This is an attempt to blog-up what's happening round here. Since that generally amounts to bugger-all, this is probably going to get boring, real quick. However I have received the slightest amount of encouragement to do this so here it goes.

This week I have been doing chores. Paul Perry of Frostwave fame kindly gave me some resistors and capacitors which he didn't want. He cleaned up his lab and couldn't be bothered sorting them so he gave them to me. I'm always on the scrounge because I can't afford to go out and buy bits all the time and I can't get them down here in Adelaide most of the time anyway. So I'm incredibly grateful to Paul for this.

So I have been sorting them out. Along the way I discovered that my parts draw labels had come unstuck and so I had to spend considerable time hot-melting them back on.

Also amongst these chores I've been taking an inventory of all the Semiconductors I've accumulated. With a view to matching them with projects under research and finding the really old and rare chips for selling on eBay etc.

As any ADD sufferer will tell you, they often have several projects on the go at any 1 time. I'm no exception. 3 old computers to build up into something useful. A project to rack-mount and super-charge a Yamaha TX7. A long list of things I'll probably never get around to. And then there's the house maintenance. Errr. And all in between bouts physical pain and psychological torment. Things happen slowly round here.

So that's it for today. Now I have to get this up and then take the dog for a walk. And by that time Dr. Oscar will be on-line for my daily consultation and reality check.

Be absolutely IceboxBatz.

20020908: The case is finished. Click on the photo below for larger photos

Today I've been doing one of my famous angle grinder upgrades. Most of you have seen Bob's shotgun upgrades by now. I don't have a shotgun so I use an Angle grinder.

Acually the big difference between mine and Bob's is that Mine tend to work afterwards. The whole idea is to squeeze a desk-top case into the smallest 19" rack box I can fit it into. Usually I can't get any smaller than 4U. (4 rack units high) But this one is only 3U. To do this you have to start with a case who's base dimentions are small enough. And these are hard to find. Desk top cases tend to be big chunky things. Not very wide but fairly tall. The first one I ever did, a system called "ADICT, was in a 6U case because it was just a bit too high for 5U and still that left a big gap on the side. I plan to upgrade ADICT in the future and hope to get that down to 3Us as well but this is a new addition to my music making arsonel. And this is what it looks like thus far.

Even if I could afford a commercially made 19" computer enclosure they are always at least 4Us high. This is, or was, a DEC venturis system. It's a largely propriatry system. A socket 7 MoBo with a riser card so that the plug-in I/O cards lay on their side above the MoBo. Currently sitting in the socket is a P1-100 but I've got some news for it when the time comes. All this box has to do is run a couple of old sound cards. We're not talking masses of power required here but I'd like it to be a little faster if possible.

To get this into a 19" rack box in the first place, I've had to chop it up with the angle grinder. The lid mainly. Every case is different and every surplus 19" rack enclosure is different. You have to study it and push some concepts round to gind out what works best. The case it self needed only minor modifications. I didn't even have to remove the MoBo or anything else. But I did remove the floppy and HD of course. Because the plastic front panel is attached to the lid, I've had to first pull that assembly apart before I could begin cutting. The lid had to be cut into 3 main sections. But it wasn't just a matter of slicing it as has been the case in previous upgrades. I had to cut it off where the rack enclosure ended and then slice the top clean off, allmost back to the front panel because there was not enough room top or bottom to allow the whole thing to slide in. Plenty of room on the sides. In fact one could be forgiven for thinking this was made to go into this rack box. But not on the top. But the angle grinder made lite work of that.

I usually paint the black but for this one I decided to use my favorite metalic blue. The top/lid in the photo looks a bit cloudy but it's only had one coat. And I won't give it another till I've drilled some mounting holes. At the moment, nothing is actually bolted in..

I learnt from ADICT that you need side access in these things. They're not like a normal rack mount unit. Hard drive screws are in the side. As are a number of other mounting screws. Especially in this boxen where the cards are mounted on their sides.

