Author: malfunction54

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fixin’ maniac…

It all started with that old ADA preamp. Since then, I’ve fixed Ken’s Tobias bass (just needed to re-solder a wire to a potentiometer), and I’ve revived my old fretless bass.

Way back in 1992, I bought my first bass. I don’t even remeber what brand it was, but it had a cherry burst finish, and a small body. I really liked that bass. I had it setup by the one guy in my hometown who *really* knew how to set up a guitar. Dave Pickett was his name, and if Pickett couldn’t fix it, it couldn’t be fixed. Needless to say, when I got it back, it played like a dream.

Then a friend of mine, Jay, wanted to know if I’d trade him for his fretless. He needed a fretted bass to do some recording. He sweetened the deal by throwing in a Crybaby wah-wah pedal. This was an offer I couldn’t refuse. So, I traded my first bass for this fretless and the wah pedal.

Many years passed, and since I didn’t play enough to be good at the fretless, I really didn’t play it much at all. Eventually, I moved out to the east coast and got the itch to play again. Unfortunately, years of neglect had taken its toll on the fretless. The battery for the active electronics had corroded and took the battery connector with it. Also, the output jack corroded. I thought it was finished. “Maybe one day I could fix it”, I thought. And so, it lingered amongst my possessions until a few days ago.

With my new-found interest in fixing things, I thought I’d fix my gaze upon this old thing and give it a shot. I looked at the electronics, and it looked like I really just needed to replace the jack and the battery connector. Everything else seemed to be okay. So, this Saturday, I headed over to a local guitar shop and got the jack and the connector. A grand total of $12. I figured it was worth that much to see if it was fixable. If it didn’t work, I was out $12 and I could get rid of the bass with the knowledge that I had at least tried to fix it.

To make a long story short, after one failed attempt, I realized my mistake and rewired one of the connections. That did it! I plugged it in and I was in business. How cool is that?!

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a little underwhelmed

Well, I’ve been using linux (Redhat Enterprise Server 3.0) at work now for over a month. It’s mostly good, but there are a few problems.

  • The CD-ROM drive has issues : for some reason, after about a day of being powered on, the computer loses all communication with the CD-ROM drive. I can’t even open the tray. I don’t recall this being an issue under XP, but it may have been.
  • The GNOME interface is kinda crappy: for instance, sometimes, dragging a window doesn’t work; a second click pops the window to that position. If this were consistent, I’d think it’s a feature, but it isn’t. sometimes, dragging a window drags a window. Other times, it just sits there, waiting for the second click. I don’t get it. I’m pretty sure it’s a bug
  • Still no good Office alternative: I have to interact with others who are using MS Office. Unfortunately, OpenOffice destroys various parts of these documents, so I really can’t use it. For my own files it’s fine.
  • Inconsistency: It’s driving me nuts that every application has a different interface, and different conventions. I never thought much about this before, but even Windows does a better job here. Of course the Mac is great when it comes to this, and I *usually* don’t run into issues.
  • No Sound: This isn’t a big issue for me, but the darn thing should work. Apparently, it mis-identifies the sound device, and it thinks everything is okay. However, it just produces no sound save for the system beep. Not too cool.

Other than these (somewhat significant) issues, linux is nice. I like having all the commandline tools at my fingertips (I guess I could just use Gygwin on Windows), but overall, the stability is nice. If I can get these things working, I’d be all set. I’ll try to figure them out, but I’d rather spend my time writing code, which I can do just fine without fixing these things. Oh well

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ADA MB-1 tube bass preamp

About 5 years ago or so, I purchased a bass preamp from my bass instructor/mentor/friend, Rusty Springfield. The ADA MB-1 was a real masterpiece of engineering, and had both a tube portion as well as a solid state portion that could be mixed together for that “perfect sound”. This unit had seen a lot of use, as Rusty used it in his travels with the Big Apple Circus, and it survived roadies, tent dust, and endless use. So, when I decided I wanted to do a little home recording, he was willing to sell it to me for a good price.

