The Life of Kenneth

DS1307 Module

2009-11-10T15:00:00.000-08:00

I've been doing a few projects lately using the DS1307 IC. If you don't already know, the DS1307 is a real time clock chip (as opposed to an unreal time clock chip, which is often used by musicians and people attending events on Facebook). This means that you just have to attach a quartz watch crystal to it, and it'll keep time for you. RTC chips are divided into two categories; those that keep time by counting seconds (usually as a 32 bit number) since some specific start point, and those that count seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years.

The DS1307 is of the latter type. This means that it stores the time as seconds : minutes : hours (12 or 24 hour) : day of the week : day of the month : month : year. It also has some smarts so it knows how many days are in each month, and even knows about leap years out to 2100.

This is great, and super useful, but every time I need to pull the chip out of the breadboard to move it, or even just accidentally remove power, it loses the current date and time. Since most of my projects aren't serious enough to warrant wiring up buttons and coding a way to reset the clock, I have to instead plug my Arduino into my laptop with a USB cable, reflash a DS1307 clock setting program I threw together, send it a 13 digit number over the serial port, reflash the firmware for whatever project I'm currently working on, and move forward. Can you see how this would get just a little annoying after the twentieth time? I also have been using the SRAM on the clock to store data, and losing that isn't catastrophic, but annoying as well.

Lucky me, the DS1307 has a neat little feature, where it has an extra pin that you can connect to a Lithium 3V battery, or tie to ground if you're not using it. Sparkfun has a board that has a surface mount DS1307 on top, and a battery clip underneath, which would be useful, but at $20, is a little rich for an inconvenience. I then saw an idea where you do the same thing, just with the DIP package, and all on one side of a piece of perf board.

Parts list

Perf board - 5 x ~17 (I used a leftover piece from Radio Shack, but any would do)
5x right angle male header. (sourced locally at Halted, 14 cents) This is so I can turn the board on end and plug the board into my breadboards when I'm done, which is the only place I plan on using this.
1x 8P3 DIP socket (sourced locally, ~30 cents), because soldering ICs hurt my soul.
1x DS1307 RTC (Digikey, $3.74)
1x 12.5pF 32.768kHz crystal (Digikey, 32 cents)
1x CR2032 battery clip (Digikey, 96 cents)
1x CR2032 cell (Digikey, 40 cents, USPS won't ship | Locally, $4.50, I hate you RiteAid)
Some wire, solder, soldering iron, etc.

Wiring it up
The DS1307 is nice enough to have 4 of the 5 IO pins on one side (5 - SDA, 6 - SCL, 7 - SQW, 8 - V_CC). The fifth pin is for the ground connection, which you need to jump from the other side of the IC with some wire. The battery clip needs to be connected between V_BAT and GND, so that'll take at least one piece of wire from the far end. I soldered the crystal straight to the perf board and DIP socket. You should end up with something that looks like this:

Plug in the DS1307 and a CR2032, and you're ready to set the time once, and use until DST.

Results
It works quite well when it's plugged into a project, and I power down everything else. It's super nice not having to try and keep this powered while I'm mucking around with all the other wiring on a board.

I have had a problem when it's just sitting loose. It seems that when V_CC isn't pulled to ground, the chip only keeps time half as fast as reality, which makes it less real time, which personally, I find quite offensive. For the second revision, I would probably add a resistor, or even just a bypass cap (0.1μF) between the V_CC and GND lines to improve this. While plugged into a project, the rest of the project keeps the V_CC line very much at ground, so it's not a very big issue as far as I see it.

Considering that I managed to put this together for easily half of what the Sparkfun board costs, and that I got to break out the soldering iron, which is always welcome, I'd call this project a success.

Temperature Logger in Refrigerator

2009-10-25T12:00:00.000-07:00

The fun continues with my new temperature logger. After leaving it running for a week in my room, I decided to give it a shot at my refrigerator.
Click to enlarge.
To say the least, I was awfully surprised by the data once I graphed it. First of all, I expected it to be much more temperature stable than it really is. With a slope that high, it's clear that you really don't want to open the door when the power is out, because it is already rapidly approaching room temperature.

The initial drop is just because I started the logger while it was still in my room, since it had to be plugged into my computer to be reset, so it took about an hour for the breadboard to cool off.
Around minute 850, we got home from grocery shopping, so before then, our fridge was rather barren, and the spike was because we had the door open, and were loading warm food into it.
It surprised me how the temperature started swinging more after it was fully loaded, instead of less. This might be because all of the added food blocking air flow means there is a greater differential between the cooling element and the sensor. Any other theories?
The bizarre temperature spike for the last hour didn't actually happen. With a diode and a voltage regulator between my 8V battery pack and the 5V ICs, that left a very small (<0.5v) margin before the regulator started sagging.

I'm really quite interested in seeing what the difference is between the bottom and top of the fridge, and getting more than a day and a half of data. Luckily, I just happened to have ordered TWO temperature sensors, so the only things preventing me from logging two simultaneous temperatures is the lack of spare hookup wire (left my big spool in Sunnyvale -_-), a dozen lines of C, and a fierce competition between roommates about whether we should be keeping temperature sensors or food in the refrigerator.

Protip: Masking Tape for Buying Electronics

2009-10-24T12:00:00.000-07:00

This was a new idea I got yesterday when I was shopping at Halted. Since the Sunnyvale Halted is kinda far from my house, and the Sacramento one is hellza far from my Davis apartment, I usually tend to go with parts lists for several projects I have queued up at once. Unfortunately, this means the first thing I get to do when I get home is sort out three projects worth of parts from one bag, based on the what seems to be sometimes optional markings on parts.

New trick: Bring a roll of masking tape, and then lay each project down on one strip of tape, then once they're all collected, put a second piece down on top of it. Once you get home, it's just a matter of peeling the tape apart when you have time to work on that specific project.

Arduino Temperature Logger

2009-10-18T23:00:00.000-07:00

Just like every other good engineer in life, I thrive on data. It doesn't even need to be solving a problem. Simply having the ability to say, "I know this," is awesome. Having some free time last month, I started playing with my Arduino again, and finally got around to ordering all the parts I needed for a project I've been thinking about for a long time.

This is my Arduino-based temperature logger. On the breadboard, from left to right, is a serial real time clock, a 1Mb EEPROM, and lastly the serial temperature sensor. Parts list:

HD44780-based LCD screen (optional)
DS1307 real time clock
12 pF 32,768Hz crystal for the DS1307
3V battery for the DS1307 (optional, not shown)
DS1631 12-bit serial temperature sensor
AT24C series EEPROM (I used a AT24C1024B, which is huge, and relatively expensive($4))
Lots of wire. I was glad I have a nice set of breadboard wire for this project.

