WII Coding

• http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Homebrew_setup - GNU C compiler suite for WII programming. Requires pre-4.3 menu system. Some variety of apps already available.

Modellbahn Modulbau

• http://www.kazmedia.de/bahn/index.html
• http://www.kazmedia.de/bahn/gleisanschluss.html
• http://www.arge-nordmodul.de/
• http://www.moba-trickkiste.de/wie-macht-man-bauen/datenbank-tipps-tricks.html?id=101&task=view&total=207&start=134
• http://www.reviermodule.de/Handbuch.pdf
• FRMO - http://www.fremo-net.eu

Light Switch Replaced

Light in one bedroom failed. Wasn't the light bulb. Worried that it's the light fixture or the wiring in the attic, but turned out to be the light switch. At Home Depot, found that it's the cheapest type of 15A, 120V single-pole switch: $1.30 incl. tax.

Top 5 Reasons NOT to use CA

CA (Cyanoacrylate) glue, super glue, instant glue, ... may just be the greatest thing that comes in small bottles.

Especially for model airplane kits where everything "interlocks", you can puzzle the pieces together, add a drop of CA to each joint, and you're done.

On the other hand, there also disadvantages, the top 5 being:

1. The bottle always clogs up
2. The fumes sting my eyes
3. I've glued myself to the plane too often
4. I'm in no hurry to finish an airplane because I already have too many airplanes
5. It doesn't "sand" well

FreeMind

.. from http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page now has interesting extensions:

• Converter to meeting notes: http://code.google.com/p/mm2notes/
• Java lib to write own tools: http://jcommons.sourceforge.net/references/maputils.html

Netflix error in Safari: errorcode 2105

Netflix player stopped working from one day to the next with "ErrorCode 2105".

There was a link to nonsense about checking for fonts.

What helped:

1. Close Safari
2. Delete the file /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/Silverlight.plugin
3. Start Safari, access Netflix, try to play movie, install the now missing Silverlight again
4. Safari's Help/Installed Plugins shows Silverlight Plug-In version 4.0.50826.0

Top 10 Computer Languages

According to http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html, it's

• Java on top - Couldn't agree more
• C before C++ - I'd still prefer C++ over C if used 'carefully', whatever that means
• C# gains, but is behind
• PHP, python above Perl - Hmm. For quick hacks, I do like perl

Systems that sound interesting, but looking at them I get a "well, maybe not":

• go, Limbo: Inspired by Plan 9, built-in communication channels
• Erlang

No longer seem to matter:

• Prolog way down on list
• Smalltalk off top-50

LEGO Mindstorms RCX 2.0

Still have LEGO Mindstorms RCX 2.0 from ca. 2003. The original software that came with it does not run under Vista. It does run under Windows XP, but caused 2 problems:

1. Will quit with an out-of-memory error when a current version of Quicktime is installed. Installing the older version of QT from the LEGO CD works, but will break online movie sites that require a more recent QT.
2. The "Robotics Invention System" software will auto-start when Windows starts up. Remove the corresponding entry from the registry via regedit.exe in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

LEJOS, http://lejos.sourceforge.net, might be a better choice for the actual program, but the graphical LEGO program is neat for children.

Garage Door Repair

How long do garage door mechanisms last?

Don't remember all the dates, but had to replace a motor and a spring already. Today another spring. While doing that, noticed that a wire was damaged, so swapped that and also needed a new pulley.

When	What
2006?	Left garage spring
2008?	Right garage Motor
2010	Left garage spring, wire ropes, pulley $60

Robbe "Geier" Flying Wing

Built from the long out-of-production Robbe "Geier" kit, which I found on eBay. Used the ribs etc. from the kit as patterns to cut pieces from balsa stock. Built-up fuselage instead of using plastic pod from kit, also using the transmitter's electronic V-tail mixing instead of the mechanical mixer from the kit.

Wingspan	1.5m
Area	46dm2
Weight	925g
Wing Loading	20g/dm2
Engine	OS-15

Flies slowly, but can also go fast, very easy to handle. Motor runs for about 5 minutes. Typical flight time is 8 minutes unless it catches a thermal. Lands in grass. Not a great glider, but fun to race around the sky. When up high and only a black silhouette, it looks just like a bird.

KCRC Model-of-the-Month August 2010.

Chipsair Wackeltest

A scratch-built airplane for testing the OS 'Wankel' rotary engine.

Wingspan	150cm
Wing Area	34.5dm2
Airfoil	Eppler 197
Elevator	6.25dm2
Stabilizer	3dm2
Weight	1700g
Wing Loading	49g/dm2

A basic high-wing design with a slight old-timer look. Building started with the wing, using the E-197 outline printed with Profili. The rest was designed ad-hoc based on which pieces of wood happened to be available and what 'looked about right' with maybe a little inspiration from the DeHavilland Beaver to get the stabilizer outline and some 'round' windows on the side. Details of the front were determined after the rest of the plane was already covered to locate the engine such that the CG would be at 25% of the wing cord.

