Archive for November, 2007
Remodelling the ‘rents kitchen
Nov 27th
My parents moved into their house in the early 70s. They’ve never touched the kitchen, so it was ready for some TLC. Here are a few photos of the kitchen, post-demolition. Unfortunately we don’t have any photos of it before, but it will definitely look a billion times better when we’re done.
zOMG, it’s VTEC!
Nov 20th
I always get a chuckle when I see this Integra Type-R in the parking lot of the gym I work out at. The owner’s got a good sense of humor, as VTEC is often the butt of jokes on non-Honda/Acura forums.
Speaking of VTEC, this one made me LOL.
Resurrecting an IBM “Deathstar” Deskstar 75GXP hard drive
Nov 20th
I have a bunch of hard drives from old PCs that I’ve kept around since I’m a pack rat. I really should just burn what I need to keep onto DVD and recycle of all these tiny-by-today’s-standards 10-40GB hard drives. It’s amazing to think of how much more data you can cram into the same physical drive now a days — a few weeks ago I loaded 4-750 GB drives in our NAS at work. Even my dinky USB thumb drive can hold 4GB. Anybody remember 5.25″ floppies (I was a bit too young to experience the 8″ floppies)? +10,000 points if you had colored floppies, even.
Anyways, I had an old 40GB 7200RPM IBM 75GXP Deskstar , which later came to be known as the IBM 75GXP Deathstar due to their high failure rates. I somehow lucked out and didn’t have one fail on me when it was the primary drive in my PC at the time. Fast forward to the present, and I hooked up the drive to an external USB enclosure to try and find a Word doc that I couldn’t locate elsewhere. The drive spun up but wouldn’t mount in XP. I thought great, it turned into a Deathstar.
I spent hours trying a bunch of different things to get the drive to mount, but no luck. I finally googled around and came across some eBay pages where people were selling the logic board to this drive. Ok, so replacing the logic board was an option. Awesome.
I flipped the drive upside down and took a look at how hard it would be to swap out logic boards. It was then that I noticed that one of the solders connecting the the IDE pins to the logic board was bad & wasn’t making a solid connection. I hooked the drive back up to the enclosure and pressed down on the loose pin (actually the entire row of pins) with the edge of a credit card, and lo and behold the drive mounted. Even better, I was able to find what I was looking for on that drive. 
ka-boom
Nov 17th
My coworker’s car was hit by someone barreling through a red light @ 40-50mph as we were going to lunch earlier this week. Another 5 feet into the intersection and we would have not been as lucky to walk away unscathed :\
Turning the Linksys WRT54g into a wireless bridge
Nov 2nd
I wrote previously about wifi problems with my MacBook Pro on my home network, so I ended up getting a new 802.11n router (a D-Link DIR-655). Turns out the router ultimately wasn’t the problem (my MBP didn’t like WPA2 encryption), so my old Linksys WRT54g was still working.
With my old network, I had it set up so that my Airport Express was acting as a WDS repeater for my network & used its built-in Ethernet port to connect my Xbox 360 to the network (the Airport Express was connected to my home theater receiver so that I could stream iTunes to it).
The D-Link didn’t support WDS (my old Linksys WRT54g did only because I reflashed the firmware w/ Sveasoft’s Alchemy firmware), so Xbox 360 wasn’t connected to the network anymore. To get the Xbox back on, I converted the WRT54g to a wireless bridge, using the DD-WRT firmware. It was pretty straightforward (much easier than setting it up with WDS), so now I’m back to where I was before my whole network started acting all goofy. w00t.