Instead of all of the parts for the clock, you can also consider SparkFun's DS1307 module. You pay for it, but you get what looks like a very nice clock/crystal/battery package that you can just drop into your project. Disclaimer: I've never played with it personally. Only had it recommended to me. No way am I paying $20 for $3 in parts on a board.
Forget that. I was able to put together the functional equivalent with less than $10 worth of parts on a scrap piece of perf board.

Since pretty much everything uses I²C, I'll leave wiring it all up as an exercise for the student (Hint: connect everything to analog 4 & 5).

Source code.

Note that some of the features of the dumper (setting the clock, reading the clock), don't work. The main goal was to just get the D(ump) and Z(ero) commands working. I'll get the other commands working at some point if I mess up and the DS1307 loses power at some point (I originally set it using some sample code I found online).

I measured the current draw as 42.5mA, so ignoring the loss in the power supply, that's only half a watt. For this much data, I can pay for half a watt!

How It Works

On power-up, the Arduino checks the CH (Clock Halt) flag on the DS1307 clock chip. If this flag is set, it indicates that the clock has lost power, and that the date and data stored on it isn't valid. Without valid data, the Arduino displays an error message on the LCD and enters an infinite loop to do nothing.

If the clock is running, the controller then loads the first two bytes of general purpose RAM off of the clock. The DS1307 provides 56 bytes of RAM which can be backed by its battery in the case of power failure. I use the first two bytes of it to store the current index into the EEPROM, so that if the controller gets reset, as long as the clock has power, I'll never start writing over collected data by starting from the beginning again. It then prints the read count on the LCD for a second before changing to the current time and date. I found this useful for debugging, since I then only needed to hit the reset button to figure out where it was writing to on the EEPROM. It also sends the temperature sensor the signal to start taking temperature readings. The DS1631 is factory set to continuously take readings, as opposed to the other option where it only takes one and goes back into standby.

Once all of the initialization is finished, the Arduino enters a loop where every 100ms it reads the time off the DS1307 and the temperature off the DS1631 to display on the LCD. It then compares the minute value to the previous one, and if they're different, that means it's been a minute since the last temperature recorded in the EEPROM.

To record the temperature to the EEPROM, the current temperature reading is written to the EEPROM, and the address stored in the clock's RAM is incremented, so if the power goes out in the next minute, no data is lost or overwritten.

Conveniently, all three of the ICs use the I²C serial interface (by accident? Who knows...), so that leaves a ton of extra pins if I manage to think up anything else to add on.

Possible Extensions

Each temperature reading is stored as 2 bytes, one for the whole degrees, and the other to store 4 bits of fractional degrees. It wouldn't be unreasonable to assume my room is never going to swing outside of something like 20-30 degrees Celsius, and try and pack the reading into one byte to save room. I'm using a 1Mb EEPROM, which gives me enough room to take two byte readings every minute for 45 days. This is an incredibly high time resolution, and backing it off to something more reasonable, like once every 15 minutes, stretches this time out to 2 years. Changing the source is trivial; just add minute%15==0 to the if statement in loop().

Since the EEPROM is I²C, having the maximum 4 devices per bus is simply a question of paying the $4 per device. You would have to change how the tempreadcount variable is handled everywhere (store it in three bytes on the DS1307 instead of two, etc) so it doesn't roll over after the first chip is filled, but that would mean being able to take a temperature reading every minute for half a year, and that's just freakin awesome.

Even without the AT24C EEPROM, the Arduino comes with 512 or 1024 bytes of EEPROM on-board. This can get you a couple days of 15 minute readings, which is at least enough to play with, if you just wanted to buy the DS1631 chip.

Problems

For some reason, I could not get the LiquidCrystal library and Serial to both work at the same time. This means that to dump the EEPROM or reset the clock, I have to flash in a different program, then reflash the logging program.
I was originally using a DS1306 clock chip, but it drifted badly (a few minutes a day). Once I switched to the DS1307, which calls for the 12pF crystal I had, instead of a 6pF crystal, it hasn't noticeably drifted in a few days. Lesson learned: make sure you have the right crystal for your clock.
Don't copy paste big chunks of code that almost do the same thing without stopping and really thinking about it. I spent a long time trying to figure out why the data dump just read the last measurement for all of them. Was using the read number count instead of the loop variable... I was afraid I had somehow smoked my $4 EEPROM.
I think finding I²C addresses in data sheets is some kind of right of passage. You'd think that they would be something they're put rather prominently on the first page, or refer to it several times, but instead, every time they do refer to it, they refer to it as, "that address as noted previously," etc. Freakin pain in the ass, digging through not only the text, but all the I²C spec diagrams to find where they happened to show the waveform for the device's address, which you then get to decode into the 7 bit number you needed in the first place. I finally wrote up one page of notes with all the I²C addresses and register numbers so I could actually write some code instead of spend two hours digging through the data sheets every time I try to implement something.

Results

After running for one day, it came time to dump the data into Excel. I did this by writing the second program, which just prints each reading number, and the two bytes of the reading, all tab seperated so they will go into seperate cells nicely. To calculate the temperature was simply a matter of =(first cell)+(second cell/256). A little bit of good old graphing magic later, I got this:
Click to enlarge!
It is pretty clear that a one minute time resolution on a 12 bit temperature measurement is a little overkill. Most values are repeated for 10 minutes before drifting down another 1/16th of a degree to the next possible value. I've been playing with massaging the data after the fact to get a smoother line, but the logical next step is to just record the average reading for 5-15 minute periods to ink out two more bits, while saving a tremendous amount of EEPROM (45 days per chip to 1.8 years for 15 minute intervals). Note that the spikes in the afternoon were me playing with it by putting my finger on it and watching the temperature go up and fall back down to room temp.

Update 10/24/09: So after running the logger for a whole week, I've dumped the 10,000 some odd data points, and graphed them in Excel, just for your enjoyment (I'm lying, mine too).
Click to enlarge.
The ticks on the x axis are about where I believe midnight to be (I'm planning on patching the firmware to log a 0xFFFF temperature at midnight, since it knows what time it is). It's pretty clear that I left my window open over night two of the seven nights (Monday morning, Friday morning). What I did find surprising was how late it was before it started getting cooler. Most nights you can see it at least holding steady until I finally went to bed around 12:30am (Sunday night being the exception, due to the open window). On Thursday (second to last day) it's most dramatic, but when I leave for class, etc, the temperature markedly stops rising. I expected being home, awake, and active had an effect on my room's temperature, but certainly not to the degree shown on these graphs.

