The collected works of Raion-Fox - Page 3

ibmfiles wrote: Woah Raion-Fox, so I'm curious; do most of you guys buy synthesizers and have this degree of familiarity with them? That's like taking all of the niche forums and topics (vogons, VCF, EEVBlog Forum, VSF, gearslutz, geekhack etc etc etc) and rolling it all into one with each member on here knowing all of these topics and switching between them nonchalantly on the fly. I've never in my life switched from discussing OS/400 to DX7s and JV-1080s, nor did I think it was possible.

Lets roll over some of my other hobbies while we're at it:

Cars (I do all the work on my Miata)
Audiophile
Music Composer
Writer
parkour (I suck at it though as I'm the only tracer within 30 miles)
mechanical keyboards
I speak three languages besides English: Chinese, Japanese and some Portugeuse
Cooking

My Miata smells like petrol today because I replaced the fuel pump. FML.

So yeah, I'm a varied interest man.

ibmfiles wrote: I bought a Yamaha FB-01 (got lucky @ $37 USD) even though it's a bit redundant as I own an "IMFC" which has the same chip. But this way it doesn't need to be inside a computer. I think the IMFC even needs the elusive -12V ISA rail, which I have no idea how it differs from "+12v" as they're both... 12v. I like that red screen, it's almost like it was deliberately chosen to be the opposite of the MT-32.
ymhfb1.JPG

Nice! I have a PSR-36, PSS-470, and my DX7 currently. I want a PSR-32, a few early analog Casios, and the Yamaha MK-100.

I did pick up a BOSS-532 mixer recently. Nice, for a mixer that uses SmartMedia.

Well I am ethnically Western Spanish-Eastern Portugeuse. Even my mother's ancestral family name, Godoy, should clue you in. Its the greatest ethnic composition in my genetics and the one I most strongly identify with, as I look very Portugeuse (By contrast, my younger brother takes after the father's side and would look at home in Denmark or Sweden.)

I'm learning European Portugeuse, though.

8.1 Embedded Industry Pro with a handful of patches and hacks is relatively alright especially since FreeBSD is being retarded on my laptop for now.

Yep that was quite the shock

I wanted one for a while but I no longer want one. I do want to know, how many of the Hobbits survived.

Eew redhat tools. I'd rather have a good pkgsrc.

So yesterday, my girl's 2013 Sonic's cylinder no.3 decided it was too hot and cracked, so I've got a dead rebadged Daewoo in my back yard I have to replace the engine in and then sell off. Clearly, after such a boneheaded event, I've made my girlfriend promise to let ME handle her car choices. She sucks at choosing reliable vehicles. She's getting a used IS300 after I sell this off, since my buddy has one he's gonna sell to us for a good price, and that way we don't need an auto loan.

Other than that, parts for my Miata's AC repair came in. New condenser, drier, compressor and PAG 100 oil with plenty of r134a. Fingers crossed when I get around to installing it.

Outside of that, the Miata needs some rust repair on the right wheel arch, right rocker, right side of the truck (inner arch) and the left rocker, although thats far more solid than the right, and a new front core support since the one in there is tweaked a bit, I straightened it out using the old come along trick, but that's not perfect nor safe lol. I know it's probably gonna cost more than its worth, but its *my* money pit lol.

Picked up two base Indy from a friend in NC two days ago, one works one doesn't, finally got around to the not working one. It has 5.3 installed on a drive.

If I let it boot normally, it will go to the screen "The System is Coming Up" then a split second later the screen goes black, the Indy's shutdown tone plays and the system gives me the restart prompt.

I've already reset the env, gone into sash and booted from the /unix kernel but the result is the same with no messages. Is this a sign of filesystem corruption? And if so, how can I run an fsck from sash? Is it a sign the system's drive is bad? The PSU? I'm at a loss.

Progress. I mounted the drive in my working Indy I got as well. Slice 7 was dirty, managed to fsck it. But it's only /usr, I did want to see what the whole disk had. Slice 6 appears to have a corruption problem. I can neither mount nor fsck. It is an efs filesystem and I don't know how to handle dumping this other than dd, which I already did. Is there a way to dump or rebuild the filesystem ala xfsdump?

>But if you go through all the trouble to replace the block why not keep it?

Because I refuse to work on it after this. The engine bay is tiny and there's no way to detach the engine from the transmission so I have to remove them together. I want to fix the car and make it someone else's problem.

