Well, after many years of faithful service, my trusty (crusty?) old 21" CRT gave up the ghost. I bought it several years ago from Valt, who found a business selling their used monitors on the cheap. (A 21" for $50?! How could I pass that up?)

It served me well. My games were large, easy to see and I loved it. Writing programs with that much "real estate" was a breeze. At high resolutions, you can really open a bunch of windows and read them all.

So, yesterday afternoon while watching "How It's Made" on Discovery Science Channel, my monitor made a quick popping noise like a racheting socket wrench does. The tube went dark and all was lost. I was relieved it was just the monitor, because from the sound of it, I thought my case fan had come loose and hit the motherboard somehow, shorting something out. So when I saw the system was fine, and the tube had gone out, I wasn't too peeved. (Besides the fact that I have a 17" CRT in the attic as a backup)

So my monitor is out - what to do... I first got on my laptop and looked at Newegg. They had a sale on a Hanns-G, which Notorious had told me was nice. I was about to purchase that very monitor when I decided I should also see what deals were to be had at the local retailers. We first went to Best Buy, nothing to exciting there, but I did feel that 19" was just in my budget and I liked the size of it. We then went to Office Depot, again, nothing too exciting. Just as we were about to leave, I saw a Hanns-G that was on sale. It was the same 19" widescreen that I saw on Newegg for $190, and here it was in the store for $30 less (sans tax). Out of stock, but the price tag was pretty low. Oh well, it was worth a look. The sales guy told me to call back in the morning to see if they get any more in.

This morning I called the store to see if they received any more stock, which they hadn't, and then I called the Tyler store. They did have the monitor in - last one. I told him to hold it and so between my morning classes I ran over to Tyler and got the last one. It looks wonderful - no glaring dead pixels. Widescreen is my new friend.

Recently, the router at the gym where I work out has been going on the fritz. It's a D-Link DI-524 so it stands to reason. As the local technology consultant for the gym, I convinced them to allow me to build a m0n0wall box for them.

The issue is that the gym is a small private studio and they are trying very hard to make it look chic and fashionable. To me, this means that they'd rather not have a honking Dell Optiplex G1 like the unit I built a few months ago. I found a solution over in SA's SH/SC forum: The IBM NetVista N2800 8364 Thin Client.

In the thread, a guy from England discussed how he made his unit work. His site has a good write-up on how to accomplish it, including this image where he outlines what is what inside the case. I picked up an 8364 off eBay for $55 shipped.

Dealing with the two BIOS flavors can be a bit daunting if you're not experienced in editing BIOS settings so if you attempt to do this, please make sure you're not dumb. But even if you are, there is a PWD_RST jumper that will restore everything back to the land of lollypops and bikinis.

The issue I'm having at the moment is one that apparently plagues the Ethernet models of the 8364. During the Linux boot process, the screen becomes garbled and the machine eventually locks. As recommended on the aforementioned page, enabling the on-board Ethernet controller seems to solve this problem.

While that was well and fine, a new problem that is undocumented as far as I can tell has emerged. The keyboard I am using to assign interfaces as well as the LAN IP address is not functioning correctly when attached to the thin client. The same keyboard works fine on my server so I know the keyboard is not the issue. Strange characters are entered for every keystroke and always entered twice. It's the oddest thing I've seen in a while. If anyone has any ideas how to work around this, please leave a comment. I'll post an update when I get it resolved.

Now, what did I do with that USB keyboard...

Since I've been here at LeTourneau, I've had the chance to meet a few other ham radio operators. Problem is, none of us can have any substantial antenna setups in order to make many contacts, if any at all.

After speaking with a couple of guys, we decided to reorganize the LeTourneau Univ. Amateur Radio Club (LUARC) and host a special event station. LUARC was more or less disbanded once the old shack was torn down to make way for Glaske Hall.

Since none of us have been able to play on the air very much, our special event will be nothing more than a chance to get on the air and hang out. It just so happens that the day we chose will coincide with the opening of the Texas QSO Party. We will be meeting on top of the birm, in the center of campus. We will be putting up the antennas around 12:00pm on Saturday and operating into the early evening. Everyone is welcome to stop by and check out our setup or operate - no license is required.

If you're on Facebook, you can see our LUARC Special Event page for Facebook.

I recently found an amazing deal in an Academy sales paper. I found that they were selling the Mossberg Maverick 88 for ~$140. "Something's up", I thought. I read a few reviews and found that the Maverick 88 is indeed a "value" line by Mossberg, but wholly compatible with the more popular/expensive Mossberg model 500.