I also implemented a histogram feature on the last of the unused LCD space using the eight custom glyphs feature on the HD44780 controller. Essentially what I did was every hour (every half hour in the picture), stored the current temperature in an array of the last 40 (5 columns * 8 glyphs) such readings. I then calculated the maximum and minimum values for this set, and used that to normalize the values so they ranged between zero and eight, to calculate how many pixels high that column should be. The code ended up being pretty ugly, so I'll leave the specifics as a challenge for the student (don't you hate it when they say that?). The general idea is:
Bar height = (temperature - minimum temperature) * 8 / (maximum - minimum)
Storing the hourly temp readings in an array was just me being lazy. The I²C bus is pretty freakin fast, so the better solution would be to just read the values back off the EEPROM, since this only needs to be done once an hour, and that has the added advantage of not having an empty graph on reset.

Update 10/25/09: Data collected in my refrigerator.

Disabling a Car's Panic Button

2009-10-11T12:00:00.000-07:00

You all know the scenario: You're walking out to your car, it's late at night, it's dark, and you're alone. You've got your keys held firmly in your hands, just like in all those public service announcements, when some gangsta mo-fo comes out of the shadows, AND STARTS MUGGING YOU! But wait, you have your car remote in hand; you're saved! You press the big red button... Annnd your car alarm goes off.

Now here you are, still getting mugged, but at least now all the neighbors are annoyed with you as well...

I'm kidding, but seriously, those little red buttons can get freakin annoying. A few weeks ago, my sister's cars alarm starting going off every time she pulled her keys out of her pocket. It got to the point where she couldn't carry her remote with her any more, so I decided I should try and "fix" it.

And by "fix," I mean disable the crap out of that freakin panic button, in case we're at all unclear what I meant by fix.

This is a relatively easy fix, that I've actually done a few times on various remotes already. Usually what I do is just cut the actual button rubber down so it becomes exceedingly difficult to press, but once I opened this remote up, that didn't look to work out well.

The buttons were all a single sheet of multicolored rubber, molded so it would look like four buttons. Thank you wonderful modern technology: you make our lives so much easier, when you work. Cutting that off just didn't seem like a good idea, breaking the seal on the electronics, etc.

That worked out just as well, anyways, since a little poking around with a volt-ohm meter made it pretty clear that this wasn't a case of fat fingers. The panic button (top right in the picture) was really defective, naturally shorted out, just waiting for some good reason to cry wolf. This meant I needed to actually disconnect the button entirely.

I first tried using my soldering iron to heat and lift off the entire button, but I've never really had much success with surface mount components like these, so I gave up on that fairly quickly. I instead opted to simply cut the trace. A little scratchy scratchy with an exacto knife, and the button is officially out of service.

You can see the scratch between the button and the 4th pin on the IC on the vertical trace. Tested it with my ohm meter to make sure it was really open, put everything back together, and we have a much calmer remote (get it? no panic - calmer. Man, I kill). Another day saved by not being afraid to open something and figure out what's up. Carpe diem, people.

The Square Root of 2 is Irrational

2009-10-01T23:00:00.000-07:00

You remember that fun piece of trivia from some math class in high school? Some teacher, in their infinite wisdom, laid down the law: The square root of 2 (√2) is an irrational number, which means that it cannot be represented by a repeating sequence of digits. The first few are 1.4142135623730950488016887242097...

But I'm in college now. I'm supposed to be challenging preconceptions about religion, culture, and basic properties of numbers, right? Of course, but fortunately, religion and culture aren't nearly as interesting, so we're going to be limiting ourselves to the third subject.

So if √2 really is an irrational number, I should be able to prove it. Before I prove it, we're going to need something to prove it with:

A rational number is a number that can be represented by the division of two integers. This means that I can represent 4 as 4/1, 2.5 as 5/2, and 3.333... as 10/3. An irrational number is a number which cannot be represented by these two integers. Some familiar ones are π and e. φ has also been coming up in discussion a lot this week.
The Well Ordering Property of Integers: Given any positive set of integers, I claim that of them, there is one that is less than all the others. That's right, when given the numbers {4, 9, 123, 19244000}, you can always look at them and say, "Ah ha! That four is less than all the other numbers!" This is important, I promise.

So now that we have something to work with, let us start making the magic. A good way to prove something in mathematics is to instead prove that what it isn't, it is not. Show that it can't possibly be anything else, so the only option left must be the answer.

Lucky for us, there is only two options here: √2 is either going to be rational, or irrational. We're claiming it's irrational, so let's show that it's not rational:

ASSUME √2 IS RATIONAL. This is mathematics, so we can play pretend. This means that we can express it as the division of two integers: √2 = a/b. Now if we multiply both sides by b, we get the following:
b√2 = a.
We know that a is an integer, since we called it an integer to begin with, so that means that b√2 must also be an integer. Now since a and b exist, it's not hard to imagine there is a positive set of integers that would satisfy the requirement √2 = c/d (2a and 2b come to mind).

Let's call the set of all the possible positive integers b√2 the set S. This means S is a really big group of positive integers, all of which are products of another integer and √2. This set must have a smallest member, as per the well ordering property. Let's call that smallest member s = t√2.

Since s is the smallest member of this set S, that means that if we can show that there is yet a SMALLER member of S than s, we've got a problem, since smaller than the smallest doesn't make much sense.

s = t√2
s√2 - s = s√2 - t√2
s√2 - s = (s -t) √2

Now we know s and t are integers, by definition. If we multiply them by another √2, we have s√2 = 2t, which means that s√2 is also an integer. Since s and s√2 are both integers, that means the left side of the equation is an integer, which means both sides are integers (we can make this argument from either side).

We also know that both sides are positive. The left side can be factored out to s (√2 - 1), and √2 > 1, since 1² is 1, and 2² is 4.

Now we've got a problem. We've got this integer (s - t) which is positive, and which is an integer when multipled by √2. This is bad, because (s - t) is clearly less than s, and we picked s as the smallest member of S. This means S can't exist, and finally that √2 is an irrational number. Q.E.D.

Well that was fun, wasn't it?

Conway's Game of Life on an Arduino

2009-09-24T15:00:00.000-07:00

I'm finally back in Davis, but unfortunately one of the first things I did once I got here was come down with a miserable head cold. I therefore took the opportunity to play with my Arduino micro-controller, which I haven't really gotten a big chance to mess around with for a while.