All was well until about a year and a half ago. For some reason, the little guy would just stop working and dump its programming. If I could get it to work, bumping it would upset it again. I searched for a place to repair it, and after much procrastination, took it in. The guy said it would cost around $60 bucks just to bench it, and then he still didn’t know if it could be fixed. And, since ADA had been out of business for some time, he didn’t know if it’d be worth looking at.

So, I went online. There were places that could repair and service it, but it was still going to be pretty expensive. So, for the time, I gave up, and chalked it up to “well, I got good use out of it while I had it”.

Fast forward to last week. As you know, I’ve started a new job, and in the course of 5 months, I’ve learned a lot about hardware, and much has been demystified. So, armed with these new learnings, I decided I had nothing to lose by at least taking a look at the preamp and see if it could be fixed. Worst case, I’d need to replace some parts. The guys at work could probably figure out what I didn’t know, so the prospect was good in my mind. So, I opened up the case and looked around. Lots of chips and lots of other electronics that I have no clue about. So, I decide that maybe a chip is loose. I start poking around with my fingers on all the chips that are mounted on sockets. There was a lot of creaking and flexing of the mainboard, until finally, one of the chips I pushed on gave a little. Hmmm, it seems it was loose after all. So, I plugged it in, and, “voila!”, the preamp ran through its normal POST, then warmed up the tubes, and displayed its normal screen. Needless to say, I was ecstatic. I immediately plugged in my bass, and there was nothing but sweet, sweet music 🙂

WooHoo!

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who shoots first?

Okay, I’m going to confess my dorkiness. I love Star Wars. And I don’t mean all the fancy digital effects of episodes I and II. I mean, I love the campy, minature-model goodness of the original trilogy. Fortunately, so does A2C 🙂 So, for her birthday, I got her the (along with other stuff) new release of the original trilogy (episodes IV, V, and VI) on DVD.

I read an interview with George Lucas regarding this release. He claims that the edits that he made to this release makes them the way he intended them to be in the first place. The trilogy that we grew up with was, in fact, a hack: an unfinished piece.

Now, being the creative type myself, I can understand the desire to make one’s creations exactly how they were envisioned. Unfortunately, making some of the changes that Lucas made here are, as Noodlemonger so aptly puts it, “like rewriting history”.

The biggest change that has been talked about is the “Greedo shot first” change that was made to the “special editions” that were released in theaters in 1997. This of course changes the portrayal of Han Solo, whose “bad boy” image gets turned into a softer, more moral Han, who shoots only in self-defense. There were rumors (that have proven false) that the new DVD release would have Han and Greedo shooting at about the same time. This would at least blur the line between hero and bad boy for our friendly neighborhood smuggler.

Anyway, I haven’t had a chance to sit and watch them yet, but I can’t wait to see the whole trilogy in its entirety, changes and all.

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A2C 365

Wow! Yesterday marked one year since A2C and I have been together (that 0x016D days in hex, or 0000 0001 0110 1101 in binary). She’s the best! As a gift, she got me the LOTR trilogy on DVD. It’s the theatrical version in widescreen. She was bummed that it didn’t have all the extra footage, but honestly, I don’t really care that much. I like having what was in the theaters. Also, widescreen was my primary concern. The whole set is 6 discs in all! Whoa. I can’t wait to see what’s included in the exrtra features.

She also managed to find something I’ve been looking for for a long, long time. She found a Buttercup keychain! It’s so groovin’. AND, she also found a little Godzilla keychain as well. Man. What a woman 🙂

In all serialness, she’s the best thing that’s happened to me, and not merely because of the aforementioned things!

A2C… she pwnz0rz!

w007!

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Linux at work!

Yay! I am writing this from RedHat Enterprise Linux 3.0. Yeah, yeah, I know, “why not Fedora?”. Well, we got this one free with the server we bought. No reason not to use it 🙂 Anyway, I can do everything I need to do for work from Linux now.

