Corina

 I can feel the strength coming back to my brain as I get into blogging again. The literary muscles are a tad sore but it feels good to be back and writing again. As I've explained in an earlier post, I got back in to the blog after making my brain "flabby" by using Facebook as shortcut to getting validation through the "like" button. On a related note, I've mothballed my other blogs, because it just seems to be a lot more work having more than one blog and even more disorienting trying to decide what posts should go with which blogs. So from this point forward until I have a very good reason to do otherwise, this blog is going to catch everything - whether it be my travels, about the development of my mad luthier skills (should that be with a "z" as in skillz?), some electronics project I'm working on, or just a random post that may or may not involve something to do with robots.

You're all old enough to do a search so I'll leave it to you to sort things out.

Who is Corina?

A guitar. Corina is my first "real" guitar. Now, I have built a functional guitar out of a 2 x 4 block of wood that I mounted a telecaster bridge and pickup to the top. If there's been one thing I've learned from all the other things I've built over the years its that if you're trying to build something for the first time, make a prototype. Besides being useful for design considerations and a proof of concept, prototypes provide a very unique and invaluable function. They allow mistakes to be made. I made a lot of mistakes with the 2 x 4and each one was an unforgettable lesson. I made routing mistakes, I made wiring mistakes, I made alignment mistakes, I made mistakes with the decals, the finish, the knob. And each time I made a mistake, I made sure it was one I wouldn't repeat when I made Corina.


Corina started out as a few scraps of pine that were glued together and routed in to the shape of a Telecaster body. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of this process, but I do have some photos of my next build that uses a single plank of yellow knotty pine. The template I used for this build and Corina came from Ron Kirn. A quick google search of that name will get you to the site where his son-in-law sells these templates. Actually, the templates ore not of a Telecaster but of a 1950 Broadcaster. Technically the same body and dimensions, but Ron makes the distinction.

 

In the photo above, I've taken the router template off and will use the edge already cut as the template to route the rest of the body from the blank.

Here's the body cut away from the the blank. This is the same procedure that I followed to make Corina. Routing out a body from a blank is technically simple on paper, but in actual practice there are a lot more considerations. I made a lot of mistakes and very expensive sawdust and firewood. When I received the Ron Kirn template, it was advised that I use it as a master to make "working templates." You could use the templates to make your body and route out the cavities, but one slip and you've ruined your template and will have to buy another. I made a working template from some inexpensive MDF I got at the local Home Depot. 9 bucks is cheap insurance.

The neck was a purchase from eBay and I spent less than $100 dollars on it and that includes shipping. Considering that it is a Japanese made Fernandes neck made from a single piece of quartersawn maple, I seriously underpaid. The neck is easily worth two and a half times that. It pays to use eBay alerts to get what you're looking for if it isn't listed.

Here's what Corina looked like before I installed the clear red pickguard:

Her she is after I installed the pickguard:

Corina is modeled after Fender's Telebration branded La Cabronita. Instead of a TV Jones pickup in the bridge position, I decided on installing a humbucker-sized P-90. People who have played her and have had a lot more experience playing love playing her, and I've had a few offers to buy my first guitar and requests to do custom builds.

 

Why did I name her Corina?  Well she's named after a girlfriend I had when I was going to junior college. Very cute, very sweet, but what I remember best was that she fit very nicely in my arms. Makes sense to me.

Next time: Travels.

Leo Fender never learned to play the guitar. But I will.

I have no idea what fuels my recent obsession with building guitars. Well, I sort of do. For the last few months, I've been buying parts on eBay and bolting together different guitars. Why would I do this, even though I can barely play three chords? First and foremost, I just wanted to see if I could. Musical instruments have been something of a mystery to me. I never understood the how and why and the mathematics of musical instrument construction. Why are the frets on a guitar's neck spaced the way they are. Why are some necks shorter than others? What is intonation? How the hell did Jimmy Page play a guitar with a freakin' bow?

Second, I thought that to truly master a musical instrument, you have to be able to build one yourself. I may be geeking out here a bit, but if Jedis had to build their own weapons in order to master them, it only made sense to build my own guitar and then learn to play it. Good thing I didn't have an overwhelming desire to play a harpsichord.

But years before I learned to build a guitar, back in 1999 when I was working in Thousand Oaks, I had gone into Guitar Center and bought a cheap beginner's Squire Strat. Not the ultimate guitar, but not a bad starter either. It cost me a whopping $99 bucks. Today that same instrument would cost a guitar noob at least $140. Along with the guitar, I bought a computer program that came on a couple of CD-ROMs that promised to teach me guitar so well that I would be able to play an entire song after only a few weeks of instruction. What they didn't tell you on outside of the box was that the song was Frère Jacques. But being eager to learn to play a guitar and becoming a rock god chick magnet outweighed my embarrassment of learning such a dorky song. After all, even rock gods had to start somewhere, right? I would have been just as ecstatic if I the first thing I had to learn was Marsey Doats.

