Sae-chan 1

Sometime ago, when Shizuma was being used as an FTP server and bound to the laptop cooler I made (I didn't want to carry her around because of the heat issues) and after I got rid of the netbook I had (the original Triela, but tbh, Triela didn't really fit as a name for that netbook), but before I got Triela, I was using Sae-chan for when I went over to my best friend's place. I was using the Bluetooth mouse that I was using with Shizuma (Shizuma had a different mouse) for Sae-chan with a bluetooth dongle.

At some point, I was poking around the internet to see if I was able to buy the Bluetooth adapter for Sae-chan, and found a way to solder a Bluetooth dongle to a wire harness and plug it into the jack where the Bluetooth adapter would connect to (turns out the jack is just a USB port). At first I had a bit of extra wire, but that caused some sort of problem, so I soldered the run of wire of the wire harness to the dongle itself.

Dongle soldered to harness, black stuff is liquid electrical "tape".

It worked decently, but I had a very limited range, since the dongle was encased in metal and couldn't really send/receive though it very well. Late last year though, I looked up a way to boost the range and found that soldering a wire to the antenna run on the PCB helps. I pre-ran the wire to the screen bezel to get an idea for the length that I'd need (plus a bit of extra, just in case), soldered the wire to the antenna run on the Bluetooth dongle, then set the dongle in and ran the wire.

I decided to ditch the plastic housing because I didn't want to waste time drilling a small hole and feeding the wire though it, so I just encased the dongle in electrical tape to prevent any short-circuits.

Dongle plugged in and set in place; the black rectangle is the electrical tape-encased dongle, and the yellow wire is the wire that's soldered to the antenna run on the dongle.

The wire follows some of the cords that go into the screen/lid area and tucks to the front/side corner inside it (I don't have a picture of this, unfortunately). Now the range is a lot better and I don't have to use the mouse on top of the keyboard for best reception (sad but true XDD).

While the lid was off, I decided to modify the colour of the apple. I used some cut squares from thick, pink anti-static bags, which gave it a nice light pink colour, and was okay when the light was on and shining though, but it wasn't what I had in mind. The picture with the light on didn't turn out well because the phone used it as the reference for white balancing.... -_-;;

Mod with the light off.

Originally, I wanted to use some red wrapper stuff I saved from Valentine's day long ago, but I couldn't find it (I think I tossed it, thinking I'd never use it), and so that's why I settled with the anti-static stuff... But I recently got more of the red wrapping stuff, and tested it out with my best friend's iBook G4.

It turned out well; the colour is more of a hot pink, which is a lot more noticeable. I then cut out a proper square for Sae-chan and installed it (after taking the old stuff off, obviously). When the light is off, it shows up red, but turns hot pink when the light is on.

Light off and light on. (Again, the phone failed balancing the white correctly, so the pink's actually darker than in this picture)

My best friend was surprised how it turned out.

I don't use Sae-chan much, but I don't have a good reason to retire her XDD

Melty 3

I got the LEDs from Jameco a couple days ago and was finally able to start working on swapping the LEDs of the PCI fan card. I noticed that the LED legs were long.... A lot longer than the regular LED legs and that I wasn't going to be able to do an easy swap.

It wasn't too hard to remove the LEDs, since they were just pushed into the holes, so I just pushed them out with a small screwdriver; de-soldering them, however, was a bit tough with the lack of clearance (I ended up burning a bit of both cover stickers).

I pondered a bit of how I was going to use the new LEDs, then measured the gauge on the stock LED leg, which was 24 AWG. Immediately, I thought of the extra cat5e wire that I stripped from a bad cable or something and went to grab the braid I made out of it. I unbraided, untwisted, straightened, and played with the wire to find a good length before cutting up the strand I was working with (white-orange).

When I was straightening the next strand (white-green), I was getting annoyed with straightening the wire and the outer clear plastic insulator crinkling as I was straightening the wire, so I decided to dig out the coil of cat5e that I turned into an audio cable (I made it when I couldn't use Ziggy for a jukebox and was still using Lie-chan as the workhorse computer) and measured a good length to allow me to get at least the right amount from one strand (I ended up with enough extra to make 3 more if I really needed it). I cut all the pieces I needed and then went to sleep, since it was about midnight and I didn't entirely feel like trying to continue working on it.