To reduce stress on the wankel engine, full-throttle runs are limited. In addition, the oil content of the fuel is raised by adding 2oz castor oil per gallon.

The plane flies great, like a trainer, but with more than enough power for vertical climb-out after takeoff. Most of the time I fly at 1/3 throttle. At full throttle it can flip and roll like crazy. On landings, it bounces easily if still at 'floating' speed.

KCRC Model-of-the-Month July 2010.

The Ultimate AL-811 Tuneup Checklist

Overall Tuneup

1. Amplifier HV, STBY, OFF
2. Adjust Antenna Tuner
3. Set Band Switch
4. Transmitter power low
5. Turn ON. Check Tubes lit, Plate Voltage ~1.7kV, Plate and Grid current 0mA
6. Preset LOAD and PLATE
   

   MHz	LOAD	PLATE
   7.1	2.25	7.5
   14.0	3.0	8.75
   14.15	3.3	8.75
   14.3	3.75	8.75
   18.1	3.3	8.7

   
   
7. Ip, XMT OPR. Check plate current Ip=0mA. Key in SSB mode. Ip~60mA
8. In CW mode, increate Xmtr power until Plate Current 450mA or Grid Current 100mA
9. Tune PLATE, LOAD, PLATE for max power. Keep LOAD a little to the right of max. output power. Stay below 100W input, 450mA plate, 150mA grid.

ALC

1. Set Xmtr power to get about 400W amplifier output
2. Connect ALC line, adjust ALC (back of amplifier) so that output starts to drop a little bit. From now on, Xmtr output is limited to generating 400W amp out.

List of Things

Things to try, buy, finish, ... in no particular order

• "Windspiel" that powers LEDs just for fun
• Steam Engine
• Steam Boat
• Elektric Jet
• P-40
• Auto Gyro
• Float plane
• Segelboot: http://www.victor-model.com, Soling 1 Meter, www.servocity.com for servo gearboxes, http://sourceforge.net/projects/sailcut/
• Oldtimer "Graubele Schulgleiter"
• 40,30,20,17,15 switched dipole
• 2-mot: B-25, DC-3
• Variometer, altimeter, http://www.wingedshadow.com Thermal Scout

Done:

• Traxxas Slash
• Linear Amplifier, abt. 500W
• Marklin "Ticket To Ride" game

APRS Links

• http://www.byonics.com/ - Tiny Trackers
• http://www.findu.com/ - One of the oldest sites?
• http://www.openaprs.net/ - Google Map based
• http://www.openaprs.net/ - Google Map based

Comcast Arris Cable/Phone Modem Signal Levels

After intermittent phone problems via our Arris Touchstone digital phone and cable modem, a Comcast technician adjusted the signal levels and checked connectors outside of the house. Now that everything is good again, they look like this:

Go to http://192.168.100.1 to view the RF status.

• Downstream should be around 0 dBmV (currently it's -1 dBmV)
• Upstream should be around 45 dBmV

A few weeks later, there were still too many times when the modem seemed to restart/reboot on its own or otherwise loose connections (most LEDs on its front off). It was replaced with a Thompson RCA DHG536 modem that uses the same http://192.168.100.1 to view its status.

QRZ.COM Web Parser Limitations

Writing a web page parser for QRZ.COM recently became harder because you have to log in to see the more detailed information about operator location etc.

That's probably why Ham Radio Deluxe and other programs announced that they'll

stop supporting their QRZ.COM web page parser and instead use only

the QRZ.COM XML interface.

Good news: The interface allows name and country lookup for every

QRZ.COM user.

Bad news: Have to be registered. That's free, but means that all lookups

are traced to your user ID.

For the full information (grid, location, license info, ...) you have

to be a subscribed user, about $25 per year.

May not be that much money considering that QRZ.COM must have considerable

costs for keeping the page running.

Anyway, XML format detail is currently here:

http://www.qrz.com/XML/index.html

Another option might be the FCC ULS data, access to which is described here:

• http://www.n6lhv.net/uls/
• http://wireless.fcc.gov/cgi-bin/wtb-datadump.pl

Steam is Alive!

There is still stuff out there for steam engines!

http://www.toysteam.net/ has basic Wilesco and Jensen engines as well as Krick boat kits.