For those who don't know, an Arduino is a very small computer, except it's designed to be hooked up to other basic electronics, i.e. LEDs and switches, instead of computer monitors and keyboards (which are actually possible). Last year I went down to Halted, and splurged on a 16x2 alphanumeric liquid crystal display for it, so I can quite easily display text on it, at the cost of 6 of the 14 I/O pins.

HD44780 based screens, like mine, have a pretty complete character set (page 17-18). On the off chance you need a few more specific characters that they don't happen to have, they have the ability for you to program 8 custom characters, simply by feeding it the 5x8 bitmap of the character. This is useful for when you want something iconic like a smiley face, but others have gotten more creative by using them to make bar graphs, etc, since you can program anything you want into it.

The idea came to me: with 8 custom characters, you could essentially make a 20x16 matrix display, which would be perfect for the Game of Life. 100 lines of C code later, I had a working Life engine. Another 60 to add extra features like checking for when it's in a steady state, and this is what I end up with:

How I store the world isn't especially elegant. I use an entire byte for each grid, where I really only need two bits for the basic engine (current state and the state for the next step). I thought about doing all the crazy bit packing needed to access each individual bit, but decided against it. Instead, I stored the current state as a 1, then as I calculated the state for the next step, stored it as a 2. Once I finished working through the whole world, divide everything by 2, and all you have left is the next steps state. That's 320 bytes, for those of you counting at home.

I then ran into the problem that, eventually, the world is going to end up being a lot of steady state blocks, or oscillators, which posed a problem. If I was only worried about it being frozen, I could just keep track to see if anything changed while calculating the next step, and set a flag, but the oscillators will change, rather uninterestingly, every step. According to Wikipedia, the oscillators can have a period of up to 30, but I figured the only ones I was really worried about were 2 and 3, since anything more than that was unlikely on such a small world, and probably pretty cool anyways. To deal with this issue, every 6 steps I save a copy of the world and compare it to the world from 6 ticks ago. Now if the only thing left is oscillators, they will end up in the same state 6 steps later, and the engine will catch it and reset the world. That is another 320 bytes, which is 8 times what I really need, and now means I'm using 640 bytes of only 1k of RAM just to store the world. Not great, but since that's all I'm doing, it's ok, right?

Calculating each step only takes a few milliseconds, so I have a 300ms delay on the end of each tick, so it could be run quite a bit faster. For those who are interested in seeing the code for it, here it is:

More Glass Etching

2009-09-04T15:30:00.001-07:00

Just like the wine glasses yesterday, I masked off a set of old fashioned glasses last night and sandblasted them this morning. I found coming up with designs for the cylindrical glasses much more difficult than for the wine glasses, due to the surface itself being much less interesting. I ended up remasking some of the glasses three or tour times before I was finally happy with it, but other than some edge leakage (ie bottom right one), I think they turned out quite good.

Etching Wine Glasses

2009-09-03T17:00:00.000-07:00

I came up with this idea while hanging out with my sister in Davis last weekend. For her 18th birthday party, we managed to find a good deal on white wine glasses, so instead of buying disposable red party cups, we bought two and a half cases of white wine glasses. Of course, we've never even come close to using anywhere near that many wine glasses simultaneously since then, so most of them have sat in storage. We came up with the idea of, instead of using wine charms, to etch a strikingly different design in each wine glass to make them easily recognizable when we have several people over for wine.

This is my first attempt at such:

I found making four different designs that were both different, yet stylistically the same very artistically challenging. Of these four, I would really only classify the last two as really being part of one matching set. I feel the top left one is too heavy handed to match the minimalistic touch of the bottom two. The top right glass is a continuous ring, and I would like to eventually pursue that as an entirely separate set of four.

How I made these designs

Making the designs was relatively simple, ignoring the fact that it requires a sandblast gun, and somehow getting sandblast media, which was an adventure all its own.
First I very carefully selected maroon duct tape from atop my pile of 35 other colors of duct tape, and masked off the areas where I wanted to detail the glasses.
Once they were masked off, I used an exacto knife to cut out the designs, and added more masking to prevent any kind of splatter damage to the rest of the glass.

Take it outside, hit the areas with my sandblast gun, peel off the tape, and wash. I have to say they turned out better than I ever hoped for. I'm currently working on a set of four plain old fashioned glasses I've had laying around in my collection for a few years, so I'll keep you updated on those.

Buying Sandblast Media

2009-09-03T11:00:00.000-07:00

Fun fact: No one has any idea what sandblast media is. I have been previously using sand, which you would think is the obvious choice, but chatting it up with a vendor at a hardware store convention, it was pointed out that sand is a rather poor media. When used, it apparently tends to crack and then you're blowing silica dust everywhere. Another one of those Bad Ideas™ in life.

One of my Sun Jars ended up broken, so I needed to reetch another jar for it. Unfortunately, when I went to pull out the cardboard box in which I store my sand, the bottom of the box decided that it was cool right where it was, and saw no need to come out to the party I was throwing for it and the other four sides of the box out in the open. Needless to say, the sand was in general agreement with the bottom of the box, but went even further and threw a party of their very own ALL over the floor. Fine. Looks like a sign from above: I should go out and finally buy real sandblast media.

In case you didn't know, sandblast media comes in several different types, such as glass beads, coal slag, aluminum oxide, or even biodegradable ones such as corn cob, as well as several different sizes, dependent on what kind of work one is planning on doing with it. Considering that I pretty much only do glass etching, I was looking for something along the order of 30 mesh glass. Of course hardware stores wouldn't have any of it. What kind of normal customer would ever dream of wanting something as eccentric as sandblast media? Me, that's whom...

I can't list them all off the top of my head, but I called several places, such as Franciscan Glass and Peninsula Building Materials, to try and find someplace that carries, or even just be able to hook me up with media. None of them had it. None of them had even heard of what I wanted. To give the guy at Peninsula credit, he at least picked up that sand might be of use to me. My father, in his infinite wisdom, next came up with Grainger. An industrial supply company with a 6 inch thick catalog. They have got to have this.

Matter of fact: they do. 26 kinds, in fact. Score. Not only do they have glass beads, they even have just crushed glass for those of us not looking to set the sandblasting scene on fire. Just a little unfortunate that they only sell it in 50 pound buckets, but when you need it, you need it. US Sieve 25-40 (which is slightly different from mesh sizes) ground glass blast media.

