yaleman.org

Here’s the photos that Mitchell took on the weekend we went to Positronic 2005. I love the action shot (below) when he took a photo past me in the drivers seat and somehow got a passing car 🙂

Well, that was an annoyingly medium-sized crisis tonight. Drove out of the carpark, got nearly all the way to Lauren’s house, and realised that my headlights weren’t working. The dash lights worked fine, the parkers worked fine (‘cept for the one with the busted bulb) but no headlights. Odd!

So, as I was leaving Lauren’s I decided that I would like to keep my license, and that having no headlights probably wouldn’t help that cause. So it was out with the multimeter, checked the fuses, checked the wiring, all the usual gubbins. One of the fuses had blown, but replacing that didn’t resolve the issue. I checked that the lights were still fine, no blown globes - something that would suck royally, since they are sealed beams and sort of expensive. Basically, no voltage was getting to the lights themselves. Poo!

Well, I couldn’t find my carter fuel pump… thought I’d put it somewhere strange in my room, or in the workshop somewhere. Today I looked through my room, and Bob and I went through EVERYTHING in the workshop and couldn’t find it. Thinking that I had put it somewhere perilous and it’d fallen into the depths of a crap-o-lanche, I decided to clean my room tonight.

So, on went my merry day, getting more bits for the gemini, and doing lots of stuff - working out the standard wiring loom and what we can probably take out, making and installing a new positive wire, negative wire etc. Installed all the fuses and stuff, then plugged the positive onto the battery, and it lit up! Hooray! *dances*

So, I stopped in Mooloolooba where my parents were staying for their Christmas holidays, and while I was talking to Dad he mentioned that he’d blown up the radiator on the Camry. It’s about 15 years old, and it’s a cheap japanese car, so these things are bound to happen.

The top tank had split along one of the parts near the filler cap, so to fix it there would have to be a new end tank welded on, and we were quoted $170 for that. Then there was the other option of buying a whole new radiator for $240 - only another $70 more. The fins on the old radiator were flaking off, and there was some nasty corrosion around some of the tubes, so for the difference it wasn’t worth having to replace the radiator in six months when the fins started busting holes in the tubes.

So, ages back when the car got broken into, whoever did it must have had a go at the key part of the ignition, the pins got all messed up and it didn’t work properly. I replaced it with a rather dodgy switch and button on the end of a wire run that I had lying around, and most of the time when I indicated, or used too much power the stereo would turn off, the lights would dim and stupid stuff would happen. This got rather annoying, and eventually I worked out that the cause of it was the long wire run itself was causing too much voltage drop in the system itself.

Ok, so since I have this week off, I’m working on the Gemini since it’s such a priority to get it on the road at the moment. Today Bob and I went to a wrecker and found a nice bosch throttle position sensor - three wire, good mounting and D-shaft actuation - the one that Repco had for ~$100 or so. That didn’t come with the plug and wires, nor any idea of how things worked with each other. So, that was free - all I paid for was a bunch of sweat and an energy drink after wandering around in the wreckers for half an hour or so - damn it was hot today.

TechSpot has written a Decent Firefox Tweak Guide, which I found on Digg

Another thing on there is a story about Maxis releasing Sim City Classic for free as a java game you can play online. Pity it doesn’t work in Firefox on my Gentoo install, else I might play it a bit more.

Update: unfortunately the Sim City link went offline, which is sad 🙁

Police checking ID’s and papers to get into an area of Sydney. What next? Having to carry your official fatherland documentation to state your intended destination, and having to ask your local kommandant to get permission to go somewhere other than work and home?

Update: News.com.au links fail eventually, had to unlink. It was an article about police cordoning off a whole suburb … because they can.

Oh wow, that was an amazing weekend. Friday morning we drove around and bought camping gear (nothing like planning ahead, is there?) then some clothes and were supposed to meet Bob at Mitchell’s house around 2-ish. At two I called Bob to find out where he was, and if he’d picked up Seb and Skitzo, but alas Seb was going to drive up by himself, and the directions he’d gotten to meet Skitzo were completely wrong.