URL Mistake

Last year, I purchased www.rigling.org and www.riglings.com so I could start to set up a family website to host pictures, a blog, or a place to exchange data (my family is spread across the country). When I gave Jess the opportunity to become part of our Rigling family, I wanted to set up a fancy wedding website for our big day. Some of my friends bought names like www.kayleeandben.com or http://beachyandcovelle.com/ but I already had rigling.org. So I set up www.berens.and.rigling.org for Jess Berens and Justin Rigling's Wedding.

Superhertz (a virtual machine in a garage in Boston) behaves as the DNS server for the superhertz.com domain, so I set it up to provide name resolution for rigling.org and riglings.com and configured apache to redirect this to our actual wedding website at http://www.mywedding.com/berensandrigling/.

This was all going well until we made a small mistake on our wedding invitations. Instead of printing www.berens.and.rigling.org, we had www.berens.and.rigling.com. I would have bought rigling.com, but a company in Germany has had it for quite a few years. This wouldn't be too big of a deal if the website was just on there for extra information. Unfortunately, our website is also our method for our invited guests to RSVP.

I tried to write an email to the website administrator of rigling.com to see if they could help redirect traffic for me. I was worried that the English/German language barrier would destroy my chances, but it turns out that the email address on whois doesn't work...

So the real reason for writing this  blog entry (first one in a couple years) is to get Google to index our page a little higher because it has a link to it from this blog.

I also bought Google AdWords to try to help out everyone who searches for us find the real site instead of some wedding registry scavenger. (The top  link on Google was a wedding registry aggregator site that we never signed up for, I guess it just searches the internet, finds registries, and gets itself to the top of the list on Google so it can either steal from our guests or make money on affiliate programs)

Spare Parts

Somewhere between my sister's house (my summer apartment) and my parent's house (my summer job) the exhaust system on my 1990 Pontiac Bonneville slowly grew louder and louder until it over powered NPR's episode on Cincinnati's potential rail system. I took a look under the car to inspect the exhaust system. For some unknown reason, the pipe was broken right behind the catalytic converter. 

I supposed I could have tried to weld it back together or at least used some wire to pull it together for a quick cheap fix. It turns out, however, that I have been storing a spare exhaust system under a 1990 Buick Park Ave in my Dad's back yard. I was unfortunately in that car when it collided with a 1995 Pontiac Grand Am in May 2001. It has been hiding by the barn with lots of spare parts (and a severely mangled front end) since then. I have already borrowed the alternator, blower motor, and seats for my dad's other 1989 Park Ave and my car.

A quick comparison of the parts online shows that all of the exhaust components are the same except the muffler. Yet they do have the same mounting points everywhere. Since the Bonneville and the Park Ave are basically the same car with either luxury or sportyness, I figure the different Bonneville mufflers just make the car sound faster.

The Park Ave muffler has half as many miles because its been sitting for the last 8 years. It can be seen on the bottom in these photos.

A few very rusty bolts later, the broken one was out and the newer one was in. Now my "sporty" Bonneville sounds like a Grandma car!

Just for fun, we put a battery in the old Park Ave to see if it would still start. I used to try to run it every couple years, but haven't for the last five while I was in Boston. A couple shots of starting fluid had it firing right away. Those 3800 engines sure are solid. I am thinking about tearing it completely out of the car (with the transmission) and putting it in a crate for some later project. If only I had more time! (and an endless supply of money)

Google phone saves the day?

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I have made the journey from Boston, MA to Cincinnati, OH with a heavily loaded 1990 Pontiac Bonneville many times. My car has achieved an all-time high score of 30mpg on the Cincinnati to Boston trip once. So I knew it would take about 14 hours and I should leave at about 6am to avoid hitting big cities during rush hour. On Friday, June 26th I actually got started a little late at 7:30am after checking the inflation on my tires (this helps the car get a better score). Two days earlier, I popped the hood to take a "let's make sure everything is in its place" look. I noticed the serpentine belt was a bit worn, so I decided to pick one up from AutoZone before leaving Boston.

