Bravo, iRobot. Bravo.

Recently the Roobma 530 started thumping and throwing Error 2: Clean Roomba’s Brushes over and over.  I won’t bother describing the troubleshooting and repair of that one since the Internet is full of the right answer.  What I will share is the pic on the left showing the ridiculous amount stuff was jammed into the Roomba’s gear train and, through some miracle of artifice-ing, the damn thing still kind of functioned instead of dying on the spot!

I cleaned it as per the Internet’s instructions and everything is back to normal.  Nicely done, iRobot.  May you continue to use your engineering cunning for good instead of evil.  That is, if that aligns with your future plans.  Whatever you want, really, glorious masters.  Please spare my family.

Conformity is Golden

We are in the process of sorting through old (or unwanted) stuff for donation and that includes the hundreds (yep) of books that are now too babyish for the six-year-old.  

The wife sorted through the library and she magnanimously let us save the ones that meant something to us in case we really cherished them.  We “rescued” about 15 from the pile.  Three of the rescued books were Little Golden Books and are discussed briefly below. 

These first two were read exactly once.  I un-donated them basically to take them out of circulation.

Scuffy the Tugboat (1946) - A charming story about a little red-painted tugboat who refuses to sail in a bathtub, believing he is meant for bigger things.  After he tricks his masters into letting him sail in a brook he makes a break for it, eventually reaching ever larger bodies of terrifying, chaos-filled water.  Just as he reaches the ocean, he is “rescued” by his owners and he is relieved to spend the rest of his life sailing from one end of a bathtub to the next.

Tootle (1945) - Trains-in-training are taught the most important rule: “Staying on the Rails No Matter What”.  Tootle decides to jump the tracks to have some fun in the meadow, which he does, then returns to his tracks. His masters want him back on the track permanently , so they come up with a plan. He soon runs into a bunch of Red Flags, which means he can’t go that way (the townsfolk have hidden throughout the meadow waving Red Flags).  The only Green Flag he sees is on the tracks.  He gets back on and happily chirps “This is the place for me.  There is nothing but red flags for locomotives that get off their tracks”.

This last one was kept just for the crazy.  The wife and I laughed so hard at this one.  No idea why it was in the donate pile to begin with.

The Happy Man and His Dump Truck (1950) - There is nothing I can say in words that the illustrations don’t say a thousand times better.  This happy (read: totally hammered) dude rides around from farm to farm all day, kidnapping animals and “tipping his dumper” to everyone he sees.  Miraculously, no one is injured and all the animals are returned to their proper homes.

Play Table Project

I thought for sure I posted on this a while back, but I guess not.

After sorting the Legos (ugh…) and storing them in the guest bedroom closet it became apparent that this was going to be a place where most of the building was going to be done.  First, it is a big enough space for several kids to play in.  Second, hauling bin after bin of bricks someplace else to build only to be told to put them back after an hour or so is, understandably, a hassle that would discourage the six-year-old and his friends from playing with them at all.

There was a small 27” x 27” x 21” table in there that was being used for some building and its location out of the way in the corner was great.  It just didn't have the surface area needed to make it a good workstation for more than one kid.  I wanted to make a play table that 1) increased the play area 2) matched the closet color and 3) did not get in the way of everything.

1 and 2 were easy - make a bigger table and paint it white.   Making it bigger without blocking access to the shelves was the real concern here. There was an 11-inch support for shelving in the closet that determined the maximum length of the table.  I used the 27” x 27”  footprint of the old table as a basis for the new one and added a section that tapered down from 27” to 11” over the length of the new section.

I used two paint-grade 6’ x 2’ composite pine boards for the top and skirt pieces and some scrap pine for the legs.  After the pieces were all cut (and, in some cases, re-cut because I screwed up) the boy helped me with the assembly and painting.  We make a good team.

The end result (upper left pic) is an oddly shaped 69” long table that is out of the way and has roughly double the surface area of the old one.  It is not what you would call an “heirloom piece” by any stretch of the imagination (nothing I make is, really :)) but it is big enough, it is sturdy enough, and, doggone it, the boy likes it.

