This weekend, it was hot. Unhappily hot. We pretty much spent it lazing around in air conditioning or well-cooled spaces. Not a lot got done, but that’s OK.
start traffic graphing some of our fibre channel switches
and a few other things too.
Going to try more of blogging the inane stuff as well as the meaty stuff. It should at least get me into the posting habit, even if it’s not all substantive.
Something more soon. I’m still catching up on sleep from traveling in the past week.
But this looks interesting — TechShop. Basically a shop where you can go and pay a day-pass fee to take classes and otherwise use industrial fabrication tools — for plastic, metal, cloth, whatever. They even have a laser-cutting machine, among their other tools.
They’re not in San Diego yet, but are apparently working on it.
So I’m a big fan of electrostatic speakers; the kind that move a large diaphragm between two high voltage stators, instead of relying on an electromagnet to move a cone back and forth. They’re usually way too pricey for me; I have a pair I was lucky enough to pick up at a store-closing sale. I think they sound better and more natural than most standard (cone) speakers.
However, this plasma speaker seems impressive. I’m curious as to how it actually sounds in real life as opposed to through a camcorder; but I like the idea that the gas is basically pushing the air around, and nothing else.
Not sure I’d actually want a plasma speaker. But the concept is cool.
The other piece of audio interestingness I’ve found recently is the Dodecasub, which apparently due to its configuration and the way in which they wire up the drivers, will give you wonderful bass in front of it up to a distance of about 15 feet, but almost nothing to the rear and outside the room you’re in. I’d have to see (hear) that to believe it, but I like the idea.
So as part of my job I’ve had to start taking the firehose crash course in Fiber Channel (or Fibre Channel, as some still put it) storage technology. It’s interesting, still somewhat relegated to the higher end of storage devices, but with Apple’s recent (okay, 3 year old) introduction of XSan and such to its systems for the video editing world, a lot of it has become somewhat more reasonable and non-Fortune-50-level. However, as I’ve found, there are very few people who really know their stuff when it comes to complicated fiber channel setups; at some point I’ll try to relay what I’ve learned. But that’s not for this post.
In this post, I would like to relay to you just how I discovered how robust NetApp storage really is. NetApp has been around for at least fifteen years (probably earlier); I’ve been interacting with their equipment in various capacities for almost ten. They’re basically dedicated file serving appliances; they’re loosely based around some customized Intel X86 architecture, with a very nice filesystem and operating system that tries as hard as it can to protect the data you store on it. Oh, and their systems are quite fast at serving NFS and CIFS traffic, too — some wag at work decided it might be a good idea to store old data on Buffalo Terastations, which, while fine for home users, really kind of pale in a multi-user situation. Copying data off of these things occurs at a maximum of about 7Mbytes/sec, whereas I’ve gotten upwards of 250Mbytes/sec going to a NetApp box, and it wasn’t even one of their higher end models.
NetApp isn’t the fastest network storage out there (that award would probably have to go to BlueArc), but they’re solid, reliable, and recover gracefully from pretty much any failure you can throw at it. NetApp is the company that first introduced me to the concept of “we know what’s wrong with your system before you do”. If a drive is failing (it doesn’t even have to have completely failed, just be throwing enough weird juju that the OS loses confidence in it), the OS will snap up a spare disk, start copying data from the failing drive to the spare drive, and then fail the bad drive and move the spare drive into the raid, all without you really noticing unless you’re paying attention to the log messages. This is the company for which the way you notice that a drive failed overnight is that a replacement drive is waiting for you as you arrive at the office the next morning.
(A note to the brave and/or foolhardy; don’t try this at home or at work, it’s certainly not supported by NetApp, and I got lucky. It may void your warranty, though I trust it won’t cause your NetApp to burst into flames.)
So, I was working with just such a system, adding some extra shelves to it as we’re trying to move towards 500G and 750G drive shelves, away from the older 275G and 320G shelves to increase density of this particular system. It uses fiber channel to connect from the head to the drives, which means that although the proper way to make changes to the system is to take it down, reconnect things as needed, then bring it back up, you can make certain changes (like adding disk shelves) on the fly.
I connected up the shelves together, wired them up to the file server, set the shelf IDs, and powered them on. The system recognized the new drives, and started doing its work to add them into the system as spare drives.