The downfall of the program was that it emphasized incorporating rhythm into learning notes which entailed tapping my foot in time to my strumming. I don't know about you, but learning to play something as complex as a guitar is difficult enough. Throwing something in that requires additional physical coordination is for me like trying to learn how to tap dance while field stripping an M-16. The program wasn't very good and a few days of trying to play something as lame as Frère Jacques while tapping my foot became tedious and made me feel like an idiot. Not to mention that at the time I was staying with my sister so she was driven insane by my ham fisted attempts at playing and then mangling an already idiotic tune. I quit playing after about 8 days. I despised that program so much that weeks turned into years and it was over a decade before I even touched that guitar again. For some reason, either guilt or the fact that I have a hard time letting go of something for which I've paid over 50 bucks, I dragged that guitar along with me through three moves over 10 years.

What finally got me back in to learning to play was a confluence of several events that essentially kicked my interest into high gear. One event was completely random. Being somewhat bored one day and doing what I normally do when I'm somewhat bored, I came across something that caught my eye while I was surfing around the internet. It was a guitar shaped like a shark.

Normally I would have looked at this and said "Oh. Coool. A guitar shaped like a shark." But as luck would have it, before seeing the awesome Jay Turser Shark guitar, I had also seen that a new XBox 360 game was going to be released called Rocksmith. Knowing that these two things existed made me say "Oh, cooool. A guitar shaped like a Shark. That I can connect to an XBox 360. Must. Have. Now." Now before I get too far into this story, let me regress a moment and go back a few years. When some of my friends got a Wii back in 2005 or so, the games that they loved playing were Guitar Hero and Rock Band. I tried playing a few times and even though the gameplay was good, I kept wondering why they didn't incorporate a real guitar. How difficult was it to make an interface that would let you use a real guitar? I knew that USB cables existed that let you connect a guitar to a computer through the instrument jack, so why why why isn't there a game that would let you use a real guitar?

Flash forward a bit to around the end of the year in 2010, when a game called Power Gig came out whose gameplay was something along the lines of Guitar Hero except it used an actual 6 string electric guitar as a controller. I almost bought it. But at the time I had just gotten off of unemployment and had found a job in San Diego that kept me there for a few months doing some contracting work. I didn't have my own permanent place or a game console so dropping a few hundred on a game and console after starting a new job didn't make any fiscal sense. On top of this, I didn't even have a television to connect a console. As it turns out, Power Gig and the game controller/guitar were an immense flop, lost in a sea of music rhythm games that were saturating the market at the time.

Flash forward again a few more months to the beginning of 2011. Sometime around April, I stumbled on an announcement from Ubisoft about their release of a game called Rocksmith. What was exciting about this game release was that any guitar with an instrument jack could be used. Better yet, it was more of an educational tool than a game. Perfect. Even though it wasn't scheduled for release until September, knowing this sparked my interest in playing the guitar again. This knowledge, coupled with my discovery of the Jay Turser Shark, and the spoils of my new job formed an idea in my head: I would learn to play the Shark guitar using Rocksmith. It was so simple. Why wouldn't I want to learn how to play a guitar shaped like a freakin' shark? Unfortunately the JT Shark was a discontinued item. It was really hard to find them new. I would have lost hope if this were the year 1999. But it's not and there's eBay Alerts. So, after just a few weeks, eBay sent an alert message for a Jay Turser Shark. Better yet, the auction had a "Buy It Now" option. Without hesitation, I bought it.

By this time it was late June, and Rocksmith wasn't going to be available until after Summer. I had a guitar shaped like a freakin' shark in my possession. I did not know how to play it. This is where the last piece of the puzzle that would launch my journey to guitar rock god status fits in: Groupon.

I had excitedly signed up for Groupon when I saw that they were offering guitar classes at Guitar Cities in San Francisco. For a mere 98 bucks, I would get 6 lessons.  Deal. That should get me started and learning the basics before Rocksmith is released. By the time I finish those 6 weeks of lessons, I should only have to wait mere weeks before I could start playing Rocksmith in the privacy of my own home. So I went to my first lesson, with my Shark in tow on the BART, on the 26th floor of California 101 in San Francisco. I had a great teacher named Nikolay who got me through the basics. Upon first seeing my unorthodox guitar he said that he had never seen anything like it, but he thought it was pretty damned cool. Then he asked if he could hold it so I handed it over to him. Now what he didn't know was that even though I didn't understand much of what I was doing, I did know that there was something very wrong about the guitar when I first got it. The strings seemed too high off the fretboard, even when I tuned it, the notes sounded wrong after I played the few notes I did know, and wasn't quite what I would expect coming from an electric guitar. I compared it to the aging old Stratocaster that I bought 12 years earlier which was in tune and had been set up correctly for me all those years ago by a tech at Guitar Center. So, after some trial and error, some fiddling around with the saddles, and a lot of back and forth comparisons to the Strat, I managed to get the Shark to sound right, at least to me. 

