My Home Network.

So, my house is slowly becoming mine.  This place is pretty good.  But.. yaknow.. a geek like me needs some hardware to back himself up. 

Since this is "my" house, and I get to do what I want.  I decided I needed a decent home network.  I'm not going to go crazy like some of my friends, and former coworkers who have full on ISP grade networks in their house.  Which while impressive, and drool worthy, just aren't what I need. 

Here's what I've arranged for myself.  I have a good Wi-Fi router, a 5 port Gigabit Switch, a PogoPlug, (for now) a 1.5Tb drive, and a 20meg internet connection courtesy of Comcast. 

The D-Link DIR-632 has a built in 8 port 10/100 hub on top of the WAN interface.  Which is nice.  And I could have forgone the Gigabit switch.  But there's something silly about having a media sharing network in your house and not getting as much bandwidth as you can.

Cutting to the chase, a couple years ago I read about this wonderful little device, called the Pogoplug.  A bit of incredible bit of industrial design that's backed up with a moderately powerfully linux computer and a nice little cloud offering by Pogoplug.  https://pogoplug.com/  Obviously, visit them when you can. 

As an aside.  I think this is where I first learned about them.  Gizmodo Article about the PogoPlug

Since I am paying for my own power now, I figured going low power would be to my advantage.  And while running a server is cool... running a cool server is cooler.  (Sorta reminds me of Zod..   That reminds me, I need to do an article about my webserver.) The PogoPlug was going to be just that.  I bought it with the idea that it would be ready, straight out of the box to do my bidding.  Sadly, it doesn't do everything I hoped.   Heck my $15 Chinese network enabled USB device did more.  But, this is an open device, so.. I can make things happen. 

From the PogoPlug website, you can get yourself a login to your pogoplug.  Root access!  Got that, you get root ssh access!  So, I followed this tutorial on how to install other packages: http://aaronrandall.blogspot.com/2011/03/customising-your-pogoplug.html  Which was a good start.  Now my big goal was to be able to mount drives directly on windows boxes. 

Step, the next, was to install samba.  Oh look, a tutorial on installing samba!  http://aaronrandall.blogspot.com/2011/10/installing-samba-on-pogoplug.html 

And right out of the box, it worked.  Well.. "right out of modding box." 

I think I like it.

The latest addition to the Paintgun Stable

Well, there we go.  I bought something smart parts.  This is the Epiphany.  It's a factory upgraded Ion.  So far I like it.

What makes it different from an Ion?

First, it runs at a higher pressure, so there's less dropoff, and higher efficiency.  From the factory they came with spacers to fill the valve chamber to keep the pressure up at lower velocities.  Sadly, the PO didn't give me those with this gun.

Speaking of air delivery, the factory ASA is an on/off one. 

Third, the body is a magnesium alloy, as is the reg cover.  The blue bits are all rubber.  It's quite a classy setup.

The gun also comes with a freak barrel, including a .693 spacer.  That's quite a bit over an ION. 

And finally it comes with the ultralight bolt.  So the gun basically doesn't kick. 

It needs a new board, a cocker threaded breech, and a QEV.  So far I'm happy with it.

When you're bored and in traffic....

I drove the full hour from work to Living Legends wearing this.  I got some quite funny looks from other drivers. 

That night were the free pump games sponsored by CCM.  I played "back player" with a pump gun.  Not just "a pump gun."  But a stock class pump gun.

After three games I had 90 rounds left, and half my air.

Oh... and while we're at it.  Here's my phantom.

Moving, forward, if not actually in.

This is an empty storage unit.  It used to contain approximately one two bedroom apartments worth of stuff. We need to thank my sister for suprvising the crew that did the moving.  Thank you!



As of today, my house actually is saving me money.  The cost of this storage unit is 1/4 of the mortgage payment.  The only thing left here is to clean it out, and sign the papers saying "we don't need this anymore."  It's all now in the garage, and I can move it in as I please.

Also on the house side of things.  The electrical work is done.  That means my garage has lights.  The switches in the house all work right.  And all the light fixtures work.  Say the least, I am pleased. 

On the not so bright side, I"m slowly discovering that the FHA 203k home inspection was massively incomplete.  In this case it's: SUPRISE, your heater will kill you. 

Really Old Paint

So... digging through the storage unit, I found a box with paint in it.  This is paint left over from when I was playing tourny ball.  Something tells me that means this paint might be six years old. 

I am quite sure draxxus doesn't exist anymore.  The paint isn't exactly round.  And the processing oil seems to have sucked the red dye out of the shells, so there was a wet red oil on everything.  None of the paint was broken though!  So, unlike the other bag of paint I found in the storage unit, I decided I could save this. 

Paper towels work wonders.  If a ball "just" broke in a bag, you can roll paint around in a towel too to get the paint off of it.  As long as you're quick, the paint will be ok.  In this case, I'm years late to be quick about it.  But all I want is paint to shoot in the back yard to figure out why my promaster is chopping paint!  That said, it chopped some of this, along with the stuff from Living Legends.

The paint looked pretty good after cleaning the stained oil off of it.  The paint isn't even the lumpiest stuff I've shot.  (that award goes to some brass eagle stuff from the first celebrity paintball event.  That stuff was like shooting dice)

Ten minutes of effort, and sixteen paper towels later I'm left with this:

The stuff that was in the bag previously, I wouldn't have fed through my worst hopper.  This stuff, is just fine.  I shot about 300 rounds today.

Somehow, I still have roughly half of case on hand.  All RPS now. 

Cheap EFI for steady, or near steady state engines. (Read: Airplanes)

http://www.rotaryeng.net/simple-cheap-555.html

Something else to think about.  EFI is a beautiful thing.  And that page suggests a method to keep an engine running if the EFI dies.  I like it.  I think it would be better than trying to run some sort of ghetto rigged carb, and would provide individual cylinder leaning.

Mmmm fuel economy, and power.

Thinking About Propellers

So I keep thinking about propellers. 

Propellers are pretty wrong. (your average one, that is.)  This article goes into it with good depth.  http://www.eaa.org/experimenter/articles/2009-02_elippse.asp 

Tonight I broke out the spreadsheet and started trying to replicate the math.  In large part because Paul Lipps died, and his son is now working on drones, instead of the recreational aviation market. 

So starting with the most obvious, I started with this statement: Your available lift goes up with the square of speed.  And wing lift is also a linear relationship to area. 

I calculated the speed of the propeller at every 2" along the radius.  But that's only good for when you're not going anywhere.  As your forward speed goes up, you're adding to the perceived airspeed of the propeller blades.  This has some really funny effects on blade chord. 

With a 64" propeller, and an 8" hub, you'd need a 64 times more chord to provide equal lift! But as airspeed goes up, that ratio drops off rapidly.  The slower the prop speed, the faster that ratio drops.  At 100mph, and 3000rpm, that ratio drops to 22 times.  (for giggles, at 400mph, it's only 3:1, but the tip speeds are at a freaky 697mph)

While typing this I figured out that I am forgetting something.  Swept area.  All of the math I have done (or, in this case, OpenOffice Calc has done..) only tells me how to produce the same lift across the blade.  This would produce a lift profile like that of a constant chord wing. 

I need to think about how to compensate for that, if it's even worth compensating for.