I began after breakfast, seeing how much of the LED leg to leave, stripping both ends of each wire piece, and preparing all the wire pieces and legs with solder. It was a bit tough to solder the wires to the legs, but probably not as time consuming as installing the LED and legs before soldering them to the fan PCB, testing to make sure the LED works, and bending the wire to be a bit more compact.

Intake side of the fan, where the holes for the LEDs are; exhaust side of the fan, where the LED wires connect to the PCB.

I obviously removed the stickers on the exhaust side, since I burnt both a bit - neither wanted to stay flipped up and out of the way - and replaced it with tape to cover the lock washer access hole (there wasn't anything else covering it besides the Vantec sticker). You can also see the orange "stripes" of the white-orange wire I used.

Obviously, I put it back into Melty, reconnected the power, closed the case, and then turned her on.... I was quite surprised.

View from the case window (I apologise for the reflection and glare).

Not only is the LED colour a cherry red, but the blue colour of the plastic is nullified into a dark grey upon closer inspection. The red LEDs are brighter than the stock blue ones (I think), but nothing to really complain about. Needless to say, I'm very happy with the results, now that there's not mixed colouring inside the case.

I also forgot to mention that I modded the LED of the card reader from blue to red as well, but that was a few days before I got the LEDs from Jameco. The LED I used is bright enough (obviously) but not ridiculously bright like the old blue one (I had to put electrical tape over the light because it was too bright at night). I was surprised that the stock blue LED had a glass casing instead of plastic (might have been why it was quite bright? XD). The way that it was set up made it a bit difficult to bend the legs like the stock LED, but I got it bent enough to solder it to the PCB.

Mei-chan 4

I got a filter for the 140mm side fan and after booting up, I thought I heard it kinda scrape against it a bit, so I poked it with the screwdriver (I tried to be very gentle) and broke one of the fins. The sound was persisting after I disconnected the fan, and found it was the rear fan; I felt so stupid, needless to say. I super-glued the fin back on just a couple hours ago, and hopefully it'll be enough to hold it into place for normal operations. The filter has a slight tear, but it isn't that noticeable, so I'm not concerned with it. I might get another one for the other side hole, but I'm not sure, considering that the case has positive pressure with the side fan running (I think it's just about neutral without the fan at the moment).

I also upgraded the Wifi card, which didn't change anything, but it allowed me to give Lie-chan the one that Mei-chan had before (and give the Dell the one that was in Lie-chan)

I'll write again when I test out the fan after the glue dries (I'm gonna give it a day or two).

openSUSE 13.1 and Touchscreen Part 1

Day before yesterday (I was going to say yesterday, but that's not true for me now XD), I realized I haven't done any testing in 13.1 with a touchscreen.

I used the Dell, since it was the easiest thing to hook up the touchscreen to. Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot to say, since I didn't really get to do enough with it before the Dell locked up and started beeping incessantly...

Anyway, in most aspects it worked well, like I was using a weird tablet-PC; the only trouble I had was anything along the top bar since the bezel of the touchscreen made that annoying and awkward.

The on-screen keyboard looks nice, except when I went into YaST, it got all weird and stayed at the top right of the screen in a semi-shrunken state, but still usable. Only problem with it is that the cursor hovers over the last key pressed, so password entry isn't secure for someone looking over your shoulder.

There's an option to long-press for right click menu, but the touchscreen was too sensitive, so the cursor kept jittering around and making it impossible to pop up (I got it to work a couple times with a capacitive stylus).

All in all though, it's not bad at all, as GNOME 3 was made to be compatible with touchscreens as well as regular input methods. If I get something with a touchscreen that I can install 13.1 on, I definitely will.

MultiSystem Live r8

As stated in the entry about Parted Magic and GParted Live, I would get the newest version of MultiSystem Live (r8).