Since 630 of the 900 mile drive is on I-90 and 95% of the NY and MA sections are limited access toll roads, fuel and food are limited and over-priced. There is about 20 miles of I-90 around Albany, NY where the turnpike follows I-87. I usually stay on I-90 there so I can make a fuel stop.

Since I had not actually replaced the serpentine belt before leaving Boston, I decided to take a look to see how it was doing when I stopped for fuel. I noticed that the belt was not actually sitting in the grooves on the crankshaft pulley but I didn't have the 18mm socket to turn the belt tensioner out of the way and replace the belt. I figured that it has probably been like that for a while, and that was causing the wear in the belt I noticed two days earlier. I looked at my fancy phone's Google maps for more gas stations. Rt 9 in Greenbush (east of Albany) has plenty to choose from, so I started driving toward that road. After only driving about 3 blocks on Rt 9, my power steering went out. I immediately thought, "There goes the belt!" Since the serpentine belt transmits power from the crankshaft to the A/C compressor, water pump, alternator, and power steering pump, I thought this was a pretty good conclusion. I drove another couple blocks to a Sunoco station before opening the hood to replace the belt.

Unfortunately, the belt came out intact; it had just fallen off the pulleys. I reached in and grabbed the water pump pulley because it looked a little crooked. I guess the rebuilt water pump that I put on the car about 6 years earlier was not very high quality because as I touched it, all of the coolant from my engine leaked out onto the ground.

I again turned to my Google phone to find auto parts stores in the area. I could get the parts (rebuilt quality again) for about $50 from the store 1 mile up the road. Then all I needed was a couple tools and somewhere to work on it. The tools I could buy, rent or borrow from the auto parts store, but as I hung up the phone, thunder clapped and the sky tore open. Without a dry place to work, I resolved that it might be OK to pay a service station for the work. In 10 minutes (with the aid of the Google phone) I had three quotes for the parts and labor for a water pump replacement. I went with Palmer's Auto Service because the rate was good and the mechanic wouldn't use the inferior rebuilt parts from cheap auto parts stores.

The replacement procedure took about two hours. I was back on the road by about 12:45pm. The whole stop set me back about 3 hours, so I hit Buffalo, NY during 5:30 Friday traffic. I finally made it to Cincinnati at about 1am without any other trouble. I have to get another tank of fuel to be sure, but I think my conservative driving and tractor-trailer drafting may have gotten me a new high score of 31mpg!

G1 cradle hack

I purchased a suction cup mount cradle for my T-Mobile G1from ppc4you.com for about $40. It was the only cradle I found that looked decent for use in my car. The description and pictures didn't show exactly what connections were available on the cradle. I wanted to be able to plug a regular USB cable into the cradle and have it pass through to the phone as well as the ability to connect some other audio amplifier (my car stereo) with a 3.5 mm plug. Unfortunately, neither of these options existed on the unit as purchased. It did have a mini USB connector for connecting the combination speaker and power supply unit to the actual cradle, but the USB data pair was not passed through. In fact, the analog audio was present on those pins.

This schematic shows the original connections inside the cradle. Notice the non-standard pinout on the miniUSB connector at left.



In order to fix the cradle so I could plug a regular miniUSB cable into the femaile USB connector, I had to open the cradle and rewire the connectors inside. The cradle actually has a lot of empty space in the base, so I was able to add a button and a 3.5mm stereo jack (mouser.com p/n = 806-STX-3100-5NB). The following schematic shows my modifications to the cradle.
I added the 3.5mm connector on the lower left and the momentary pushbutton on the lower right. This photo was taken before I added the audio wires, but the USB wires can be seen going from the miniUSB connector on the left to the underside of the extUSB connector carrier board.

I like the fancy green button that says "RUN" because it has a perfect tactile feeling like a Dell QuietKey keyboard.
Since the miniUSB connector no longer has the audio output from the phone, I had to modify the speaker power supply unit to have a 3.5mm plug for the audio. I did this by cutting the cable about 3 inches from the connector and splicing in an old iPod headphone cable.



Now I can mount the cradle in the car and pass the audio directly to the auxilary input on the car stereo. It is also now possible to connect my laptop to the phone in the cradle via USB.