Meddy New Year (Ah Ha Ha Ha Ha)!

Three days late.  Not a great start.

Long hours have taken their toll and my health has taken a significant hit as a result.  I won't get into the details on either the task or the health issues yet but, basically, I have half a gallon of semi-gloss and my job is to single-handedly paint Gabriel's Horn.

So over the past too many months I have been playing veal calf (tied to a desk, no sun)... Except I doubt very much that veal calves have Harry Chapin's "Cats in the Cradle" playing on continuous loop in their heads.

That ends now.

Hey, don't get me wrong - it hasn't all been horrible.  I have found some time to do this, that, and the other over these past months, and I have been immensely enjoying getting everything back on track over the past several holiday weeks.  Hopefully this will pave the road to a great new year.

Happy New Year, Everyone!  May God bless you and yours!

Hunter Ceiling Fan Light Repair

TL;DR Summary: The Limitor part you are looking at (T160: Labeled Y59 B 120C or similar) is a thermal/current limiting switch.  It has failed and is probably why your lights aren’t coming on.

A couple of weeks ago I flipped on the light to my kid’s room and I was startled by a PLINK and blue arc flash of death that signified that it was time to begin the ritual hunt knowing that there was, like, a 5% chance I would have any bulbs that would fit.  

Oh, it’s not like the socket or bulb are anything special - I was just playing the odds with my Schroedinger’s Lightbulb Cabinet of Utter Inconvenience.   Since I needed two 40W candelabra bulbs, it was likely I would find one 15W, one 40W standard socket bulb, and twenty-seven 100W outdoor flood lights.  If I need a flood light, there would be a completely different distribution of stuff there.  Maybe it would just be filled with scented candles and a whale oil lantern but it would almost certainly contain no flood lights.  I’m sure you have a junk drawer or pantry shelf with similar qualities in your house.  

So imagine my surprise when, lo and behold, there were two perfectly good 40W bulbs at the ready.  Awesome.  Let’s just screw them in and flip the ol’ switch and… nothing.

Hmmm…

The fan’s still working so maybe I didn’t screw in the bulbs tightly enough.  Nope, that’s not it.  Let’s try the pull-chain - I never use it, but, hey, you never know - while I was hunting for the bulbs maybe someone else in the house tried to be “helpful” and yanked the pull chain a random-but-odd-number of times (look, don’t even get me started…).  No dice.

“The pull switch must have died when the bulb blew.  Wonderful,” I thought.  I shut off juice to the fan, removed the bulbs, took off the housing, removed the switch and took it to the garage so I could write down the info for a replacement.  On a whim I screwed in the bulbs, got my multimeter, and measured resistance across the switch.  Low resistance.  I pulled the chain.  High resistance.  I pulled the chain.  Low resistance again.  Everything was fine.

Again, hmmm…

Well, maybe the switch had some crud in it and I knocked it loose taking it out. I put it back in the fan and, of course, nothing.  I wondered if I was getting power to the bulbs at all... I mean, the fan runs, the bulb must have been getting power before it blew, and all the breakers looked OK...But since you never know what kind of maniac wired your house it makes sense to check all sorts of things it makes no sense at all to check, you dig?

Since the wall switch felt mechanically "fine" (not loose, good action going from up to down then back) I decided to test for power to the bulbs at the fan. With the wall switch in the OFF position I got the expected 0.0VAC. In the ON position, though, I got less than 1.0 VAC but not zero. I mean, what gives? It's a switch, some wire, another switch, and some bulbs, right?

Wrong. I didn't notice the little part (pic in the upper left of this post) that was in series with the bulbs.  On the front it had the label “Y59 B 120C” and on the back it had “Limitor T160”. After some searching (I couldn’t find an exact match [9/27/15 edit: see comments for link to part]) I was able to determine that it was a thermal/current limiting switch.  If its surroundings get too hot (120C) or the current gets too high (B = 5 amps, I think), the switch opens and kills power to whatever it is that is causing the issue.

Good idea, right?  I guess, but in this case I'm questioning the reasoning behind installing it here.