So after handling it and actually playing it for a few moments, Nikolay said that the action was good, the intonation was spot on, and the neck felt really good in his hand. I had absolutely no idea what he meant when he said "action" and "intonation." None at all. I wasn't completely clear on what makes a guitar neck "feel good." So when he asked me if I had set up the guitar myself, I asked him what that meant.

"It means that you've set up the saddles so that the intonation is correct and that the action on the neck is low."

Still not quite understanding what he meant I just said "Yeah, sure, I did all that. Uh, I just fiddled with the saddles and made sure that the strings weren't high on the fretboard and that it sounded right when I placed my finger on each string at one of the frets."

"You've never done this before, have you?" Nikolay was on to me.

"Well, not until last night. It just seemed to make sense that a guitar string shouldn't be a quarter inch off the fretboard and it should sound right and not buzz when you place your finger on the 12th fret. Did I do it alright?"

"Yeah, you did pretty well for someone who didn't really know what they were doing."

The rest of the lesson was just basics; pentatonic scale, finger positions, that sort of thing, and as soon as I got home I looked up what it meant to set up a guitar properly and it seemed that my instincts were correct. Encouraged by Nikolay's assessment of my noob luthier skills, my interest in building an electric guitar was sparked now that I had a rudimentary understanding of what makes a guitar sound good. And that got me to wondering: just how hard would it be to actually build one?

Next time: Corina.

August 25th, 2009

Wow, was that really the last time I even posted to this blog?

Seriously?

I guess that I can blame my lack of posting to the fact that during that time away I've been unemployed, traveling in Mongolia, doing rally stuff, re-employed, living in Carlsbad, living in China, and then getting another job, getting terminated from that job, and being rehired again at the same exact place in a different role and title. All that since I last posted to this blog.

So yeah, I've been busy.

So why a return to this blog? Because I saw myself getting lazy. Facebook lazy. It was a simple matter to post a funny quip, a lame photo, or an even lamer status update on Facepile and reach a wide audience of my friends. So lazy in fact that I slacked off in my writing skills and very nearly forgot that I had a few blogs that I used to regularly update. Forgot about the fun and challenge in writing for the sake of writing. So I'm taking up blogging again in an effort to flex my literary muscles and firm up the area of my brain to the left of my lateral cerebral fissure.

Facebook made me realize that I was taking shortcuts in being what I thought was creative. Instead of posting original content like I used to in these blogs, I was instead copy-pasting some item I had found on Failblog, or linking to a news story, or worse yet, hitting the "Share" button on other people's posts. How lazy is that? Lazy-ass indeed. I also found, with some consternation, that I was posting things that I thought other people would react to in hopes that they'd hit the "Like" button or post some comment. Gone was my desire to write for writing's sake and in its place was an attention whore who needed people to press that "Like" button for validation. There was a time that I would blog things because I liked the freedom in not caring what other people thought, when it wasn't about the number of hits I got in a day. It was more about getting things out of my head and out on (virtual) paper and maybe for the occasional reader who stumbles on my posts and gets it.

It's not that I hate the Facepile of social networking per se, but when it comes to maintaining the creativity and the thought process that comes with actual writing, Facebook is to my writing what a McDonald's Super-sized McMeal is to my physical fitness. Sure, it satisfies a basal need but it's not something you want to be doing every day, especially when you want to write or run a marathon. So after using Facebook for the better part of the time away from this blog as my near-exclusive method of updating the world of what I was doing, I found myself trying to condense complex stories and experiences into a couple of sentences and maybe a photo taken with my iPhone. (Yes, I caved and got one. Best device ever. EVER. Shut up...) Being limited to just a couple of lines had reduced my normally verbose descriptions to:

The sunset was awesome today. So awesome...

When I really wanted to say:

Yesterday,  as I was coming through the Caldecott Tunnel, I caught an amazing view of the sun setting over the Bay. The clouds had turned the color of orange embers, reminiscent of the color of charcoal briquettes on a summer night right before that first steak hits the grill. It was the perfect beginning of summer backdrop for the silhouettes of The City and the bridges. The view reminded me of the reason I came to live here in the Bay Area and symbolized the rich panorama of experiences I've had since leaving Sacramento almost 20 years ago. I don't think I ever want to live anywhere else.