QR codes

Last week I needed to add the 128 bit WEP key to my phone for my sister's wireless. I looked it up in the repository (where I store a file of wireless keys) and decided that I am too lazy to actually type in all of those characters on my phone's tiny keyboard. Fortunately, there is an application called "Barcode Scanner" on Android that uses the phone's camera to scan barcodes. Appropriate name, eh? It can scan UPC type barcodes and perform a product search as well as 2D QR codes. The QR code can contain a URL, vCard or MECARD contact information, URI for the android market or geographical location, plain text, and many other psudo-standardized formats.

Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_Code for more information on QR codes.
Check out http://code.google.com/p/zxing/ for more information on the android application.

Since Barcode Scanner can transfer captured data directly to my phone's clipboard, all I need is a way to produce the QR code containing the WEP key. After a little searching, I found and installed a program on my Ubuntu based laptop called qrencode that takes a file or stdin and generates as a png a 2D barcode.

$ sudo apt-get install qrencode


Example 128 bit WEP key as 13 hex pairs:
00112233445566778899aabbcc

$ qrencode -o qrcode.png 00112233445566778899aabbcc


Then I used gqview (sudo apt-get install gqview) to display the png on my laptop's LCD. I fired up Barcode Scanner on my phone and captured the image, decoded it, and copied it to the clipboard just by pointing the phone at the image. It actually captured it at a funny angle, so I consider the QR codes to be very robust. (I think it also does just fine if the image is 30 feet tall and you capture it with a lot of keystoning.) Next I just opened the wireless settings and pasted the key in the appropriate field. Everything worked wonderfully. I was happy even though I reallized I probably did much more work than I had to just to type in a WEP key.

Today I was upgrading Firefox on my sister's computer to version 3. When the incompatible add-ons screen popped up, I remembered the fun experiment with the QR codes and wondered if there was an add-on for Firefox to generate them. I found "Mobile Barcoder" and installed it.

Here is a link to the Mozilla Add-on site: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2780

Now, I can highlight a block of text, right click and generate a QR code immediately. It is rather convenient. There is also a small mouse over icon in the status bar that provides a QR code with the link to the current page.

Hillbilly Diving Board

I don't really consider myself to be a Hillbilly even though my family lives in rural Ohio and we have a few more cars and boats than we need. One of the things we have on our 8 acre slice of Wayne Township is a JLG MS 25 "Sizzor" lift. This lift has a 5'x9' working platform that can raise to an elevation of 25'. It is considered an "all terrain" lift because it has big tires. I would have preferred four wheel drive, but this one was the right price. Everything is hydraulically actuated with electrically controlled solenoid valves from the work platform or a control box on the base of the unit.

Originally we bought this lift to facilitate extensive rework of our leaky roof. Soon after it arrived in our backyard, however, our minds came up with numerous other uses:

1. Cleaning the gutters on the house and barn
   
2. Trimming those hard to reach tree limbs
3. Lifting light poles into place
4. Repainting the back porch
5. Installing new lights in the barn

Though we came up with many more practical and relitively safe uses for the lift, our best idea yet is the "Hillbilly Diving Board"!

Falling 21 feet into a 4 feet of water is actually a really bad idea.

So we only really jumped from about 5-6 feet above the water. We would still hit bottom every time, so we always went feet first.


Maybe at our next party I will add wings to it, extend it to the top, and drive it around like an amusement park airplane ride for the little kids.

Now blog works!

I had the blog working with my DNS at home by adding the following line to my zone file:

blog CNAME ghs.google.com.

I restarted bind9 with:

/etc/init.d/bind9 restart

And everything seemed to do right. At least I thought so.

A couple days later I tried to go to http://blog.superhertz.com from the LAN at work. This completely failed since the secondary DNS server for superhertz.com also happens to be the DNS server on my work's LAN and was not updated when I made my changes. In order for the primary DNS to update the secondary DNS, the serial number must change in the zone file.

I changed the serial number to today's date and viola, the DNS logs show that it notified the secondary server of the new zone. Now I can read my own blog from work.