Except for one piece of stupidity on my part. I’d forgotten that shelf IDs are not like SCSI IDs; even though the little setting supports it, you can’t have a shelf ID of zero, and that the shelf IDs start at 1. Which meant that shelf “zero” wasn’t being recognized by the system.
So I figured, what the hell, they’re spare disks, let’s just power the shelves back off and reset the IDs. I’d noticed that the system was upgrading the firmware on one of the shelves, so I waited until this was done and it didn’t appear to be doing anything else to that chain of disks, powered them off, reset the IDs, and powered them back on.
The system did scream bloody murder (beeped, sent pages to the admins, and opened a trouble case with NetApp support), but after about five minutes of twitching, the system figured out that the 56 disks that had just disappeared had indeed reappeared, and that after a few bouts of convulsing and finally calming down, everything was really all right.
What impressed me most about this was the reasonably graceful manner in which the NetApp figured out what was happening and recovered from what for all intents and purposes was a catastrophic disk failure. I suppose the two things that made this less severe than it could have been were 1) the disks were all spares, not data disks, and 2) the disks were on their own fiber channel interfaces that didn’t have other disks on them as well. But my recent experiences with Macintosh computers on fiber channel (even if a disk’s not mounted by a system, if the Mac can see it over the fiber channel network and the disk goes away, the Mac will probably lock up at some point in the future if you don’t reboot it first) had made me wonder what would happen when I tried this. I would at least have expected the system to not re-recognize the disks the second time I powered them up.
I have to say that for as pricey as these things are (usually in the five to low six figures; though they’re not nearly as bad as some higher-end storage), they’re worth the amount you pay for them in purchase and support. The systems don’t go down, the support organization behind them is stellar, and they just plain work. The only thing I don’t like about them is their new logo (the monolithic ‘n’; it looks like a piece of a henge. You know, like stonehenge, woodhenge, and strawhenge). Beyond that, I’m quite happy with that equipment.
…to the first post. In the grand tradition, I’ve not done a good job at all of keeping my new year’s resolutions; though I’ve done OK at the whole not obsessing or getting cranky thing. Everything else, well, at some point soon I’ll make progress, really. I promise.
A couple of notes and bitchings. First, I can’t get enough of QI — the Quite Interesting quiz show out of the BBC. Basically, it’s sort of like Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me from NPR if you take out the news and the callers and just let the guests banter about whatever topic is put before them. Curse the person who thought of region coding DVDs; we’ve been importing the discs from Amazon UK – Quite Interesting: The A series and Quite Interesting: The B series — and have been having great fun enjoying Stephen Fry, Alan Davies, and the rest pass BS and generally make up interesting facts about whatever they like. It’s sort of like Balderdash with comedians and intelligent people.
Second, I’d like to take this opportunity to decry the ineptitude of either certain flash programmers or of the flash plugin itself. Granted I’m writing this on an older system, but lately it seems everyone and their subsidiary needs to write a fancy new video player or fun animated flash ad; every one of these increases the page load time for web pages I surf, frustrating the heck out of my attention-span-challenged self as I sit there waiting for a page to finish so that I can start oh, say, scrolling down to read it. The worst are the web sites that write their own video player and don’t test it on anything but the fastest modern systems; YouTube’s viewer is just fine, thank you, while sites like Gizmodo and UCB Comedy feel the need to write a bloated pig of a player that can at best perform 1 frame every three seconds on my poor overworked system. The first rule of web design is that thy page should not take more than 5 seconds to load. (I realize this site is also an offender, but I’m working on optimizing it and keeping it as fast as I can with the old server it lives on.)
[update: as I just found out, apparently clearing out the cache of flash movie stored data at Adobe's flash player privacy manager (it's a special page that pops up the control panel for the flash player) with 'Delete all' makes the flash player pop up much speedier. However, it still doesn't fix inefficient flash media players.]
Beyond that, I’ve discovered the magic of lemon butter and how they can make cooked greens like chard and the like taste yummy; I’ve been practicing the horrendous-for-you but oh-so-good recipe for Ruth’s Chris restaurant sweet potato casserole, and the first couple of tries have gone OK. (I can’t afford to go eat there, but I don’t mind so much if I can recreate their best dish at home.)
