Frivolous At Heart

You know… I wonder lately why newer laptops roll out with all the bells and whistles but the manufacturers hide the harddrives so inconspicuously. You would have to remove the whole front or bottom of the laptop to get to the harddrive. What reason? I don’t know! No wait, I do know!!! They want you to bring it in for repair and or services and charge you an arm and a leg for labor!

Before, they had harddrives conspicuously hidden on the side of the laptop or on the bottom with a plastic/metal cover shroud over it. That was easy to access and easy to upgrade harddrives at will. Not now-a-days. The reason why I bring this topic up is because harddrives are prone to failure within many years of service and sometimes they just die at a very early stage during their service… What the hell do you do if you have harddrive failure? Opps, got to take it in because I can’t get to it or I migh void my warranty… How long does warranty process these repairs? Weeks! When do you need your lapper? You want it NOW dammit: not three weeks later!

If you are like me, whom restore their systems quite often… Why? Well it only takes 5-8minutes to restore my system with Norton Ghost… Does lappers allow you to do this efficiently? NO. Why? Because they come pre-installed with some type of operating system (XP or Vista for example) and all these systems that are pre-installed, will only restore to one partition… Here is a typical harddrive setup for lappers:

If you take a look at the above photo, you see that you only have one partition in lappers… I like to have two partitions; one for your operating system and the other to make backups of that operating system. The reason is because sometimes your lapper decides to slow down and or act flaky and instead of losing everything with the restore disk (newer lappers don’t come with restore CDs dammit), you can restore it from the Norton Ghost (Ghost) file. Do you see that EISA partition? I call it the ghost partition because you can’t see it. That partition is the restore partition and it is required for the system to operate (some manufacturers).

The way I setup my partition is this: You need two partitions (excluding the EISA partition), one 30Gig and the rest the second partition for full system backups. In order to do this, you are required to take out the harddrive to first backup the system using Ghost. Then make the two partitions, then do the restore. The logic behind this is because the lapper comes with the pre-installed operating system with all drivers; you can’t use the restore disk to install a new operating system on the 30Gig partition because the OEM restore disk won’t allow it. You can do this without removing the harddrive by reinstalling everything and that requires a new operating system to be purchased.

If you have a lapper, I highly recommend this type of partition setup for efficiency. Nothing beats a system restore that can be done in less than 15minutes. Norton Ghost is a life saver! Harddrive failure, virus, wacky systems etc- all pay tribute to a quick system restore. If you don’t have Ghost, you obviously are quite brave!

FYI: Sony & Toshiba Lappers do not require the EISA partition. IBM Lenovo 2005–? requires the EISA partition. I know this because I have had to do it with dozens of lappers for friends and family. My newest trail was with a Dell Vistro. I gave up because I wasn’t going to take the lapper apart to get to the harddrive… The harddrive is hidden somewhere within the shell. Not worth taking the risk of voiding the warranty!

Converting Watts to Amps

The conversion of Watts to Amps is governed by the equation Amps = Watts/Volts

For example 12 watts/12 volts = 1 amp
Converting Amps to Watts

The conversion of Amps to Watts is governed by the equation Watts = Amps x Volts

For example 1 amp * 110 volts = 110 watts

Converting Watts to Volts

The conversion of Watts to Volts is governed by the equation Volts = Watts/Amps

For example 100 watts/10 amps = 10 volts

Converting Volts to Watts

The conversion of Volts to Watts is governed by the equation Watts = Amps x Volts

For example 1.5 amps * 12 volts = 18 watts

Converting Volts to Amps at fixed wattage

The conversion of Volts to Amps is governed by the equations Amps = Watts/Volts

For example 120 watts/110 volts = 1.09 amps

Converting Amps to Volts at fixed wattage

The conversion of Amps to Volts is governed by the equation Volts = Watts/Amps

For Example, 48 watts / 12 Amps = 4 Volts

Download link 

high quality video here:
http://www.diuternity.com/vids/MOV01957.MPG

As you can see from the video, this printer bottoms out (scrapes the bottom of the ink carts)

Even it this printer would print correctly, how would it print if it bottoms out?

