Author: Blake

Snow… a little more

Blake

Well we haven’t hit the 7 foot snow banks yet, but we did get a fairly large snow storm here in North Bay. We got the end of a storm that hit Enterprise High School earlier yesterday. This storm was just snow for us. Usually by the time a tornado storm gets here it’s usually at it’s last dieing breath. Well I went out and took some pictures. I know it doesn’t look like allot but most of it was drifted so it was very very compacted. Wasn’t that much fun to move… Even with a snow blower.

Drift on Roof:
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Down the street:
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House:
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Up the street:
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House Numbers:
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Stereo to Mono Adapter

Blake

As most of you know I have a auxiliary amp that is also used as a second sub woofer. I have found lately that I don’t always want to plug my laptop into the 5.1 surround sound and blast the bass and every thing else through the house. So I have made an adapter for anything with a stereo controlled out put to be converter to Mono. (one channel)

Now here are the specs on the amp.

  • 1/4 inch input
  • 100 watts (single Channel)

This is what you going to need.

  • Stereo head phone cable (Left, Right and Ground)
  • 1/4 inch mono plug male
  • 1/4 inch stereo plug female (can be 3.5mm if you want to plug in a CD player or something
  • two 10k resistors
  • solder iron

Okay now I’ll lay out the rest of the process into steps.

Step 1

Cut a length of the head phone cable about 1 foot long. (or how ever long you need to go). Then strip the first jacket of insulation off then you should see one with no insulation, one with red insulation then another with white insulation. You will want to twist the ground (no insulation) together so there tight. Next strip the insulation off the red one then twist it together. Do the same for the white. Then do the other end.

Step 2

We are going to do the easy part first. Take the female stereo end and solder it to one end of the cable. Make sure the ground (no insulation) goes to the ground of the plug. Some are tabs right off the metal case.

Step 3

Next will be the complicating part. Take one of the 10k resistors and solder it to the red lead at the other end of the cable. Next take the second 10k resistor and solder it to the white lead. Then twist the ends of the resistors together. Make sure that before the resistors aren’t touching. I taped myna very well so they wouldn’t touch.

Step 4

Next solder you ground to the out side shield of the 1/4 inch male end of the plug. Then solder your twisted 10k resistors to the tip tab on the plug. Slip the covers over top of them. (or tape them 😛 )

Step 5 (only if you have the equipment)

Get out a voltmeter and set it to Ohms. Next you will want to check the grounds to make sure there not shorting out the audio.

Finally

Now if every thing checks out and you are confident, plug the adapter into your amps Line level input. Next tern the volume down on you devise. (CD player, Laptop, Tape deck, etc.) Remember to use the headphones output so you can control the volume. Then plug the other end into you devise. Now tern on the devise then the amp. Now run away just encase it ignites. 😛 Now insert a CD or whatever your using that as a part where it uses only the left or the right. In this case I used Queens – Fat Bottom Girlss .

That should be it. If you have any problems, feel free to post them on the forum. Here are a few pictures of the final product in use.

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Grade 11, 2nd Smester

Blake

Well last Monday we started our second semester at Widdifield. I have a fairly easy semester.
English first period, auto second period, then MSIP third, Online Business course fourth and lastly CO-OP last. So far English and Auto class have been the essayist’s. My Online business course is good now because we just got signed up and loged in.

The Business course is still in Beta testing if you want to call it that. There is about 10 of use that are trying the new e-Learning system they have put in place. This system is shared across the school board. There is a bunch of other schools testing this system as well. In total there is well over 200 students signed up for various courses within the system.

The software they uses is very in depth and very easy to use. The software is called Desire2Learn. It has a very easy to use “Dropbox” system so we can hand in our homework. It also has a cheap version of MSN so when a user is online we can talk to them. It also has a message board that is really setup kinda like e-mail accept every body can see any post and you can see who has replied. We have what is called as a “Locker”. It’s just 5MB of space so we can have access to our homework no mater what computer I am on. This doesn’t really mater because I got my laptop. 😀 Lastly we get a simple e-mail address thats is closed to the system. We can send e-mail to people that are signed up for the e-learning course but we can send any to any out side e-mail addresses.