More to come soon, I hope. We’ll see if I can’t catch up to that third New Year’s resolution.
I haven’t forgotten to keep posting; the stuff I’ve been busy with has been more mundane, though.
The city approved the rough framing and electrical work a couple weeks ago; since then I’ve been having Fun With Insulation. I just finished the last of it, and while I don’t really have the energy for a full post, I just want to say that while I appreciate what it does and that it’s an incredibly efficient insulation material (we have one room that’s been insulated properly, and it doesn’t get above 80 degrees in the summer), i HATE HATE HATE installing the stuff.
I have installed 1 and a half packs of R-13 batts in the walls, 2 packs of R-30 batts in the exposed ceiling areas, and 3 packs of R-19 batts in the attic above existing insulation (which, installed in the early 80s, was only R-7, so we now have R-26 in those areas). That’s a lot of itchy fiberglas.
Here is what I have learned doing so:
* There aren’t a heck of a lot of fuzzies, though there are more when you cut the batts, but you can vacuum them up with a vacuum cleaner
* A HEPA filter, or ghetto HEPA filter, is a godsend (I’ll post about how to make one soon), but doesn’t prevent the itch
* If you even look at fiberglas funny, you will start to itch
* The paper facing on fiberglas batts is more durable than kleenex, but not by much
* (From one of our drywall guys) If you dust yourself with talcum powder or baby powder, you can look at fiberglas as funny as you want and you won’t itch as much, until you sweat the powder off
* Tyvek suits are not built for people taller than 6 feet or with a long torso.
* The Kimberly Clark tyvek suits are slightly better built than the other brand, but still rip in the crotch if a person taller than 6 feet bends over wrong.
* Either brand of tyvek suit makes you hot and sweaty
* Installing fiberglas in 90 degree weather in an attic is a good approximation of one of the levels of hell
* Showering in cold water FIRST, after dealing with fiberglas, and shampooing and soaping with the cold water will get rid of more fiberglas bits than warm water. You can switch to warm water later, after you had a good wash with cold water.
There are probably more things I’m forgetting, but the important part is that I am now done with fiberglas for a very long time. I hope. Will post more soon.
Today, I bring you a post outlining how to start the process of soundproofing a wall.
I got a lot of help and advice on this part from the good folks at Super Soundproofing here in San Diego — I’m trying to do my best to follow their direction, but I may be missing something here and there. With that said, though, here’s how I’m doing soundproofing for the first wall between two bedrooms.
On this wall, I only pulled the drywall off of one side, so it’s not getting the full double-sided soundproofing treatment that the living room to bedroom wall is getting. But for sound transmission between two bedrooms, I think this’ll do OK.
The steps to complete the wall are basically:
Seal all holes and butter any boxes with acoustical caulk
Install cotton insulation batts between studs
Lay and attach mass-loaded vinyl across the studs
Seal mass-loaded vinyl edges with acoustic caulk, and butt joints with lead tape
Lay green foam tape over each stud
Install 5/8″ sound deadening board (like GP HushRock) on wall
Seal seams with acoustical caulk
Install 5/8″ drywall, with seams running perpendicular to sound deadening board seams
Seal seams with acoustical caulk, leaving room for joint compound and taping
I used an SPL meter to measure the difference sound level after adding the various pieces, with the stereo in the next room turned to 25, playing The Puppini Sisters’ “Mister Sandman”. (Not quite pink noise, but it was something fun to listen to.)
So here are the steps I followed:
First, any wall penetration on the other side needs to be sealed with acoustical caulk that dries very flexible and rubbery (and stinky for the first week), to prevent sound transmission from air gaps. As well, any box (like the electrical boxes for power and ethernet/coax) needs to be buttered up with the stuff in order to reduce vibrations and resonances of the box.
Looking at the pirate-ninja scale, I can’t see that I fit in as pirate. While it’s amusing, and every now and then I can be a bit of a boor, it doesn’t work out for me well enough that I could live up to being a pirate. Ninja, on the other hand… I’m not necessarily what one might call disciplined, but I do have a habit of swooping in and fixing (or sometimes breaking) things every now and then. The “Oh, I see the problem” school of mechanical artistry.
