Bass-ically Basic

The term "god-like" is thrown around too much these days.  It has been cheapened to the point where I have been robbed of the only adjective that I can think of that fully describes my ability to vastly overrate my bass playing prowess.

About the pic.  Heh heh.  Insert nonchalant world-weary faux stretch here.  You are seeing that right.  I picked up the bass and ripped out all 328 notes (or so) to "You Really Got Me" on my very first try.  "Flawless Performance", the Rocksmith Guy said.

Flawless!

Oh, sure, the song is short and super simple, and I know for sure I hit at least a dozen sour, buzzy notes in there but, hey, maybe the original 1964 recording included a lot of "whoops dammit ah there we are" retries which is why I wasn't dinged for them - I unconsciously kept true to the artist's intent.  That's totally probably it!

Yep, you could throw around all sorts of fancy terms to explain away this glorious achievement like "harmonic aliasing" and "spectral bleeding" and "you are just a lucky, lucky [bleep] that's all there is to it".  I'll just chalk your attitude up to jealousy and your bitterness at being born with functioning ears.

Shenanigans aside, I remember having a conversation with someone a while back before bass arrangements were a thing in Rocksmith.  I wondered if different filtering/A-D hardware would be required since the acoustic range would need to be expanded on the low end.  Did they already engineer that in from the beginning, or did they need to make some sort of timing, phase, or other concession to make the scoring work out?  Both?  Neither?

I wonder that now more than ever because it seems like many of the bass arrangements are super-forgiving.  Well, the ones that don't have your fingers crammed together on the, like, 37th fret trying to plink out notes that would cause a fruit bat to tell you to "knock it off", anyway.  "Pick a different instrument," I yell at the TV.  Hell, even a triangle would make more sense.

One last thing: I didn't get a chance to play in the pit band before Christmas.  Maybe cuz they sensed my awesomeness and didn't want to be shown up.   Again, that's totally probably it.

Hey, it just gives me more time to practice... Wait... What am I saying?  I'm Flawless!

"Want Super Badly" Equals "Need", Right?

Nothing - not even a Brand Names catalog - has ever matched the sheer “Ooooh! I want that!  No… wait… that!” of all the stuff I see in OFFGRID magazine. I picked this up at the checkout station at Barnes and Noble the other day because I thought it looked interesting. 

Oh, yeah, baby.

Knives with lights… Off the shelf bug-out bags… Inner-city defense pencils (these are spikes, plain and simple).  Also, how to make (extremely) old-school weaponry out of rocks, sticks, and other jazz, how to filter water… Sweet!  Hey, what would happen if a riot threatened my neighborhood?  What, this neighborhood?  Well, I'm pretty sure that a few dozen Stepford Wives runners-up armed with decoupage and rum cake could make short work of... No. No...  I guess not.  Hmmm... I probably won't ever need this snowmobile survival stuff but ohmygodohmygod, there’s a Swiss Army Hammer in here!  Honey, there's a Swiss Army Hammer in here!  How could I not already have one of these in my backpack?! Man, even the ads in this mag are awesome!

What?  Only comes out quarterly?  Weak… Still, though, this next b-day is gonna rule!

Speaking of the Brand Names catalog… A ridiculously late “thanks”, Dad, for the Walkman.  I had no idea these things were, like, $80 in 2014 money.  You were right, btw.  Playing tapes ate batteries like crazy.

Boogie Board Battery "Replacement"

Picture it: Virginia, 2015. It's raining and the boy and I decide to create a new board game - one that is way better than Zombieland (this one would have had vampires and ghosts in it, you see). I go out to the garage to get the BoogieBoard only to discover that the thing won't clear when the button was pressed!  The battery must be dead! I look for the battery compartment, but there isn't one!  Panic sets in...

Then I remembered that I wasn't the only person living on this planet. Let's see what one of those fine people out there have to say. Ahh... The battery is not meant to be replaced, and a replacement from somewhere costs a significant fraction of what I paid for the unit to begin with. 

Without a battery this device is basically just a cutting board so, instead of band-sawing spooky bad-guy castle parts for a board game, I decided to give the boy his first lesson in soldering and electronics. Not a hands-on lesson, mind you. More of a "just watch and listen thing" rather than a “whoops, dad, I'm sorry about burning down the garage thing".  He's six. You don't hand a six year old a soldering iron. It makes me nervous enough watching him walk downstairs with a pencil in his hand, FCOL. 

The idea behind this was not to restore it to its former glory.  It's a "mend or make do" thing. I had everything I needed in the garage, even the half-dead AA batteries taken from the little window Christmas candles before they were stuffed back in the attic. 

The pic below says it all, really. It works fine, the batteries are replaceable, and now it has a bit of Mad Max slash BTTF2 street cred thrown in to boot.  Later (read: probably never), I might take apart some Dollar Store solar lights I have and incorporate those. We'll see. 

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…