03.28.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:18 pm by webmaster
Today there’s a lot of posts of what I’ve made. 
I made a filter for our turtles’ tank. The previous filter, Sacem Marathon 2000 quit the job with a motor meltdown. That one circled 2000 l/h, but I wanted even more efficient filter and more filter material, because, you know, four turtles produce a lot of shit.
So I planned making a wet-dry sump filter. In this kind of filter, the water flows through an overflow box to a sump, which is on the floor (or lower than the water level in the tank anyway). There’s filter material in the sump. From the sump the water is pumped back to the tank.
Here’s a couple of pictures of the overflow box I made:
 Just type overflow box on google to get more information about their principle, if you don’t understand it from the pictures. This piece doesn’t look expensive, but actually cost me about 40 euros! The most expensive part was the clear pipe (25 e for a short stump) and pipe angles (about 6 euros each). I tried to make the overflow pipe of garden hose first, but this didn’t give enough flow. Those boxes are just breakfast serial containers. The piping going down to the sump was “borrowed” from my parent’s garage. They have piles of piping stuff (they used to be in that business).
The sump is made of a couple of storage boxes (with wheels under – WHOAAA! ). Two of them just in case one of them leaks. The filter material is put in smaller storage boxes on whome I drilled lots of holes on the cover and bottom. The hose from the pump to the tank is supported right over the surface of the tank’s water, so that if there’s power cut or the pump breaks, the return hose won’t suck the tank empty. Here’s a picture:
Here’s the whole tank (I made that one too myself):
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The turtles also have a ramp so they can walk on the floor any time they want. Usually they don’t, so we take them out of the tank every day for an hour or so and block the ramp so that they can’t climb right back. Basically only time they come on the floor voluntarily is when they are having eggs and they are looking for a place to dig them. Then they try to dig holes through the floor. If they do this in the summer, they can dig their eggs outside. In the winter the situation is more problematic. We have a big box full or dirt. Sometimes they dig their eggs there, sometimes not…
There’s also a level at the back of the tank where they can warm up under regular glow bulbs and a UV lamp.
Happy turtle – I hope:
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Posted in Uncategorized at 9:25 pm by webmaster
I made this guitar a while back and actually it took a couple of years to finish. There was a long period of “idling” in the middle though, and finally, tired of looking at the half done guitar, I just finished it in a zap. First I bought a used Jackson Charvette guitar (looked pretty awful – somebody had painted a “nice” spider web thing on it) and took it apart. I painted the guitar with base paint and sanded it. I looked up 60’s spirited pictures from internet and printed them with a laser printer and then glued the pictures on the guitar. Finally I put clear plastic with glue on the other side on top of all (the same stuff that you use to cover books). Sounds simple but it took two years. The explanation is that I was going to look for more pictures for some empty spots, but because I never got around to it, I thought heck and just covered the guitar with the plastic… The empty spots don’t stand out much, since the base painting is black and white as are the pictures. Here’s a picture (this time it’s a bit bigger than my usual pictures, so that you can see at least some details):
Oh yes, and the guitar is ok to play.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 9:05 pm by webmaster
I made us a birthday cake, because it was my birthday recently. I make them always the same way (the best way): I bought a cake base from a grocery store, wetted each surface with peach juice (the juice that’s in a can of peaches… it’s mostly sugar water), put jam (strawberry is good and raspberry too), banana slices and peach slices on each layer. On top of all I put whipped cream (remember to put sugar in the cream). But this time I also made an especially nice decoration. I drew Jimi Hendrix’s face from a poster we have on paper and cut the “mask” off with scissors. Then I put the pieces on the cake and threw some nonpareils (colored sugar balls) on it. Then I picked the nonpareils off the mask and drew the pieces of paper carefully off. Here’s the poster:
And here’s the cake:
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03.05.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 1:09 am by webmaster
Quite recently, by some influence of my friends, I’ve been introduced to the world of blues. We’ve been playing some too, even though some say you can’t play blues unless you’re black, fat, old and blind. This can’t be true because e.g. B.B. King, although black and fat and old, is not blind. And Johnny Lee Hooker was not fat nor blind. We are, however, non of those things. We are white, slim (well…), young (about 30 and less…) and we still see fine (I have glasses, though).