For elf-dwarf, on the other hand; while I would love to be on the practical end of things — I love perusing Make magazine, building and doing things, and making things better — I have to admit that I’m much more high concept. I’ll come up with an idea, hold it up to the light and admire it, then promptly forget about it. Or I’ll come up with something, work on it for a bit, then let it fall by the wayside for a while until I regain interest. Viz my cron-rs485-controlled sprinkler system, the LED outdoor lights I’ve talked about building here, and any one of a half-dozen projects that sit half-finished.
I collect oiltight industrial controls (telemecanique and allen-bradley are my favorites), and have been known to add switches and buttons to a project just to have more switches and buttons, even if they’re totally unnecessary.
So yeah; the almost-finished-remodeled bedroom with just a few more grout lines to fill and baseboards and window trim to add testifies that I’m probably more of an elf.
Not that it’s necessarily bad to be an elf-ninja. And my family puts up with it. I suppose I need to find a t-shirt now.
Let me back up. Four years ago, due to a poorly-constructed addition (before we moved into the place), our roof leaked; catastrophically so. It took us a bit to figure out what was happening, since the leak took place inside a wall. But by the time we did, the dreaded mold had set in.
This actually happened shortly after we started remodeling a different room, and discovered that asbestos had been used in the glue for the linoleum flooring, and in the acoustic popcorn from hell coating the ceilings. So we had already started talking to a company, Alliance Environmental, that specialized in asbestos (and now mold) remediation.
I tried fixing the leak myself, but that didn’t work; shortly after Alliance came in to pull out the asbestos and damaged drywall and remove the mold from the framing, the roof leaked again, so I put them on hold while we had the roof fixed.
We had the roof redone, completely, where they found more water damage. So that was taken care of. We worked on the initial bedroom, putting insulation (when the house was built, insulation wasn’t important!) in the walls, putting up new, non-paper-faced drywall, new windows, bookshelves, and floor tile due to not being able to seal the concrete floor and too much moisture coming up from the concrete slab.
Fast forward a couple of years, and we’re finally ready to finish the job started a few years ago. We just had Alliance back out to take care of the popcorn ceiling in the kitchen, where they also finished the final bit of mold cleanup, from the last of the leaks we knew about.
The guys who pulled out the damaged drywall and cleaned up were absolutely stellar; it took them about a day and a half to do (most of that was setting up the environmental containment stuff — I’ll post pictures soon, but our house looks kind of like what they set up in E.T. when the government moved in), and they finished yesterday. Now, an inspector from the company, as well as a tester from an independent lab have to come out to verify that all the asbestos and mold are gone from the air in the contained area. If that’s the case, they can take down the plastic and we can get at our kitchen again (today breakfast was root beer and pop tarts, yum), and start doing the actual fixes.
The other projects that are coming together with this are:
putting the stereo equipment in a built-in closet in the family room
retexturing the kitchen walls and ceiling with something not-sprayed-on, and fixing all of my unhappy drywall repairs after ripping out the old, too-big-for-the-kitchen island cabinets
insulating more outside walls where drywall’s been removed
and putting soundproofing (or rather, sound-reducing) items between the bedroom we’ve finished, the bedroom we’re remodeling, and the family room.
Since we’re actually doing work instead of just talking about it, I’ll try and post more about what’s actually going on. So there should (should }:> ) be more posts for a little bit.
…in Home Depot or otherwise, is not to be used for:
* items like wire that have been cut to a custom length and labeled by an employee
* items like bolts that do not have barcodes
* items that do have barcodes but are too light to trigger the bagging scale to register that a new item was placed upon them
* giant items like ten foot pieces of conduit that do not in any way, shape or form fit on the bagging scale
These things I learned while noting that the one human-powered checkout line was miles long, whereas there was nobody at the self-checkout lane this weekend at Home Depot. It ended up taking twice as long as the human-powered checkout, since the person supervising had to take half my items over to the central station and scan them manually. (It didn’t help that they went through three people during this time and the last one had to verify that all the items in the bag were on the receipt at the end.)
So I do see, now, why a lot of people consider the self-checkout line to be more of a pain than it’s worth. From now on, I’ll (try) to use it only for middle-weight, medium-sized boxy items that fit on the bagging scale and have a real barcode. Sigh.