I love my bandsaw. Installing baseboards is easy! If you had only to cut 45degree angles only! I had to cut round corners which made the task a little challenging but I did it without a sweat! A whole house would probably take me 2 full days but now it’s only taking a day. To do round corner baseboards, you have to cut three pieces: three @ 22.5degrees!

Cutting the center piece that ties into the two boards is a pain! So I setup my bandsaw to cut the center 22.5degree piece. I needed twenty-four of them. Cutting them one at a time would prove to be very VERY time consuming. The bandsaw made it easy once I had setup a jig for it! Took me less than 30mins to cut all the pieces! Now all is needed are lots of other boards cut! I’ll finish tomorrow!

EDIT: Here are samples of the cuts I’m talking about:

My sisters like all women, believe that you must hold on to something that belongs to you. Women in general, feel insecure that their man is going to study, out for lunch, or chat to another woman without them fearing that they will lose them. That is true and I know that for a fact, a lot of men fall for someone else that they “hang out” with. I understand the woman’s point of view and how they are insecure about all this.

My take on it is that if you have a sound relationship, your partner won’t do things like that. Why would they need to? If they do, they are not for you and that kind is not something you want to keep around. Someone true to you and themselves will draw a line between anything when the need arises.

You certainly can’t expect your gf/bf to drop everything and have a new life with you. That isn’t possible. Friends will always be there; your gf/bf may or may not. Let them hang out with their friends guy or girl. If they are going to leave you, no matter how tight your grasp, they will leave without hesitation. Be patient and secure with yourself so those around you will be too. You can’t keep a heart happy by chaining their leg to yours; they’ll find else where to nest at.

I ordered something online on October 6th. The transaction was smooth no problems! I received an email with a coupon for my next transaction at the place of purchase and it was sent via shopper discounts and rewards. All I had to do was sign up with my email but little did I know that they too, signed me up on their program to charge me $10 a month. What bunch of shit! I didn’t get my coupon because it required for leg work in buying something else or something to that extent… Two months and $30 dollars charged to my account…

I theorize that the way they make money is by depositing unsuspecting consumer’s funds into their accounts and within a short period of time, make a small percentage of it via bank cash back. How awful… They must do that tou thousands of upon hundreds of thousands of people… Multiply that by 10 and you got a large lump sum to make cash back on it.

I called them and without a question, gave my money back without a fight… Dammit, what a damn shady company!

Been a long week! I just got back from a football game and I’m so exhausted. Had a short hangover. I don’t like drinking dammit!!! I had lots of fun non-the-less. I also learned football too! My buddy XP explained the game to me- it was pretty cool! You learn something new everyday not to mention, if you don’t know the rules to the game, it’s stupid to watch because you’ll be confused.

I still won’t watch it on TV or get overly excited about it though. It’s just not my forte. I will probably not go next time because I don’t see any point on going. The atmosphere is crazy! The girls there are crazy too! My friend was crabbing girls left and right (lol). I’d imagine these girls can party just as hard as the boys!

On the way out, the losing team patrons were full of steam. One almost got his ass handed to him for swiping the hat off of another patron who was walking out. CRAZY. Man, I need more time for my own blog. New mandate: two blogs at least a week!

[ratings]
I picked up an AMT 14″ bandsaw and the trunnion was broken. It was cast aluminum (very thin when cast) and so it broke. This is very common of Taiwanese bandsaws. Harbor Freight, Northern Tool, Grizzly- all sale Taiwanese and or Chinese made bandsaws and the parts are interchangeable 99% of the time. They are just marketed under different names and have very little change to differentiate btwn brands etc. Get cast iron trunnions if you can afford it! Lesson learned!

