Just posted an old project, how to build a tandem bicycle cheaply with two bicycles and a welder. You could build this without a welder if you’re tricky, it would just need a few hose clamps to hold the rear frame from swaying!
Author Archives: Waterppk
Instructables Projects Back Live!
I’ve began to migrate my Instructables ( LCD Overhead Projector, Laptop Overhead Projector, EXIT Sign Lamp, etc) Projects over here after deciding that Instructables doesn’t need to make money off of my projects that have and will always be available for free here.
Interesting HAM / Amateur Radio Frequencies Around Madison, WI
I just picked up a VX-6R handheld amateur radio off of eBay and have been scanning the airwaves in and around Madison. I thought I might be helpful to post interesting frequencies as I run into them:
| 152.390, 152.415, 152.330 | Seems like the taxi dispatchers, all from dispatch to the cabs, haven’t found the cab frequencies yet |
| 146.685 pl:123 | BARS Repeater |
| 859.7375, 857.9875, 856.7125, 856.2125 | Police |
| 858.2125 | Paramedics, Fire, Police, Madison Metro Bus Dispatch, Meriter Receiving |
| 453.250 | UW Safe Walk |
| 444.375 | Weather Spotters |
Here’s a nice list of nets:
Nice list of state used frequencies:
State Radio Frequencies (police, UW, etc)
I’ll keep posting things as I run into them. Anyone else have anything interesting around here?
Microsoft Closes Hotmail Account
I’ve had a Hotmail account for years, and today I went to sign into it to retrieve and old e-mail address and was met with:
Which is interesting in an of itself, you would think that rather than having a link to ANOTHER form, they would have just put the form at the bottom of the page, or better yet have a challenge or a captcha (that’s better than the obviously insufficient one that let the spammers create the account in the first place) to let me reinstate my account after proving I’m a human. So instead they send me off to yet another page:
Hmm, interesting, the same as the first page, except now they let me know that I probably didn’t violate their TOS (actually I’m sure I have doing something, not that they’re actually noticed). Additionally, there isn’t a form to fill out here, in fact there’s barely even a contact e-mail at the bottom of the page – but alas, I can’t use my e-mail account!!! Somebody fails here, as they’ve suspended my e-mail account. So now what I would have to do is sign up for e-mail with somebody else! Great move, drive customers to OTHER service providers so they can send you an e-mail begging for their account back.
I was eventually able to figure out that my account had been sending spam messages, so either the password was too weak and dictionary attack got it, I logged into this account through a bad access point and someone pulled it from the traffic, or I was on a computer with a keylogger/malware that pulled it. I rarely use the account except for MSN/Live Mesh, when I log into Hotmail I go directly to the page from a browser so I really doubt I got hit by someone phishing with a fake site.
Moral of the story: use strong passwords and change them often, other moral is if you’re designing a web interface make sure you have a logical system set up for your users, in this case likely there are many programmers at M-soft and somebody never checked the links.
AeroBird Extreme Maiden Flight
I purchased a pair of beat up AeroBird “Extreme” trainer planes on e-bay about 2 years ago but never had anywhere to fly them [so I bought a helicopter instead o:-)]. I’ve now moved and am right next to a set of 6 soccer fields all in a huge block, so plenty of flight space. Unfortunately the only takeoff strip is a tiny 15 car parking lot, complete with sign posts and curbs which make every take-off interesting.
Of course no maiden flight is complete without landing in a tree courtesy of a nice cross wind:
Fortunately I have many years of tree climbing experience:
and after pulling the wing off and carrying it back down to safety we were back up and flying in no time 🙂
Wii Power Brick Screws
First: Your power brick is most likely NOT broken, don’t waste your time opening it up, instead unplug it, go outside and run around for 15 minutes, come back and plug it in and see if it’s now magically fixed! (Shortcut is to unplug it and short out the output to drain the capacitors in the power supply, making damn sure it’s unplugged before doing so so you don’t actually pop the fuses)
On with the opening up step if you’re still not convinced. . .
If you’re wondering how to open a Nintendo Wii power supply brick you’re in luck. For some reason my Wii wouldn’t power on at all last night, no red, yellow or green lights on the console, nothing. I grabbed my trusty Harbor Freight multimeter and checked the power supply output. Nothing. Next up was to open up the power supply and find out if my power brick had suffered from a blown fuse. Of course, Nintendo put proprietary screws on the power brick to prevent someone from opening it, and of course they weren’t tri-wing, they’re some nutball spanner screw heads. The good thing is that they’re a terrible “tamper proof” head, as they put the dimples directly opposite of each other (even number of engagement points).
If you want to build a truly pain in the ass fastener you need to have features that don’t line up, typically by using an odd number of engagement points, like the tri-wing screws they use on the console. Just grab a pair (or two) of needle nose pliers
And span the screw with the tip of the pliers, apply force to engage the pliers in the dimples and then carefully twist left. You should be able to see the screws almost immediately rise away from the supply. The good thing is they used correct, coarse threaded high angle plastic screws so it’s only about 4 turns to get them out of the supply.
The annoying thing is that the fuse wasn’t burned out on the supply, nor was there anything else wrong with it. It definitely smells like hot plastic/capacitor electrolyte in there, and they’re using lead free solder and don’t have the best joints I’ve seen, but nothing major. I’m thinking the supply may have not started up correctly and therefore shut it self off (there are some optocouplers on there to detect if the supply is operating correctly and feed back to the mains side of the supply). So most likely by me unplugging it and the time it took to disassemble “fixed” it, otherwise there may be a dry solder joint in there that was flexed the right way to remake contact while I was taking it apart. YMMV
Nintendo has a remarkably useful write up here regarding resetting the Wii power supply.