Here’s one that I just ran into; the results from a google search aren’t exactly helpful (no, you don’t need to reinstall the package because of this error).
After installing proftpd 1.3.0a, using a mostly-default /etc/proftpd.conf, on CentOS 4.4, you try to start it up and get the following error message:
- Fatal: ScoreboardFile: : unable to use '/var/run/proftpd.scoreboard': Operation not permitted on line 58 of '/etc/proftpd.conf'
The unhelpful error message doesn’t explain, like the comments in the source code do, that the scoreboard file should not be in a world-writeable directory. On CentOS 4.4, /var/run is world-writeable with the sticky bit (like /tmp) so that processes that don’t run as root can put their lock files in there.
Solution: create a new directory (I chose /var/lib/proftpd), chown it to the same user that proftpd runs as (the User directive in /etc/proftpd.conf), and make sure it’s mode 775 or similar. Then change the following line in /etc/proftpd.conf:
I should probably submit a patch to make a more helpful error message. But that won’t help the users with default installs who just run into this error.
Every now and then I get a hankering to watch old, somewhat classic TV shows. Unfortunately, the ones I want aren’t out on DVD, because they’re not the standard pablum everyone else seems to watch.
Parker Lewis Can’t Lose — Clone spin-off of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off that was better than the official spin-off
WKRP in Cincinnati — with the original music, mind you. Depending on who you listen to, the music is either too expensive to license, or the production company is too cheap to pay for it, and they’ve substituted crap muzak that ruins some plotlines and generally makes the DVD pressing bad.
Almost Live! — Sketch comedy that didn’t get tromped like SNL did in the 80s
Night Flight — like MTV before there was MTV; goofy, offbeat, and experimental
I’m sure there’re more. I just know I’m not excited by “Chico and the Man”, “Everybody Loves Raymond” (how amazon decided I might like that, I have no idea), or “Full House”. I realize asking for something exciting, intelligent, and entertaining from TV is sort of like asking a llama to spit a fine cognac, but those shows are out there — somewhere.
Last week, Make posted a link to a doorbell that I saw a few years ago that got me thinking. The doorbell — an exposed electromagnetic solenoid and two wine glasses — is basically just the mechanism from a standard hardware store doorbell with wine glasses instead of the metal xylophone-style (or metallophone, for the picky) bars that make the ding dong noise.
Upon seeing that, I thought it was rather neat, and tried to come up with something I could make that would be similarly cool, and far less pricey. In the course of random shopping, we found a singing bowl with a pleasant note; and it made the perfect candidate for a doorbell mod.
So we bought that, a wall platform at Cost Plus, and a cheap electromechanical doorbell at the hardware store. I think the total cost came out to about $70. It turned into this:
It really wasn’t too hard to make; it’s not the prettiest thing in the world, but it sounds good, and is enough of a doorbell to make the dogs go nuts when they hear it.
This may or may not be the first in a series of posts in which a strange unknown error is found, and a non-obvious solution is found.
This particular error message came after creating a software RAID device:
# mdadm --create /dev/md7 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1
mdadm: /dev/sdc1 is too small: 0K
I had just partitioned the disks with fdisk and set the partition type; sfdisk -l on the disk gave the correct output. Nobody else appeared to provide a solution to this, even though a couple of posts with the same query went unanswered.
It turns out for the first time ever for me, despite the perpetual fdisk warning, the partition table didn’t get reread properly by the kernel when fdisk wrote out the new table. This only happened on sdc, not on sdd.
I figured this out with mke2fs’s much more explanatory error message:
# mke2fs /dev/sdc1
mke2fs 1.35 (28-Feb-2004)
mke2fs: Device size reported to be zero. Invalid partition specified, or
partition table wasn't reread after running fdisk, due to
a modified partition being busy and in use. You may need to reboot
to re-read your partition table.
The fix was to run fdisk one more time, and just say ‘w’ to write out the partition table again, and (more importantly) make the ioctl() call again to have the kernel reread the partition table, this time properly. The next step would have been to reboot if that didn’t work, but I didn’t want to. (As Saif said in the previous post, rebooting is for adding new hardware.)
As I find more of these non-obvious error messages and the solution, I’ll try to post about them. Hope this helps someone out.
