20:34 - [perma-link]On Friday I picked up my new Demon carburetor from FBO Systems in Beavertion. Josh and I pulled an all-nighter installing it in my Charger. We wanted to get it done in time for "Dodge Dyno Day" at Fast Specialties (and we did, barely). Things never go as smoothly as anticipated.
Turns out the old intake manifold (the 35lb orange thing in the second pic) has the wrong bolt and hole pattern, so it had to be replaced as well. The new one is an Edelbrock Performer. It weighs 14 lbs (big savings!) and is made of aluminum. In all, the car has a new gas pedal, driver's seat, throttle and kickdown cables, throttle bracket, K&N air filter, carb and intake.
With no sleep, we drove it up to Fast Specialties, in Vancouver, WA, yesterday afternoon, arriving just in time for the guys to tell us they were packing up to go home. After we told them what we went through getting all the parts on the car, Travis (the tuning genius) said, "well lets throw it on and see what it does!" I smiled and tossed him the keys.
The first run was a disappointing ~170 horsepower. Travis tweaked the carb to get the secondary butterfly to open and adjusted the
timing. The final run topped out at 210hp and 290 ft-lbs of torque. Its not as much as I had hoped, but its a start. Plus I got a 40hp gain just for driving up to Vancouver. Woohoo! The car definitely feels peppier than with the old carb, and it doesn't bog when I stomp the pedal anymore.
My distributor needs work next. It is supposed to vary the timing based on RPM, but its just keeping everything constant. I'll take it apart this week and see if I can fix it. That should improve things, and get back some of the low-end torque that's missing now with the the timing set for WOT.
I took my video camera, but due to lack of sleep I ended up with footage from only 1 dyno run and about 15 minutes of the inside of my pocket. Even through my coat the motor still sounds strong (<-- give it a listen). The last 3 pictures show the engine bay as it is now, how it was last year, and
how it was when I bought it several years ago. I like the progress.
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| Sunday, January 22, 2006 |
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Are you for Scooba?
by brian @ 13:08:45 - [perma-link]I got my iRobot Scooba about a week ago. Its the Roomba successor that
mops floors. I'm using it to clean my garage floor. Considering the
Scooba was probably designed for interior floors rather than one covered
with various oil and tranny fluid spills, it does a pretty good job. I haven't mopped out there in a while, so there's way more dirt and gunk
on the floor than this thing could possibly handle in a single run. The
squeegee and filters eventually clog with dirt and have to be cleaned
out (they're easily removed and rinsed). This is the third time I've run
it out there. After this or the next time the floor should be clean
enough that running it once a week or so should be sufficient. Overall I'm pretty impressed with it. Its not too loud, so I can run it
while I'm working in the garage. Its flat enough to clean under the cars
and cabinets, so I don't have to move everything out of the garage like
when I would mop the floor the old-fashioned way. Robots are cool.
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| Friday, January 20, 2006 |
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Our ReplayTVs are working again
by brian @ 15:59:44 - [perma-link]Turns out some of it was Operator Error, and some was a bizarre
firewall issue. (No pictures, and probably not an interesting read, but I needed to
make some notes somewhere I could find them later, and this seems
like as good a place as any.) The ReplayTV in our bedroom was failing to set its clock to the
Replay NTP server. This was actually the final problem, but the one
I'll most likely forget next time the IP address changes, or
something stupid like that. MacOSX Server was rejecting the NTP
replies, but an "Advanced" firewall rule: allow udp from 64.124.80.9 123 to 192.168.3.32/30 to get the response back in. I'm not quite sure why it was being
rejected. The time check is the first action in the net connect, and was
causing it to fail. I had switched to using WiRNS which seemed to fix the problem, since the
time sync and channel guide all happened within my network. WiRNS
worked OK for a while, but it fails on the ~weekly Comcast outtage,
or if someone looks at the pccard ethernet dongle the wrong way (I
don't think its a problem with WiRNS itself, but more with the laptop
it runs on). I hadn't discovered the NTP "bug" back then, so WiRNS
was sort of grabbing at straws, but it worked... for a while. The one (at least) of the disks went bad. I replaced the two with a
single 250G (down from 160+160, but still p-p-p-plenty), and it boots
up fine now. Probably heat damage, as the replay is on a shelf in
the rack, and the sides of the shelf were (this is brilliant!)
blocking the vents cut in the side of the replay case. The failure
probably happened in the summer due to the excess heat before we got
the small AC unit. It should be fine now as its much cooler in the
room, and the drive has better ventilation (pushed the unit so the
solid-side is against the shelf instead of the vent side). No longer using WiRNS, since it doesn't seem necessary. I wasn't
using any of the advanced features, so I don't think I'll miss it,
and now there's fewer things in the path to go wrong.
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| Wednesday, January 11, 2006 |
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Dear men who pee on floors...
by brian @ 11:22:18 - [perma-link]Too funny
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Rasterbation
by brian @ 16:35:01 - [perma-link]No, not what Astro does when the Jetsons aren't home. href=http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator/>Rasterbation creates HUGE
rasterized images from a picture. I made a 6x6-page poster of "The
Stretched Minpin Trick" and hung it in the basement.
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| Sunday, January 8, 2006 |
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Super-green iPod
by brian @ 17:33:11 - [perma-link]
I just noticed my iPod Nano was charging itself. See cuz its
charging, but its unplugged. What's going on here?
The roughness on the surface is the light adhesive residue from the
screen protecter that was on it. The Nano's are rumored to be super-
scratchable, and my portable devices tend to get pretty scratched up
anyway (no clue). I figured if I didn't protect it mine would be
unreadable in practically no time.
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| Wednesday, January 4, 2006 |
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How is he doing that?
by brian @ 12:35:20 - [perma-link]Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I thought all M5s (previous generation, not
the 500HP monster) were stick, not automatic. This tool in front of me is *somehow* driving with his foot (heh, or
something) on the brake pedal. Shifting (cuz I can see the car sort of
stutter), steering all over the lame (drunk?), and slowly but surely
accellerating, and the brake lights have been on practically the whole
time.
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| Wednesday, December 28, 2005 |
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Case mod
by brian @ 17:05:57 - [perma-link]To make a short story long.... Yesterday I put a new power supply in my raid box. The old one was
slightly underpowered for the number of devices inside. The new one has
a different fan configuration, so while the old PS fan could draw the
hot air off the processor, the new one pulled in a different direction,
leaving the CPU to bake in the case. It would heat up and set off the
alarm at 50C whenever the CPU was really working. Today I added a 120mm fan to the top of the box, directly over the
450Mhz Pentium 2. I cut a hole with my plasma cutter, which is pretty
rad. This was the first time I'd used one. It cuts through sheet-metal
like butter. I traced the circle around a toy wheel that was about the
right size, popped it out and filed the edges. I installed the fan and things are running much cooler. It even dropped
a degree since I put the cover back on!
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