Elvis Ripley

If you have been in my kitchen in the past quarter of a year you have probably seen the wires and electrical components spread out on my kitchen table. Last night I decided to finish it a it took about 4 more hours of very slow soldering to finish a very fantastic amp. It is sort of an old style DIY HiFi. It uses a new type of amplifier and is super clean sounding with very high efficiency meaning small size and a low amount of heat. It also means it has loads of tiny pins to solder that are way too close to each other. I am very pleased with it and plan on building a nice box so I can take it off the towel. Also, I plan on making a much more powerful amp or maybe even a multi channel one. This entry is a little short, I think I am too excited. I will have to wait another day and fill this out.

Update: So now that I have spent some time with the amp, in its still bare board form. I am still very pleased with the easy sound of the amp. I don't have any speakers with an efficiency high enough to really explore high end hifi like a nice pair of La Scala II's. I will probably just build some simple Voight Pipes in my spare time and use those for my office speakers. That would be a weird adventure.

I am working this weekend on creating a Drupal theme. Hopefully I will be kind of done by Monday. I you come by the site and find it to look especially plain, like plain text on a black background, that means there is no style applied because I am testing something. Don't worry and everything still works so just continue like normal. The problem with most Drupal sites is that they look like they were made with Drupal. I don't know if that is too big of a problem but it would be nice to have some style. I am going to try it out and see where I can get with it. I might need to wait another week before I can have the site like I want it. Maybe much longer, it is pretty tough.

Update: It is going to take a while longer. It was harder than I thought and my first attempt wasn't very usable. It was just a little kloogy. I am going to work on a module first and see how that goes. I need some more understanding about what is going on behind the scenes. I could modify an existing theme but I didn't think that was the way I wanted to go. I am trying to get started fresh so I can understand the way Drupal is trying to lay things out. So depending on the week ahead it might be done or it might not. I would like to get this done so I can move onto some other sites.

I am trying out some new site management software. Send me an email if you notice anything you need to work and I will go through and fix it. Missing images, broken links, keep that stuff in mind when you are going through the site. It will take about a week for me to get the look and feel of the site how I want it. Right now this is just a test version of the site as I am mainly working on database stuff and things behind the scenes.

I decided to try this because I wanted to set up a new version of The Tractors site that was more flexible and could be easily updated. I thought about using Wordpress which is what elvisripley.com ran on before. Wordpress works really well for pages and blog posts but for anything else it doesn't offer much. I looked around for a better content management system and found a few places running Drupal, then I found some big sites and started researching it. I wanted to try it out here first because I wouldn't mind dealing with whatever issues came up and I could always go back to Wordpress pretty easily.

I will spend the next week making this site work like I want and look like it should and then spend the next couple weeks making a Tractors site that won't be anything like this site. That should be a good experience.

Also, for the next couple days you have to register to post stuff and not have it say anonymous. I am working on it.

I am painting my wall right now with a couple coats of primer and then if that looks thick and smooth enough I am going to add on Behr Silver Screen paint (770E-2). It gets good reviews for a screen surface so I should like it. We will see.

This is a link to the new projector setup photo set where I will be adding pictures of my painting and the progress as it gets finished and as the projector goes up and I will add another post that is more complete when I get to a more final stage in the process. The stages are 1 choose a target size and prepare an area larger, I went with 3 inches on each side extra so I would have some room, 2 sand and primer the surface to smooth it out and get rid of the yellow, 3 paint plenty of grey on the area, 4 mount the projector and figure out the best size for the room and the projector, the larger the image the dimmer it will be but the blacker the blacks so a balance must be reached and 5 paint a black border around my final screen size to enhance contrast and improve the cinematic feel.

Stages of Projector Setup

Stage 1

Stage 2

Stage 3

You can see this image big to check out the surface detail. There are some little marks but it is very smooth overall. This picture below was taken when there were still a couple coats left for the wall.

Stage 4 So it took an extra day because Optoma changed the size of the screw holes. Lowes and Home Depot didn't have the screws I needed. Lowes had the area for the screws but the what I ended up with at home for sure weren't the right fit. Ace Hardware really came through. That place is nice. So after one awesome night of using the projector on the coffee table projecting an image about the size of my last setup, 92". Because the projector was brighter than I imagined and because of the changes of the screen surface I think I could go really big. I might go ahead and fill up my whole painted space or I might go with my original estimate of around 110" being the correct size. This image below is 107", or pretty close to that. If it gets bigger my couch starts to be in the way and I already had to take the globe, chains and light bulb out of my ceiling fan. It hangs down just a little too low but any light fixture should work, probably just no fans.

If you click on this image it will link to the larger size.

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And this is an example of why I was hesitant to paint my walls. I don't think that some spackle or mud or whatever would be able to get it totally smooth. I sanded it to get the intense peaks out but this is some serious plaster warpage. My experience with the previous screen assures me that these won't really be noticeable unless the bathroom door is left open which happens sometimes.
Update: You can't see any of this stuff. It looks great.

Update: It is still all awesome.

I have wanted to take an old pc, install Linux on it and then turn it into the sweetest router around for a long time. Heather's parents got a new computer a few months ago and I ended up with the old one. It is a Pentium III 600 MHz beige box and the version of Linux I installed is ClarkConnect.

I also tried Astaro and Smoothwall. Smoothwall was too simple and Astaro was too awesome. I never could get Astaro to let me get on the internet. I didn't try too hard because ClarkConnect can do more than be a router. It can be a mail or web server and run a VPN server for protected surfing while I am out. It is a little noisy but I am taking out the fans to see what I need to get it to be quiet. It doesn't seem too hot so far so I think I will be fine if I keep the sides off.

I am still in the testing stages so my Xbox might not work or phone service or something but I think everything is going alright. Better than alright. I will have to see how it works over the next week. I think I am going to really like it. It has some advanced bandwidth rules which I will enjoy and the new beta version has some interesting new features that shows the future is looking very nice.

This is really a project I have wanted to do for a long time and one night in the hours after midnight I decided to get after it and a little bit later it was up and running.

Update: So far I have a web, web proxy and vpn server and of course a router. I use, or will use, the vpn to connect to my home network while out and then the proxy server on the home network to connect to the net so that all my traffic is encrypted for safe open wifi surfing. I have set up some multileveled bandwidth rules for my different devices. That is probably about it for now.

Working with Worms

Originally uploaded by elvisripley.

I started thinking about composting my food and all the solutions I looked into were big and messy and didn't work well unless it is hot. That is it doesn't work well unless it is hot. I stumbled around and found worms for composting. It makes sense. They work out side to break down leaves and dead plant material and the waste that I produce is left over plant material.

I have about a pound of worms that can eat up to their body weight a day so that is up to a pound a day but if I were to start producing more waste then there would be more worms and if I produced less it wouldn't really matter because they don't need to eat all the time. It just works out very nice.

I lost the gasket on my blender right when I got them so I wasn't making smoothies every day and wasn't producing very much waste so that mixed with the curiosity of worms when they are placed in a new environment caused some of them to get out (3). They didn't get very far so if it happens again, and it shouldn't, I know that don't really move well on tile. Where they do move faster than I was ready to see was in their natural dirt/scraps environment. They just fly across the surface but as soon as they get to the side they really slow down. It is really interesting to watch. We will see how it goes over the next year but so far there is no smell or pests or whatever. It smells better than the trash does after just having food in it for a day.

Lots more pictures here.