Cleaning

Cleaning up the pig style I live in... boy does it bring back memories.. found some old school uniforms, karate outfit and other clothes that I used to love... oh well.. time to put it into the old clothes bin for the people in need..

Also discovered a whole pile of other bits and pieces... need to find a good way to store these things.. what are some good storage solutions for things like this?

Thoughts on Hewlett Packard Photosmart C7180 printer

YAY!! I have a photo printer! The decision was based on the fact that I want to be able to print out some of the photos that I have taken and be able to experiment with the colours and such... If I was to do the same thing by taking the adjusted photos to the shop and printing them, it would have required more time and the large prints would have been more expensive.

I printed three prints in total last night, to see what this printer was capable of...

The first print was a portrait picture of my girlfriend. The colours were mostly dark apart from the face. It was printed on HP advanced photo paper. Most of the photo was reproduced flawlessly, apart from the top right corner. In that corner I noticed some obvious noise in the blending of the reds and darks. I had a look else where on the photo to see whether the other reds had the same kind of noise. Near the center of the photo, next to the guy in white, there is a pinkish tint window with a white background. There is hardly any noise in that. These are observations of the first print I did, more 4x6 prints with different colours needs to be done to check out other colour blending.

The second print I did was an A4 print of the top of Aiguille Du Midi in Chamonix. This print is composed of mostly blue and white colours. There were no noticeable noise on the picture at all! This is quite amazing, but I am guessing there isn't the same kind of blend as the first print, the redish and darkish blend.

The final print I did was quite similar to the second print, and it turned out to be about the as the same as the second print. Almost flawless!

All in all, I am quite happy with this investment. I still have to play with negatives scanning, general scanning and printing more photos of different colours.

Finally, bring on more devices that connect to the computer via wireless ethernet! There is only one wire going into this printer and thats the power cable! awesome!

Miniz Problems and Voltage Comparison

Last night I decided to take out my Miniz racer and decided to take it for a run around the house... To my horror, it stopped working, just like it did before... no motor movements, no steering movements (the first time it stopped working was when I installed a FET upgrade to it (2x3 of FET 7389) but it started working again 3 years later without me fixing it).

I took the thing apart and found that the negative battery has snapped off and the negative servo wire has snapped off too.. strange I thought.. on closer examination, it turned out that the wires has become brittle from heat generated by the electronics. I don't know the cause of the excessive heat, but I didn't really want to know anyway...

I replaced all the faulty wires on the board and put the batteries back in and viola, it started to work again...

My girlfriend asked me which miniz's out of the three that I have was the fastest one.. my natural answer was the one with the FET upgrade (the Subaru body)... Then I decided to experiment and find out which pushed more voltage to the motor...

The Miniz's

Subaru WRX

FET upgrade (2x3 7389 plus the stock FETs)

and other various hop ups

MR01 chassis

Ferrari F40 - Japanese electronics

Stock car

MR01 chassis

Initial D Toyota Trueno AE86 - Japanese electronics (I am guessing)

Stock car

MR015 chassis

As it turns out, the Trueno gave 5 volts to the motor, WRX gave 4.81 volts to the motor and F40 gave 4.79 volts... Keeping in mind that I bought the F40 and WRX at about the same time, I was actually quite shocked to see that the electronics of the WRX and F40 gave about the same voltage. Whats more shocking is that the Trueno I bought recently, gave more voltage than the other two miniz's...

I do remember when I first compared the WRX (before upgrading) and F40 years ago, the WRX was noticeably slower then the F40...

It seems the Japanese have the better electronics right out of the box... but more experimentation is need to conclude this...

First Blog

I have ventured into the unknown... Blogging. What is it? What fascinating stuff should I crap on about every so often? mmm.. questions that will be answered or will they? Who cares!

More importantly though, time is moving faster and faster and it feels like stuff that happened a year ago only just happened yesterday... what happened in between?

On a lighter note, thank you for taking the time to read this blog and I hope you find something that interests you...