Put-Put engines might be the simplest steam engine to build at home, see http://sciencetoymaker.org/boat/makeBoat4_07.htm

iphone, blackberry, mobile web pages

When trying to create web pages for web browsers in mobile devices, the initial idea might be to simply create "small" pages which for example contain images with a widths of 480 pixel that should fill the display of a 480-pixel-wide phone.

In reality, that image might then only use about 50% of the screen!

Reason: Mobile web browsers pretend to be like a desktop web browser, for example having close to 1000 pixel screen width, and then scale the web page down to fit onto the physical display, so a 480 pixel images uses 480/1000 = about 50% of the screen.

One important hint is this HTML tag that instructs the mobile web browser to use the phyisical screen widths:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width">

See

• iphone web devel
• 12 iphone devel tips
• Blackberry Browser Fundamentals

'Processing' for graphical art and gimmicks

Found this: http://www.openprocessing.org/ : Language based on Java for creating graphical gimmicks.

Laptop from Trash to the Ham Shack

Assume you have a 6 year old Compaq Presario 3000, disk is full of programs no longer (or never) used. Plus: it has been dropped so that the display's lower 5mm are garbled up and the DVD drive no longer closes.

Throw it in the trash?

Or:

1. Reinstall Windows from scratch, then add Google Chrome, GIMP, EchoLink, Java, Eclipse
2. Move the task bar from the damaged lower section to the left of the display
3. Close the DVD drive with tape
4. Add more memory, 1GB can be had for less than $30

Voila, good as new! Not really, but good enough for the shack, plus its speaker system is nice for watching online movies.

Damaged Display	DVD Drive that won't close
Task Bar at left, avoiding Damaged Display	"Fixed" DVD Drive

Features for Multi-OS Plugins

Assume you have a plugin for more than one, but not all platforms. One that may run on Windows and Linux, but not OS X. Assume it's called the "non_osx_tool" plugin, and the plugin's MANIFEST.MF contains a filter:

Eclipse-PlatformFilter: (| (osgi.os=linux) (osgi.os=win32))

Fine.

Now you switch to P2, and base your Product on Features. So there's a feature that lists this plugin. If you just list the plugin, then try to compile for all OS, all will look OK, but installation will fail on OS X because the feature requires the installation of the "non_osx_tool" plugin, which in turn declares itself unavailable for OS X.

You can specify in feature.xml that a plugin is OS-specific:

<plugin id="non_osx_tool" os="linux" ...

That way, the installation will work better because the feature will only trigger installation of the non_osx_tool on Linux. But you can only list one OS, Linux or Windows, not both.
I tried to use os="linux,win32" but that resulted in compiler errors The type ... cannot be resolved. It is indirectly referenced from required .class files referring to code in dependent plugins which were suddenly not found. Listing multiple architectures is either unsupported, or uses a format that I couldn't find.

Solution:
Create additional features "my_feature.win32" and "my_feature.linux". They each list the plugin for only win32 or linux, and the top-level feature then includes both these sub-features with a filter:

<includes
id="my_feature.linux"
version="0.0.0"
os="linux"/>
<includes
id="my_feature.win32"
version="0.0.0"
os="win32"/>


Copyright Header Utility

Found this Copyright wizard for Eclipse http://www.wdev91.com/?p=cpw_ug that works very well! Download zip, add single jar to dropins or use update manager, then invoke menu Project/Apply Copyright... and it helps to

• Determine the text based on EPL or other examples
• Add that to all *.java files or even other file types (see Preferences/General/Copyright)
• Update previously entered copyright headers to make them all consistent

Align TRex 600 OS 50 Engine Problem

After running great for month, the engine started to have a rough idle. Otherwise it seemed OK, especially it was not running hot. Eventually, though, it quit in flight. It has never been quite right since then: Rough idle, and when using the governor, the engine RPM seemed to oscillate around the target RPM.

After trying this and that, including taking it apart, eventually even getting a new engine for comparison, reasons for the problems seem to include:

• Rust on bearings. Unclear how that happened because I'm using after-run oil. It is because of the oil?
• Play in throttle serve

New engine in comparison idles down to a low put-put that I don't remember ever achieving with the original engine. Either I've gotten better at adjusting engines, or the previous one always had some imperfection?

---

Good entry about OS 50 Engine rebuild, everything except for removing the crank and bearings:

http://www.helituning.com/index.php/maintenance/engines/os50/237-os-50-hyper-max-engine-internals.html

Yes, be careful with the piston ring. It does snap easily when taking it off the piston, especially when it's brittle from having been in the engine a long time. On the other hand, a new piston ring goes on quite easily, snapping right into place.

Product Editor Bug

When switching to P2 and changing from plugin-based to a feature-based product, the application suddenly refused to start because of problems in the config.ini.