I mean, 120C?!  Yikes!  This is higher than the melting point of many commercial grade plastics, but is thankfully under the melting point of PVC insulation. Based on the location of this item, the recommended max wattage of the bulbs, and the distance of the bulbs from the metal housing, things would have to be pretty bad for this tiny thing to decide that the only way to save the day is to shut off the lights while the apparently-engulfed-in-flames ceiling fan blades continue to merrily spin round and round...  

I can almost hear the calliope music now. 

Since the lights were off when I flipped the switch and stayed off after the remaining lightbulb popped off to join the choir invisible I was 100% sure this part did whatever it does to keep the inrush current under 5 amps while the tungsten filament vaporized (destroy itself, I guess).  No heat issue. No lasting over-current issue.

After some more searching on Hunter ceiling fans I discovered that lots of people have had this problem. I also discovered that some people REALLY, REALLY hate the Hunter corporation and Home Depot. It's all "lack of customer service" this and "horribly filthy expletive deleted" that. Entertaining but not super helpful. The Limitor website seems to disavow any knowledge of that exact part number, and the closest match I could find at AllElectronics was for a normally open switch, not a normally closed one.

A couple of sites, though, said some people simply bypassed the switch and things got back to normal.   The reasoning some gave for justifying the bypass was a little cavalier and/or conspiracy theory driven (ranty planned obsolescence stuff). 

Normally you don't want to bypass or defeat safety devices but, in this case, I couldn't come up with a scenario where the thermal part of the switch would ever be useful.  Maybe... and this is a pretty big "maybe"... if the room was already at the upper operating limit for the fan AND the bulbs inside were at or exceeded the max wattage AND the fan was not running then maybe the temperature inside the wiring housing could get to 120C, causing the switch to open in an attempt to cool down the unit. But, even then, once the unit cooled down the switch would (maybe) close and either a) arc weld itself shut or b) self destruct open.  

Exactly the way a lightbulb filament fails...

So why not use a thermal fuse to begin with?  Or "nothing"?  Does this thing also have some surge-suppressant capability that helps extend the life of the bulbs?  Maybe. If so, maybe it’s also there to extend the life of the pull-chain switch.  I’m sure there is a reason I am not smart enough to understand, and I wasn't going to armchair quarterback their engineering/sales/legal decisions any further. After all, the sun was going down and you need good light to fix a light (something that totally blew my six-year-old's tiny little mind).

So in the end I cut power to the fan, snipped out the part, stripped the wires, and twisted them together with the smallest wire nut I had. I reassembled the... uhh... assembly and flipped the wall switch. After cursing profusely in the gathering darkness for a few seconds I remembered that I yanked the pull chain to the light while I was putting it back together. Dummy.  Another pull and there was light.  

And I saw that it was good. 

I kept the two 40W incandescent  bulbs shining for a few hours and "measured" the housing temperature with the back of my hand. Nice and cool.

I might someday just out of curiosity take a thermocouple and actually measure the temperature inside the housing but I probably won't. If I notice that I am going through a lot more bulbs than usual I might revisit this issue, especially if I begin blowing through the newer fancy-schmancy expensive ones.  Time will tell.

All in all seems that the bypass surgery was a success - your results may vary.  If you do choose to bypass the part, do yourself and your family a favor - use your brain and be careful.  After all, I'm just some dude on the Internet and, as Richard Bach might say “Everything in this blog post may be wrong”.  

Good luck! 

Frankenfoods?

Hey!  I know what'd be fun! Showcasing my ignorance and rapidly declining cognitive abilities with a couple of quick pics!  Let's do it!

I have been driving past this sign along Route 58 every fall for about 10 years and this is the first time I was able to take a picture of it.  It's gotta be on purpose... right?  Right?

I sat there in the parking lot and read this sign half a dozen times but for some reason I could not for the life of me figure out that they meant A-1 Steak Sauce here.  I guessed "AI"was some fast food abbreviation I had never heard of or maybe it was slang marketing thing like "super-sized".  It bothered me enough to force me to type into Google "AI BACON CHEESEBURGER" when I got home that night.  I immediately felt so stupid that my next Google search involved looking for hospice providers that specialize in caring for folks who think that there might actually be such a thing as an Artificially Intelligent bacon cheeseburger...

