Reading (For Dummies)

Vantage

Yours truly, leading 40 Bucks a Night (what this cost refers to is a mystery, although we met the woman who put the climb up)

Laura and I rose at 5:30am to head for the middle of Washington State, the furthest west that I have been since settling down in my new podunk town. Everything on the west coast seems to be bolted, Vantage is no exception. We started climbing at the Feathers, and did 40 Bucks as well as Ruffled Feathers and Feather in My Cap. The climbing was quite easy compared to Gunks climbing (a comparison that I always make here on the west coast). I do somewhat miss the stiffer ratings and trad climbs of my father and brother's home town.

Slot Canyon on the way to Sunshine

We set up some top ropes at Fat Man, which is the a ledge below Sunshine. The topography of the area was quite interesting, with short cliffs separated by a flat ridge. The basalt cliffs are quite featureful in this area, although they are still bolted. Down below Sunshine we set up Teaser (5.5), Tease Me Please Me (5.7), and Pornstar (5.10c). Laura, in her insanity, was able to put up Pornstar. Quite nice!

Grim-looking by photograph, it's actually quite stunning in person

Power Supply Overload

I won an Icom 706MKiiG radio on eBay a few weeks ago, and I've had it now for about two weeks. It's a fantastic little radio that does everything from 160M up to 70cm (1.8Mhz to 470Mhz), which is quite a range for a new ham to explore.

The radio came with a nice LDG antenna tuner, and a promising Kenwood PS30 power supply (which can supply 15Amps/20Amps max at 12 volts). Unfortunately, the power supply got pretty beat up on its way here. The back end is dented in, and the main circuit board inside is actually cracked inside. The power read 15.5 volts between the leads (which is, as it turns out, normal for the radio when it is not under load). The radio would not turn on when connected to it, though.

Fortunately, I had built my ATX power supply, and jumpered the radio to it using my voltmeter leads. The radio worked! But the ATX unix doesn't supply enough amps to work the 706 at max power (~100 watts on the HF bands). Still, I was happy to have a working radio at low power, and my ebay seller has been super nice and responsive in getting an insurance claim on the supply going.

I bought an identical power supply from the Northwest Swap-n-Shop. Unknown to me, this one had been sitting on a shelf for a decade, in the original box, with the original manual!

...the manual -- click to enlarge if you want a printable copy

"They don't make 'em like they used to," is what comes to mind. It's quite amazing to me to see a manufacturer include a complete electrical schematic with their product! Power supplies are quite simple devices, but I don't have much of an electronics background. Having a manual was enough motivation for me to tear apart the bad PS30 and get my soldering iron out.

A repaired supply

My assumption was that the PCB was just cracked, and when i tore it apart it became very obvious which connections had been severed. I jumpered the cut traces with a little 12 guage wire leftover from the ATX conversion project, tested with a voltmeter (still 15.5volts, which is okay for a radio), plugged it in, and voilla! It powers my radio with quite a bit of power now.

TRAC reporting

When I was an undergraduate at Syracuse University, a good friend and often-times-roommate worked for TRAC, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. It is a very interesting little organization that Syracuse University helps provide the resources for.

As I heard on the rumor mill, TRAC was started after its creators were audited by the IRS concerning a completely different business. Of course, the audit cost them a lot of time and money (and money was something that they had made little of at that point). They were clean, but they wanted to find out just how often the IRS audited low-income folks versus bigger businesses. They filed a FOIA request, which resulted in a long slog through the courts to get the information that they wanted. Ultimately, they showed that the IRS audited far more low-income individuals and businesses than high-income. The New York Times story broke, made headlines, and they suddenly saw that their experience in gathering FOIA statistics could be very useful in helping people keep an eye on the government.

My personal feelings for the current administration aside, TRAC has faithfully reported on .gov statistics for the last 7 years -- at least, those statistics they can gather. The disturbing trend of the Republican-controlled congress and white house was a lack of data, and a lot more red tape thrown in TRAC's way. Not all that surprising, given the information that TRAC can find. I find it very interesting that our government is paying a lot more attention to immigration issues (people stealing minimum-wage jobs at worst) than to, say, government corruption and white collar crime (people stealing millions at best). I think that the argument could be summed in a foolproof comparison: a man exporting an F-14 Tomcat to Iran (Axis of Evil, anyone?) is given two years behind bars, while a woman who immigrated to the US illegally from Canada is given one year, plus a hefty fine ($120,917.69).

Somehow I don't think that the punishments fit the crimes. Here's to 2009...

Apple Tech Support: A Transcript

Apple used to have really good tech support. A few years ago (the last time I had to use Apple's support), my iBook battery had gone finnicky. They didn't even ask a question, they just sent me a new battery with a box to return the old one. My how things have changed...

Laura's Macbook has joined the ranks of the Crackbooks when the palm rest began splitting open. Apple told her that it was due to abuse (it isn't) and that they would charge to replace the top cover. She refused, wisely. I think it is in Apple's best interest to fix affected laptops. These case cracks could easily cause a user to cut their wrists on the sharp plastic splinters, and they quite obviously begin forming where the screen bezel touches the palm rest (so pretty much every time a user closes his/her macbook, they are causing the problem) -- it is quite obviously a design and engineering flaw.