I have a funny story about B.B. King. A former colleague of mine, a physicist (I’m saying former, because I’m not working in that field anymore), was waiting for a visiting researcher with a friend of his, who is also a physicist, on Helsinki’s airport. A fat black man walked by and caught my colleague’s eye. He told his friend ”hey, that man looked a lot like B.B. King”. Taking into consideration that it’s a bit odd to see B.B. King walking by in Finland, you may think that this is another white guy who thinks every fat black man is B.B. King. BUT a short while later, more fat black men walked by and they had a text “B.B. King” on their arms. So he WAS B.B. King.
Blues is flexible. Some are purists and just stick to the tradition (worst case of this when some bands just play the scale over and over again, basically creating songs which all sound similar). Some may be very good at it, but this doesn’t interest me, because of the lack of variation, except when done by Johnny Lee Hooker. Johnny Lee Hooker. He can say any shit he wants and it always sounds good. (I’m using present tense, although I know he’s dead. But he’s also alive, you know, through his music.) If I’d sing: “I heard my papa tell my mama, let that boy boogie woogie”, they’d laugh at me. But when Johnny Lee Hooker says it, the listener thinks: “YEAH! LET THAT BOY BOOGIE!” Boom Boom Boom. That’s street credibility at maximum.
The lyrics in blues songs are usually nothing special, but that’s their brilliance. It’s the beat and feeling that counts. If you listen to the lyrics with a critical ear, they sometimes sound even quite funny. In one song, by B.B. King and Johnny Lee Hooker playing together, they complained that this woman tore up their family by seducing them (they were singing as the man in this story). As if it was the woman’s fault But they were so serious about it that the listener feels sorry for them. In another song (I haven’t heard this one, but heard the story from my friend) B.B. King sang a duetto with a lady singer. B.B. King was married to the lady singer, his “wife”. The “wife” was complaining about something to the “husband”. The husband kept telling all the things he had done and sacrificed during their long marriage, but the wife kept knocking out his arguments, one by one. Finally, in the climax of the song, B.B. King howled in pain: “BUT I GAVE YOU SEVEN CHILDREN!” That was his final and strongest argument. HE gave HER the children  A lot of this blues thing seems to be testosterone oozing dirty old men’s world. That’s fine by me. Although I consider myself a modern man, I still sometimes need that testosterone feeling.
Back to the flexibility. Blues has developed into a lot of things. The Yardbirds still sounded like a mixture of blues and psychedelic rock, but the yardbirds’ “chick”, Led Zeppelin, was considered the first heavy metal band. (Wonder if heavy metal got it’s name from “led”…)
Btw we thought that our band’s name should be “Led Light” (not sure if the other members of our band know about this). I and my wife gave us blues names, too. I am Papa Blues (guitar, vocals). My wife is Mrs. Hippy Mississippi (drums, vocals). The other members are Mojo Hand (guitar), Voodoo Daddy (metaphysical things, drums, guitar and vocals) and Sweet Lips Wookie Man (metaphysical things, harmonica; he has a beard, that’s why “wookie”).
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03.01.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 9:33 pm by webmaster
There are probably thousands of computer case related stories out there and here’s another one, because I feel like writing and nothing better worth of reporting came to my mind.
My previous computer (which I still have on my table, on the other side of the monitor ), was loud as hell. It was put together in the era of computing (early years of this millennium) when only number crushing power was important and noise levels could be insanely high. The main noise sources were the processor fan (the processor is an originally 1.7 GHz Athlon overclocked to 1.9 GHz) and the cheap power source. I still use that computer to burn my CDs and DVDs, because I have my… Oh yes, I haven’t mentioned about that either: I made an accounting program and I sell it: http://www.zerovero.com. So I have my tools and sources to make those accounting program CDs on that computer. I also use it as a file backup device (some of my old IDE drives are on that computer). And If I’ll ever do some network programming, I need it for that, too.