Geocache Update November 2014

Now that it has cooled down a bit and the leaves have begun to fall in earnest it is once again perfect weather for Geocaching.  

We went out of town a few weeks back so my wife could visit with her relatives so the boy and I went and hit some caches around central Virginia.  The following Saturday he asked if we could go again so we spent the day cruising around our stomping grounds and finding what we could find.  A lot of new caches had popped up since I had last gone so it didn’t take too long to find an area that was dense enough where we wouldn’t be doing more riding around than walking.

He loves his backpack.  Lots of pockets mean lots of places to stuff snail shells, sea shells, cool leaves, cooler stones, and about a bazillion acorns.

Hiking through the woods with the six-year-old is a blast.  He is more jazzed about finding waterlogged, broken dollar-store trinkets in a muddy sandwich container under a rotten log than any sane person really has the right to be, and that energy is super-infectious.  Also, he is tenacious without being ridiculous about it.  That is, he’s not a quitter but he knows when to give up when we can’t find what we are looking for.  As the great philosopher W.C. Fields once said “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.  Then quit.  There’s no sense being a damn fool about it.”

“Besides, we can always come back some other time, right, dad?”  “You bet.”

It’s not entirely about the stuff in the caches, really, or even finding them at all (we are about 75% successful).  For both of us the coolest part is the hunt and exploring along the way.  For example, the picture you see in the upper left of this post is a California Redwood tree that someone transplanted to the middle of downtown Suffolk, Virginia in 1954.  It was my first time ever seeing one and I doubt I would have ever known it was there if I hadn’t been looking for geocache number GC2319B. (If you are reading this, TFTC, SN&P!)

Odd nooks of public land sit awkwardly in areas you would never expect.  Tiny jetties forty feet wide and a tenth of a mile long jut out into protected swamplands all over the place here – just park on the street and walk a “trail to nowhere” for a really rewarding view even if you aren’t rewarded by finding a cache.  It’s weird to be able to stand less than 75 yards from a CVS drugstore and still be enveloped by nature (pics below).  

 

That tree in the second photo had about two dozen vultures in it… just silently watching us not fall down and die, I guess.  Off-putting, sure, but cool nonetheless.

Rook Update: The rook I put into a geocache forever ago (see pic in sidebar) is now in South Wales.  It has traveled 10,000 miles since it was turned into a Travel Bug by the people who found it 16 months ago.  I am not sure what the owners have in store for it after it completes its “tour of Scottish castles” but I am thinking about offering to trade the D20 cache container I made for it should the little guy ever make it back to the States.  The D20 is (still) sitting in my garage taking up space and I (still) have no desire to be a CO for it. Nonetheless I would really like to see it used “out there somewhere”.

Geojunk Clock Update: Although a couple of pieces of the geocache treasure that had been hot-glued to it have fallen off, the clock is still ticking away as expected.  After 300+ caches, though, real-estate on it is at a premium so I might be forced to come up with a solution for what to do with new cache finds sooner than later.  

Also, I only have a couple of handfuls of the cipher discs and the little fish I made to trade so it will soon be time to plan for replacements.  Not sure what I will build next, but I doubt it will be puzzle-related.  

Maybe something with invisible ink, though… Hmmm…

Happy Halloween!

It's that time of year again!  Pumpkins have been carved and the boy is bouncing around the living room waiting for some buddies to get here so they can go out trick-or-treating.

This year he was going to be The Flash but changed his mind after one of the kids he is going out begging with tonight said he was going to be a Jedi.  My kid "had no choice" but to go as a Sith Lord, "of course".

So it goes...

Last year we tempted fate by wearing all black as we walked about our poorly lit neighborhood - he in his ninja outfit and me in my Grim Reaper garb.  Instead of playing another impromptu game of Invisible Pedestrian I opted for a Mad Scientist outfit - welding goggles, wild white wig, white lab coat, couple of glowsticks in the pockets.  He has a red lightsaber, and one of the kids will have a green one, I guess.  Dragging along the plastic wagon covered in battery-powered blinking orange skulls should guarantee that we can be seen by any traffic... probably even air traffic.