The IS300 I'm buying her after the car is sold is far far more reliable with the legendary JZ engine by Toyota. Unfortunately my girlfriend is smart when it comes to art and fashion, her majors, but she has been forced to admit she was a bonehead buying the car. I actively discouraged her from buying it but she didn't listen.

I have asked her to never buy a car again and not take my opinion seriously. It's costing me the weekend after this, beer and pizza for my helpers and $900 for a replacement shortblock, mounts, headgasket and headboard and a timing belt kit, since I'm changing the engine, why the hell not? Plus machine shop work on the head.

The engine in the Sonic is a terrible design. It is an open deck with very thin aluminium walls, insufficient water jackets, and valves that aren't adjustable easily. You have to replace the entire rocker/tappet assembly.

I dd'd it, I'll mess with it later. For now, got other projects to focus on.

guardian452 wrote: I have a laptop, wii U, switch, and PS2.

Boring. Although the U and Switch are well worth the money.

guardian452 wrote: I'm glad I went through the big-iron-hoarding phase, but I'm also glad I've grown out of it My electric bill is rarely over $50 now.

I don't pay for electricity, my roommate does. And when he complains about the power bill, I point out that he cranks the heat and air more than I do and I have zone data from my thermostat to prove it. In lieu of running air when running old computers I crack open windows and put my big window fans in them and vent the air that way. So in my case justification of electrical bills don't worry me. We pay around $250 for three people, including me running big iron, my girlfriend and our roommate/owner of the place that has lots of flood lamps and incandescents when he could have LEDs.

If I had a girlfriend try to force my hobbies out, I'd gladly dump her ass in a second. My girlfriend currently made a big stink about the state of my office and I took her into her walk in closet and pointed out the 50 pairs of shoes and the receipts from her shopping for clothes. She has many more clothes than me, and with that kind of justification she gets off my back readily especially since when she's off work I actually spend time with her instead of hobbies.

Miata did pretty well on my trip to Arlington. It has developed a bad habit of not staying in second gear for some reason but I'll try replacing the mounts this week to fix the problem.

I'm 23, and my first computer I had contact with was an Atari 400, or so I remember. My family had various machines throughout my childhood but the A3000UX became mine because nobody else wanted it. I mostly stuck around in workbench but I still have the AmigaUnix manual somewhere.

The 3000UX sadly disappeared, probably sold for pennies to help fund my father's purchase of a then state of the art PIII 800MHz with 128mb of ram and Windows ME.

Older isn't necessarily worse in all ways, is one way I say it. I did own briefly at 1987 Supra twin turbo and that was fast. I went 157 in it and beat a Mustang Cobra. The only problem with the far it had 400k miles, interior was completely worn out and the engine had been rebuilt 200k ago. So I resold it for more than I paid for it. That car handled better than many modern cars and was far faster though it's acceleration was pitiful by comparison. This wasn't a quarter mile race after all. It took me a good three miles to outspeed the 'stang.

I refuse to drive cars newer than 2011 due to the government thinking it has to hold my hand with electronic stability control that cannot be disabled. The Miata has no ABS and I prefer it that way as ABS has directly contributed to my only wreck, where I rear ended an SUV in my Lancer because I hit a floor joint in a tunnel which tripped the ABS and made me lose control.

I will refuse drive or own a self driving car. I will fight tooth and nail to keep my right to drive a manually driven car, and if one day a country stops allowing it, I'll simply leave that country.

I imagine at some point there will come a day where I will stop buying new computer and network equipment and forgo a modern cellular phone for today's equivalent of the N900.

People say the automation innovations will lead the way to a post work post scarciry world. I call bullshit. We won't master so called quantum circuits in our lifetimes so we're going to be eventually stuck without process shrinks to give Moore's law credibility, because we can only mathematically approximate and hypothesize quantum circuits. To build something like that requires materials we will likely never possess. Carbon nanotubes are toxic.

I have no problem doing that one day. I refuse to live in any 'utopia' because we were warned decades ago about the real implications of that.

guardian452 wrote: Right, the last auto accident I was involved in I was walking in a crosswalk and was hit by a driver DUI (on oxys) who was turning left and didn't stop. The police let her go without even a citation. At least she was honest and admitted she shouldn't have been driving. I hope things like this can be prevented by AVs.

I think it is unwise to put intoxicated people behind the wheel of any vehicle. And autonomous vehicles, in order to have redundancy, are going to require manual override controls. Putting that in the control of someone is high is something I don't recommend in the least.

guardian452 wrote: Sometimes I weep for humanity. So did insurance buy that BS about your ABS not working, or was it just an excuse for mommy and daddy? Because whenever a young 20-something rear-ends an innocent victim, they always have someone else to blame. Some of us here actually know how ABS pumps work because we've had to sit through many long design meetings about their control software. So you were already on the brake and beyond the limits of the car on a public road. Just admit it.

I only race on private land. I don't speed on the highway, and hell fucking no in the Hampton-Roads Bridge Tunnel. I am lucky that there's a 3 mile stretch of private road that I am permitted to use for this purpose. 157 mph would put me in jail for over a month in VA as we have a punishment of every mph over 90 is 1 day in jail, at the judge's discretion, plus class 1 misdemeanor charges on top including up to 5,000 in fines. I would be retarded to drive like that on a public road. So what I said re. speeding a Cobra is not relevant to what I later said.

No, the ABS didn't fail. The system overcompensated. You see, the HRBT has asphalt cut into sections with steel expansion joints between them. It was steady 35 mph traffic and I was driving an automatic 2005 Mitsubishi Lancer ES. Not an EVO, not a fast car, and I was driving under the 35mph limit.

I was not distracted, the road was dry and I stayed ~60ft behind the car I rear ended. So what happened?

I hit the brakes, but I didn't hit it enough to trigger the ABS. One of the floor joints struck my wheels and likely locked one or more of my brakes, triggering ABS. The car skidded diagonally, passenger side first into the SUV. I could not steer around it, as ABS proponents claim to be an advantage, because to my left was a wall, to my right was a line of cars in heavy traffic. I could do nothing and there were other cars that wrecked ahead of us, but they were considered separate, as this crash didn't touch that crash.

I know you're an engineer but guess what, SO AM I. ABS systems work on the principle of toggling brake pressure to avoid wheel lockups. It does not work well when the conditions are anything other than level, dry pavement. I was traveling on a dry, yet downward grade, which puts excessive load on the front wheels, with uneven surfaces. ABS is a computer based system based on modeling and sensor input. It is far from a perfect system, and has often had people spinning out on ice here. You may chime in that ESC/TCS/DSC/whatever makes that not happen but that isn't true. It happens anyways. Because computers in cars are not and will not be ever sophisticated enough to reduce the problem to any wide degree.

Insurance in a tort state like VA doesn't care about how a crash happens. What they care about in a rear end wreck is who hit who. I hit the SUV, so I was declared at fault. Explanation would have made no difference because it wasn't going to change the outcome of the case. Pick and choose your battles.

However, I did get a "following too closely ticket" thanks to the asshole state cop. I hired legal counsel, drew up engineering diagrams and an explanation of the situation depicting what likely happened, along with some tests using a similar surface, with a similar grade, in a Lancer EVO at similar speeds. The evidence was sufficient to get the judge to dismiss it.

In 6 years of owning a drivers license, I've had a single speeding ticket, which was dismissed when a faulty VSS was determined to be the cause. I've had a single wreck. I am not proud of my record, but I refuse to consider myself a statistic and for that patronizing tone to be taken with me, when I'm far more responsible than I let on

So you're a walking, talking statistic driving society and regulation *towards* driverless cars and excessive surveillance devices.

I suggest you take the tinfoil hat off and stop reading internet screeds from salty idiots who think because they worked at a goofy lube for two months and learned how to change oil and tires they know more than the combined knowledge of an industry that has existed for well over a century. It's 2017 with 2018 models coming out, and there's still no trouble disabling these devices for whatever purpose you desire

You can disable TCS, but not ESC altogether, from what I have understood. ESC consists of several parts including skid control computer, yaw sensors and lateral acceleration sensors

commodorejohn wrote: Yeah, that's why I didn't get a Volkswagen until I moved out to California. Woulda just been eaten away...

That's right, you have a bug right? Pics please! Do you do your own work on it?

As for the DMC-12, it's actually stainless steel panels, not aluminium. The car has a mix of steel/fibreglass parts, and they rust if the assembly isn't perfect, which being they're in early-80s Ireland, not many of them were!

Very nice. My grandmother had one in the exact same colour.

My 1999 Miata is a rust bucket, it originally came from Ohio so I'm not surprised, but it has been reliable with all new brakes, oil changes and the like it just keeps on chugging. For a near 200k miles car it doesn't burn much oil, doesn't overheat and doesn't have any problems other than it did have some of the filthiest coolant out of any car I have bought in it.