I got it for a sweet deal too! Forty-Five dollars for it and a 32″ wood lathe. I’m fixing to sell the wood lathe though plus the old bandsaw table as well. The bandsaw table is cast iron and it’s quite good castings might I add! If only the trunnions would hold up, I would of had a solid table. Knowing me, I’ll probably upgrade the table anyways just “because”. Well I needed a larger working area and that it must be plumb with the blade. So I made this:

The piece of aluminum you see there, is a bracket to hold the iron frame together. Without it, there wouldn’t be no possible way of putting or taking off the blade. Plus the thick aluminum bracket helps square everything out. I tell ya what, I’m not using bed frame irons anymore unless I’m cutting it with an abrasive disc. The high carbon cold rolled steel is extremely hard! It ruins drill bits and saw blade of any kind in minutes!

My welds look like crap because I forgot to turn on the gas while MIG welding. You can see it with the photo below:

I made the top out of ply nailed to particle board. Reason is because the particle board is smooth and uniform and the ply is for strength. Both combined, will withstand twisting and the surface will always be true. Provided the surface it lies on, is true. I chose melamine to be on top because it allows things to “glide” over it without much friction.

I’ll soon upgrade this with slide railes and I will convert this bandsaw to a metal cutting bandsaw!

Update 09/29/07:

Gear Reducer: Browning Gear
Ratio: 15.1
RPM: 1750
Input HP: 2.61 Output: 1252 Lb. Inch
Shaft: 7/8in/1 1/8in

Reduction Pulleys:
1 sku # 6245K51 : 6″ pulley
2 sku # 6204K515 : 2.70″ pulley
3 sku # 6204K246 : 4.45″ pulley

2.70″ + 6.000″ = 52rpm (metal cutting)
4.45″ + 5.875″ = 88rpm (aluminum cutting)

This is the photo of the gear reducer. It has both 2.70″ & 4.45″ pulleys on there. My bandsaw is out of commission because it is waiting to be hooked up to the reducer. Too bad the 6″ pulley can’t fit on there. I’ll have to take my losses and not get the projected rpm I’ve set. I’ll get 53rpm & 88rpm. I’ll be happy with that. I will cut steel and aluminum just fine. I’ll need to get bi-metal blades for it soon. I have supercut carbon steel on there right now (purchased at northertool.com).

More PHOTOS coming!

[ratings]
I’ve always been pretty head-strong about recycling -anything- and I just started recycling aluminum cans (again). I find that storing them in the 5-gallon buckets will not suffice since I have so many of them! I need a aluminum can crusher or something. So I got one- from ebay that is=) I can’t wait for it to arrive because I know I’ll get a kick out of it every time I crush a can.

I have lots of nieces and nephews and I’m sure they’ll love to use the “can crusher” (lol). Maybe I’ll still store them in the bucket and then wait for them to come over and let them have at it in the shop. They’ll probably fight over how many cans one should each crush- it’ll be so much fun! Maybe a good stress reducer and joy inducer too!

The other day I heard that glass bottles are more environmental friendly? I think they pose more of a danger when stepped on vs stepping on an aluminum can don’t you think? Likewise, we will run into issues of environmental issues such as pollution and to see if it’s worth recycling them at all. Takes more energy to recycle something than it does making them. The fact it, recycling something takes it out of the landfills and put back into better use. I like that idea more even though it’s using more energy i.e causing more pollution but hell, we can’t prevent everything. It’s a domino affect in every thing.

Talking about landfills…, how in the hell are all those things being crushed and buried? I don’t know I’m off tangent here but isn’t burying trash bad? I always thought that the trash will be a “filter” if you may, that will filter our water and so on and so forth. It’s bad practice. Why don’t we just separate (I know, more work but the end result yields efficiency), burn, and recycle? I know for sure that the landfill a city away is no longer burying their “shit” and is now burning them. It’s good for the waste company because they get free energy that the originally had charged the consumer to come and throw away their trash (fuel).