Overkill

Sunday, July 22, 2007 

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Final modifications to the hovercraft engine mounting plate… drilling four 3/8″ holes in 1/2″ of aluminum… a cordless hand drill would have worked fine. But that’s not The Way. Ultimately I had to correct for a bad OEM drawing of the plate on the bridgeport, but the new hovercraft engine is is ready to assemble.

Posted at 22:15:16 GMT-0700

Category: photoSRL

Inverting SSR

Sunday, July 22, 2007 

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This is part of a cooling system for the cabinet. This relatively inexpensive (on ebay) Watlow series 900 temperature controller has a single output and two alarm relays. The output and one of the alarm relays have snubbers inside and can trip fans on their own. The second output was NC and needed a relay to invert it. I used a solid state relay (SSR) to do it and it is currently controlling the halogen light. It turns on if the temperature goes over 81. Woo! Three more simple wiring harnesses to fabricate and then the whole mess to install in the cabinet. The concept is that a set of filtered fans will run full-time to drive fresh air into the cabinet (not quite working yet) to achieve ambient temp, say below 85 or 90 degrees. If the temperature goes above that, a single extraction fan will turn on. If it goes up another 5 degrees a second extraction fan will turn on, and 5 degrees above that a third, honking big fan will turn on. The extraction fans will probably suck in some dust, but better that than melting down.

Posted at 17:10:15 GMT-0700

Category: photoTechnology

Fighting the IP Meme.

Sunday, July 22, 2007 

On the media had a report about the harry potter book appearing on bittorrent. They promoted the idea that file sharing is piracy of some sort, as many do, never questioning the absurdity of the concept of “intellectual property.” I had to write them back.

I’m listening to your report on the harry potter release and I’m saddened to hear you, one of the most enlightened of outlets, refer to the unauthorized electronic distribution of digital content as “piracy.” You even go so far as to say that you “wouldn’t take a peek at the harry potter book because it is wrong.”

Your are promulgating a lie created by the content industry to equivalence physical property and ideas, the fabricated meme of “intellectual property.” This is, on it’s face, absurd. Lets take your example about the taking a peek at the Harry Potter book – would it be wrong to listen to someone tell you about the book? How is a digital copy different from the copy you will carry in your brain after you read the book? Does Scholastic own both? Do they then, therefore, own a physical part of every brain that is exposed to any part of Harry Potter? Can they take it back?

Ideas are not property: not legally, not practically, not conceptually, and not logically. As a society, we have decided that the advancement of ideas is a noble social good, one of such great value that we enshrined the goal in the constitution: “to promote the progress of science and the useful arts.” The mechanism by which we attempt to achieve this goal is the grant of a temporary monopoly, either a patent or a copyright, as an incentive to the inventor to share their invention with society as a whole.

It is instructive to consider the difference between a patented idea and one granted copyright. Typically a patent protects something of concrete useful and economic value to society often developed at great expense while a copyright protects any “fugitive fermentation of an individual brain,” even the most inane. A patent is valid only in so much as it teaches the world how to implement the protected idea and only if the taught method is the best and highest known by the inventor; and then the monopoly is granted for only 20 years. Every irritating jingle is granted a monopoly for 120 years and it is currently a crime even to sing it in public.

The entertainment industry has usurped the concept of copyright and abused it beyond anything the founding fathers would recognize. The current copyright regime, including the DMCA and the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension are patently unconstitutional in as much as they do not promote the progress of science and the useful arts, but rather retard them as they restrict the advancement of computers and networks and their use and adoption, something of great value to all of society as they attempt to protect the profits of pop culture. Further, it is far from clear that there is any more legal basis for regulating non-commercial dissemination of ideas as, for example, typically implemented in peer-to-peer file sharing networks, than there is to make singing “happy birthday” in a restaurant a crime (it is under Sonny Bono).
Ideas are a part of our universal commons. Restrictions on those commons can be legitimately made only by social agreement. It is those that take exclusive use of our commons that are pirates, pirates of the public domain, not those that freely share ideas.

Thomas Jefferson would shudder at your ignorance.

“It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body.”

Thomas Jefferson To Isaac McPherson Monticello, August 13, 1813

Posted at 15:22:40 GMT-0700

Category: Politics

Welding headers

Saturday, July 21, 2007 

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Today I got to weld again, for the first time in about 8 years. I like TIG welding, it’s very satisfying, though I think I gave myself a bit of a tan – my skin has that “just welded” smell. The tubing is an exhaust header for the hovercraft motor. I also fabricated a nice metric broach to cut a keyway in the shaft adapter I designed (and Mark cut out on the Mori Seiki I fixed last week). Fun work… tired now…

Posted at 20:55:16 GMT-0700

Category: photoSRL

Bikey bikey

Friday, July 20, 2007 

New plugs for the K100.

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Posted at 23:45:16 GMT-0700

Category: photoUncategorized

Blooming Yard

Monday, July 16, 2007 

The yard is flowering very nicely at the moment….

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Posted at 16:05:35 GMT-0700

Category: photoUncategorized

depearlized

Monday, July 9, 2007 

 

Pearl parts

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If you have a blackberry pearl and you work near metal dust or filings it will not last long.
I took mine to SRL yesterday and needed to use it with dirty hands. I wiped them off on my shirt, really, then used it a few times and noticed that the trackball had stopped running smoothly. The problem is not just the dirt (see the black streaks around the knurls on the little potato masher shafts), but metal flakes that stick to the magnets.
Turns out the blackberry’s trackball works with four little hall effect sensors on the mother board (you can see one of the black sensors in the top right of the cavity where the trackball was). The black ends of the four little (TINY) potato mashers are magnets and attracts dirt… and tools.. and make them endo and stick to things in very annoying ways as you try to reassemble the trackball. If you get a metal flake wedged between the sensor and the magnet cylinder as you roll the cylinder past it you draw nice metal residue rings around the black magnet, which do not come off easily (but fortunately do not affect operation).
Cleaning each bit carefully with rubbing alcohol, blowing out the cavity and the magnets, and particularly working on a strip of tacky paper (like painter’s masking tape) makes it possible to clean the parts and get the little metal bits off. The pearl itself is very likely to make a break for it across any gradient. It’s only 3.5mm in diameter; do not lose it.
These instructions helped. Basically pry the silver ring off gently from the front (under the 2/t/y key) and pop the trackball assembly out. Mine did not have the second metal retaining ring in it and seems to work fine without it.
All back together now, but it will not be accompanying me into environments with metal dust and chips as the sensor is perfectly designed to draw them into the workings and specifically right to where they will jam the rollers. It does seem fairly immune to finger grease and pocket lint though.

Posted at 12:19:11 GMT-0700

Category: Cell phonesphotoTechnology