I consulted with my father-in-law, whom I had asked to keep an eye out for a good deal on a shotgun about a month ago. I showed him the sale ad and he was amazed at the low price. I told him what I had read and he said that Mossberg wouldn't put their name on something that will fall apart. He suggested that I jump on the deal as soon as possible. I did. After leaving their house, the first stop was at Academy where I looked the gun over to really examine the quality of the low-priced shotgun. Everything seemed to be in order and it looked like it would be all that I really need for now. So I purchased.

After some brief paperwork, I walked out of the store with my brand new 12-gauge Mossberg Maverick shotgun. Later I stopped at Walmart and stocked up on Winchester shells - I bought 100 shells.

Tomorrow, Notorious and I will have a "barrel warming" with some skeet to put this gun through its paces.

Update: Just got back from Walmart where I found they have 2 other chokes for this shotgun at $5 each. I picked up Full and IC chokes on the cheap. Good stuff.

I just finished making quite possibly the world's most simple radio. I had read a few HOWTOs for constructing a crystal radio. Some links offered the basic formulas for figuring the specs needed for the coil if you wanted to tune various frequencies. I purchased 3 spools of "Enamel-Coated Magnet Wire" from Radio Shack for ~$5, and picked up a crystal ear piece while at EPO in Houston.

After reading that just about any round object will do for a coil-form, and not having an empty toilet paper tube, I settled on an empty fish food container. It was small, compact, and just the right size - plus with the screw on lid, I can keep the antenna, ground and ear piece inside. I rinsed out the fish food residue, tapped 4 small holes with a drill bit and started wrapping the 22awg copper wire around the bottle. Every 5 turns I would wrap around a toothpick. After wrapping the bottle - which took a while - I ended up using about 30ft. of wire. (FWIW: my coil came out to be about 118uH) The toothpick wraps were then scraped free of the enamel coating to make antenna taps for rough tuning. (how this works) After ensuring there were no shorts along the coil body, I hooked up the 1N34 diode, ear-piece, ground wire and antenna and was greeted with some shortwave radio broadcasts. The first station I heard ID was WWCR out of Nashville, Tennesee, although there are plenty of others I can hear.

The trouble with such a simple receiver (no variable capacitor) is that there is little selectivity and the listener is bombarded by 2 or more stations at once - a mixing of all of the signals within a range of frequencies. To fix it would add complexity, but it's not hard to do.

For my antenna, I just have an 8' wire tacked up to the wall. For my ground, I have an 8' wire precariously plugged into the ground on an electrical outlet (I wouldn't recommend it, but it does work).

In the picture, the toothpick is shown on the coil with the wraps every 5 turns. The green wire is my ground, the black alligator clip goes to my antenna wire (the clip makes it easily movable for tuning), the diode is at the top of the coil, next to the green spool, and then of course the white high-impedence ear piece. Also note that no solder was required, I opted to use springs to connect points, but twisting and taping would have worked just as well.

If you're interested in trying it out, gather the required parts and let me know how yours turns out.

Grendel sez: For my next trick, I hope to swap the diode out for a razor blade and safety pin! The best explanation of how crystal sets work, that I've found so far, is here.

update: Success! After trying for an evening, I got the razor blade and saftey pin combo to act as a detector. Here's a picture of the setup.
I used regular straight blades (found by more "modern" blades in the shaving section of most stores) and an ordinary safety pin. After reading about the "blued steel" of the WWII-era blades, I learned that the blue hue of the blade was due to a heating treatment that is done to the blade during manufacturing. I wasn't having any luck with my blade so I gripped the blade with pliers, held it horizontally in a flame until I saw the blue appear on top of the blade. I wiped away the black residue from the flame on the bottom and tacked down the blade.

Next, I got a small piece of lead from an automatic pencil, connected it to the safety pin via a small dab of solder, tacked down the pin and hooked up the radio. (Blade goes to the ground, pin goes to ear piece.) You have to be patient and fish around the blade for the right point but you'll find it.

It also doesn't help that I'm not very close to a strong station, so it took a while longer. I'm sure anyone near a 50,000W AM station won't have much trouble. The signal is very weak, even compared to the diode, so make sure you are getting a decent signal with your diode before attempting this method. (I hooked up my ham radio antenna and got alot stronger signal than the aforementioned 8' wire.)

Tip: Try in the top-center of the blade around the hole in the blade - that's my sweet spot.
I've also found out that florist's wire works just as well and is alot cheaper (and more easily found in stores).

update: To make it even easier try a Slinky!