I take it back. I do hate Facebook. Damn you. (Fist shaking)

Facebook does have its place, and though I most likely won't abandon it completely, I'll be posting more to my blogs. I think that my left brain will be thanking me for doing that. The three people that subscribe to this blog's feed might want to thank me too. If they existed.

Also, go to hell McDonald's. (Fist shaking)

Taking the HTC for a spin around the blogs

I'm testing out the new HTC mobile blogging device I recently got. Kick-ass device with q "qwerty" keyboard. Nope, non of that virtual keyboard iPhone crap for me, I like it when my keys click. I don't have a full-sized virtual keyboard so why should I settle for something like that in miniature. With this HTC Ozone I can get positive feedback about whether I keyed in a character or not. I'm in seriously deep like with my new HTC.

Building the beast

I did some cleaning and sorting through stuff recently and found - or rather re-found - some things that I had purchased years ago and either forgot about or just didn't have the time to fiddle with.

I found a couple of high-end audio transformers from Taiwan crammed into the corner of one box. After seeing those again after I had put them away 9 years ago, I felt compelled to either use them or sell them on eBay. You can probably guess what I decided to do with them.I spent most of that weekend designing and building a small amplifier around them. The sound, however is much bigger than the 1.3 watts per channel it puts out. The transformers have surprisingly good bass extension down to 15Hz and when coupled with the Klipsch LaScalas can play uncomfortably loud if I wanted.

Another gem I found was the burned-out carcass of an old Dynaco ST70. I had been planning to recover the transformers and whatever else I could use. I had a brand new spare front end board lying around and mounted everything to a chunk of plywood.At 50 watts per channel, it'll be considerably louder than the 1.3 watts my other amp will have. But instead of the nice finished appearance that the other amp has, this one will look like something out of a mad scientist's lab.

Which, of course, was the exact look I was going for.

Acryl-iPod

Sometimes one person's blunder is my chance to make something cool that everyone wants. Case in point: one of my friends here at work inadvertently threw her iPod Shuffle in the washing machine when it was attached to her laundry, effectively bricking it. (Does this term even apply to something as small as an iPod Shuffle? I guess it's akin to saying that you have footage when you've taken video on a camera that has no film or tape. Ah, this modern world...)

After futiley trying to dock it in hopes that iTunes might recognize it and allow a reset, I decided to open it up and look inside. I didn't expect that I'd find anything that looked wrong, as these small circuit boards are almost completely composed of surface mount components and are washed after their wave soldering step, so I knew that the electronics were probably still good. I suspected that the lithium ion battery was probably not that happy to be dunked in soapy water and was rendered useless during the wash cycle.

It wasn't very easy opening the tiny case and removing the circuit board, but I found instructions online that helped me along. Once I had the thing open and put a meter to the battery, I discovered that it held no charge whatsoever. Still, I decided that the only way to see if the shuffle was still functional was to connect a battery to the terminals. I didn't have any tiny lithium ion batteries handy so I used the next best thing: a battery from a cordless phone whose charger I had lost years ago. It had almost the same voltage as the old battery, 3.6V instead of 3.7V and knowing that the iPod probably wasn't going to be that picky, I went ahead and soldered the battery in. I connected a pair of headphones and to my surprise, music started playing.

My next action was to see if iTunes would recognize the tiny skeleton of an iPod Shuffle. I had a docking cord from Monoprice.com that allowed me to plug the Shuffle into the USB port of my computer without the annoying docking station that normally comes with an iPod Shuffle. After a few moments, the Shuffle appeared in the menu. I decided to restore it so I could find out if I could upload music to it. After it restored, I found I was able to load it with music.

So now I was stuck with the tiny circuit board of an iPod with a battery 5 times bigger than it. What to do? I decided to glue it to a block of acrylic approximately the size of a normal iPod. After carefully removing the navigation disc from the shell and attaching it to the buttons on the circuit board with some super glue, I carefully aligned the headphone/USB jack, circuit board, and battery on the acrylic block. I bought the block at a local craft store; normally they're used as a stamping block for clear acrylic stamps and as such, had an alignment grid etched onto the back. The grid comes in handy for aligning the various components on the block before glue and high-strength double-sided tape attaches everything permanently.

Once I was done, I ended up with a rather cool looking device. Since the new battery has 7 times the capacity of the old one, I decided to see just how long it would last. After fully charging the batteries, I connected a pair of headphones, turned it full blast and let it run. I left it in a spare bedroom with the door closed and check it everyday after I came home from work. It ran this way for 7 days. I charged it again and tried to see how long it would run at half volume. I got impatient after 10 days and turned it off.