I was able to put that version of Parted Magic that I found onto the flash drive without any problems, though I noticed while booting from it that it only "extracted" the "copy to RAM" versions, but it's not a problem seeing that I can't boot from USB with Lie-chan, Ziggy, or the VAIO. Not to mention, any computer that can boot from USB is going to have more than 1GB of RAM.

Everything looks nicer, and translated a bit better, except for the "view menu" button thing which is still in French.

Sadly, I wasn't able to put the DVD installer for 13.1 like I wanted, but at least the live version's on there, so it's okay. Maybe in a future release, it'll be doable.

If I remember correctly, it's also a dual-arch ISO, so it booted on both the VAIO and Triela.

Only real problem I had with it was that to be able to put ISOs on a device, the device has to have a label of "MULTISYSTEM" and nothing else; it took me a while to figure this out when I was trying to put it on an SD card so it'd be easier to use for Triela (I was doing all the work with Triela). Luckily, if the drive already has been "multisystem'd" the label problem doesn't affect it.

I think you can install MultiSystem and use it as a desktop thing, but seems a bit pointless to me, I don't know.

Just needs a bit of polish, but it's getting better! :D

Ziggy 3

The metal bracket is a bit wider than the plastic one (the plastic one was able to fit in between it), but luckily, it wasn't that much of a problem. The metal bracket's holes were about 1-1.5mm too short, and I couldn't fit one of the sides of the socket 478 adaptation bar though the hole. At first, I was going to file it down, but since I would have to get rid of 1-1.5mm of metal, I thought it would be easier to just cut it out.

Boy was I wrong. The steel was too hard for the blade to cut into it (it was slowly doing something, and though I was using a dull blade, I'm sure a new blade wouldn't have helped any). I decided to modify the adaptation bars instead, as it's made of "structural" aluminium (I don't know how to call it). I filed down enough of the top tip (as it doesn't contribute to structural integrity) of one side for each bar so it would fit through the hole and have enough left to hold the bar in place.

Installing the Zalman CNPS9500 back on was annoying as hell, even with the motherboard out of the case. I first started with the non-fan side, then quickly realized that wasn't a good idea. After getting the screws to keep the 9500 harness in place, I used a pair of pliers to slightly bend the bracket a bit, so the adaptation bars would seat properly (I tried by hand, but it was too hard). Besides exerting a lot of pressure to get the screw to the bar to screw in, the metal bracket lowered the bars a bit more than the plastic one, so I decided to not screw the 9500 harness down all the way and left about 3-4 mm between the harness and the adaptation bars.

I decided it was enough pressure, and I was already a bit edgy with how much pressure there was, but I was also uneasy with the screws not being in all the way; I also wanted to use longer screws to kinda ease all that, but I didn't feel like undoing the screws, since I used quite a bit of energy just to get them seated and such.

If all goes well, the metal bracket should last for quite some time.

New metal bracket and old plastic bracket.

I also got a chance to replace all the motherboard stand-off screws while I had the motherboard out (when I got the case, the company decided to short me 2 stand-off screws, but I adapted with some weird plastic things that was the same height), and the other stand-off screws I had weren't the same height, but I had enough to replace them all, so for once, the motherboard is fully screwed in.

Don't remember when, but I took the IDE DVD burner from Lie-chan (the other one in her is SATA), and put it in Ziggy, since Ziggy would benefit more from it than Lie-chan.

I've also put 13.1 on Ziggy without any problems, but might have to reinstall once I find a real use for him

Things I've learned from this escapade:

• Intel sucks at CPU cooler mounting ideas
• Zalman CNPS9500 installation for socket 478 sucks more than Zalman CNPS9900 Max installation
• Ziggy can handle openSUSE 13.1 just fine

Melty 2

I decided toward the end of December that I'll keep my fix and not get the 7770 since the 6770 does just fine, but I'll be changing out the blue LEDs for red ones, as Melty has a red front fan and a Zalman 9900 Max that lights up red, needless to say, better to stick with the theme than to have an unusual blue glow for the bottom half of the inside of the case. I haven't looked at the LEDs on the PCI fan card properly, but I'm hoping it's not horribly hard to swap the LEDs.