Victory. I call them up, and talk to a rather intelligent sounding guy who figures out which store I should be at, and points out that they only have two in inventory, and offers to put one on will call for me. What the heck? Type type type, done.

Next day, drive across town to Grainger, and ask for will call for Kenneth Finnegan.
"Sir... we don't have anything under Kenneth Finnegan... What's your company's name?"
"I don't have a company; I will called this last night."

He then went on to point out that Grainger does not sell to us lowly public, but since I seem like such a fine and upstanding guy, he'd do me the favor of taking my $40 for a freakin bucket of ground glass, this time. Me possibly getting a catalog for my collection was out. of. the. question.

Long story short, I got my sandblast media, and the message that Grainger does not want to serve me as an individual. I later found out this has to do with them keeping their wholesale status, and one of my buddies gladly gave me his card to use next time I need something.

In case you're curious what the stuff looks like, here is two pictures of my bucket once I got it home. After my first pass with the stuff, I now realize it flies much farther, and is much more noticeable, than sand. Unfortunately, this was after three hoppers worth of media, so I am currently working on strategies to reclaim the stuff to keep my entire front yard from being as sparkly.

Buying Classic Soda Locally

2009-09-01T20:30:00.000-07:00

Last week I found a youtube video about a soda shop in Los Angeles that sells something along the order of 500 different types of microbrew soda. Soda using real sugar and flavoring, that is something I've always wanted to try. Luckily, they have a website where you can mail order their soda from. Unluckily, mail ordering soda is much like mail ordering water: rather heavy, and incredibly expensive.

I've been hemming and hawing one way and the other about paying quite a bit of S&H on some rather expensive soda to begin with. I had almost talked myself into it, when I happened to be wandering around a BevMo this weekend. Beverages and More is a chain of stores which sell almost nothing more than drinks, and mostly alcoholic drinks at that. I was sharing in the experience that was driving to BevMo and buying drinks by those of the prim and proper age to be doing as such. This left me in the very axillary position of completely and utterly useless, so I had some time to wander the store.
There it was. Bubble Up. The very soda, above any other soda I saw at Soda Pop Stop, that I knew I had to have. Cane sugar, real lemons, real limes. The holy grail of lemon lime soda. And it was right there. In my hand. I had to have it. There was additional flavors bought. An underwhelming Strawberry and Grape, as well as a quite good Peach. None of them quite compared with this though, so I'm quite content with my current supply of snobby soda.

So be advised, if you're a fan of, or want to try, good soda made with real ingredients, BevMo has one short aisle of the stuff, which might hold you over until the next time you happen to be in LA.

My First 24 Hours of Texting

2009-08-28T21:00:00.000-07:00

I finally broke down yesterday and decided that it was worth $10 a month for me to get and send text messages. If it was just up to me, I would have probably lived without them, but unfortunately too many people I know assume them to be guaranteed delivery, so when their texts to me just disappear into the ether, they assume I just ignored it...

So in the last 24 hours, I have sent or received 70 text messages. Luckily most of those were to others on Verizon (ie my sister or my best friend), so I'm not counted against my 500/month for those. Most of those were sent using t9word, which I found to be an interesting experience. Sure I had used it before to enter short notes to myself, but never anywhere near thee extent I've used it in the last 24 hours. As I got more experience, it very slowly stopped being so much about hitting the number with the correct letter on it, and more about hitting the right combos for the words I wanted to type. Much the same as can be said about morse code: You can't think of it as dots and dashes. You have to start listening to it and just be able to hear that - .... . means "the" and - .... .- -. -.- ... means "thanks." In this case, it just happens to be only encoding, and not both directions.

It goes to show that, if you spend some time learning something every day, you can pick it up rather quickly. Now I just need to start working on my morse code as such...

Personal Best for Origami Ball

2009-08-21T11:00:00.000-07:00

I have been folding these balls ever since 6th grade when my teacher had one on her desk. I was just obsessed with it, and she made a deal that for every week I turned in all my homework, she'd teach me the next step to making it.

The one she taught me how to build used 30 squares of paper. Each square is folded into a parallelogram, then woven together. The centers of each parallelogram make the edge between two of the pyramids on the surface of the sphere. The 30 ball was made by grouping the triangular pyramids in groups of 5, like the group in the front of the first picture. I soon discovered that you could make a smaller ball using groups of 4, which only used 12 parallelograms. Going in the other direction, I soon found that groups of 6 would make an infinite sheet (consider the pyramids as just equilateral triangles, and you can see why they'd lay flat).

This left me with a challenge: How do I make a sphere larger than the 30, when 6 groups don't make a sphere at all? I figured that a heterogeneous lattice would do it, but couldn't quite visualize what the layout would be.

Wikipedia to the rescue! Buckminsterfullerene (C₆₀) is perfect to model my sphere after. Treat each Carbon atom as one of the equilateral triangles, and each bond as the long edge between each pair of triangles, and the whole design drops out. The fact that I was able to realize this somewhere in the order of 8th-9th grade, is, in hindsight, pretty impressive.

Wanting to have a general idea of what I was getting myself into, I wanted to know how many of these parallelograms I needed to fold. This turned out to be a fairly easy calculation. Each triangle is made from three interlocking parallelograms, and each parallelogram is part of two triangles. Since I'm treating each triangle as a Carbon atom in the fullerene template, I know I need 60 triangles. 60 triangles * 3 parallelograms per triangle / 2 triangles per parallelogram = 90 parallelograms. Quite a project.

Lucky for me, I was generally unemployed this summer, so time was my middle name. I woke up at the crack of noon one day, and decided, "self, today is the day that this is actually going to happen." A paper cutter, 24 sheets of paper, and 6 straight hours of folding later, I sat down to dinner being the proud owner of a sphere admirably larger than my last.

In case we're unclear, by "larger," I really mean "more awesome"

UPDATE: Before I finally disassembled it, I figured I should take a picture of this latest accomplishment next to its predecessors to give you a better idea of what kind of progress has been made. Pictures below is the Buckyball on top, with the 4 cluster on the left and 5 cluster on the right.

I Have a Pen Problem

2009-08-20T15:30:00.001-07:00

I'm ready to admit it; I have a pen problem. Fry's had a ridiculous sale this week: an 8 pack of pens for 15 cents. 15 freakin cents! So like every reasonable human being, I promptly drove to Fry's, Jeff Glass in toe, and bought 5 of them. Unfortunately, my wonderful mother pointed out that she needed more pens for her desk, so being the reasonable son I am, I sold two packs to her for 30 cents.

