Orion

Saw Orion for the first time this season.  It’s my “ski constellation” because it’s most easily seen during the winter months. 

Around 11pm I went out to check the cloud cover and visibility in anticipation of the Leonid meteor shower.  Leo rises in the east (actually, everything rises in the east) and while looking that way I spotted my old friend Orion.

Most years I spot it first during early October, but this year it’s halfway through November before I saw it.  Not sure why this year was so late and am hoping it’s not because I spend less time looking at the stars – but I think it is.

Got up at 3am to go looking for Leonids.  Sky was perfectly clear and I stood there tired and cold for about 5min and spotted 2 Leonids.  I told the kids about it in the morning, and they asked why I didn’t wake them up – and I reminded them that there we’re only 2 in 5 min and that if it was more I would have got everyone up.

My daughter asked me what I wished for – and I admitted I totally forgot.  That gave me the idea that the next time there’s a meteor shower to wake them up for, I’ll remind them of all the wishes they get to make – which is a part of a meteor shower I never thought about until now.

Cat 5 dirty little secret

I just got a 2nd access point working at home.  It’s about 50ft away from the existing access point.  I had this working before, but replaced the main router (replaced dLink with Belkin) and it stopped working. 

I was able to rule the problem down to a cable running about 20ft from my main router to the 2nd router. 

• If I plugged the 2nd router into a 4ft patch cable it worked fine.
• If I plugged the 2nd router into the 20ft cable it didn’t work at all – no lights on either router, no ping response, nothing
• If I put a continuity tester on the 20ft cable it showed all 8 wires were connected in the right order.

So – Short cable worked fine – long cable didn’t work at all.

After much research and a call to Belkin (who said 15ft is the max cable length) I solved the problem.  It boils down to what I consider a dirty little secret of network cabling:

When creating a cat5 cable you must wire the ends such that twisted pairs end on specific pins.  It is not enough to just get the two ends wired the same. Pins 1&2 must be a twisted pair and pins 3&6 must be a twisted pair.

Here’s the dirty part:

Those are the only 4 pins you need to hook up.

What it means is you wire both ends something like this

Pin1: Orange Wire

Pin2: Orange & White striped Wire

Pin3: Green Wire

Pin6: Green & White striped Wire

And you leave the rest empty.

More info on 1000bast T cables (which need all at this link.

I know I have asked network guys and cable pulling guys specifically if there were any tricks to wiring the plugs, because I suspected something like this for a long time – and they all refused to tell me.  I vaguely remember one or two of them having an evil grin when they told me this.  Job security?  Maybe.  It was hard to learn, it should be hard for you to learn kinda thing?  More likely.

Light bulb life span

We moved a year ago and in that time I think I’ve had to replace about 4 light bulbs in the new house.  In the old house I was replacing what seemed like 2 or 3 a month.  I’m not sure if it’s a property of the wiring, or some quality of service from the electric company. 

I don’t think I’ve had to replace a single CFL bulb in either house.

Airport Express doesn’t like 802.11n

Bought a new router (net connection was dropping for a second a few times a day) and replaced it with a Belkin N Wireless Router.  All hard wired computers were back online pretty quick.

The Airport Express that I use to play music in the office did NOT connect though.  When I tried to configure it I would get this:

An error occured while trying to access the Apple wireless device.  Make sure your network connection is valid and try again.  Error 10057

After trying MANY things I flipped my router from “802.11b & 802.11g & 802.11n” to “802.11g” the Airport Express now works.  I don’t know what this does to my range/speed for devices that are able to talk 802.11n.

The bigger problem is the long network cable that no longer works… zero changes to that end of things but connecting a computer directly to the other end fails to work.  Little choice but replacing the entire cable, about 20ft long… through the basement… through a hub.

I hate networking – but not as much as I hate printers.

Tell me more…

The basic idea: A method of presenting information such that you get as much detail as you need based on how long you read/view the info.

Example one: The Red Sox beat the Orioles last night… the key piece of info is who won.  So one of the smallest versions of this story could be “Red Sox Win.”  Most people will want more – like the score, maybe they didn’t know who they were playing or where… so another version is the obvious “Boston Beats Baltimore 3-1 at Fenway.”

For purely academic discussion: If the news query was “How did the Red Sox do last night?”  The answer could be boiled down to a single bit.  1= They Won, 0 = They Lost. If all I had time for was a single bit – this would be a great piece of information.

Continuing the academic discussion: What if I had time for 2 bits?  Maybe there’s nothing useful in a 2nd bit… or maybe it could be defined as “At home?”  So last nights story in two bits is 11, which translates to “They Won, and they played at home.”