It appears that someone did fix at least part of the issue I ran into — a memcpy() was left out of the repair kernel code — but I’m not planning on installing that kernel for a while. Not without some serious testing, or perhaps after it’s applied in a RedHat/CentOS update kernel.
However, I did come up with something that may work as a very ghetto software RAID1 verification technique. (The following keywords should help someone google this post: linux software raid verify scrub oh shit.)
Here’s what you do. First, find the size of the mirror from /proc/mdstat:
md5 : active raid1 hdd1[1] hdb1[0]
58613056 blocks [2/2] [UU]
Multiply the number of blocks by 1024:
[root@linux] # bc
bc 1.06
Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
For details type `warranty’.
58613056*1024
60019769344
Then, run cmp on the two devices that make up the mirror:
If the byte at which the two devices differ is a higher number than the one you came up with using bc, it means both mirrors contain the same data. (From what I can tell, that’s the area where the raid metadata/superblock sits, at the end of the disk.)
If the differ byte number is smaller, you can probably do a more extended test with cmp -l to find out what data differs and whether there are one or more differences. Not sure how to repair at that point; if you feel lucky, you might be able to do some kind of block editing (and guess the value that block should be), but I’m not about to try that part.
Part of the point of scrubbing is to read every byte of data from every disk and make sure there aren’t any read errors; if there are, it should throw a kernel error which shows up in logs, or with IDE might allow the drive firmware to reallocate a block that has a soft error in it (which will show up in smartd’s output).
Note that this will only work with RAID1; RAID5 lays out data differently, in stripes of data and parity, so you’d have to do parity calculations as well as figure out where they are. It could probably done with some programming, but that’s left as an exercise for the reader }:>.
So yeah, it’s really ghetto, but it appears to work. And now I don’t feel like I’m flying 100% blind and not knowing whether my mirrors are really mirrors. If I feel industrious, I’ll probably put this into a shell script and start running it weekly or something.
The other day, our dogs decided to play “How much is inside?” with our Love Sac post-beanbag thing that had become their bed.
It’s quite the game with the dogs to rip their toys apart; unfortunately, when they run out of toys, they move on to bigger and better things. They do seem quite pleased with themselves when they manage to rip something apart; our tripod (the brown one) takes particular relish in pulling all the stuffing out of a stuffed toy she’s tired of licking to death, and she and the puppy (the black one) enjoy a good game of tug of war with anything that has seams that will tear.
In any case, THAT MUCH is inside a Love Sac, and there’s still plenty of foam left inside for cushioning the dogs. (The seams, unfortunately, were quite ripped; not being any good at sewing things back together, we ended up tossing the lot, and now they have $20 (but just as comfy, it seems) fleece stuffed pet beds from Costco.
One thing before I start my rant about java. It means two things: coffee and a programming language. Coffee, to be clear, is absolutely my friend. It makes me happy in the morning and keeps me awake at night. I treat it with respect and it helps me out.
Java the programming language, on the other hand, is not my friend. Let me explain.
At work we’ve been working on a piece of software that, from within a web browser, needs to open up a file on the user’s computer and send it up to a server. To make sure this works on pretty much every browser, the only real option is java.
So we look around for how to do this, even buy a source license from a commercial package that does something similar, and think we’ve got it figured out. The head programmer writes up a set of code that should do the trick, builds a signed jar file, and tests it out — it works! But only on the programmer’s computer.
Let me back up and explain something about java. Unlike most languages, it has two modes. The first is your standard “everything works” mode, where you write code, you run it like a normal program, and it just works. The second mode happens when you download java code from a web site and run it inside a web browser. In this case, there are a set of things you can’t do — you can’t make network connections, you can’t open local files, etc. — unless the code is signed and/or you specifically grant the program permission, either by clicking ‘Yes’ at an allow box or by modifying a java config file.
One of the things I dabble with every now and then is electronic circuitry. I’m not nearly to the point of doing fun things with PIC boards and microcontrollers, but I do enjoy wiring up and playing with small circuits. And I’m currently somewhat fascinated with what one can do nowadays with LEDs.