The craft this year was making some zombie heads out of some repurposed pretzel and animal cracker jugs.  They were painted with leftover house paint and given torn-up grey rags for hair.  Nearly bounce-less tennis ball halves make the eyes.  That's them there in the pic.

Oh, hey, FWIW, cutting apart a tennis ball is easy if you use a bandsaw.  Ten times easier, though,  is accidentally cutting your thumbs off with a bandsaw while trying to cut a tennis ball in half.  My fingers were violently yanked to within a skin-cell's width of the blade because I am an idiot like that. After my heart rate returned to normal I grabbed a c-clamp and used it to carefully guide the balls through the danger zone.

Well, gotta wrap this up.  Have a fun and safe time tonight and may your pumpkin patch be judged the most sincere.

Bad Kitty. Bad.

Man, things went south quickly after I left for the gym this morning...  One day, I swear, autocorrect is going to give me a heart attic.

Guitar Stuff October 2014

After taking a while off from the game, I have returned to playing Rocksmith 2014 regularly.  I didn't quit playing guitar altogether or anything like that - I was practicing off-line.  Well... Strumming, running scales,  and learning the tabs to simple songs I was interested in learning anyway... The word "practice" probably doesn't work there.  Just fooling around I guess.  

I got a little bored with the music selection, even though I have close to 160 songs to choose from. The songs I liked  I played a dozen times but I never really practiced them offline (or even online using the Riff Repeater tool) so I plateaued in the 70% - 85% Mastery range. The songs I hated I played maybe once. Songs I was ambivalent about got a handful of plays.  Thirty or so tunes went completely untouched - sure, some was just avoiding stuff I didn’t like but some of those songs I got as DLC!  

I got bored with the mini-games because... Well, I guess because I didn't see the need to practice harmonics and my bends sounded just fine to my tin ear. In many of the games I was just getting crushed over and over and got irritated with seeing the “LEADERBOARD CHALLENGE FAIL” message pop up all the time. Besides, I wanted to make better use of my limited Rocksmith time by...

By what, exactly?  Learning songs? I thought we just went over that...

After a while I came to the realization that I was just going through the motions.  I wasn't getting worse, really, I just wasn't getting any better. I even stopped playing songs that required me to retune my guitar which severely pared down the catalog - it was just too much of a “hassle”. Listening to snatches of some of the offerings like Satch Boogie or In the Hall of the Mountain King was depressing because I “knew” that mastering stuff like that would be out of my reach even if I lived to be three hundred years old, so why bother?

Eventually I just didn't feel like digging the cable out of the drawer and hooking up the guitar and waiting for the software to load anymore. And, I knew, the more days that went by like this the less I would be able to recall, so the worse I would get, which would make it even less likely I would want to play the next day.  Remember, I am not a musical person - stuff like this doesn't stick for me and without constant exposure my already tenuous grasp of the subject poofs into nonexistence. 

Man...talk about a funk.

One day, my in-laws came to visit and I showed my wife's father the 3/4 size Strat Squire I got for $40. He used to play a little about a million years ago so after a bit of messing around with it he asked if I had an amp. I said I did and fetched it and my bass. I plugged him in and there we sat in the kitchen swapping instruments back and forth bickering about the chord progression to House of the Rising Sun.  I think our free-form whatever-ing sounded... well, if it didn't sound exactly "good" it wasn't horrible to listen to, either. Since we both appear to play with the same level of skill it wasn't annoying or embarrassing when we stepped all over each other and it didn't turn into some sort of bizarre contest where the most obscure chord or hipster-iest technique "won".

It was a blast and gave me the boost I needed to lift me out of this most recent rut.  Hey, I know there will be other ruts but, for now, I wanted to be better so that impromptu jam sessions would be even more enjoyable!  Back to the software!

Ok, since I wanted to "get better" I was going to have to look at a lot of these songs for what they were - many of them were just there to hone techniques so I might as well make peace with that. Incubus (I Miss You) is pretty much all harmonics, Nirvana (In Bloom) is all about power chords, the Black Keys (I Got Mine), Tommy Tutone (8675309), David Bowie (Rebel Rebel) are mainly relentless grinds of a handful of notes that are there to test coordination in the face of boredom (I think). 