My next thing to do is arrange a meting again with the principle to discus the state of the wireless access at the school. From what I’v herd there is over 20 points installed but only 5 of them work. 😛 Well thats how my semesters going to go. Sounds like fun aye?

How to Clean your Keyboard… The fast way!

Blake1 Comment

My dad finally toled me to clean the keyboard for the computer. Needles to say there was allot of dust around the keys… and in the keys. I came up with a very good idea to clean all 100 and sum keys.

First I started by popping off all the keys with a screw driver. Simple enough.
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Next was taking out all the screws on the back so the top plate, that held all the keys in place, would come off.

Next, I cleaned the plate with water and some paper towels. I then began to clean the actual keys. After about the fifth key I got tired of cleaning the underneath with cu tips. So I filled the laundry tub up with water and through the all the keys in. I sat there with my hand for a wile trying to circulate them around, after about two minutes of that my arm fell asleep. So then I went into the crawly space for some idea. I came out with a pump that my parents use to pump the water in our pond out front. I through in a little orange soap then put the pump in the water, plugged it in and there we have in circulation.

keyboard2.jpg keyboard3.jpg

I left them for about an hour or so then I grabbed a few of them out of the tub and had a look at the under side. Good as new. No gunk build up, it was like the keyboard was brand new. Next I took out the keys and let them dry. Then a reassembled the keyboard.

To sum up. The easy way, is the best way!

New File & Testing Server

Blake

Well this is actually old news, but thats ok. Windows XP Home finally took a dump on my home server. Lucky for me all the data was on another hard drive (Maxtor 120G no longer available). All the family Photo’s my dad gathered over the last 5 years is still in tacked.

The Server would crash randomly and just lock up. Using it to store your My Documents folder was not a smart idea. Windows would also forget the clock speed of the processor, this usually caused about 99% of the crashes. Also printing to my family’s Epson Stylus Photo R300 printer was very slow process. It took about 2 minutes just for the print job to be processed through the network.

An upgrade to Linux is what the server needed. I was debating weather to install a GUI or no GUI and just keep it strictly command line. After talking with my dad, I thought a small GUI would be a good idea. I spent some time debate to go with ether CentOS or Xubuntu. With many previous experiences with, Ubuntu and Kubuntu, I figured Xubuntu wouldn’t be to difficult, I would be using just the command line anyways.

After about a good hour the new Xubuntu server was up and running. After completing about another thirty minutes of updates, the system was ready for software. I folowed this How To. I picked a Domain Controller setup because our Home Network is growing very fast. It will also allow use to automatically map out the drives. This is good so we can log onto any computer on the network and all of our stuff will be in the same place no mater what computer were on. (Similar to Schools and Cooperat Networks)
In the How To, I skipped the setting the network ip to a Static one. I just set the IP in my routers configuration. I setup just two shared folders. One for all of our program ISO’s and another for the family pictures folder.

The next step was getting all the computer on the network connected. This part was a little more difficult because we are running XP Home on all of out computers. I changed the systems to the correct group and they picked up the server right away. Unfortunately we had to manually map out our drives to our accounts. No big deal, but XP Professional  is going on the next order to Tigerdirect!

Next was setting up the printer. Very simple to follow in the How To. The only thing you have to remember is to add the printer via HTTP in Windows. Other then that it was very simple.

This was very easy to get this type of system up and running and it can be done with just about any computer with a big hard drive.
It’s been about 5 weeks now and the server hasn’t had to go off once. I now have setup the My Documents folder to go right to the server. Next my parents want a computer for there new TV so we can run slide shows for when people come over. A little Cat5, and were good to go!