PUR / Dupont / OmniFilter Faucet Mount Filter Failure / Broken / Bad
On the topic of failures, broken, and poorly designed stuff. I’ve had a PUR faucet mount filter for about 15 days under a year and it’s literally sprung a leak:
I’ve been watching with intrigue as it had more an more stress fractures over time. I’m betting the pressure pulsations combined with the mix of plastics (white and the clear for the window) allowed some points of stress concentration along the window which led to the cracks propogating around the filter and ultimately a broken PUR water filter. I was half hoping for a spectacular failure one of these days, but the filter has finally sprung a leak that sprays about 8 feet across my apartment. I’m moving in a week or so and I’ll just buy a new one (which is conveniently cheaper than buying a new filter. . . what a scam).
UPDATE:
I’ve purchased a OmniFilter F1 Series A Faucet Filter hoping it would work better/as well as the PUR filter. This filter has a different designed filter housing (transparent and a single piece), and the filters are much much cheaper. These filters are available at Menards or Farm and Fleet (large hardware stores) along side the PUR and Brita filters.
Well, I purchased the filter on sale for ~$8 and hooked it up. . . and water just sprays everywhere. Right out of the box.
As you can see above, the filter leaks out of the knob, out of a small hole on the bottom where the housing halves meet and a dribble of water comes out of the actual water output.
So I e-mailed OmniFilter (I like to call companies, but sometimes I don’t have time and in this case there wasn’t much at stake) on June 30th and was replied back to on July 9th. Sure it’s fourth of July weekend/week but I can’t imagine that OmniFilter’s e-mail traffic is high enough to take over a week to get back to me.
It sounds like you have a defective filter. You can take it back to the place of purchase & exchange it out or warranty it though us. I would need a copy of the receipt along with your name, address & telephone number. You can fax the information to me at 866-227-6218. Once it is received we would replace it out for you.
No chance I’m going to be fighting the fax machine at work to get my $8 back, I’ll just try to swap it next time I’m at Menards and I’ll post if I have any better luck next time.
To OmniFilter’s credit, I have their much larger whole house filter on a project and it runs great, no leaks, filters are cheap and work great, hopefully this was an exception to their faucet filters 🙂
SECOND UPDATE:
I’ve exchanged my original bad OmniFilter for another. This one didn’t leak out the bottom, but instead had the filter shatter when water was ***slowly*** turned on for the first time. When I realized it broke I pulled the filter out and there was a chunk of o-ring in it that likely came from inside the filter. I’m going to pull it apart and post some pictures since my local Menards will no longer be stocking them (this was the last one and they’re marked down to $5).
FINAL UPDATE:
I carefully disassembled the filter, you can check out the results here. It basically comes down to the o-ring seats aren’t deep enough to let the o-rings properly sit in the filter – JUNK 🙁
Next up for consideration, I thought I’d try again this time with a Dupont “Premier Faucet Mount” Filter model number WF-FM100XW.
Dupont Faucet Mount Filter Box
Dupont Faucet Mount Filter - Includes free roll of teflon tape!
Initially this filter seemed promising, it included a 4 Phase filter (most are 2 or 3, likely means they added an extra layer of plastic mesh and called it a filter). The cool thing was a good design! They housed the filter as it’s own case inside the outer top screw on cover:
Dupont Faucet Mount Filter - Cartridge takes pressure inside housing
So I shouldn’t have the same failure as I did on the Pur filter where the housing fell apart. Unfortunately on hooking this filter up the sink flow rate was sooo low it was unbearable, I expect the filtered water output to be slow, but the restriction from the filter on the sink was too much. It would take several minutes to fill a pitcher of water, let alone fill the sink to do dishes in with unfiltered water. Ultimately this filter was removed and set aside. I pulled it apart but can’t see any obvious restrictions, try at your own risk!
I cut open the Dupont filter and I call BULLSHIT on their “quadruple filter”, have a look:
Dupont Faucet Filter Chucked into the Lathe
On cutting it open we find. . .
Giant Single-wall Carbon Filter
That’s right, the water goes in the middle and out the outside through the carbon cylinder, no magic and no “quadruple filter” to be found. False advertising?
No Dupont Magic to be found in the Bottom
Smooth Upgrade!
I’m consistently amazed at the level of automation out of WordPress through upgrades. I clicked a few links (using the automatic upgrade plugin of course) and magically I’m running a completely new version without a single hiccup!
Westinghouse PY-5 Wattmeter Instructions
If anyone out there is still trying to use one of these Watt / Volt Meters:
Very Old Westinghouse Wattmeter
You might want the instructions. I’ve scanned and uploaded them here, if you want a print size scanned copy e-mail me and I’d be happy to mail it to you. Then go buy yourself a clamp on multimeter unless you’re using this in a black and white movie 🙂
Westinghouse PY-5 Portable Single Phase Wattmeter Instructions / Parts List
Instructables – FAIL
Instructables has decided to force users to pay a monthly fee to continue using basic features of the site. They’re removing a long time features of “View all steps on one page” and added no improvements.
Pay for additions to the site are :
Clearly some MIT thinking hard at work here, thinking with your finances and not with the mindset of “what your users want and are willing to pay for”. Hell, had they come out with some innovate tools to getting Instructables up quicker or anything
I’m waiting for the return fire of the open-source collaborative true community solution to the problem, aka someone returning fire in much the way Xiaonei has to Facebook.