At this point, I was faced with a dilemma. I only had 3 packs of pens, which works out to be 24, which is good, but not nearly as awesome as 5 packs of pens. Normally, that would be that, but I happened to be in that side of town again (literally drove right by Fry's), so the obvious answer was to go in and buy another 5 packs.

I have 64 pens, and I spent $1.34 to get them. My life is awesome.

Portable 2m Antenna

2009-07-28T13:00:00.000-07:00

I had some free time this week (like every other week this summer - thank you unemployment), and finally put my roll-up J pole antenna together. I cut and made the actual antenna last year (plans for 300 ohm TV line J-pole), but lacking any kind of system to keep it organized and a way to get it up (a common problem for hams), I never took it out for portable ops.

There isn't much more to it than what you see. Cardboard with two slits to keep the string orderly. Pack of washers to heave over the tree. Biggest binder clip I could find to keep the coax together.

I originally tried using fishing line and a hdd magnet instead of string, with the though that I'd attach it to gutters or hand rails, but fun fact: hdd magnets are stronger than fishing line... I attached the string by poking a hole just big enough to get it through, and tying a stopper knot much like a barrel knot (my knot reference is in Davis. Living in two places is the pits).

Sun Jars

2009-07-28T01:00:00.000-07:00

I know. Way to go with the fad and do what everyone else on the internets are doing. I'm a tool, I know. Sun jars are little more than the innards of solar lawn lamps hacked into frosted jars to sit on your patio. Lifehacker posted a step by step guide, and for $8 a piece, it was hard to disagree that they'd look pretty sweet on my window sill or patio. The lamps are $5 at Lowes, and I got the jars for $3 at Cost Plus. The jars were the only size Cost Plus had, and according to the sheet the smallest size, marked "1/2L." I'd say smaller is definitely better for the jars; they're totally cute.

The one thing I did change from their guide was in the method of frosting the glass. They have you buy a can of glass frosting (like for Christmas), and spray it on, but I just so happen to have a mother-loving sandblaster, so I unleashed a pneumatic can of awesome instead. Getting an even coat was a little tedious, but it's a very stable frosting, so the effort was worth it. Other options would be to acid etch it, or fill the jar with marbles, broken glass, etc.

I also happen to have access to theater gels, so I've been debating whether to change the colors, but I've been *very* happy with white. My family loves them, and we're almost temped to just put larger rechargeable batteries in them, because we enjoy them inside in the dinning room.

North American QSO Party - RTTY

2009-07-19T00:00:00.000-07:00

Phil W6TQG invited me to come to his shack this weekend to operate the NAQP RTTY contest as a 2 radio, multi-op team. The two of us had a great time working the full 12 hours from 11am to 11pm side by side.

From the kick-off until about dinner, we used the HF yagi and the 10-15-20 triplexer. Phil had me operate 20m, since he knew that'd be where the action was, and he was right. He spent the afternoon moving around watching for openings on 10, 15, and 40m. I was working stations hot and heazy, both CQing (calling for contacts) and hunt and pecking (searching around for others calling), until 20m shut down around 4:30-5pm. For times, I was able to maintain a rate of at least a contact a minute.

Around dinner time, 40 and 80m opened up, so Phil took 40m and I 80m for the rest of the night. Unfortunately, Phil's 80m antenna isn't great, so I was only working CA stations until quite late in the evening, and only managed to collect 7 multipliers total for the band. Luckily, I was able to get quite a few local contacts, so it wasn't a total bust.

In case you don't know, each multipler means we worked a station in a different state or provence. You get additional mults for each band, so working the same station on each band is to your advantage. We worked quite a few different multipliers from Canada, and I worked one Mexico station. I also managed to work a station from Slovenia (East of Italy) on 20m, which was REALLY cool. I tried to work him again with my call sign (W6KWF), instead of Phil's, but he slipped into the noise again (about the fourth time since I started tailing him), and never came back. I also got very close to working a Spain station, but he slipped away as well.

Score:
Band - QSO count - Multiplier count
80m - 46 - 7
40m - 114 - 35
20m - 155 - 45
15m - 23 - 10
10m - 3 - 1
Total - 341 - 98

Phil's score from February ~ 25,047
Total score = 341 x 98 = 33,418

Field Day 2009

2009-07-14T21:30:00.000-07:00

I know I'm about a week and a half late on this, but better late than never. Every year, the last weekend of June is the Amateur Radio Field Day. This is a nation wide event where clubs and individuals go out and try to inform the public about field day, as well as make as many contacts with other participating stations, for points. Last year's Field Day happened to be just two weeks after I got my license, so it was a very informational event for me personally. I spent most of last year hanging out with the West Valley Amateur Radio Association, since they're very serious about this event and had 8 radios running all weekend on battery power (point bonus). Being a year deeper into the hobby this year, I was involved with the WVARA station from setup Friday until tear-down Sunday afternoon, and had a really good time doing it as well.

Friday
Radio wise, Friday wasn't anything too exciting. As per the rules, starting at 11am local time, we started setting up the camp on Mora hill, which is a great East sloping hill overlooking the whole South Bay. This involved pitching tents for each station, as well as stringing up most of the antennas.

We had two HF Yagis doing most of the heavy lifting for our station. The experiment this year was that one of the club members had built a triplexer that allowed three stations on 10m, 15m, and 20m to all share one antenna without interfering with eachother. This meant that we had 6 stations transmitting and receiving on only two antennas, which made the antenna layout for the camp much easier.

Saturday
11am Saturday morning rolls around, and it's out of the starting gates for Field Day 2009. Jeff Glass, KG6SGX, and I were signed up for working graveyard on the digital station, so I didn't officially have anything to do until after dinner, but couldn't resist showing up on time anyways. After lunch, one of the SSB (Single Side Band, aka Voice) ops wanted to take a break, so I got to spend an hour and a half on 15m.

Working 15m in the afternoon was really interesting, because I had dnever experienced band openings before. HF propogation will increase and decrease, in somewhat unpredicatable ways throughout the day. When I first started, the only other stations I was hearing were all from the Santa Clara Valley, so the band was closed, and we weren't getting very far. 45 minutes later, the noise on the band seemed to change in tone, and after a few minutes, the band opened right up. Where before I was only hearing a dozen stations scattered through the band, I was now hearing people three stations deep all the way across the band. I started hunting for one that stood a chance of hearing me on low power (5 Watts), but three minutes later, before I had gotten a chance to work anyone, the band closed up again and was as dead as when I started. I kept grinding, and managed to work a few more SCV stations, before the noise floor started changing again. I could tell the band was about to open up again; I was starting to hear farther California stations again, and they were getting stronger, but would you believe that another member of the club showed up just then with his kids and wanted to get them on the air? Rats. Good for those kids; they seemed to have a good time logging contacts an order of magnitude faster than I did.

