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Showing posts from May, 2021

Jeep YJ Wrangler Lighting

I used  these lights  in the Wrangler dash, and they worked perfectly. Except, about half of my sockets didn’t like them (mine had a mix of Toshiba sockets and some other kind of socket). I bought “ Toshiba V2 V-2 Socket T10 Instrument Cluster Light Bulb ” from eBay, $8, and swapped out the unhappy sockets.) For the footwell light, I used a  67-CW12-G . For the reverse lights,  OXILAM 1156 LED Bulbs Reverse Light . As lights fail, I’m replacing them with LED; should last longer, run cooler... DOT headlights will be the expensive one. (Don’t run non-DOT LED headlights. Please.) Convert what I have now? ( link ) Wholesale replacement? ( link )

Just a bit unconstitutional

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“Cyr conceded that current federal law and FAA regulation on revenue diversion would make this bill nearly impossible to implement by the state. Changes to those federal laws and FAA regulations would need to happen to make this state-level bill possible ...” https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/business-aviation/2021-05-18/mass-bill-impose-1k-landing-fee-wont-fly Federal law, like, that pesky  Privileges and Immunities Clause  ...

The One Where I Learned About Basic Tool Maintenance

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Well, it finally happened.  After desoldering and rebuilding multiple boards, with a couple of bridge wire fixes but nothing insurmountable, I finally killed one. The Keychron K6 RGB is a well built board, and the switches did not want to be removed. Compounding things, after several keyboards’ worth of desoldering, the insides of my Engineer SS-02 were ... grimy. In retrospect, it makes sense that it would need to be cleaned out periodically (though it does spit out those nice shiny hollow tubes of removed solder). Need to pick up some lithium grease to do it right:   Anyway. All the switches still work, save the “shift key” row; from left shift through the “B” key, the keys don’t respond at all. From N to the end of the row, any keypress (or, using tweezers between the two solder points to simulate a key switch press) spits out all the keys from the entire row. Sounds like it’s probably a diode issue, and probably beyond my current ability to troubleshoot or fix. Maybe not, though

KISS Principle

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I’ve had an old Marshall MS-2 guitar amplifier for ... Probably 30 years. Maybe longer. The other day I went to fire it up and it was dead. Okay, swapped in a brand new 9V battery. Nope, still dead. Hmm. Take it apart to see if there’s anything obviously wrong. Doesn’t appear to be. Dig out the cheap Harbor Freight multimeter I have handy (I have a low end Fluke , but not here), and do a quick continuity check . Everything looks good. Before I dive into the circuit board, I turn to Google University to see what the masses might have discussed regarding common failure points on this little guy. Sure enough, the first thing I found was the answer: The 9V connection, while looking fine, had gotten a bit loose. Simply bending the connection prongs out a bit fixed the issue immediately. (Just as well; I needed an easy win. )

Easy data persistence with JSON in Perl

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Dumping this here because it took me a minute to get back up to speed with everything Perl (I’ve forgotten most of what I used to know, regarding things like hash and array references, etc, but with just a little bit of playing around it’s all coming back). This stores a Perl hash (well, actually, a hashref) in a JSON file. Voila, you’ve got a JSON file with the contents of the hashref.  JSON  will have to be installed from CPAN if it’s not already (which I did as an unprivileged user using local::lib). #!/usr/bin/env perl use warnings ; use strict ; use local::lib "~" ; use JSON; # Load the existing data from persistence.json, if present: my $psjsonfile = "persistence.json"; my $persistence = {};     # empty hashref, used if the persistence file doesn't yet exist if ( -e $psjsonfile ) {         open ( PSIFILE , $psjsonfile ) or die "Error: Unable to open $psjsonfile : $! \n " ;           # $/ is a special variable that holds the delimiter

Adopt don't shop? Not so fast.

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I’ve been meaning to write this note for a long while. A reddit post prompted me to sit down and actually do it. I’ve been the fur dad to four dogs so far in my life (not counting family pets when I was a kid). Onyx was a black Labrador / pit bull / Australian Shepherd mix we found as part of a litter, “free to a good home,” in a play pen outside a Stater Bros. in Big Bear. I wasn’t his dad for very long - I was living in a college dorm and my push to get off campus housing permission as a freshman wasn’t successful. But good friends adopted him and I got to watch him grow and thrive with his two Labrador brothers-by-adoption. It was about 14 years later before I decided I was ready, and I adopted Maynard from a rescue as a puppy. He was the best. Seriously, I know everyone says that about their dogs, but he really was. Quiet, mild mannered, polite, well trained, playful, energetic. He passed July 3, 2019, just shy of his 10th birthday. When Maynard was about two (in 2011), we pulled

When everything clicks (and a rapid introduction to the Avidyne IFD GPS)

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Had to make a run out to Chino, and then over to a meeting in Redlands. The SR20 I’ve been renting was booked with lessons, but an SR22 G2 was available, so I booked that instead. I have about 75 hours in an SR22 G2, but haven’t flown it in about 10 months (I’ve flown the SR20 more recently). I have never flown this specific SR22 before, however. It has the Avidyne Entegra glass cockpit, as does the other SR22 I’ve flown, but this one’s been upgraded from the venerable and ubiquitous Garmin 400-series GPS units , to an all-Avidyne stack: AMX240 audio panel, IFD540 controlling an AXP322 remote transponder; IFD440 ; and DFC90 autopilot. I've logged some time behind an IFD540 in a Cessna 340 , but always with someone who knew the interface a lot better than I did. Downloaded the iPad simulator  the night before, watched some of the Avidyne training videos , read through the pilot guides . Totally ready for a day of forecast CAVU VFR flying. (You probably know where this is goin