I tried giving it back to my friend, but she told me to go ahead and keep it since I had put in so much work into it, and besides, it was a lot bigger now and didn't have the clip that made it perfect to take along on runs. Other friends did want one and have been offering their dead Shuffles to me to convert into Acryl-iPods.

Kitten for Hoku

Well, Hoku's been kinda bored. I'm gone most of the day and she's left to sort out her own way to relieve the monotony until I come home from work. Despite being the brilliant conversationalist that I am on the evening and weekends, she's still alone 40 hours a week.

What Hoku needed was a companion to keep her company (I know that was redundant, but it was either make a parenthetical comment here or interrupt the flow of my freeform writing and think of something more clever, thus derailing my train of thought. Crap. Now I've done just that. Anyway...) and I thought that I would get another dog. But that in itself presents problems. It's not bad traveling with one dog and a simple matter to take Hoku to my parent's home when I have to travel, but 2 dogs complicates matters a lot more than one. Hoku is already a handful at races and meets, and having two dogs to look after would be a challenge. Addtionally, I thought that dumping off two canines at my parent's home would be too much for a couple of retirees, and seeing as I'm going to be gone for three months next year, making my dad take care of 4 dogs was too much.

So, what then? Something between a dog and a gerbil that is mostly independent, won't destroy the place and won't mind at all if left alone while Hoku and I go to the races. The obvious choice was a cat. Hoku loves cats and not in that "they're delicious" kind of way. That decision made, I went off to the Berkeley Human Society in search of a pet for my dog.

Right away I was drawn to a very cute kitten whose colors were described on the tag as "dilute tortoise" whatever that meant. Here's what a dilute tortoise looks like:
She's already integrated herself and made the apartment her playground and she's only been here 2 days. Upon meeting Hoku for the first time, she made the requisite hissing sound, something I would probably do if I'd never seen a dog before, but she didn't run or even growl at Hoku any further. It was probably more like a hiss born out of surprise more than warning. After that, the new kitten's curiosity got the best of her and later that evening she went and gave Hoku a very close sniff. Hoku, being the dog she is, treated the new cat as almost dangerous, and has been taking great pains to give her a wide berth, until she figures this new roommate out.

It didn't take long, and after 48 hours in the same apartment together, managed to conspire against their benevolent mutual guardian to hijack the couch.
Funny thing is, they even have similar facial expressions.
My next dilemma, one that has bugging me ever since I decided weeks ago before I got a kitten, was what to name her. Getting out a pen and paper (I recently re-discovered writing with pen and paper, something that lends itself well to brainstorming in a way that a neatly arranged keyboard can't) and played around with a few anagrams. I wanted something unique that would be a combination of letters from the names of other pets I've known over the years. I thought of Shandy and Isis. Shandy was my very first pet, a rat that I had while I was living in the dorms. She was perfect in every way except her lifespan. Isis was a cat that I adopted when I was living in my first off-campus apartment. Everyone loved her and she was a great cat, capable of some extreme cat toy driven stunts. Rearranging the letter in "Shandy" and "Isis" gave me a number of interesting combinations, however the only one that made any sense as far as being a name for a cat was...Daisy Shins.

It made sense in some weird way. Hoku and Daisy Shins are going to get along just great. They're already beginning to emulate each other.

I'm such a GTD convert

Adult Attention Deficit Disorder.

Yeah. Check. Got it.

For years I struggled with the ups and down, confused by my apparent lack of concentration for some things and my days-long laser beam focus on others. Like most people I really believed that ADD was a lack of attention to anything and everything. I thought that I couldn't have ADD since I had moments where my concentration was so incredible that I blamed a lack of motivation for the times I couldn't or wouldn't concentrate. I fell for the most common misconception about ADD.

As an example, I remember when I directed Heidi Chronicles for a small theater in Berkeley. Not only did I direct the thing, I also did most of the costuming, all of the music, some of the lighting, built some of the set, and acted. All while maintaining a 40-hour a week job. It was even more hectic for The Sisters Rosensweig. When I directed that play, I also did all of the things I did above in addition to being the play's stage manager. I distinctly remember not sleeping for three days while I worked to get the set done, the music edited, and the painting and wallpapering done. I invited my then-manager who was a theater buff to come see it. His first reaction was one of disbelief. He had trouble equating the tardy, late with projects basket case he knew at work with the fanatic workaholic that produced the play he just saw. That's ADD's Jeckyl and Hyde.