After that, I chilled around camp until around dinner, when Jeff showed up, and the two of us gave the 20m voice op a break for a few hours. We had a pretty good national spread, and had pretty good success in the pile-ups for the bigger stations. For a while we were keeping a good rate of a contact every 5 minutes. Once the sun when down, we were able to lauch our balloon-lifted loops for 40m and 80m, so Jeff and I switched over to voice on 40m. Unfortunately, it seemed that our loop antenna was almost *too* good. We were hearing tons of stations that just couldn't hear our 5W back. Time after time we could hear stations calling for contacts, but they'd not hear us, and just keep on calling.

Sunday
Around midnight, Phil, who was in charge of the digital station, briefed me on everything I needed to know while working graveyard, then he went home to get some sleep. Working Digital is an interesting experience. You plug your radio into the sound card on your laptop, and then software on your computer encodes and decodes text into sound that can be transmitted over the air. It's kind of a very slow version of the dialup modem.

Jeff crashed almost right away, so I sat in almost complete silence, just me, a laptop, and a radio. I was doing fairly well making contacts until about 2am. At one point, when I had already worked most of the stations I was hearing, I happened upon a guy a few hundred km north of Tokyo, Japan calling CQ, so I had a nice keyboard to keyboard chat with him until 20m shutdown on me, and that was that. I kept calling and searching until 4:30am, but never got more than a few more contacts for the rest of the night. At that point, I crashed, and Jeff woke up not much later to take over for the rest of the night. All in all, we managed to keep the digital up with only about half an hour of dead time for the whole 24 hours, which is pretty good.

Around breakfast time, other digital ops started showing up, and we all chewed the fat until 11am, when the contest officially closed. I happened to be in the seat as 11am rolled around, and to my luck, a guy answered my call with about 15 seconds left on the clock, so I got to go into overtime finishing the exchange with him.

Tear-down took another few hours, then I dragged myself down the hill to where I parked to drive home and take a well earned nap in a soft bed with no bugs flying around me. Over all, it was a great weekend experience, and I'm looking forward to working a few more multi-op contests this summer with some of the guys from the club.

Update: The final QSO count was: 889 CW, 149 Digital and 415 Phone, for a total of 1453 QSOs and 12,455 points. In addition, we had 1950 bonus points, bringing the total score to 14,405, beating the 9,190 score we set in 2006. Last years score was 11,650 in 8A.

Linux on Two Imacs

2009-06-25T16:00:00.000-07:00

My sister, Kristina, has a summer job teaching at a local daycare. Her classroom had two imacs in it that still ran OS 9, but unfortunately, one of the kids had set passwords on them, then left or forgotten it, so there was no way to use them any more. All Kristina wanted was something with a word processor, and maybe some games. Sounds like a perfect fit for Linux if I've ever heard one.

Hardware:
So hardware wise, what have we got to work with? One graphite and one blue 3G Imac, which had 10 / 13 GB hard drives, and 128 / 192 MB RAM. That is a little tight, but still definitely useful if you're careful about how you set it up. Once running, I was able to browse reddit and check my email on them no problem.

Software:
Of course, the CD drives didn't work, so I got more practice netboot installing PPC Ubuntu. One of them wouldn't get the boot filename from my DHCP server, so I had to pass that to it in openfirmware (boot enet:0,yaboot instead of boot enet:0). I partitioned the systems 5GB XFS for root, and the rest for home, also XFS. I used XFS because, like most PPC hardware, the clock batteries are dead in these systems, so when the power dies and the clocks reset to 1903, I don't want the FS to sit there and fsck because it was last mounted in the future. Considering how lightly these systems are going to be used, it doesn't really matter how fast the file system actually performs, as much as how quickly it boots when the kid sits down. Didn't feel fancy enough to setup NFS between them, though in a more serious installation, that could be an option to have saved files available on both.

128 MB of RAM is too little to run GNOME, so I only installed a command line system and built a GUI from the ground up. For some reason, the Imacs were only displaying 16 colors, so slim looked awful, and auto-login wasn't working anyways, so I switched slim out for xdm, which looks fine (grey FTW). This means that the students have to type in the username and password (both creatively set to student), but that's not a big deal. I created a teacher account during the install process, then adduser'ed the student account so it wouldn't be a sudoer, and now will be even harder to do any real damage with (just being Unix based by itself helps make it damage resistant, they'd have to know what to type in!).

On top of xdm, I installed xfce4. I looked at using some of the ridiculously light window managers, like fluxbox, etc, but felt that they were just a little too foreign for children in a classroom. I've also never liked Xubuntu; it always seems like it tries to do everything Ubuntu can, so it's not *that* much lighter than Ubuntu proper. I figure that if I can run Xubuntu on a system, I may as well just go with Ubuntu, be loads more comfortable with the same wm I use on everything else, and deal with a little more slowness. Xubuntu would also be rather overkill for what I need, so xfce4 proper it is.

At this point, I had an entirely working GUI, with absolutely no programs in it. Beyond some simple utilities like a calculator and a picture viewer, I installed three major programs. Abiword, along with all the plugins (why not?) as a functional, yet light, word processor. For games, I installed gnome-games, which seemed to work surprisingly well on 400MHz systems, and here is the real gold mine, sgt-puzzles. They lack some polish, and it's not always entirely clear what you're meant to do, but it's a huge number of small, quick puzzle games, perfect for a classroom.

The whole setup took about two to three days, and after setting them back up, the students have been using them all week with no problems I've heard about. One boy told my sister he was very happy with the new computers, because they old ones only had one game on them, but now they have a million! I appreciated that.

Here is a final list of everything I installed on top of a cli system.

xdm - desktop manager / login screen
xfce4 - window manager. I enjoy the mouse icon as well.
gnome-icon-theme - seemed some icons were missing from xfce4 by itself
firefox - Websites look really bad in 16 color, but if these ever happen to be plugged into a network, they would be very usable browsing machines.
ristretto - picture viewer
mousepad - simple text editor
galculator - basic calculator program
gnome-games
sgt-puzzles
abiword abiword-help abiword-plugins - word processor
gnumeric - spreadsheet program, in case one is ever needed

Anything else you think would be perfect to have on old slow machines sitting in a classroom? Please write in the comments.