I use VNC to connect to the Windows machine with the compiler. I also use Samba to connect to that same machine to edit the code. I can read/write Office docs, so long as they don’t get too complicated. Of course, web and email access are a given.

It’s nice. I think I could really get used to this 🙂 Okay, that’s enough outta me.

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so it goes…

I just finished “Slaughterhouse Five“. What a great book. The humor is dark, as promised, and the reading is fairly quick. The absurdity of the situations and the understated manner in which they are presented are the keys to the darkness of the humor.

I’ve really never read a book quite like this. I have to say, I’m hooked. I’m definitely going to pick up more Vonnegut now. I would recommend this book for those with an “off” sense of humor, or if you’re outright weird and twisted, this book is for you!

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sometimes it’s too easy

So I took the Quadra 700 home yesterday. I got NetBSD running pretty quickly. I even installed MacOS 8. Kudos to the NetBSD/mac68k port maintainers. The install was really, really easy. So easy, in fact, it’s not worthy of its own project page 🙁 Oh well. There are other platforms out there.

I also installed a bigger hard drive. I happened to have a 9GB SCSI disk lying around (actually, it was in the recycle pile). Anyway, I replaced the meager 90MB drive. The biggest downfall is that the 9GB drive is about 10X louder than the 90MB one.

Getting the drive in there was really simple, too. I removed the cover, the power supply and the drive cage with 2 screws. Mind you, this thing was made in 1991-1992, so if any of you remember PC cases back then(think 486), it often took 4-6 screws to get the cover off. The other nice thing about the 700 is the size of the case. It’s a tiny mini-tower design. The floppy mounts vertically.

So now what? Well, I’m thinking of getting an ethernet tranceiver for it. Small Dog Electronics has the Asante transceiver for $4 USD. Once this puppy’s on the ‘net, then it’ll be infinitely more useful. I’ve been looking for an old machine to use as a serial terminal for my other *nix boxes. However, I wanted a machine with no hard drive, boots up in a matter of seconds, and has a minimal GUI. Unfortunately, the Mac Plus that fit this role perfectly died. I’m still looking for a solution to that problem. The Q700 doesn’t fit the spec. For now, I just plug in my PowerBook to the serial switch via a USB->Serial adapter.

Another thing I was thinking was that the case for the Q700 screams to be turned into a mini-itx project. I’d just need to lengthen the floppy slot and mount a slot-loading DVD-ROM/CD-RW.

Anyway, just pipe dreaming for now. Lots of other things to tend to at the moment 🙂

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it’s like deja vu all over again

So my co-worker says to me, “Hey, you like Apple, right? Got any use for some older ones? I have one or two.”

“Sure”, I say. He shows up at the office with a Quadra 900 and a Quadra 700. The 900 is a honkin’ beast, so I probably won’t take it, especially since the specs are the same as the more petite 700. This thing is really cool!

So, what am I going to do with it? Run NetBSD, of course! It’s supported by the mac68k port. I’ll be sure to post something on my projects page when I get around to it. This little guy has 20MB RAM, a 90MB SCSI HDD, an external SCSI CDROM drive, and is really quiet. I may use this for my terminal server. If that’s the case, I may just run an old version of MacOS on it and use zTerm.

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stupid…

Uh, I guess Microsoft is just playing with me now. I get a notification that Windows Update is ready to download SP2. So, I click the dialog to go ahead and download it. It went away. No failure message, and certainly, no update. So then, I go to the update site to get the download. I used the “express install option”, which apparently means, “do nothing”.

That option scans for the most recent updates. When it returns, there are no updates to be found. Not only that, but there’s a message that says that Microsoft recommends updating to SP2 as soon as it’s released, and gives me links to find out more about the features of SP2. Okay, but can I install it? Apparently, it isn’t ready yet.

Okay, so then why was I notified that it was ready for download? What a load of crap.

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