There's a reason that I've had fifteen jobs in 12 years. I either had the foresight to get out while I still had a good reputation, was smart enough to take an assignment that only lasted as long as it took for me to get bored, or found something more bright and more shiny and more interesting. Right about now would have been the time for me to leave my current job, but a coworker sat me down and had a long and enlightening talk with me. He actually had me pegged as someone afflicted (blessed?) with ADD and made some suggestions about what methods I could employ to help me exploit the Jeckyl and wrangle the Hyde aspects of my ADD.

One of the things he suggested was I try David Allen's "getting things done" methodology.

Ha! Right. That's all I need, some self-help guru telling me how to "get things done."

I borrowed the book Getting Things Done and thought that it was pretty boring. How was this going to help? Fortunately I didn't chuck GTD out of my life just yet. I figured I'd at least try to listen to the mp3s that were given to me.

What a difference that made. It was one thing to read the boring dry book and quite another to listen to David Allen's enthusiasm through my iPod.

In a nutshell, GTD has shown me how to "dump my brain" onto paper and onto my computer so that I can finally think. I hate analogies because they're weak, but think of your brain as RAM. If your psychic RAM is filled running endless loops of everything that vies for your attention, you might just have enough processing power left to brush your teeth in the morning. That was me until I started using GTD and writing things down.

One of the most startling things I learned was that your brain makes no distinction between promises made externally to others and those made internally to yourself. If you flake on yourself, it's as bad as someone breaking a promise to you. Crazy, but true.

Go ahead and check out what others have been saying on the web about GTD.

I now carry a small notepad everywhere and with GTD it's changed how I look at and process information. It goes beyond task lists and action items.

Works for me.

Batteries for remote controls

Well, I built this yesterday in response to my DLO remote for my iPod docking station going dead. After opening the battery compartment, I discovered that the power source for the remote was a small lithium button cell that put out 3 volts. I went over to the corner Walgreens and was flabbergasted to learn that one of those little button batteries cost $4.29! Why, that's nearly 2.7% of the cost of the docking station when I bought it new. I simply was not going to fall prey to the rampant highway robbery of purchasing a small power cell for my remote.

In formulating a strategy for replacing the remote's power supply, I set some criteria for getting the remote functioning once again:

The solution had to be less than the cost of a new battery.
The remote must be fully functional.
The power source must last as long or significantly longer than the 3V lithium replacement battery.
Must be friendly to the environment.

Ancillary problems to be solved:
Must be able to find the remote.
Solution must make the remote far more interesting than before.

To get the poor dead remote functional once again was simple: provide a power source of 3 volts or close. Obviously the amperage requirement of the device was very low given the size of the battery that normally powers the device. Making the device power source last longer than the button cell was simple; just make the capacity bigger. Batteries of this size normally deliver several micro-amp hours of current. I wanted to go completely overboard and provide at least several hours of current at several tenths, a whole amp hour if I could manage it. This would require a power cell significantly larger than the nominal power cell. My mind was reeling with the possibilities.

To satisfy the environmentally friendly aspect of the project, I decided to try to build a battery out of components I had lying around, or could buy at the local Dollar Store, keeping in mind the$4.29 limit. It turns out that rummaging through some boxes in my closet provided everything I needed to bring my concept to reality:

Two baby food jars that I was using to store miscellaneous small parts.
Two large hose clamps.
Two nearly dead D-cell batteries.
A brand new package of 2 part epoxy.
Black and red wire, 22 gauge.

In the kitchen I found sea salt and the tap provided a source of water.

I stripped the dead batteries of their steel casings so I could get to the zinc casing that acts as the anode for the cell. I cleaned the casings with some sandpaper to ready them for soldering. My next step was to use my Greenlee punch to make an aperture in the baby food jar lid large enough to accommodate the D-cell. About a centimeter down from the top of the cell, I soldered the cell to the lid around the entire circumference, making sure that I wasn't leaving any voids where electrolyte could leak through. To make sure that no electrolyte leaked through the nylon insulator at the top between the positive cathode and negative anode, I sealed it with a liberal coating of 3-minute epoxy. Since the EMF of a carbon-zinc chloride cell was about 1.4 volts, I would need two cells wired in series to satisfy the voltage requirements of the remote. My next step after soldering the two primary cells to their jar lids was to make a couple of small holes in each to allow the flow of aqueous electrolyte into the cell.

Making the new electrolyte was simple. I just need to make a saturated sodium chloride solution. I mixed the sea salt with water from the tap. No complex chemistry here and it was completely safe to make. I aliquoted enough of the saltwater into each jar to reach the holes I drilled in the dead D-cells. To ensure that nothing leaks out, I sealed the lid to the jar with more epoxy.