San Jose Bike Party

2009-06-25T15:00:00.000-07:00

Kristina and I got invited to the San Jose Bike Party last Friday evening. It's this crazy event where literally 1,500 bikers met in a parking lot, then rode 17 miles across town, taking the road by shear numbers. We rode on her tandem, which worked great until it lost a spacer a mile from the end, so we had to walk it the rest of the way.

The experience was generally positive, but there was some funkiness that has started creeping into the community. People were running red lights, then running from the police when they get lit up for it. There were bystanders throwing rocks and eggs at us, which was super unfortunate, but considering how big this event is, it'd be incredible if this type thing didn't happen. We had a good time.

Verizon Wireless Network Extender

2009-06-17T11:00:00.000-07:00

I been home from Davis for almost two days now, and it's probably been the busiest two days I can think of. My dad has made listing projects he wants me to work on almost an art form. Lucky for you, that means I'm going to actually have some real content now.

Most exciting project so far is this black router-like device from Verizon. It's called a Femtocell, and it is pretty much a miniature cell phone tower that you plug into your internet connection, and promptly have five bars throughout your entire house. Granted, it cost $270, which is a little outrageous considering that we are now using OUR electricity, and OUR internet connection, to extent Verizon's network, because they couldn't get their act together and get decent coverage (read: any coverage at all) to our house. At the same time though, unlike many other companies, they aren't going to charge us $10 a month to use our power and our internet to help make their network more appealing, to us, so we would want to give them more of our money, which makes me SICK.

Anyways, onto this specific product. In a word, it works. Getting it working was litterally a 20 minute excercise in plugging in cables and waiting for the GPS to pick up.

To operate, it needs three things: Power, internet, and GPS coverage. The GPS is for the E911 service so when someone is laying in your driveway, and wasn't smart enough to program the local 7 digit emergncy number into their Verizon cell phone, the police will still know where they are, which is very clever. Unfortunately, when the instructions say that you need to put this thing near a window to get GPS service, they're really not being that conservative. It really doesn't work anywhere else. Except, that they're also clever enough to include ~25 feet of coax to allow you to run the GPS antenna (which pops out of the device and who's shape is reminiscent of a USB dongle) out to aa window, so I currently have it running in the dead center of my house with all LEDs blue.

The one oddity about it is the bandwidth usage. In different places in the documentation it says it needs 300kbps (37.5kBps), or 40kbps (5kBps). The 300 number caused me some concern, since our internet definitely doesn't get 300kbps up, so if it meant 300 up and down, we were screwed. Luckily, I haven't seen anything even close to 300kbps in either direction, so I have no idea where that number is coming from. The femtocell has 3 standard channels + 1 E911 channel, and from playing with it and watching my router, a single phone call looks to take 6-7kBps in bother directions. Standby bandwidth usage looks to be a 10kB download every 60 seconds, and maybe 3kB up scattered throughout the minute. Pretty much negliable.

It definitely suffers from heavy bandwidth usage, such as bittorrent. I haven't gotten around to playing with the QoS settings on our router yet, but as would be expected, bulk traffic and real time traffic just don't mix, end of story.

Would I say that this thing is worth the $270 we spent on it? Probably not. Is it worth something remotely close to $270? Definitely! I can sit anywhere in my house and make and receive phone calls, crystall clear (though possible with slightly more lag? Possible just me looking for it). Does it mean our neighboors are freeloading off our femtocell? Possible. I was picked up on it instead of the towers anywhere in our house. I would no be surprised if our immediate neighboors might pick up on it if they happen to be Verizon, but luckily we can set it to give our numbers priority. We still need to do some more range testing for it.

UPDATE: After some experimenting, it looks like cells would only *connect* to it from the near half of only one of our neighbors properties. The range of the device was somewhat farther than that, but that was only when the call started closer and then moved away. Note that any call started on a tower will never transfer to the femtocell, possible to prevent passer-bys from randomly connecting to it, only to go out of range again in seconds.

Link Dump

2009-06-01T08:00:00.000-07:00

Interesting links from the last month:
Father takes three children and three clocks on vacation. Of course, they were Cesium clocks, so at the end of the weekend, he was able to test his calculations for the time dilation of being on the top of a mountain for 40 hours. They gained 23ns for being farther out of the Earth's gravity well.
Endurance Hunting. The evolutionary advantage of sweat glands never made sense until I read an article about this. Wildlife may be able to run faster than humans, but we can chase them to exhaustion.
Epic prank video.
Apple keeps screwing itself with this iPhone market.
Sleeping pigs.
Star what?
Vaseline on a birdfeeder.
Interesting article on how not to baby your children.

Water Drop Photography

2009-05-28T17:30:00.000-07:00

Finally got around to really digging into the custom firmware on my new camera this week. I took these pictures with a Canon SD1000, which is a small point and shoot camera (I don't know why it's so expensive now, even the newer model is only $199). What's cool about the Canon Powershot series is that there is a project, CHDK, which replaces the firmware on the camera with their own, which allows the camera to do anything the hardware is possible of, not just what Canon lets you do.

I took these in my sink in macro mode with the shutter set at 1/40,000 through the alt menu. They're pretty standard for first projects with CHDK, so now I need to start digging into the rest of the features. This thing even has a programming language so you can write scripts to do whatever you want.

Bought a New to Me Bike

2009-05-09T23:30:00.000-07:00

Considering that I am spending at least the next two fun-filled years of my life in UC Flatlands, I figured now would be a good time to reinvest in my primary mode of transportation and buy myself a new bike. This was mostly inspired by a weekend trip to Santa Cruz to hang out with my sister, when I got to borrow her boyfriend's bike. I had forgotten how nice it was to ride a relatively new bike after something like 7 years on mine. The fact that I have put little to no maintenance into mine unless something catistrophically failed made the difference all the more pronounced (My crank has started making a rather concerning grinding noise this quarter...).

Luck for me, that very bike happened to be for sale, so I am now the proud owner of a new-to-me, 9 month old bike. I could post all kinds of pictures of it for your mild enjoyment, but I think this is an instance where I can say more with less:
That's right, it's got a mother-loving bell.

Egg Salad

2009-05-07T11:00:00.000-07:00

I enjoy a good egg salad, but I got a little tired of boiling two or three eggs at a time, so I started boiling larger batches of eggs and just peeling them as needed. This of course left me with the dilemma: How do I mark hard boiled eggs so my roommate doesn't try to make a cake with it? I think the answer was obvious: