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Month: February 2017

Floor

Floor

A couple of hours work, and I can see at least 10% more floor! Sometimes it seems I spend more time cleaning the garage then working in the garage.

CDs

CDs

I have been digging through my CD collection so I could re-rip some CDs that I previously ripped with lossy compression. Many of my CDs are from high school or earlier. I was surprised to find the first CD I ever purchased, a Vivaldi Four Seasons by an Italian Orchestra with Pina Carmirelli as the lead. I purchased it in mid 1983. [no doubt I was on the leading edge of coolness getting a classical music CD in middle school!]

These old school CDs stand out a bit in part because they were all made in the same Philips/Polygram factory in Hanover, West Germany. It was interesting because for the first few years, all of the CDs said “Made in West Germany”. Some of these original CDs were also stamped AAD or ADD, as they were all based of original analog recording.

It was also a reminder that back in the day they didn’t do very unique ‘cover art’ on the CD itself.

Even being 33 years old, that CD had no problem being read.

No doubt David S Gardner will remember listening to this CD on that first gen Toshiba CD player.

8mm

8mm

Mika Lepisto I was digging around my old 8mm video tapes and found these… In car footage from a few rallies we did together. The first one is from the Dryad one, which I remember as being very rough road surface… and sure enough the camera is pretty shaky! The second is from the Oregon Trail in 2002 I think.

Those were great times, and you were a fantastic driver!

https://youtu.be/zCghWB15KGM
https://youtu.be/k3GwqH9hPKI
https://youtu.be/zCghWB15KGM

Track

Track

Something Christopher Neil Bradley and Myles Kerr might find funny.

I was digging around and found an old 8mm camera tape from one of my first track days. This was in 98 or 99, and I was driving my Supercharged Acura Integra. I was a complete newb to track driving, so expect lots of early braking, trail braking, and way early apex. Oh and terrible video quality.

The video stream was from an Intel Proshare camera I had taped to the front of the car with a composite video output going to a camcorder under the seat. I have to admit I was surprised it lasted as long as it did.

The Integra was mostly stock aside from the Supercharger. Tires were some kind of all season, fuel was pump gas, and tune was non existent. I am so shocked this car didn’t blow up. If memory serves me, it had a relay that shorted out the IAT sensor under boost so the ECU would run richer, plus it had a rising ratio fuel pressure regulator with something like 2:1 boost to fuel pressure gain. What a hack!

Power was about 245whp with a weight of probably 2700lbs.
On the plus side it was a really light car, which made for a good learning platform. The Porsche guys were always complementary of it.

About min 4 I start dispatching with some traffic. Needless to say this was the start of my real car addiction.

https://youtu.be/kvNpB4rzkAA

SCSI

SCSI

Thanks to Matthew R. Wilson for the help getting my SGI Indy up and running! In place of the original Seagate 1GB SCSI hard drive I used a SCSI2SD, which is a SCSI drive simulator that uses an SDCard for storage. Much more reliable than a 20 year old hard drive.

Installing Irix 5.3 is pretty straightforward as it is a single CD, but getting Irix 6.5.22 takes a bit more work since it is 5 CDs. Matthew figured out how to get the bootp loader to work correctly, as we were able to get an install of all 5 CDs over the network (10Mbit btw) from his NUC.

Once the install was complete, but not configured, I made a dd image of the SDCard. That makes it easy to start over with a clean config if I need to.

Matthew also had some spare memory, so we bumped it up to 128MBs. Combine that with a screaming 133MHz MIPS R4600 and we are talking power! 300,000 Dhrystones.

I would not, however, put this guy directly on the internet. 2003 security patches does not bode well.