Berry Punny

From time to time you will find items like this here.

Q: What do you get when Apple buys the capital of Libya?
A: IEEE!

(Edited 2-27-11. Original: What do you get when Apple buys Tripoli?)

Electric Tomato Plant

I planted a plant a month or two ago. I knew the soil wasn't the greatest--sandy, loose, quick to drain--but I looked at the plot and said, "This is just what Here needs."

It was hard to get growing. The first week was painful.

It started to grow. Two friends of mine offered stakes to support it. With some twine and encouragement it started to rise to the challenge.

I'm still not sure what kind of plant it is. Were it woody, it would grow strong and tall with kind guidance. Were it weedy, it would use the stakes and twine as a scaffold to reach air and sunlight but never stand on its own.

Today is a day of decisions. My friends have asked for their stakes back.

I remember the first week--I never thought this little slip could even take root where I'm growing it. Now its nodding its feeble head towards the sun, and I have to decide what to do to help it grow.

What kind of plant do I want?

Crowbars

If you do something stupid with an electronic power supply, sometimes they are equipped to sense it and throw a crowbar across the output to protect the insides. Picture a Jacob's Ladder running, an evil scientist cackling maniacally, and a hero sneaking through the shadows carrying a crowbar--he then poises to cast his payload into the crackling storm of electricity--

If you're reading my blog, you probably know by now that something rather technical shows up once in a while. This is one of those posts.

I'm checking out a Con Avionics HS26-13.5 analog power supply. It weighs a good 30 lbs. and is rated at 24-28 VDC at 13.5 A. This particular unit has been dropped on its head. The front right top corner has been displaced a good inch into the volume of the machine.

I could tell the case would short a couple of contacts inside if it were powered up, so I resolved to get the cover off. Well, first thing to do is take an odd silver (matte aluminum) box off the back. It's a -Con Avionics OVH26-13.5. Google says "con avionics ovh26-13.5" doesn't exist. At the moment I think it's merely a sophisticated external overvoltage crowbar circuit.

It's connected across the output. It has large bolt-mounted diodes or SCRs of some kind and an MCR648-2 mounted on the outside on a moderate heat sink. The supply is "HS26-13.5" while the attachment is "OVH26-13.5," so it seems to me we have Over Voltage Handler or somesuch with a common voltage-current pair with the supply proper.

Solfeg

After listening to his music tutor sing a long and clear note, a novice innocently asked him, "is that so?"

"Nah," the Master replied, "It's just me."

Realizing his pun had not gone undetected, "D'oh!" slipped past the novice's filter.

The Master shook his head at what a ray of light this young whippersnapper was.

Notably, he thought, This is fa' better then being T'd off. Lahts bettah.

Does that bring us back to sew?

Not without a bit more doh.

Making Kinections

So, I'm the proud owner of a brand new XBox 360 Kinect bundle.

I'm kinda giddy about it.

I'm quite happy about many other things too, like my internship.

See, internally it's a specialized PC (i386-compatible? ia64?) architecture. It plays fun games. It's one of the later revisions of the hardware, so ring-of-death and other issues have been worked out by all those who came before me. (Thanks!)

Also, the Kinect (with a $35 addition) can plug into the PC and use the libFreeNect driver to pull the 3-D and other informations out of it that the games on the 'Box can. See, I don't think dancing in place in front of a camera in order to make a figure on screen pretend to imitate me is going to be much fun--but driver and algorithm development, THAT will be awesome. :)D

I'm also pondering looking into rooting the box and installing Linux--but that'd require a hard drive as the installed nonvolatile memory is only 4GB. Also, I value it's Halo capabilities a touch more than I value its Linux or computing power. (What's in those things, anyway?) (I had to look it up. Check out the wikipedia article on its internals. Apparently it would be sweet for raw power's sake.) Thus, I probably will put that task off for quite some time. (I really wouldn't mind running Windows on it--I'd just love to have a general-purpose 3-core 64-bit PPC machine of my own.)

Biggest uses for it? Playing DVDs, playing games lots of people can play, and hacking the Kinect. That's about it. :)

(Microsoft, will you Please please please pretty please allow Steam to operate on XBox Live? I might even consider that grounds on which to get a paid subscription.:P)