I’ve ordered an MR16 light from SuperBrightLEDs — I got the 3W warm white spotlight bulb. It’s actually quite nice; I have some MR16 track light transformers I’m not using, one of which seems to work OK (no flicker or buzzing) with this bulb. The light given off is remarkably similar in color temperature to a nice halogen bulb, and reasonably bright — you’d need a few of them to come close to a 20W halogen bulb — more than I expected. It’s actually quite good as an accent/spot light. Unfortunately, it’s $35 per bulb, which isn’t cheap.
So I started investigating the parts. They use Philips’ Luxeon LED emitters from LumiLeds, which come in various configs. The ones I’m interested in are warm white (1W max — the 3W bulb uses three), and cool white (3W max). They’re like other LEDs except they’re much brighter, and use correspondingly more current (350mA instead of 20mA like normal LEDs).
I had the idea that I could put together a simple package of an LED and the support circuitry, and with any luck fit it all into a package that would go into a bi-pin Malibu light fixture, so I could purchase some reasonably inexpensive outdoor lighting, and add way more lights to my piddly 120W transformer (that’s already got 50-60W in use with 5 fixtures) for various bits of landscape lighting.
So I ordered 5 of the cool white 3W LEDs, which came out to about $27 for all of them, and have those. I ordered the star package which includes a bit of a heat sink; these things get hot.
For a support circuit, I didn’t want to use the traditional “just use a resistor” circuit to limit the current. I found the LED current controller circuit that uses a couple of resistors and a transistor to achieve the right current through the LED.
I guesstimated some of the values, and ordered five each of the following from Mouser Electronics:
Component
Price
Xicon 3W 5% Small Metal Oxide Resistors, 30 ohms
$0.39 each
Xicon 3W 5% Small Metal Oxide Resistors, 2.2 ohms
$0.39 each
Fairchild Small Signal Transistors TO-92 BC63916 NPN GP AMP
$0.14 each
Rectron Rectifiers - Bridge RS-1 1A 200V
$0.46 each
The total order comes out to about $7, not including shipping. This is why I’m posting; other than the exotic LEDs, getting components like this can be super cheap. If this works the way I think it should, I’ll have converted malibu halogen lights to LEDs for about $7.50 plus labor; not much more than the cost of the actual replacement bulbs.
If it works out, I’ll post a how-to with pictures. For now, gotta wait till the order comes through.
So, here’s a concept, though I’m sure I’m not the one who pioneered it. We went on a couple-hour road trip a few days ago, and I made a mix CD for it. But since I can’t post the songs (copyright violation), or stream it (expensive), the only way I can share it with others is to post a table with the song, artist, and album. We’ll call it an open source mix tape. And just to be snarky, it’ll be web-2.0 as well (note hyphenated web-2.0 is similar to but for trademark purposes not identical to Mr. O’Reilly’s copyright) — each album takes you DIRECTLY to the Amazon page for that album, except for one obscure Japanese album. (Full disclosure: each is an Affiliate link.)
Listening to and evaluating the mix is left as an exercise for the reader. My notes are at the end.
So obviously, I’m greatly influenced by a few things — techno lounge music and Soma FM’s Secret Agent music stream. I am amused by cheese, but do require a certain quality to the music I listen to. I can’t do techno that’s either just noise (is that “industrial?”) or only has a beat; I need something at least slightly melodic. Some of the Ursula-1000 style sampler artists do it for me. And well, I’m entertained by goofy music and energized by things approaching punk (but again, not noise punk).
Most of the music more or less flows; some of it could stand to be mixed together because a few have strange intros and such, but for the most part there aren’t any jarring transitions. (I used to help out a DJ a long time ago, who tried to teach me some of the finer points of choosing music.) Some songs are fun to listen to; Secret Agent Man is done by a Japanese band (RC Succession) that released an album of song covers where all the lyrics are literal translations into Japanese, including Summertime Blues and Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. Others just have a good driving beat (”Take This Job and Shove It”, “Ballroom Blitz”).
Still others are peppy covers of older good songs (various Henry Mancini/Pink Panther tunes, Seks Bomba songs, the Lemonheads’ Mrs. Robinson). And later on it goes into some good funky soul (Aretha could sing Hot Cross Buns and it’d still be good). For good measure (only 41 more shopping days) there’s a Barenaked Ladies’ Christmas song thrown in as well.
Anyway, use the links to check out song previews, buy some new albums if you’re feeling like it, and enjoy the open source mix tape.
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