Biobug.org

No pressure - compression that is

willo — Fri, 09 May 2008 19:22:44 +0000

I’ve been poking around on the project bike as time allows. It’s been surprisingly refreshing to work on the old beast. I used to enjoy working on my cars, but hadn’t wanted to commit to any of those projects in a while.

It turns out that the bike is worse that I thought. It’s down to zero compression on all three cylinders. I reset the cam/crank timing chain hoping to fix the problem. It turns out that the bike has some stuck valves. I’m going to pull the head and assess the state of the block this weekend. I get the feeling that the bike sat for a while with the valves open, so I’m hoping that the job only needs a trip to the machine shop and a some gaskets…

New project bike: Yamaha XS 850

willo — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 05:09:16 +0000

Just rolled a new project int my shop today. It’s a 1980 Yamaha XS 850. This is one of the few three cylinder bikes of it time, and is actually an interesting find. Three cylinder, air cooled 850cc engine, three hitachi carbs (oddity), overhead cams. 79hp from the factory! It’ll either get some serious love or become the next electric motorcycle.

Progress and the new gig

willo — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 05:20:54 +0000

Can you guess what this is for? Once I get it together and finish the project, it’ll show up on Hack-A-Day as part of an upcoming how-to.

I made it through my first week over at the Uni. I’m pretty happy with what I’ve seen so far. I think things will definitely stay interesting around there. Eventually I’m going to end up with some time on-call, but that just goes with this kind of work.

Last day at MOREnet

willo — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 19:47:40 +0000

Today’s an interesting one. I’m saying goodbye to the office, co-workers and cubicle I’ve been at for almost six years. Today I’m a bit of a chair warmer, but it’s a relaxing, rainy day. Tomorrow I start my new job over in the Department of IT at the University of Missouri, Columbia. More on that later.

gparted: re-arrange your drive like it’s furniture

willo — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 15:57:21 +0000

I’ve had to use windows more lately due to certain project requirements. When I last set up my machine, ubuntu was seeing more use, so I didn’t give windows very much disk space. Now it’s time to install a few more programs, and I’m down to my last gig on my windows partition. What to do? Grab a gparted live cd, boot it up (I had to tell it to use the nv video driver, but I got to run a native 1920×1080 on my 17″ dell laptop) and start resizing partitions. I had room, just not in the right place. I mostly got rid of a large utility partition I’d built, pushed my linux swap space all the way to the back and expanded my windows partition to 70+ gb. Once the changes are done, gparted batch jobs everything and tells you status as it works. It plays it safe - rather than destroy and rebuild my swap, it’s doing a block copy. Still, this is way easier than moving furniture…

Stupid espresso machine trick #31

willo — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 04:06:22 +0000

I ran across this egg post by Saul on Instructables. (He’s one of the founders) The other day I was up early to go off to the pool and help teach SCUBA - and I needed some protein. Yes, it’s totally possible and awesomely handy to make steam eggs with your espresso machine. It takes less time that it does to steam milk and makes an excellent quick warm breakfast to go with an Americano at wake up time.

I got a new gig

willo — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 04:10:26 +0000

This won’t make a big difference in my published work, but in a couple of weeks I’ll be starting a new position within the University of Missouri system. I’m pretty stoked about it - it should definitely make for an interesting summer at the very least.

New kick-ass recipe

willo — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 15:26:59 +0000

I added a new recipe to my collection. This is one of the best yet. Seared Tuna steaks with Ginger-Shiitake Cream Sauce. This stuff came out amazingly tasty! The only un-healthy bit is the cup of cream in the sauce - I’m going to look into a healthier replacement when I have time.

Cheap espresso plumbing

willo — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 18:58:11 +0000

I finally put up some info on my inexpensive plumbing design for supplying water to my espresso machine. Total cost is around $20 with fittings and tubing.

Laser etching fun

willo — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:16:22 +0000

I’m now the proud semi-owner of an Epilog Mini 24 Laser cutter. After some test cuts, I laser etched the trackpad on my laptop. Everything works great - I used two passes at 100% speed, 15% power to get the result. Here’s a short pictorial of the process.