I decided to give Apple a call and played a hardball.

AC: Applecare customer support, this is Chris, can I have your name?

Me: Hi. Chris, is it? Okay. My name is Reid Wightman.

AC: Okay, can I have the serial number of the Macbook?

Me: Sure. XXXXXXX.

AC: Okay, what seems to be the problem today?

Me: First off, Chris, I am required by the state of Washington to inform you that I am recording this phone call. Is that okay with you?

AC: Uh..uh..we can't have that. It is against Apple's policies to record tech support calls.

Me: Well, could I speak to someone with whom I can record this call?

AC: You won't be able to get service if you record, sir. I could bump you to second tier support to see what they say.

Me: Okay then, I am turning my recorder off. There. I am calling because my fiance's MacBook has the case cracking in the palm rest area.

AC: Yes, I see the phone call recorded here. She called on October 5th. We said that she could take it to an Apple Store for assessment

Me: Right, but she was told that it would not be covered under warranty. This is quite obviously a design flaw, as there are hundreds of people having the same issue on Apple's message boards. There's even a Flickr photo group of about a hundred people who have this problem.

AC: I see.

Me: Look, the nearest Apple store is a five or six hour drive from here. We'd like to have a box sent here, and we'd like this repair to be covered under warranty.

AC: Okay, I can send a box out. I just want to be sure that it hasn't been dropped, or smashed, or otherwise mishandled--

Me: I can assure you that it has not.

AC: Okay, because if it has, it will not be covered under warranty--

Me: I can assure you that it has not.

The phone call pretty much felt like pulling teeth, as short as it was. Not a good vibe, although I sorta did that on purpose. Laura had spent the better part of an hour trying to get them to fix her laptop. Fortunately playing hardball still works, but it shouldn't be necessary.

Here's hoping that Apple does a voluntary recall before some lawsuit makes the headlines.

Wallowa Mountain Wandering

Laura and I went out to the Wallowa Mountains over the weekend. They're some fantastic-looking peaks just a few hours south of us (sadly, down and up and down and up, through the Snake River and Grande Ronde valleys). It's a very nice little park, more like the Adirondacks in its laid-back attitude towards backpackers (just fill out a slip of paper at the trail head and take it with you), as opposed to my adventures in Southern California (which often included waiting lists, lotteries, and fees).

We hiked most of the way up to Ice Lake, which in itself was a pretty mofo hike. I was getting a fierce headache, though, and suffering from general lethargy...and we were hiking inside of an ice cloud...so we headed back down. The stove died, of course, completing the trip with us shivering to keep warm.

That's okay, we'll be back...

On the way out of there, we stopped at a small town a bit north of Joseph (Joseph is an oppressive little tourist-trap town that I really do not understand) I got to talking to the man pumping my gas. His other job, he told me, was going around to water district's control centers and telling the area farmers that they had used up their water allotment/shutting off their water/etc. Often not a fun job, he said -- and made a lot less fun by the weather for the last ten years. The Wallowas of the early 90s always had snow, even in the summer he reported. Now they get snow in September, but it starts melting right away (we saw a lot of snowmelt already) as temperatures get into the 40s on some days. Frequent winter thaws prevent the snowpack from developing as it should, which means far less water come springtime. Thank goodness for small miracles.

ATX Power Supply Conversion

I won a radio on ebay a few days ago, and it even comes with a power supply. Of course, why have one when you can have two for the same price?

Testing...1...2...check, check...

My old swampmate, Buer, sent me some nice instructions which prompted me to convert an old ATX power supply into something usable for ham radio (or other funness). I decided to put both banana plugs and a cigarette lighter in mine. Cody came to the rescue -- that madman has a drill press in his office! We drilled out holes and I filed them clean, protecting the power supply board itself with a handy plastic bag.

I picked up the cigarette lighter plug and banana plugins at my local Radio Shack (lighter == part number 270-1556, banana plug binding post == 274-718 for the radio shack curious). I don't really care about a wide range of voltages, so I just put the +12 volt and ground to the banana jacks. I left the positive feed of the cigarette lighter unattached until I find my o-ring connectors and press the wire into one. For now, I can just screw the lead into the binding post and have power to the cigarette lighter. Not having a wire hanging out of the supply would be nice, though...That baggie is in one of the boxes around here...

About all I can add to these detailed instructions is to skip the extra switch (my ATX supply already had an on-off switch on the back anyway). In order to skip the switch, you'll need to solder the green and black wires together (it's mentioned all the way down at the bottom of the article, so I almost missed it). Also, I would add this: don't shove your pin voltmeter leads into the wire slots of the banana plug adapters if they are mounted sideways. The pin will go all the way through and short out on the other plug. Oops. Sparks are fun, but power goes bye-bye. But this is why ATX supplies are so nice -- just turn the supply off, let the capacitors discharge, and turn it back on, and you will again have 12.5v of clean, beautiful power (and 10 amps of it, too!).

I'm also planning to experiment with the resistor mentioned in the instructions -- using a 10ohm resistor seems fairly low, and means that the supply is drawing .5A/2.5watts just looking pretty. I'm finding myself curious if there's a nice way to cheat this part of the ATX spec and make the supply a little more efficient when it is sitting idle.

Almost finished. I'll trim the excess from the leads off tomorrow.