Now to make sure that these two cells stayed together as a pair, I used the two large hose clamps. Since one alone was too small to reach around both cells, I fed the ends of the clamps into the other to make one big clamp with two tightening screws, making the cell pair look that much more robust. After the epoxy set, I was ready to connect them in series. Soldering a wire from the cathode of one cell to the anode of the other cell and a wire to the battery's anode and cathode made the battery functional and ready to hook up to the remote. I opened the remote up, identified the positive and negative terminals and soldered the wires from my newly-built battery. I left the old battery cover off to provide an entry for the substantially larger wires to get through and I was nearly done. The hose clamps made a nice surface to attach the remote to the battery with heavy duty double sided tape.

The new power source has an EMF of about 2.8 volts; plenty enough to run the remote and will last substantially longer than the little lithium cell. The little lithium cell had about 225 mAh capacity and weighed in at 0.1 ounce or 3 grams, this bad boy has about 16000 mAh capacity and weighs in at over a pound and a half or 700 grams. The ancillary project goal of making the remote loss proof was achieved as it seems highly unlikely that this combo will be lost inside the couch between the cushions. It also gives the remote a new aesthetic that appeals to me - and maybe only me. At least I didn't pay $4.29 for a battery, and I got to distract myself for a couple of hours.

2mor is B9

That's the text message I sent out when my dad and I learned his renal tumor wasn't cancerous. Yep, got word yesterday that my dad is in the 30% bracket of people whose renal tumors are benign. His doctor joked that after the follow-up appointment in three months, there shouldn't be a reason for him to see my dad ever again.

That's one dis-invite that I liked hearing.

Blogging At 1995 Speeds

I'm in Salinas taking care of my parents since driving is verboten for my dad until he's fully recovered, and my mom can't drive anymore. They're pretty much on their own out here without someone to taxi them around and after my sister did her week and a half here, it's my turn. My dad had something of a scare this weekend that landed him in the hospital for a night so the need for someone to be around in case there's another trip to the emergency room is imperative.

I don't mind hanging out and parent-sitting. The problem is that there's no broadband access at my parent's house. They have satellite TV and a phone and that's it. And you all know I'm recovering from a TV addiction so television for me is verboten as well. (Hi my name is Fel and I'm a Full House addict.) Thinking that I could get a PC Card broadband modem through Verizon and update all my crap online that way proved to be futile. I walked in to the nearest Verizon store after work, and perusing the modems I saw that they were all on sale. Oh how they teased me with their promise of anywhere access and high speed surfing. The model I chose was marked down 50% and there was a 30-day return policy where all would be taken back, and my precious money refunded. I figured I would use the modem for the few days while I was in Salinas and upon my return, I would go back to the Verizon store and dump the modem and two-year contract. Moments before whipping out my card to complete the deal, I asked the sales rep about broadband coverage in Salinas. A quick check of the service area map confirmed that as far as wireless access is concerned, Salinas is as broadband-free as when Steinbeck was alive and roaming the streets. Dial up and it's glacial download and upload speeds for the next few days, then. It took damn near 3 minutes to upload the picture of the phone. Forget loading a new website until the end of the week, unless I lose my mind and think that watching the upload status bar move one pixel an hour is preferable to hanging out at the local mall.

So this blog is being brought to you through the damn phone line, something that I haven't done since the last millennium.

I've Hacked My iPod

After waiting weeks for the iVue front panel to come out, I finally plunked down my money and bought one.

Anyone who knows me knows that I like being different and that I often modify stuff I own to personalize it. My iPod is no exception. I wanted something so distinct and personal that I went to an extreme of sorts as opposed to getting a skin or case. I actually went to the extreme of nullifying my warranty and opened my iPod to do this. It's more along the lines of major surgery to replace the front panel and click wheel cover of an iPod. It's serious.

The level of seriousness made it imperative to conduct this modification under some special conditions. I was, after all, opening my iPod and the last thing I wanted was to introduce any particulate matter into the delicate works. I certainly didn't want to do this mod in my dog-hair ridden apartment (thanks Hoku) and I can't stand dust on the screen that I can't get rid of because it's on the inside of the panel. Luckily, I have access to a laminar flow hood which is dust and bioburden free.

After some major work and sweat under this laminar flow hood, my iPod now looks like this:There have been some comments from other people on the web about this being an ugly mod, but I like it and the whole point of this is to have my iPod be more personalized than anything else that's out there. I have yet to see someone else with this mod, so it's pretty safe to say that within the circle of people I hang out with and know, I have something very different. Add the firmware hacks I'm doing to change the look onscreen, and the combination will be uniquely mine.

No, I won't do this mod for you.