The transmission on the other hand is eventually going to need a rebuild. The previous owners have manhandled the synchros and thus it grinds occasionally going in or out of gear 2. I've been changing the gear oil regularly in an attempt to flush out any crap in the system, and while no big chunks have come out it's a lot of small bits of brass and steel coming​ out.

Inevitably I'm simply considering driving the car until the body goes and swapping the engine into a Miata with a good body.

Much better for someone to make molds for injection molding than 3D printing.

If it runs on Alpha then it should work as I know Alpha had big endian UNIX on it at some point.

If you have Linux with EFS support, you should be able to mount the images.

On the subject of old SGIs I've been trying to learn UNICOS/mp so the few people who still use it could hire me. Of course all I have is documentation I can find, but UNICOS/mp is just IRIX with mods to run on a Cray X1 or X1e

Uclibc is probably better for your use case

Do these run on 220v three phase only?

Nice! A bit out of my price range and freight for it would probably bankrupt me, but if I get out to CA sometime soon then I'll give you an email.

Yeah, thats what I thought! Glad it works.

I'll get a pic of the one in my father's shop sometime this week. Nice clock

The Sonic has been sold with it's new engine. My girlfriend has her silver IS300 and is happy and I am happy knowing I won't have to afford to pay for her piece of shit Daewoo rebadge, plus I got to keep the profit on selling the Sonic since I did all the work for her.

The IS300 has 160k on a well maintained engine. No rattles, knocks or anything. The transmission fluid was brown but I replaced it and no metal shavings were on the drain plug so I think we're good. The AC had a leak at the drier so I just popped in a new one and vacuumed it down, charged it up and it blows ice cold.

Now to change my Miata's transmission oil, diff oil, rip out the half assed cruise control and fix the A/C. I'm also in the market for a manual rack but those are expensive so that won't be until after I've recovered some expenses. I mean the PS rack is fine but I prefer fuel economy over light steering.

So yes this conbines 2-4 VPro inputs and makes a 2-4kimage out of it.

mopar5150 wrote: Holy crap, sounds like you have a full blown repair shop going. And we thought you were just a computer nerd.

Not really. I just have a concrete slab behind my house and some nice friends who are willing to help with the bigger jobs. Replacing the Sonic's shortblock took about 3 days. One to pull the engine, one to swap the parts over to the shortblock, and one to put it back in. Biggest pain was reinstallation. The Sonic has a tiny engine bay made for Korean child labor.

Now I did work as a low end mechanic at one job and learned a lot of shit, that's how I know to do what I do.

Man you're buying an awful lot of stuff!

I put a DX7 Special Edition ROM in my DX7, which fixes the buggy MIDI implementation and offers some expanded features for $15

I'm yanking your chain. I bought no less than $400 worth of vintage gear this passed week. I did however pick up some stuff at a recycler and sell it to offset my costs (an old Alpha system I already had a buyer for, a spare PDP-11 for a customer of mine, and a PC XT that went to my cousin)

There's an IBM monitor that can do it, forget the name but Hamek uses one.

I misunderstood the purpose of the compositor, my bad.

Currently I have three PCs, all laptops, 8 SGIs, two Suns and a C64C. Its funny that most of my computers I own are as old as, or older than me

So I heard today that the scots have a wonderful thing called deep fried pizza. It's like a marriage of the tastiest way to cook something with the most popular food in the Western world.

For those whove had a 'pizza supper' as it is so called, how good is it?

Yeah I've been lagging off on cooking as of late, I've been on the road all day everyday

Yeah we can't be too careful about patent/copyright trolls.

You can try selling the software at vcfed or on eBay, otherwise, you could always discuss this privately with your buyers.

Two Dell flat panel TFTs at a thrift store for $15, a 1907fp and a s1709wc. 1280x1024 and 1440x900 respectively, so not high end, but good enough for their use case!

Heh, I like 1920x1440 and up but its hard to find 4:3 monitors. These are going to be used on lower end systems where hooking them up to my 1920x1200 displays I use on a daily basis is impractical or non-sensical. It's best to have a monitor close to the native resolution when possible.

Nikon you mean? Nice! I enjoy photography too.

On the subject of opiods they make me too nauseous so I can't take them. I used Kratom after slicing my hand open bad, that helped with far less nausea.