Unlike the old version of Rocksmith, there are no gigs to strive to qualify for - there's just Percent Mastery, a pure number. There's no penalty for ignoring the Goals like "Achieve 75.42% Mastery in Pour Some Sugar on Me”, so the forced focus isn’t really there anymore.  While this software is a better teacher then the older version the open-ended nature of the new version relies on a much larger scoop of self-discipline so, you know, not so great if you, like me, have the attention span of…

In order to gauge where I was with where I wanted to be I needed to pick a metric. It's all well and good to "master" (score 100% or more) some of the songs but some are so easy that it would be difficult to not master them. On the other side of that coin is stuff that is so fast and complex that hearing the little snatches that play when I am making my selection makes me wonder how it is possible that a single human holding a piece of wood that has six strings nailed to it is capable of making the noises I am hearing. I needed an "overall mastery" that made sense to me and that didn't require me to check out my stats online from a PC. 

I didn't want to do a lot of math and I didn't want to have to write down all of the mastery levels for all the songs so I just counted them in groups of 5% and used the weighted average to determine my overall mastery.  Here’s what I have so far:

I have played all the stuff in my collection at least once now. As you can see, doing so really kicked the average to the right. 

You might be thinking, “Well, just download a bunch of new stuff and play the songs once and that will increase your average even more”.  No, not really.  Oh, at first, it would, since it seems that I average 30% or so mastery on any new song that I play once (see that peak there?).  After a while, though, the peak in the 30% range would get higher and higher and begin to dominate the average, anchoring the overall mastery to that level.  

Plus, for each song I add, the less of an effect each individual song has on the average as a whole.  Huh?  Well, let’s say I wanted to bump my average up by 10% - I would need to improve by 1600% (the number of songs I have times 10%).  So each and every song would have to go up by 10%, or half the songs would need to improve by 20%, or I would have to bring 20 of the songs from the 20% and below level to the 100% level…  Adding new songs (unless they are trivial to play) does nothing for the score, and, worse, doesn’t really make me a better player, which is the whole point of doing this in the first place.

So how long would increasing my mastery by 10% take, anyway?

With 160 songs increasing the mastery by 10% in one go is probably not going to happen.  For every song that I have bumped from 30% to a whopping 65 or 70% in one or two attempts, there are a couple that I have seen pathetically inch up by one or two tenths of a percent.  By my reckoning the best case scenario is 10 hours of game play (160 songs, 4 minutes a song), assuming the songs I make huge strides in balance with all of the ones that are kicking my butt. Although I guess this could be done in five days, a more realistic goal for me is a 1 or 2 percent improvement per week.

Also, I don’t mean to imply that in six weeks time someone could go from my level of mastery to somewhere near 100%.  That’s ridiculous.  At some point the whole “diminishing returns” thing really kicks in and the only way to go up is to actually learn the songs note for note, not just plow through them in a general, unfocused way.  I’m not sure I will ever get to that stage.

I guess what I will try is to bump one song in each category (like the 20-25% range) up into the next category (the 25-30% range) each time I play.  This should sloooowly push the graph to the right while making sure I am not leaving any songs behind.  Looking at my song list I see that’s gonna require a lot of re-tuning.

Since I still don’t like having to retune all the time so when I need to play a song that is way out from E standard, I grab my old Strat Squire. It doesn't hold a tune as long as the Ibenez but it’s way quicker to get on point - the changes in mechanical stresses don’t de-tune the other strings as much for whatever reason.  Also, I can just leave it in Drop D or whatever.  For stuff that is slightly sharper or flatter than E standard I stick with the Ibenez.

So (until my next rut, that is) that’s my plan for the guitar.  The bass is another overly-long story. I need to wrap up this post for now but here’s a quick summary: 1) many of the arrangements for the bass on Rocksmith 2014 are really, really easy 2) I think the software might be a wee bit too forgiving in some cases and 3) As generally unskilled as I am, I may be “faking the funk” in the pit band for a play at some point a few months from now. 

More later.