What you see in the photo then is totally unfinished. The white patch at the back is the back half of the case. I haven't even cut that to shape yet. That's the next thing to do. Once that's done the whole thing can be aligned and then bolted down. I'm debating whether to put rack handles on it to make it easier to get in and out of the rack. I don't know how much use they'll be with the front panel protruding out like that but they might offer some protection from a side swipe.

The sound cards going into this box will be an Old Turtle Beach Pinnacle card and a Yamaha XG daughter board. I'm on record as saying I don't like TBS much and that's true. These cards cost about 1200 AUD when they were new but both of these cards cost me about 50 off of eBay. I was mainly interested in the Yamaha card since they don't often come up for sale. Whilst they are only ROMPLERs, they do have filters and other nicities that make them interesting. The TBS card might be alright but from all the TBS cards I've experienced so far, the best that could be said of them is. "Well intentioned but very badly executed."

The interesing thing about the Yamaha card is that the header on it simply provides MIDI I/O, Power and audio out. You could in fact, give it some power and an opto isolator and you'd have a stand alone unit. The host doesn't have to be intelligent in any way. The thought had crossed my mind of putting it in a 1U 19" rack on it's own. With a linear power supply and maybe even a bit of a front panel. That's still an option but I think it would end up being just another rack unit taken up and I'm short on space.

So that's it so far on that score. Over the past few days I've also been working on my space habitat.

OK. So currently it looks a bit like the death star but the fact that it's spherical is about where the similarity ends. This is essentially an O'Neil style space habitat, or "TAT" which spins on an axis to achive gravity by centrifugal force. It's mainly inspired by the work of Mike Combs. A guy who writes some of the most amazing hard-sci-fi I've ever read. Go check it out.

However this is part of the sci-fi series I've been working on. More pictures to come later.

In the mean time, death to SPAM and as always.

Be absolutely Icebox

Batz.

GIMME YOUR OLD JUNK

I'm not a stuckist by choice but I guess that's what I am. I am of course referring to that most recent of art movements that seeks to go forward by being retro.

If it weren't for the fact that I'm a starving electronic musician with a disability or 2, then I'd probably never have even heard of this Suckist movement. But since I am, and every mother fucker on the planet tries to take advantage of me in one way or another, I'm well and truly "STUCK".

The computer mentioned previously is stalled because I can't find the right processor. It's a voltage thing. I have a P100 in it. That runs at 3.3 volts. All of the processors I have that are faster have a 2.8 volt core. The machine has provision for a VRM to deal with this but naturally, the only VRM (Voltage Regulation Module) is 3.3 volts. Which is pretty damn pointless really. I looked on fleaBay but so far, nothing useful. Even at the usual inflated prices.

I'm still looking for a solution to this before I start loading an OS onto the thing. I can't load an OS and change the CPU later because even with Linux, that's just too much trouble.

But if you think that's funny. The Compaq box I got for the other system upgrade turns out to be just 10mm too wide to shove in a 19" rack box. I considered anglegrinding 5mm off each side but they've built things right out to the extremes. It just makes it all the more challenging I guess.

But this is really only background to what I want to say on being a "Stuckist." I'm not a stuckist by choice. It seems that this may be the way of the future however. People think I have a lot of computers etc but they're really just old toasters by today's standards. The thing is that they're cheap and you can still do a lot with them if you have a clue.

But the main deal is that whilst Microsoft and Intel are hell bent on locking their customers into a continual cycle of upgrading - the so called "Microsoft Tax" - most linux people will tell you that there's no such thing as obsolete hardware. And I'd like to make it known that I'll gratefully accept donations of old hardware.

See, we've been reading about this Paladium thing. Microsoft's next draconian OS after XP. This will include drastic DRM. (Digital Rights Management) It will phone home and tell Mircrosoft what's on your computer. (Because they're so trustworthy we'd let them know that) If there's something on there it doesn't like, it will lock it down. An MP3 perhaps? A video clip maybe? Not only that but Microsoft will have permanent back-door access to your machine and turn on or off features it thinks you should or shouldn't have. All without you knowing it's doing it. The plan seems to be that unless you're running at least one Intel box with Microsoft's latest OS, and paying your Microsoft Tax each year, you will be locked out of access to content on the net. Go to THE REGISTER and do a search for Paladium and you'll see what I mean.

