Mon Jun 28 19:49:58 PDT 2004

Finally got around to moving the 555 timer from the old KAP camera to the new Kodak EasyShare CX6200. Turned out to be incredibly easy to do. There was plenty of space in the Kodak, and while I needed to cut the plastic a little, it went fairly cleanly and smoothly using a pair of diagonal wire cutters.

I ended up mounting it on a small 2in x 2ft board with a 5/16 in hole cut at each end. On the one end I used a bolt with wings to hold the camera to the board via the tripod screw mount. The other end I pulled the kite line through and wrapped it over the end of the board to hold it tight. This may have been a bad plan, since on the 2nd flight when the wind really picked up, the line snapped right a the point where it was looped around the board, so either rubbing on the board or something caused it to break under the heightened stress.

On the plus side there were lots of good photos. The camera was only minorly damaged. The plastic where the screw mount on the bottem is broke, but some glue should help put it back together. The really bad news is that I lost the kite. I seem to have trouble keeping a kite and a camera together and working for any length of time.

So, lessons learned – it gets windy around here in the evening and I really should have switched to the 200lb line before continuing to fly. Fortunately, the latter is a mistake I can’t make again since I lost over half of my line and no longer really have enough of the small line on the reel to fly a significant single-line kite.

Tue Jun 15 22:32:44 PDT 2004

Been quite a while since I’ve dumped some info into one of these plan files. Anyway. Some notes:

Verizon Business ADSL a 1.5/364 can be had for about $40 a month if you can work through the hassles of getting it set up (3 weeks!). Compared to Comcast which Michael got up and running in about 3 hours, including a tech support call. I’m pretty amazed that Verizon gets away with this. Anyway – it all appears to work, performance is very close to the max rates according to the little applet thingie on www.dslreports.com. Also, the "Terms of Service" have no restrictions on running your own servers. Yea!

Learned a few things along the way of note:

1. My little linksys access point doesn’t really like pushing data all the way across the street, which was a little surprising. We had it over at Michael’s house upstairs and could only get poor reception in our upstairs front room, and slightly worse reception downstairs at the front of the house to the point where I couldn’t quite keep a VNC tunnel open.
2. To do cascading NAT, you need to not reuse the NATed address ranges. In other words, if you have a 192.164.0.0 network behind a NAT, don’t put another 192.164.0.0 network behind it, use a 10.0.1.0 network or something like that.
3. Dynamic DNS from dyndns is a great deal at $40 a year, and it works seamlessly so far. I’m really impressed with how easy it was to get working and the little updater script had great install instructions and worked first time I tried it.
4. Getting a Xbox to dual boot with a modchip is much harder than it sounds, but that’s a story for another time.