Clearing Out Mental Logjams, Dealing With Life

So this is the other blog that catches all the other stuff of my life. When I mean "other," it doesn't mean that this blog will be mutually exclusive of my other two (or is it three?) blogs in the ARL NorthAm universe. It would be difficult at best to try to compartmentalize my life into neat little blocks and of course you'll see some bleed-through here from the other aspects of my exponentially complicated life.

What you won't find here are rants complaining about how crappy my life is, because a) I refuse to beat myself up over it thus reinforcing the illusion that my life is crappy and b) my life isn't that crappy.

I use the word illusion when it comes to the perception of how crappy one's life is because it's excatly that: an illusion. Was Paris Hilton's time in jail tough? Probably not to us, but to her the perception of being in jail led to her having a nervous breakdown. Whatever. But enough already about this life coaching drivel, I have more important things to blog about. Like my upcoming iPod modifications.

Now some if not most of you have one or more of these devices from Apple and if you’re like me, you’ll want to make it more personal. It’s not enough that they come in different colors, or two if you own the full-sized versions. You have to make it more your own and personalize it so that you feel like it’s a part of you. For some people I know, their iPod is a part of them since I rarely see them without it on some part of their body.

I myself own four versions of the iPod: a 1st generation Shuffle given to me as a gift, an 80 gigabyte video iPod, a 2nd generation Shuffle, and an 8 gigabyte video Nano. Sure, I’m a little crazy when it comes to these devices.

What I plan to mod this time around is the 80 gigabyte video iPod. Right now it’s just basic black and encased inside an Otterbox waterproof case. When I bought the iPod I never bothered to take the plastic film that covers the front off, so it’s never been scratched and is essentially as pristine as it was in the box. The mirror finish back is preserved through the use of some protective film I bought when I bought the iPod.

So just what kind of mod will I be doing to this iPod? Well, as long as I can remember, I’ve had a fascination with things that are see-through and love to be able to see the inner machinations of things like radios and cell phones. In fact if there's an option for getting something with a clear case, I'll probably get that one. I've replaced cell phone cases with clear versions just so I could see their inner works. When I found out that RapidRepair came out with a clear front panel for the 5G iPod, I was right there to order it the moment it was available for shipping. I had the option of sending my iPod in for installation or I could do it myslef. I opted to do it myself. I wanted to opportunity to explore the guts of my iPod before I installed the panel. I also wanted to make sure that no dust gets inside during the disasembly and reassembly process. You might be wondering how I plan to do this. Here at my work we have laminar flow hoods that are are basically clean environments that are the size of a tabletop. Imagine a clean room shrunk down to bench size and you get the idea. Just in cse yu were wondering what one looks like, here's a photo:
It has a HEPA filter that will screen out all the dust, lint, and even microorganisms that might contaminate the surface. I'll avoid any problems with dust inside the facplate.

It's on it's way in the mail and I should be getting it sometime this week.I'll have a seperate blog for the installation when it comes in.

Other things I'm working on: getting the ARL NorthAm offices into order. However, I've been wondering about whether I want to keep living on the snoozy little island of Alameda or pick up and move to Berkeley. I really miss living there despite the obvious hippie-freak factor and Alameda just seems so bland. Actually what I really miss is having neighbors that interact with me. My current living situation would be great if there were neighbors that said more than three words to me a week. Being the highly social person I am, I get antsy at the thought of going home to four walls. Hoku is a great conversationalist, but her range of subjects is limited and she really doesn't care much for talk about iPods and driving around the world. I pretty much control the conversations we have and it would be nice to have a human being take over the selection of subject matter once in a while. Her main topics deal mainly with going outside, chasing fast moving objects, barking at those who might be viewed as invaders, and whatever I happen to be eating at the time. Ah, youth. Dog youth.

So I'm scanning the craigslist options and thinking that it may be time to get a place in Berkeley with roommates. As long as I have my own bathroom and enough space for my stuff, which was pared down substantially since the last move, I think I'll be fine. I'm not the stuff accumulator I was a few years back, and my collection of big bulky items has been relegated to the warehouse for a time when I can store it in a warehouse of my own.

Back on task. I did manage to clean up the ARL NorthAM office, currently located in my second bedroom. Gone were the styrofoam food trays from the take out places, miscellaneous paper trash and accumulated dog hair. Up went the ARL NorthAm banner and some photos and viola! ARL NorthAm headquarters.

Now if I could only get some work done in there.

I Can't Believe That Someone Didn't Take "DNAgent" to Title Their Blog

So Bonus for me since I own dnagent.net. Why hadn't anyone claimed this name? It's such a cool name that I was sure that someone had taken it.

Oh well, sucks to be whoever wanted this blog name because it's mine now, sucker.