Wel, I have just one thing to say to them. "Fuck That!"

I'm paying the Microsoft tax no more. Every day I get closer to changing yet another machine over to Linux. I'm not downgrading any machine to run XP. I don't give a damn what seductive features they throw in. The core values are motivated entirely by greed and the whole thing is morally bankrupt.

But this is where the Stuckist thing comes in. What more do I need this stuff to do? I can do audio. I can do video. Every new version of software is either just a bug fix or a cosmetic fix. It's like selling soap powder. "New and Improved." Because the only way to keep people buying this crap is to convince them that the old stuff was crap and you have to have the new stuff. Which of course, you don't. The old stuff worked perfectly well. Assuming it worked at all. But Paladium takes that one step further. It's now a case of. "Buy the new stuff OR ELSE!"

Well if they wanna do that then I don't give a flying fuck. Maxim semi conductor recently asked me to beta test some software for them. A new web browser add on. Well guess what. It only works with M$ IE. Well what a shame. Tough luck. I don't run IE. It's too much of a liability. It doesn't run under linux anyway so it's a moot point. And cool though it seemed to be, I couldn't be bothered if it meant I have to jump through hoops. I'll continue doing things via the time tested methods I already use and that's just bad luck for Maxim.

So I may be stuck but that could be a good thing. My computer scientist friend Ben and I were discussing the merits of old 386 boards yesterday. We've decided on strategies for using them as controllers. Now bear in mind that a 386 is probably about 100 times more powerful than a controller need be, and people are paying to have this stuff taken away, there is a lot of scope here. This old hardware is far from redundant. The old hardware did it's job. If that's the job you need doing, why would you need the latest M$ OS to do it? You can't strip down XP to run off a floppy. Or out of a small FLASH drive. The ISA bus is a doddle to interface to. "Ah but that's alright for you geeks." I hear you say. Well let me put it this way, As microsoft and intel squeeze more and more people out of the loop, there are going to be more and more of us Geek stuckists out there. And those who can use any old hardware will be the last man standing. As it were. So gimme all your old hardware. Old CGA video cards. Hercules and EGA. Old 8 bit sound cards. 386s and 30 pin RAM. I'll take it all. And if that means I'm a stuckist, well I'd rather be stuck here than stuck with Microsoft. It makes you wonder who's really getting stuck?

In the mean time, death to SPAM and as always.

Be absolutely Icebox

Batz.

Just another day in the good life.

Today I did the shopping. Didn't get much sleep but that's not entirely unusual for me. So my mind is really bent out of shape. However I did manage to get a few things done. Or at least run an experiment or two.

I found a P120 to put in the venturis box. The pins were bent up to hell so I had to straighten them as best I could. (Don't try this at home) It works though which is a bonus of sorts. I paid for a P133 which I bought off of evilBAbY. I also did a deal and bought yet another venturis box. This one has a P166 in it. Which means it handles 2.8 volt chips. Which means I can put this mo-bo in the current machine, then put a P200MMX in it. With any luck. The remaining one? Mmmm. Who knows?

I tried the VRM module I got. Whatta ya know, it's different. It's bigger than the VRM on this board. Bugger it!

Built a mouse cable to go from the new computer to the KVM box. I need to butcher/modify a PS/2 keyboard cable with a DIN on it and I'm tossing up what to do about the video cable. I have a super wizzzbang cable but I also need to hook up some other computers. And this computer isn't more than about 300mm away from the KVM as the cable flies. Decisions. Decisions.

And I got a little more model making done. I primise to get some more pictures up soon.

I know I said I'd get that "Bread and Circuits" Link made a little more obvious but it's proving to be a hassle. One wouldn't think so but I'm fighting with this crappy (insert crappy software company name here) software. Of which I wish I'd never parted hard earned money for. Especially since I then got the sack from my HTML job when they employed "Gee, wizz bang and company. Web site builders to the queen." Actually I hated doing that crap anyway so I wasn't fussed.

And that's it. I'm too tired to care about Bill Gates and his hovering testicles today.

Be absolutely Icebox

Batz.