Like so many others I got fed up with the WWWWWWWOOOOSHHHH. So the next thing I wanted was a completely silent computer. Bought expensive parts. The mother board (Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe) and graphics card (cheap Geforce 6200 card) are passively cooled. A 500W power source (Antec Phantom) is passively cooled when it’s cool enough (the fan wakes up sometimes, but I’ve got it on the lowest temperature setting). I also bought a generously sized copper processor cooler (SilverStone) with three heat pipes. The manufacturer stated that it could be also used as passive cooler. The processor is AMD 64bit X2 (double core).
But when the parts arrived I noticed that I had bough a cooler which is not compatible with the processor slot of my mother board. Damn. I had to make an adapter. But there was no way I could have the cooler in it’s most favourable orientation for passive cooling, which is so that the air could travel vertically through the slots between the cooling fins. Well, maybe I could have, but it would have been hard. I thought that there’s no guarantee anyway whether the cooling could be completely passive, so it wasn’t worth the trouble. Besides the cooler would have been too close to the power source. So, I pointed the fins towards the back wall of the case. This way I could put a case fan to cool the processor if the passive cooling wouldn’t work.
Here are the adapters:
They are the aluminium parts between the motherboard and cooler. The picture should be self-explanatory.
Ok. I was ready to measure the temperatures. First, just to make sure, the processor wouldn’t cook, I pointed a table fan towards the cooler. Then I installed the operating system (Windows Server 2003). I had a bit of trouble finding a suitable software to do temperature measuments. Motherboard Monitor didn’t work on Windows Server 2003, but Speedfan did. I downloaded CPU Burn-in to stress test the CPU. I ran two of those to get full 100% of the both processor cores. But things didn’t work out. The temperatures went too high. I reached 70C when I wasn’t paying attention at some point! Luckily the processor didn’t suffer. So I needed a fan. I searched the web and ordered Noctua’s 120 mm NF-S12-1200. This is as quiet as they come.
I dry tested the fan without attaching it to the case, but instead to the processor cooler (some tape and a paper clip was needed). Much of the air went by the cooler, because the fan is huge. I measured the temperatures and the result was: 56-59C, the mean being about 58 degrees Celsius. Still quite high.
Then I mounted the fan to the back wall of the case:
 
Perfect fit I cut a fan size hole in the back. I didn’t settle for drilling a few small holes for air intake, because I didn’t want anything to block the air or cause turbulence (and noise) near the fan blades. I have to be a little bit carefull when I’m doing something behind the computer in order not to stick anything to the fan, but you don’t really have do something behind the machine so often, so it’s not a problem.
Then I made guides to channel air to the cooler as effectively as possible:
Some sheet metal, rivets and tape was needed for this stage. I measured the temperatures again: 52-54C, the mean 53C. This was with the fan at 70% speed of the maximum which is 1200 RPM and both processor cores at full 100%, of course. At this speed the fan is almost completely silent even when the side panel of the case is open. Actually the side panels have been open for about two months now. I never finish up anything 
Problems: the hiss of the hard drive is now bothering me. Also the fan of the power source wakes up sometimes. I’ve decided that I need sound insulation on the walls of the case. That’s up in the programme next.
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UPDATE 19.03.2007:
 I finally finished the computer. I bought some sound insulation material from a hardware store and insulated the side walls and bottom of the case with it. When I closed up the case (up till now the side walls had been open), the temperature of the processor rose. I had to put the fan to 100% speed which of course is a big louder. However, thanks to the sound insulation the overall noise is a bit lower. It would be sweet though if I could still keep the fan at 70%… It’s a pity that the motherboard doesn’t have automatic speed adjustment for the fan. I’ve already been looking at water cooling systems. Oh, dear… when is it going to end?
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