Akom's Tech Ruminations

My old motherboard finally died, so I managed to free up another one and threw it in. This is one of my very few windows machines, dual boot Win2K/XP. Neither one worked with the new motherboard - 2K gave me a very nice bluescreen with the infamouse Stop 0x0000007B error, while XP simply quietly rebooted.

The old board was the wonderful (back in 2001) Gigabyte 7VRXP (1.1) sporting an Athlon XP-1800+. The "new" board is a NVidia based A7N8X-VM, complete with an Athlon XP-2000+.
I managed to downgrade my server to an Intel Atom low power setup (see separate post), so this one was available, moreover - it has n AGP 8X slot and the old board - only 4x. Yes I know this is ancient hardware, but I have no interest in spending hundreds on all new hardware when all I want is something to run Nero and Realflight. (And occasionally, Blackberry JDE).

Anyway,

Continue reading "Old Hard Drive, New Motherboard and the Windows Stop 0x0000007B error "

I decided to downscale my asterisk server (currently Athlon XP2000) to something that's not quite as power hungry. The server barely does anything most of the time, but consumes just over 100 watts.

The Atom 230 on the D945GCLF

$70 later I was staring at this very cute little green square, complete with a chipset fat/heatsink and a very naked CPU (needs no cooling at 5 watts). It looks hilarious in my small tower case, hides entirely behind the vertical ATX power supply (I realize I can run this off a Pico PSU)

Power improvement? (Same case, power supply, hard drive) A7N8X-VM with Athlon XP 2000+ : about 100-110watts at idle.
D945GCLF with Atom 230: About 45 watts at idle. (At this rate, the power savings will pay for my expenses in 10 months, roughly - including the $30 for the 2GB DDR2 RAM)

The following is a small list of issues and solutions I've come across while migrating my Gentoo server over to this thing.

Continue reading "Gentoo Linux on D945GCLF with Atom 230"

I finally have a fully charged battery so I'm off to have a nice long flight. Or so I thought.

So there was some wind this morning - not too much, I figured - I can handle this, I've flown with wind in the simulator. Went out to a different field today - more open, less wind cover. Took off from a sandy path, plane rolled easily and I pointed it into the wind for takeoff. It took off before I even asked it to, and the fun began

Continue reading "Exceed Pitts S2A third flight (wind and broken rudder)"

As the CTO of Namaste Holistics and Nutrition 4 Entrepreneurs (see links in nav above), I was dealing with a progressively more dissatisfied CEO, and with good reason.

She is dealing with an overcomplicated email/calendaring/contacts setup that's somewhat... imperfect.

The following is the setup and what was done to improve it.

Continue reading "Syncing, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Blackberry, Outlook, etc"

The broken wing was dry this morning (see previous post) and the wind was almost nonexistent, despite the hurricane that went through overnight.

I'm off to fly! This time around I moved the servo pulls to the second hole, making the controls slightly more sensitive (I have been getting better with the simulator, and the last flight it felt a little unresponsive). I also set the elevator to fully horizontal position - I had it pointed down slightly last time, also out of caution, but this morning it didn't even want to take off this way.

It flies!

Continue reading "Exceed Pitts S2A second flight"

First flight! Yay! I guess I consider myself good enough after playing with the simulator for a while.

After a little trimming (adjusting the servo pulls with the tiny allen wrench they supply) I got on my runway (a paved road on a park slope) and (with some trepidation) pushed the throttle forward. It took off, with some effort, and flew!

I think it flew with what others have described as a tail-heavy tendency - it seemed like I was always pulling too hard on the elevator - or maybe I was, in the turns, I'm not sure. In any case, all I had to do was push the nose down every so often and it would avoid stalls... which it survived just fine anyway, just taking a small dive and recovering. I circled the area for about 2 minutes, and then just as the plane was getting away from me to the point of "a bit too far", it suddenly disobeyed...

Continue reading "Exceed Pitts S2A first flight (and crash)"

I got this thing for our Conversion-Conversion Van. I wanted it to do everything for me. (Also take a look at our Wanna-B-RV(ers) blog entry on this)

The innovatek box

Overall I can't say that I'd recommend this unit, but for some specific applications (such as ours) it seemed to work out.

The breakdown:

Continue reading "My Review of the Innovatek 362 DTM Head unit with DVD,TV,MP3,Rear View Camera"

I have to admit, I've never owned a real R/C plane before, so the following may be painfully obvious to someone who has. When I say real I mean hobby grade. OK I admit it, I had a Hirobo Shuttle nitro heli for a while, but I crashed that so many times that I'd rather not go there. What I learned in the process though is - simulator software is not optional. So this time around I borrowed a friends' copy of Realflight G4 with the controller. I am steadily getting better.

Anyway, so I bought the RTF version, which, I have to keep reminding myself, stands for Ready-To-Fly. Raidentech.com is one of the few places that sold it at the time and I found a free shipping code (CJFREESHIPPING) on somone else's blog. It eventually arrived, in a very large box (OK so I should have expected that, the plane has a 3 foot wingspan). On to assembly...

Continue reading "Assembling the Sapac Exceed Pitts S2A 4ch R/C plane (and some improvements)"