Traced down to misleading product editor, https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=312086

Default Eclipse Workspace via config.ini

By default, the workspace of an RCP app is somewhere inside the install location, and might actually differ for Linux, Windows, OS X or different Eclipse releases.

I needed a location in the user home directory, independent from the OS, and not affected by updates (including complete replacement) of my RCP application.

The solution is adding something like this to the RCP's config.ini:

# Set default workspace location

osgi.instance.area.default=@user.home/MyRCPAppWorkspace

In the *.product file editor, the Configuration section allows you to specify a custom config.ini to accomplish this, but that brought up another problem: The original content of the config.ini beyond my workspace location settings, entries like osgi.framework=file\:plugins/org.eclipse.osgi_3.5.2.R35x_v20100126.jar, changes with Eclipse releases, so you have to continually update your custom config.ini?

Solution with P2: Use the auto-generated config.ini, and instruct P2 to add your custom content by adding a file p2.inf to your product with the following content:

# Add the following to the generated config.ini

instructions.install = \
setProgramProperty(propName:osgi.instance.area.default,propValue:@user.home/MyRCPAppWorkspace);



Learning Eclipse P2

Good intros: http://www.vogella.de/articles/EclipseP2Update/article.html ,

http://www.ralfebert.de/blog/eclipsercp/p2_updates_tutorial/,

http://www.slideshare.net/irbull/p2-introduction.

Exporting a feature with P2 info from the IDE is quite straight forward.

When adding the P2 UI to the final product by adding the feature org.eclipse.equinox.p2.user.ui, I had strange problems under Eclipse 3.5.2:

Product wouldn't start, or not include the P2 UI, or not have much P2 information.

It only works halfway from within the IDE, and only after the run-configuration is deleted and re-created.

To export a working product:

Include org.eclipse.equinox.p2.user.ui with either the full version number, or use 0.0.0, but beware that this must be entered manually because of https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=279480

This will provide a product with the P2 GUI, but About/Installation Details would be nearly empty, Configuration completely blank unless also exporting with metadata.

Checking the "metadata" option on export combined with source export, however, results in error "gather.sources" does not exist because of bug https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=286940.

Export with meta data but without sources works OK.

Info about plugins/features in general, based on the old update mechanism: http://www.eclipse.org/articles/article.php?file=Article-Update/index.html Includes tip to always end the update site link with "/"!

Merging repositories, for example a repository resulting from a new stable version into the 'main' repository on a web site:

http://wiki.eclipse.org/Equinox_p2_Repository_Mirroring

Remaining issue:

• OK to export product, based on features, into repository
• OK to export additional feature into repository, then install into product via UI
• OK to export update for that additional feature, and update product via UI

What doesn't seem to be possible:

• Export update for feature in product to repository. Update fails with message regarding conflict between the new plugin from the updated feature and the original plugin that the product requires

Workaround: Always update the whole product, including version of the whole product, then the old product can update itself.

Big Brother

Scary amount of information available about random people: http://www.123people.com

PSK31 Volume and RF Output

One way to adjust the output that seems straight forward and "works":
Set the FT897 HF power to 100%, then adjust the sound card output such

that the power is only 20 or 30 watts.

GPS Map to Model Airplane Field

To track location on Magellan explorist:

• Menu Button
• Track Log
• Active Track
• Either "Start Logging" or "Clear" if already logging

When done:

• Menu Button
• Track Log
• ActiveTrack
• Save with some name under "Track Logs"

To display track on map image:

Connect to GPS to computer, which should mount as "removable USB disk". Locate "Track Logs" directory.

On GPS Visualizer web page,

http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/,

upload the track log, select map, ...

Echolink Audio Setup, DTMF

Under Tools/Setup/Audio, the Calibrate button suggested a fine tuning of -94, but with that the DTMF tones were not recognized...

What works:

• Fine tuning: 0 (default)
• Sound card "Microphone" level 50% with "Advanced", "Boost" enabled
• Sound card "Volume" all 100%, master volume around 75..80%

Echolink Network Setup

After installing Echolink, the Firewall/router test failed.

Fix:

1. In Windows firewall (Wireless interface, Properties, Advanced, Firewall, ...) add Exceptions for UDP port 5198 and 5199, i.e. add 2 separate exceptions.
2. In the D-Link DI-614+, add similar exceptions under Home, Advanced, Virtual Server: Traffic from "public port" 5198 needs to go to "private port" 5198, where the "private IP" is the IP of the laptop, like 10.0.104. Again add 2 separate Virtual Servers for 5198 and 5199.

The D-Link setup has the drawback that it's locked to an IP address, so the Laptop should have a fixed IP on the local wireless net.

This post shows how to enable Port Triggering which solves the IP address issue: http://echomac.sourceforge.net/routers.html