The score and opponent are usually viewed as important pieces, so we have to define how many bits for this info, and we eventually get to a “11111101″ = which breaks down to “They won, at home, 3 to 1 against the 4th team in a list of MLB eastern league teams.  An algorithm could be designed to fit useful info into as few bits as possible.

Back to the big idea – currently we have a very established system of “Head Line” and “Story.”  I’m sure there’s a commonly accepted maximum length for the Head Line – maybe 100 characters, and the Story tends to range from a front page “couple paragraphs” to magazine styled “as much as can be read in a typical bathroom session.”

My idea is to enable an author to write a story such that it can be consumed in almost any size.  The Sports story is easy to define – but where this really hits the fan is international political stories where the audience has a questionable amount of previous knowledge.  Someone very up on their geopolitical events could get a short version, but someone without this background could consume more bits to deepen their understanding.

Weather is another topic that could probably be broken down to the single bit response to “Will it be nice out tomorrow?” to the more complex, “What temperature will it be during school hours?”

Sliding Doors

Our house has at least 10 sliding doors.  I think 2 of them work like they are supposed to.  Last night the sliding door on the shower decided to go off track and I can’t get it back on.  Found out the sliding door in the bedroom is letting mosquitos in.  I’m looking for something to replace all the sliding screen doors, as almost every one I’ve owned in my life has been problematic.

Obama get’s same map

I installed my map in my office back in September, and just read a blog post detailing NatGeo giving the same map to the President as a gift.  Although his is actually a map cabinet that holds lots of maps.  Kinda kewl to have pix of my office and the oval office in the same blog.

iPhone OS3 Upgrade breaks eReader Bookshelf

After upgrading to v3.0 of the iPhone operating system the eReader Pro application can no longer switch what book your reading.  A big problem.  The reader still worked, but if you finished a book (as I did last night) and tried to open another one you’re kinda just lost… it didn’t crash, it just didn’t go to the bookshelf.

To the developer’s credit their company, Fictionwise responded to an email I sent complaining with this:

We apologize for the trouble. A fix is currently in progress. We do not have a definite time for when it will be made available at this time. But it should be soon.

The most surprising thing about the response is that I got it about 5min after sending the complaint. Expected response from this kind of thing is days, not minutes.

I found reports of this problem in a couple places, but only buried in the iTune store application reviews did I find the work around: Delete eReader Pro and re-Install it.  This gives you a chance to open a new book – but has the side effect of deleting all the books you’ve downloaded as well as resetting your application preferences.

Had I got this from fictionwise I would have been much happier.  Ideally I would have liked to find a great big, top of the page kinda support link on their help pages detailing the problem and the work around.

Chinese Curse

Even though there’s no official link to anything from China, I like the Chinese Curse – it gives you a lot to think about:

• May you live in interesting times
• May you come to the attention of those in authority
• May you find what you are looking for

Disassembly Inspired

I’ve been encouraging the boy to understand how things work – and decided a fun way to do that would be to take things apart, after all that’s what I did at his age.  So we headed to the Flea at MIT on a hunch they might have some fun stuff to take apart.

Turns out it was the perfect place to find exactly what I had in mind.  The place is a geeks dream come true.  So much old technology I didn’t know where to start.  I was tempted to buy an old oscilloscope, as their were at least a hundred of them in different stalls. 

I ended up finding a reel-to-reel tape recorder a guy was selling for $50.  I started talking him down on price and asked, “Does it still work?”

He replied, “Perfectly.”

I told him the plan was for me and my son to take it apart, and that I didn’t want to ruin something that still worked well.  He agreed and told me to take the reel-to-reel recorder sitting next to it for free.  It weighed 30pounds easy and I had to carry it all over the place.

Nick really enjoyed it – although maybe next time I’ll get something that we can see working first and maybe keep plugged in (low volt DC something) to watch it work.

Anna was along for the whole ride – and I had a screw driver ready for her.  Instead she played repoter with the stuffed weasel beanie baby she got at the Flea at MIT.

They really don’t make things like this any more – hardly any plastic.

The kewlest part of this device in my mind was that it had vacuum tubes.  I was tempted to try to get the amplifier part of the thing working and maybe build a small guitar amp or something… but my ambition escaped me.

Here’s a pretty kewl shot with the tubes visible:

We got it apart as much as we good – with a ton of screws and bolts lying around.  The carcase sat on the table for a week or so – hard to dispose of that much metal.

 

All in all the project was a complete success.  Quality dad-kids time and maybe a little education.